Witnessing Last Things

Last updated on: September 29, 2016 at 6:00 pm by Marilyn McEntyre

Witnessing Last Things 2016-09-29T18:00:18-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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Volunteering for Hospice has taught me more about living in the moment than a good many sermons and inspirational readings. Every visiting day I drop into a patient’s life expecting nothing, knowing the slow ending may come today, or tomorrow, or in months of unexpected ongoing. One of them, a dear one, just died a few weeks ago. Our visits over the ten months I knew her covered a surprising range. Some days she wanted to walk and talk. She pulled a knitted cap over her bald head, twined a colorful scarf around her neck, grabbed her cane with one hand and my arm with the other and we set off. She told me stories about growing up with deaf parents: her first language was signing, and her earliest experiences of socializing were as translator. She found her way into healing work. She taught others what it meant to enter into healing relationship. She let me write some of her stories as she reminisced her way through a photo album. She let me read to her from a treasured volume about Mary, Queen of Scots—one of her personal heroines. She let me feed her spoonfuls of yogurt when she could no longer hold the spoon steady. She let me sit by her bedside shortly before she died and hold her hand and breathe with her.

I was out of town the day she died. I likely wouldn’t have been there, anyway. I was not family. Often when even those patients die who have become friends on that last stretch of their journeys, the circle of family and old friends closes around them when the end comes, and those whose ties are recent and institutional are gently relegated to the “others”—those who will be invited to the memorial service or to post on a tribute page, or to share stories, but not to sit among those who mourn someone who has lived close to the very heartbeat of their shared lives.

I think many times of T.S. Eliot’s simple line, “The rest is not our business.” It applies widely. It is a good reminder to stay in discernment about what the moment calls for, and whether it is we who are called. There is a courtesy to mourning, and a diplomacy. Death watches are often troubled by muted but strong jealousies or jockeyings for position. To avoid those tensions, it’s good to ask: Am I the one to be at the bedside? Am I the one to take charge? Is it appropriate for me to be included in this discussion about decisions? If not, the gracious thing to do is to let go of my desire to be involved or consulted. Recognizing what is not my business is good practice in humility. Rather than asking “Why must I be left out or sidelined?” if I ask, “What is given me to do? Where am I being called? Where is life offering the next invitation?” I can let go with greater grace.

Many hospice volunteers speak among themselves about their own mourning, about the loss we experience when a patient to whom we’ve opened our hearts dies and we find ourselves at one remove. It’s not “our” loss—and it is. We mourn on different terms. And then we let go. We will be assigned to other patients, enter into other stories, drop into different families where we may again be gratefully received and warmly included, and again have to let go when the time comes, quietly impart what blessing we can—a last touch, a word in the ear—and, leaving others in the room, quietly close the door.

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