MAKING “CELEBRITIES” OF THOSE AT THE EDGE OF LIFE
We hear the word “celebrities” and there comes to mind the persons who appear as the guest-shots on television “talk shows” or those whose personal scandals are blaring from tabloid headlines. But we forget that “celebrity” and “celebrate” have the same ancient word source. One definition for celebrate is, “To extol. To solemnize with reverence.” “Celebrity” is linked because praise and honor are “Bestowed on one because of character and exploits.” Celebrity does not always necessarily mean “a well-publicized person.”
Every human life has endured, has contended, has overcome. For some persons, just having survived is an action to be celebrated. Others have quietly plodded away with grace and grit, their “character and exploits” known only by a few. Dr. Viktor Frankl was able to distill this observation after years in a Nazi concentration camp: “Every human person constitutes something unique; each situation in life occurs only once.” Respect for that singularity and particularity of personhood should mark our constant view of others. Their lives are to be celebrated, and thus each life is celebrity-like, granted the awe given to famous personages, but minus the notoriety factor.
In our work as hospice and palliative care volunteers, my husband and I come to approach each person whom we are asked to visit as a unique and special personage, a celebrity to be celebrated in her or his own right. Each has lived a singular life that is now drawing to a close. Each life has a particular story to tell, a one-of-a-kind history to be acknowledged.
When I was teaching about thirty years ago, an article was written about me in a small Eastern newspaper. I thus became a small-time “instant celebrity,” because, as a child, I had appeared in the Our Gang Comedies, now called the Little Rascals movies. Parent-teacher conferences took place about that time, and one mother said to me, “It must be wonderful to have lived the life you have had, growing up in Hollywood and knowing so many famous people. My life is just so plain!” I remember responding, “Every life has something of interest in it. It just seems commonplace and familiar to you. But every life has its own unique story.” I believed that then and believe it even more so now. Over a century ago, Boston’s William Ellery Channing said, “Every man [woman] is a volume if you know how to read him [her].”
My beloved foster-mother was my very first hospice care patient. In her early seventies, she had suffered a number of heart attacks, and was confined to bed. One day when I visited her, I tried to get her to think about the future, about things she might want to hang on to and live for, -- a trip back to New York City, seeing her show business friends again, watching my children (her grandchildren) grow up. That future-oriented tactic did not work. I realized she was not thinking any more in terms of a future, but was trying to come to grips with the confining present and her certain demise. Although she didn’t speak of it, she was obviously well aware of her impending death.
We were sitting by her sixth floor window, looking westward toward Beverly Hills. I really didn’t know what to say but longed for something positive to share with her. Finally I ventured, “You have had such a wonderful life, haven’t you?” “Mommie W.” sat silently, gazing out into the afternoon sky for a long time, seemingly lost in thought. Then she turned to me, and with relief and a smile of gratitude, she said, “It has been a wonderful life, hasn’t it?” I didn’t know until then that one of the chief gifts we have to offer persons who are facing imminent death is the waiting, listening ear, granting them the opportunity to recapitulate what their lifetime has meant to them.
When the fullness of a lifetime has been acknowledged, it is somewhat easier to bid good-bye to it. I saw this with my Dad also. Toward the end of his long life, nearing ninety, he would often say, “What a life I’ve lived! Imagine crossing the prairie from Iowa to Idaho in a covered wagon, then six decades later, flying around the globe in a jet plane. What marvels and wonders I’ve seen in my own lifetime!”
Often in our years as hospice and palliative care volunteers, my husband was assigned to visit unsophisticated retired farmers, either in hospitals or out in the community. From his own background as a farmer, Cliff had a talent to engage these former farmers in a review of their lives and their exploits husbanding animals and crops. Many a face lit up as Cliff would enter a hospital room or approach a residence, for the patient always knew, “Here comes my opportunity to talk about ‘the good old days.’” There would be “a recollection with gratitude” (Hans Kung) of “better days that used to be.”
I myself was privileged to overhear, first a son, and then a daughter, guide their aging mother verbally to revisit places she had lived and loved, even though she was now confined to a hospital bed. It was like a guided meditation. With imagery, the son walked her through a visit to the summer cottage the family had all treasured for many years. The daughter, in words, helped her mother return to her former apartment, and, in a manner of speaking, to take “one last look around” with her mind’s eye. “Do you remember, Mom, that little what-not as you entered the hall?” Both son and daughter knew they were enabling their mother to say farewell to what had been, and would be no more.
Listen to Dr. Frankl again: “The world appears to manifest something akin to a law of the conservation of spiritual energy….…..The drama and tragedy of a man’s inner life never have unfolded in vain, even when played out in secret, unrecorded , uncelebrated by any novelist. The ‘novel’ which each individual has lived remains an incomparably greater composition than any that has ever been written down.” Perhaps, because I grew up wanting to be a writer, I have always looked at peoples’ lives as amazing stories to be told. I am convinced every human life has drama, intrigue, and transcendence at its core.
Besides writing these essays for the web-site, I have also transcribed the life-stories of two elderly women. My great-grandmother kept a journal (1874-1896). I decipher her feathery, fading notations and I catch glimpses of a heroic life lived on various frontiers of the West. She coped with an enigmatic doctor-husband, with plagues of locusts, with financial chicanery from a trusted lawyer-friend. Then there is my living 91-year-old friend, who, though legally blind, typed out her life-story, handing it to me to be edited for spelling and grammar. And as I transcribed her account of living in primitive pre-World War II conditions, living through the Great Depression, losing several babies to premature births, there welled up in me a great admiration for the spunk and the spirit of this gallant lady. I am in awe of her survival and her desire to share that with her descendents.
Every lifetime has its high-points and low-points. Having lived through the good and the bad needs to be acknowledged. Getting others to recount their lives and their struggles, their victories and their losses, -- giving them time and space to share with you, -- is a precious yet free gift that care-givers can bestow in the final days and weeks of a person’s life. We honor each life that crosses our paths, -- regarding that life as worthy of celebration, -- because we remember the wisdom found in this admonition from John Powell, prolific writer and Jesuit priest:
You have an important message to deliver,
You have a beautiful song to sing,
And a unique act of love
To warm this world and to brighten its darkness.
And when the final history of this world is written,
Your message, your song, and your love
Will be recorded gratefully and forever.”
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