Palliative Care for the Soul

There’s some snobbery in a person judging if another person is in denial, don’t you think?

Sitting around tables we shake our heads or we tsk-tsk or the like because some unfortunate soul is not coming to terms with their own death or with that of their loved one. How rude.

Suffering, hope, depression, grieving, coping, etc. have faces and nuances we don’t always recognize or understand in people. To cope with hope….what’s wrong with that?

The only time I am more realistic than the family (when a loved one is near death) is in practical matters. The family says that someone from out of the country or out of town wants to visit ‘before its too late.” There may be legal papers that need to be signed before someone goes unconscious. There may be a physical therapy room in the house and the family insists that a loved one near death participate even when they are begging not to.

These are just a few of the reasons I may try and bring a family into the reality of imminent death if they are not already there. It’s not often. It’s not my job to judge if a person is grieving appropriately unless they are hurting themselves or others. Then it becomes an issue of safety, not what state of acceptance of inevitable death a person is in. I can be a comforting presence and companion no matter what frame of reference a person is in. My place in the comforting of another is to be with them where they are, not where I think they should be.

What about hope? If the family talks about hope, I don’t talk about hope of cure; I talk about hope of curing distressing symptoms. I talk about the hope of breathing easy as a person dies and of not being in pain. If the situation is realistic and it is true, I talk about the hope of not dying alone if that is what the person wants. There is so much hope during this time.

There have been a few who insisted on a cure until the day they went unconscious. They knew they would be healed. One person asked me if I believed he would be cured and not die. He wouldn’t let me get by with ‘what I believe doesn’t matter,’ or redirecting the question back to him. What I said was there was no cure for death and that I would hope with him that he would not die now.

‘Unrealistic hope,’ ‘pathological grieving,’ whatever. Let each other be. Stone-faced, crying, ‘depressed,’ happy, oblivious, busy, chatty, angry….hoping until the end that a loved one will survive…whatever….let’s let each other be.

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