The Life of Death: Care for the Dying
“It’s not all doom and gloom death, there’s a lot of really good times”
Nailed Contributing Editor, Roy Coughlin, engages the subject of death from an outsider's perspective in the monthly column, "The Life of Death."
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Two of my grandparents were dead before I was a toddler; two died later, one when I was fourteen, one when I was thirty. None of these deaths left much of a mark on me, except in the way they affected my family. No other relatives have died and no friends. In the absence of actual death, the abstract has immense power.
With these things in mind, I spoke with a close friend about her work as a hospice volunteer (essentially, spending time with the terminally ill). I wondered why someone who lost close grandparents and both parents (and was with her mother as she died) would choose to care for the dying, and how that affected her. What follows are some of her words from our conversation.
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You have to kind of learn to be—you learn that you're a professional, that you're coming in to assist and help, that these are not your family members. You have to be able to do that so you can go in and be helpful and still know that this person is terminally ill, and still be able to leave and go about your life. It's hard not to [take it home with you] sometimes. It really is.
The first time I went through it was a real lesson for me. This particular patient had no family members. I would go in there and sit with her and hold her hand, and I would give her stuff to drink. Things like, her mouth would be very chapped and I'd put lip balm on her. It's weird to sit with someone who is becoming that ill, because when we watch movies and read books, a lot of times death is portrayed as this huge, massive event. And it's very intimate, but there's also a lot of, you know, watching of TV. And just being there physically with someone. Being with her, I learned a lot. I knew that to be able to volunteer and to do this, I had to be able to leave there without being overly emotional. Like a doctor, in that you have to be able to remove yourself from it to still be effective and helpful.
There's something about me that I'm able to sit with people quietly, who are going through this change in their life. A lot of people that I talk to say, “I could never do that,” and it's not easy, but there's just something about it that was really important for me because I have the ability to do it. And it wasn't all sad. It's not all doom and gloom death, there's a lot of really good times, a lot of laughing, a lot of learning about them and their family. So you take that with you as well.
But I'll never forget, she said, “Can we talk about dying for a minute?” And I thought, Okay, well, here it is. Because her brother was kind of, Everything's going to be okay. You just have to do what the nurses say. Everything is going to be fine. He knew it wasn't going to be fine, but he was trying to give her hope, which is always important. But you also need to have those conversations that are real, and that talk about what's going to happen. So, I think she benefited from it in that I was somebody who was there, who she could say, “I know this is going to happen to me. There's no one else that I can have this conversation with.”
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You never really know when the last moment will be. Sometimes patients hang on for awhile; sometimes they wait for people to get there; sometimes they wait to say something.
It's also interesting, the physical act of seeing someone die can be different than your emotions about how you feel about this person that you love dying. There's also an interest—like, that person is not breathing anymore. They were here and then they're physically not here. There's the very physical part of seeing someone who used to be alive like you were, suddenly not there. It's something that you can't really understand until you see it happen in front of you.
[My mother's] hands started getting cold over the last hour, her feet had turned colors. Her eyes started changing, her pupils got large. And it wasn't scary, it was just, Oh, the blood is leaving these extremities. Oh, this is why her lungs are making this noise. It was kind of a lesson in what a physical body does when it's dying. That was kind of secondary, obviously, to the emotion of seeing someone pass. But I remember that when she was gone, I said to everybody that was there, “I think Mom's gone now.” I said, “Where did she go?” Which was both a physical question and a very emotional question. Where did this person, where did this being, where did my mother, go?
That's the weird thing: When somebody close to you dies, you can still hear them say things to you. That maybe sounds a little bit crazy, but they're never entirely gone. Like when I'm doing something or trying to make a decision, I can hear my mom say certain things about it.
It feels weird to be parent-less. I just keep pushing on, you know? Shit happens and I'm like, What else can happen? And then something else happens.
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I never really had any of them say, “I'm afraid to go.” I never really had anyone say, “I am afraid to die.”
Am I afraid of death? I don't think that I'm afraid of death. I think that I'm afraid of not being done with what I want to do before I die. You never have as much time as you think you do. And that's one of the main lessons that I learned from a lot of these folks that I worked with. I would be afraid of being a burden to people. I know it's a lot of work to care for someone who can't take care of herself. I wouldn't want to be that. Like most creatures that are alive, I don’t want to die. But I've been around it so much I don't feel like I'm afraid of it; I'm afraid of other emotions around it, but not of the physical death itself.
I'm part of what goes on around me. I'm part of this universe. I will never cease to exist. I will always exist in some manner. Of course it's a little bit frightening to think about not being what you are now. I feel very strongly a sense of history. It's important to me to know who I came from, where I came from, studying things like, the nationality of my people. I feel a strong connection to old letters, antique things, things that people owned who were here before me. So I think for me personally, that ties in a lot to my interest in helping people who are at end stage of life. And some of it is just a natural curiosity: What do we go through when we're getting ready to pass from this life?
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