Category: Spirituality

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How clergy can help believers die a ‘good death’

U.S. clergy may be increasing the sting of death for many members of their flocks.

By David Briggs

[T]wo new studies find that many clergy are both ill-prepared and reluctant to fully engage in end-of-life conversations with terminally ill congregation members and their families.

The result, both studies suggest, is that more believers may be spending their final days enduring painful treatments with little chance of success in intensive care units rather than receiving comfort care at home.

One of the studies was a national survey of more than 1,000 clergy. The other involved in-depth interviews with 35 ministers from five states. The research raises three critical areas of concern:

· Too much faith in miracles: More than three in 10 clergy in the national survey said they would strongly agree with a congregant who said, “I believe God will cure me of this cancer.” Eighteen percent affirmed the belief that every medical treatment should be accepted “because my faith says to do everything I can to stay alive.”

· Lack of knowledge: In the in-depth study, spiritual leaders showed little knowledge of end-of-life care, including the benefits of palliative care and potential harms associated with invasive interventions. “Many grossly overestimated the benefits of aggressive medical procedures at the end of life,” researchers reported in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Three-quarters said they would like more training in end-of-life issues.

· Fear of overstepping boundaries: The default position of many clergy, even those who personally believed it was against God’s will to suffer unnecessarily, was to merely support the decisions of dying congregants and their family members.

But even such passivity has consequences, researchers said, in that it can enable congregants to seek potentially nonbeneficial treatments that are associated with increased suffering.

The larger problem was summarized by one study participant: “We have not done a good job…on preparing people to die–that they don’t need to live the last days of their lives under terrible and excruciating pain.”

Competing principles

The new studies are part of The National Clergy Project on End-of-Life Care,

What is clear in both studies is the complexity in end-of-life decision making.

Spiritual principles such as the sacredness of life and the capacity for divine healing may come into conflict with other religious principles to comfort the suffering and place faith that God will care for individuals after this life.

For example, clergy were asked in the national study what they would talk about when visiting a patient with cancer and no hope for a cure.

Fifty-six percent said it is important to encourage acceptance of dying as part of God’s plan. Two-thirds would place a priority on suggesting hospice as a good idea. Eighty percent said it is important to talk about heaven and life after death.

Yet, 60 percent also would strongly encourage prayer for physical healing, holding out hope for a miracle.

At one extreme, 18 percent of clergy endorsed the idea of accepting every medical treatment to prolong life, and 16 percent said doctors and nurses should do everything possible to extend the life of a patient.

The clergy most likely to place their faith in divine healing were from the black church, Pentecostal and evangelical traditions and those serving low-income congregations, researchers noted in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

The attitudes mattered to their flocks.

Clergy that endorsed life-prolonging religious values were approximately half as likely as other clergy to have a discussion concerning entering hospice, stopping treatment or forgoing treatment. The absence of a clergy-congregant hospice discussion was associated with less hospice and more ICU care.

In the in-depth interviews, no clergyperson said aggressive care was an “absolute good.” Several said it hampered a good death, and one said it was an “absolute bad,” researchers reported.

Yet despite their own strong views, many clergy refrained from influencing decisions about end-of-life care.

The ministers said they did not offer guidance out of respect for the “free will” of congregants, but researchers indicated a lack of knowledge of the medical consequences also played a role.

Humble approach

What can be done to assist clergy in helping religious individuals make better informed decisions about end-of-life care?

Clergy education is critical, researchers from both studies said.

The studies concluded that clergy training focused on the intersection of religious values and medical issues at the end of life offer several opportunities for improving care, including:

· Closing the gap between the clergy’s beliefs and actions.

· Empowering clergy to counsel congregants about the moral and spiritual implications of end-of-life medical decisions.

· Supporting religiously informed decision making by patients that minimizes unnecessary physical and spiritual suffering.

· Creating partnerships of ministers and disease-based and palliative care clinicians.

What clergy say – and what they do not say – can make a major difference in whether believers experience a “good death,” the studies find.

“There are times,” one black minister from Chicago told researchers, “Death itself is a cure to what ails you. It’s the healing.’’

Complete Article HERE!

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Where Do I Go To Mourn?

By Ariele Mortkowitz

[T]he Jewish tradition is rich with mourning rituals. We’ve done it as a nation for millennia; mourning the loss of Jerusalem, lamenting the Holocaust, remembering the long lost days of the Holy Temple. As individuals, we do it with bagels and covered mirrors and week-long shiva visits. We can say Kaddish (the mourner’s prayer) for a year. There is plenty of space and opportunity to grieve.

And it’s a good thing. A great thing even. It’s supportive. It’s community showing up at times when someone might be at their lowest low. It’s not leaving people to manage their grief alone. It’s a built-in system of shoulders to cry on, arms to lean on, caretakers, yentas – all of them creating a space for you to mourn and pause before gathering strength to move forward.

But while we offer so much to mourn those who have passed, there is nothing available to support those mourning pregnancy loss. There are no rituals. No one brings bagels. No one even talks about it. Some rabbis will tell you that you are not even permitted to say Kaddish after a stillbirth. It’s like it never happened.

And there’s a logical reason for that. In times long ago, pregnancy loss was incredibly common. It was also often very public. It was rare to find a family that had not lost a child or infant in the course of their family-building. In fact, many parents lost more than one in their lifetimes. So if the custom would have been to stop everything to mourn, people would have been in states of mourning constantly. And one could say that therapeutic value of shiva/mourning rituals would be diluted. The rabbis, in their wisdom, thought it better to not make such a big deal of pregnancy loss – precisely because it was so common.

But what about today? 2017. When pregnancy loss is not something that happens as often in each family? And certainly not in the same public way it did in olden times? What do we do with these feelings of loss that can be so devastating – particularly in the midst of communities that value children so highly?

Where should a couple take their grief when they learn that they will not be able to be parents? How should a mother-to-be mourn the loss of a life that she cherished? What prayer should she say? There is no ritual. No one talks about it openly because of the attached shame and disappointment of not being a “fruit bearer.”

It’s rough. It’s lonely. And it is incredibly sad.

It is ironic that a faith community that is normally so very good at supporting individuals laden with grief, can fail so terribly at addressing this common and natural loss.

I know of more than a few synagogue regulars who stopped attending services and recuse themselves from the ebb and flow of Jewish communal life after a miscarriage or when they continue to fail to conceive. With no “official” way to mourn a pregnancy loss or a fertility struggle, it can be incredibly isolating and “othering” for couples — often pushing people away from their communities during the very time they need support most. They feel not understood, invalidated, wrong for being so heartbroken. The absence of ritual or commemoration of pregnancy loss sends a message loud and clear: “Your loss is not a real loss. It is not worthy of the community’s attention or caring.”

Ouch.

So we wanted to do something about that. We wanted these important community members to feel held and supported and we wanted to validate their loss and let them know that they are not alone in their grief.

This month, we participated in Yesh Tikva/The Red Stone’s “Infertility Awareness Shabbat” in an unusual way. Our goal was to create a space for empathy and understanding about infertility in the very tight-knit, family-focused Jewish community. But, rather than ask our clergy to talk about infertility or pregnancy loss in a sermon as has been traditional, we decided to do something new.

On the Sabbath before Passover, the Agam Center at Ohev Sholom invited the entire community to “Light A Candle For Your Loss.” We circulated an anonymous form and asked our community members to indicate the number of memorial candles they would like illuminated on their behalf and gave them the option to have their candles dedicated or labeled in the manner of their choosing.

The response from the community was overwhelming. We lit forty-seven candles, submitted anonymously by thirty individuals – just from our 300 family congregation alone. We displayed these candles publicly, at the entrance to our sanctuary, in our light-filled atrium. Every community member passed by the memorial display on their way into services, and our clergy, Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman, invited the community to pay their respects and honor the (often silent) loss felt deeply among our grieving community members.

The responses from the community came pouring in.

“Thank you for doing this. Don’t really have words right now. Just gratitude to have the opportunity to mark my little boy’s birth, especially so close to the actual date.”

“This is absolutely beautiful. Thank you for giving a voice to so many who are on this journey. All my love and support for your amazing, very necessary work.”

“I thought I’d fill out the form because it was a lovely idea – and then found myself in tears, making a small space for something I mostly push aside. Kudos to you for creating the holy opportunity. Really proud to be a part of this community.”

As far as I know, our decision to publicly anonymously recognize pregnancy loss in the synagogue community is a unique endeavor to validate this loss and create a space for a life-experience that can be so isolating and stigmatized and reframe it as an opportunity for communal support.

As we filed into the sanctuary for Saturday morning services, we stopped to read the inscriptions and dedications next to the memorial candles. They took my breath away. Here is but a sample of what was shared:

“I would have loved to love you.”

“Eternally grateful for the journey you were a part of, as painful as it has been. Your loss made way for those we watch grow, shaping me into a mother who strives for daily patience and gratitude.”

“Mothers Day 2011. You were and then you weren’t. Still wonder why I wasn’t supposed to be your mommy.”

“For the family I thought we’d have and the empty seat at our table that I wish we had filled.”

The Agam Center is working hard to make people feel seen and understand that their community is indeed there for them during their time of sorrow or struggle. We want to help people in the midst of a fertility journey see that they are truly not alone, and that there have been so many others – even right in their very synagogue community – who have walked this path with them. We are creating a space to mourn something that is usually so privately painful – particularly in a tradition that is, ironically, so “good” at supporting mourners in other circumstances. I am hopeful that we can begin to highlight ways that communities can create spaces for these losses and families unrealized.

Rather than staying home and feeling isolated, these mourning couples made a point to come to synagogue that week and watched as others learned about and began to appreciate the magnitude of the loss they were feeling. They came inside from standing on the fringe of the community and felt embraced and found solidarity, all without a word. This heartbreakingly beautiful display was our community’s way to show that all loss is real loss and to remind those still struggling that they are not alone in their grief of hopes for the family of their prayers.

May our communities know no more suffering. Amen.

Complete Article HERE!

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After Great Pain, Where Is God?

An etching from “The Book of Urizen,” by William Blake.

By Peter Wehner

[T]hese days I find I’m more alert to the grief and sorrow around me than I once was. In part it’s a product of my age, of youth giving way. I’m guessing my situation is not that different from many of yours.

Last month I checked in on a childhood friend whose 13-year-old son committed suicide last year after struggling with a brain injury. He told me, “I’ve stopped crying every day, which is a major transition.” He added, “I spent more than a year trying to get him well and keep him alive, and only in recent days have I finally, mostly, lost that mode of thinking. I don’t have to do anything now because I can’t.” Yet in his dreams, my friend said, his son is still alive and he’s checking on him to make sure he’s O.K.

Another lifelong friend recently died of colon cancer. His wife wrote to me: “I wish I could tell you that we are walking this journey with courage and faith, but that really doesn’t describe our situation at all. The outward courage feels like a ruse to convince ourselves that this immense pain will subside in time, and the weakness of our faith is showing us its shallow limits.”

Sometimes the struggles are not about death but things like addiction. Two weeks ago I spoke to a friend whose wife had told him she no longer wanted to be married to him because of his relapse into alcoholism, which he described as a “deep, dark struggle” that robbed him of his true personality. (He’s now in recovery, trying to rebuild his life.)

Stories like these are hardly the whole of life, and most of the people I know are in a pretty good place. Yet every life has a story, and every story is marked by pain, loss and sorrow. Sometimes we suffer; other times we have to watch people we love suffer. Each situation is difficult in its own way.

I’m no theologian. My professional life has been focused on politics and the ideas that inform politics. Yet I’m also a Christian trying to wrestle honestly with the complexities and losses in life, within the context of my faith. And while it’s fine for Christians to say God will comfort people in their pain, if a child dies, if the cancer doesn’t go into remission, if the marriage breaks apart, how much good is that exactly?

During 1940 C. S. Lewis wrote “The Problem of Pain.” Lewis’s answer to why an all-good and all-powerful God would allow his creatures to suffer pain was a bit too neat and tidy. Among other things, he wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Now flash forward two decades to the publication of “A Grief Observed,” which Lewis wrote after his wife’s death. God’s megaphone didn’t just rouse Lewis, it nearly shattered him. In writing about his bereavement, Lewis described what it was like to go to God “when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” He added: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’ ”

Years ago I had lunch with a pastor and asked him about his impressions of “A Grief Observed.” His attitude bordered on disdain. He felt that Lewis allowed doubt to creep in when his faith should have sustained him.

My response was the opposite. Perhaps because my own faith journey has at times been characterized by questions and uncertainty, I found the fact that the 20th-century’s greatest Christian apologist would give voice to his doubts reassuring. And Lewis was hardly alone in expressing doubts. Jesus himself, crucified and near death, gave voice to the question many people overwhelmed by pain ask: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus’ question, like ours, was not answered in the moment. Even he was forced to confront doubt. But his agonized uncertainty was not evidence of faithlessness; it was a sign of his humanity. Like Job, we have to admit to the limitations of human knowledge when it comes to making sense of suffering. “From the biblical evidence,” the Christian author Philip Yancey has written, “I must conclude that any hard-and-fast answers to the ‘Why?’ questions are, quite simply, out of reach.” So, too, is any assurance that the causes of our suffering, the thorns in our flesh, will be removed. So what, then, does Christianity have to offer in the midst of hardships and heartache?

The answer, I think, is consolation, including the consolation that comes from being part of a Christian community — people who walk alongside us as we journey through grief, offering not pieties but tenderness and grace, encouragement and empathy, and when necessary, practical help. (One can obviously find terrifically supportive friends outside of a Christian community. My point is simply that a healthy Christian community should be characterized by extravagant love, compassion and self-giving.)

For many other Christians, there is immense consolation in believing in what the Apostle Peter describes as an eternal inheritance. “In all this you greatly rejoice,” he writes, “though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” It is a core Christian doctrine that what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal, and that what is eternal is more important than what is temporal.

But even so great an assurance as eternal life, at the wrong time and in the wrong hands, can come across as uncaring. It’s not that people of faith, when they are suffering, deny the heavenly hope; it’s that in being reminded of this hope they don’t want their grief minimized or the grieving process overlooked. All things may eventually be made new again, but in this life even wounds that heal leave scars.

There is also, for me at least, consolation in the conviction that we are part of an unfolding drama with a purpose. At any particular moment in time I may not have a clue as to what that precise purpose is, but I believe, as a matter of faith, that the story has an author, that difficult chapters need not be defining chapters and that even the broken areas of our lives can be redeemed.

The book of Isaiah, in prophesying the messiah, describes him as “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We’re told “by his wounds we are healed.” For those of the Christian faith, God is a God of wounds, where the road to redemption passes directly through suffering. There is some solace in knowing that while at times life is not easy for us, it was also hard for the God of the New Testament. And from suffering, compassion can emerge, meaning to suffer with another — that disposition, in turn, often leads to acts of mercy

I have seen enough of life to know that grief will leave its mark. But I have also seen enough of life to know that so, too, will love.

Complete Article HERE!

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Is there really life after death?

Brain activity is recorded 10 MINUTES after patient dies in an ‘unexplained’ case

Scientists from from the University of Western Ontario in Canada studied the extraordinary case of a patient continuing to release delta wave bursts after they were declared dead. We normally get these delta waves during a deep sleep

By Phoebe Weston

[L]ife may continue even after death – just in sleep mode.

Doctors have found scientific evidence that people’s brains can continue to work after they are clinically dead.

A patient showed persistent brain activity for ten minutes after their heart stopped and experienced brain waves we normally get during deep sleep.

Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit described the case as extraordinary and unexplained.

Researchers from the University of Western Ontario in Canada assessed electric impulses in the brain in relation to the beating of someone’s heart after life-sustaining therapy was removed.

Brain inactivity preceded the heart stopping in three of the four cases.

However, in one of the cases, the patient’s brain continued to work after their heart stopped.

‘In one patient, single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP),’ the researchers said

There was significant differences in electrical activity in the brain between the 30-minute period before and the 5-minute period after the heart stopped.

‘It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG [brain] activity given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation’, according to the paper which was published in the National Centre for Biotechnology Information.

Across the four patients recordings of their brain were very different – suggesting we all experience death in unique ways.

The experiment raises difficult questions about when someone is dead and therefore when it is medically and ethically correct to use them for organ donation.

As many as a fifth of people who survive cardiac arrests report having had an other-worldly experience while being ‘clinically’ dead.

However, scientists say it’s far too early to be talking about what this could mean for the post-death experience – especially considering it was only seen in one patient, according to Science Alert.

In 2013, a similar phenomenon was investigated on experiments on rats whose hearts had stopped.

In one of the cases, single delta wave bursts persisted after the heart had stopped and the patient was clinically dead. The experiment raises difficult questions about when someone is dead and therefore when it is medically and ethically correct to use them for organ donation

The research, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed rats had a burst of brain activity one minute after decapitation.

The pattern of activity was similar to that seen when the animals were fully conscious – except signals were up to eight times stronger.

The researchers said that the discovery that the brain is highly active in the seconds after the heart stops suggests that the phenomenon has a physical, rather than spiritual nature.

It has been argued that the dying brain is incapable of such complex activity and so near-death experiences must have their origins in the soul.

It suggests something happens at the brink of death that pushes the conscious brain to a high level of arousal, potentially triggering the visions and sensations associated with near-death experiences (NDEs).

As many as a fifth of people who survive cardiac arrests report having had an other-worldly experience while being ‘clinically’ dead.

Typically NDEs involve travelling through a tunnel towards an intense light, being separated from the body, encountering long-departed loved ones or angels and undergoing some kind of judgment of ‘life review.

Some emerge from NDEs as transformed individuals with a completely altered outlook on life, or a new belief in religion.

But many scientists believe near-death-experiences are nothing more than hallucinations induced by the effect of the brain shutting down.

Complete Article HERE!

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The teacher gets schooled on the question of death

Norris Burkes

By Norris Burkes

[F]irst, I need to assure you that my wife, Becky, only wears dead things around her neck during S-week. That’s the week she challenges her pre-kindergarten class of 4-year-olds to wear something that starts with the letter “S.”

The dead thing was a necklace her brother made from snake vertebrae and turquoise. It must sound terribly gross to the uniformed, but believe me it was a real attention-getter when she taught fourth grade.

Last year during S-week, my wife stood fingering her serpentine skeleton and asked, “Class, who knows what this is?”

 

One kid said, “Your fingers,” but that’s how literally little guys think.

“No,” Becky said. “This is a necklace made of snake bones, ‘Ssss,’ ” she said, making the snake hiss. “S-nake for S-week.”

“Ewww. Is it dead?” asked a prissy girl in the front row.

“Yes.”

“How did it die, Ms. Burkes?”

“Things just die,” she said with a dismissive inflection.

The kids seemed unprepared for that word “die,” so I’m guessing “dead” never came up during D-week.

“Aww,” exclaimed a sympathetic boy.

“Do squirrels die?” asked a kinetic boy who often chases the figurative squirrels.

“Yes,” my wife said slowly. She was beginning to see this line of questioning as a stacked deck.

Hoping to draw a better hand, Becky called on a favorite, little Brayden, whose parents she sees regularly at the gym.

Braydon put his cards face up on the table. “Do people die?”

“Yes. Every living thing dies eventually,” she explained.

Just then, an eerie stillness paralyzed their up to now wiggly bodies. My wife offered what she hoped would be one last touching example. “My mom died.”

“Is my mom going to die?” Brayden asked.

“Oh, don’t worry.” Becky said. “My mom was much older than your mom.”

Of course, the question no one would dare ask was, “Will I die, too?”

As a hospice chaplain, I can tell you that the unquestionable answer to that unasked question is “yes.”

As we move through the holy season of Lent, we recall the wisdom of the one who made it clear that he was going to die. He knew the timing of his death and he knew how he would die. Yet his followers resisted his predictions despite his saying, “It’s appointed unto a man once to die and after this the judgment.”

Since those words were first recorded, many seek to emphasize the judgment part. Yet, I think there’s a deeper meaning. Jesus was calling us to live our lives with a heightened sense of expectation and joy. He wants us to live at peace with all men as well as our God.

Alcoholics Anonymous calls this kind of life, “Keeping your side of the street clean.” That means we can’t predict our lifespan, but we can choose the way we live our lives.

Still searching for meaning, those kids kept drilling their teacher.

“My grandmother is old,” chimed one. “Is she going to die?”

My wife had reached a dead end. This was the moment every public speaker knows, the point stage actors describe as “dying out there.”

She thought about quoting Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season … a time to be born and time to die.” But instead, she glanced at her watch and said, “Oh my, kids! It’s time for recess!”

Complete Article HERE!

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Hospital volunteers unlock deep mysteries with dying patients

David Wynn, left, Edie Bennett, right, and Carolyn Lyon, center, are volunteers in the St. Joseph Hospital NODA program in Orange. No One Dies Alone is to provide a reassuring presence to patients who would otherwise be alone.

by DAVID WHITING

[T]here is life and death and the in-between.

It is the in-between where hospital volunteers such as Edie Bennett and David Wynn make sure that no one dies alone.

Over nearly a decade of volunteering at St. Joseph Hospital of Orange, Bennett and Wynn have comforted people going gently into the night, endured sepsis many would run away from, even witnessed people crossing death’s door and suddenly reviving.

But perhaps there is nothing Bennett and Wynn say that is more comforting than hearing when someone is unresponsive humans connect on far deeper levels than you might expect.

It has to do with love. But sometimes it also has to do with jazz.

MOVEMENT OF LOVE

Family and friends gathering with someone near death is as old as humanity. But in the modern world, there is a raft of reasons dying patients face death alone.

Some have families too far away to arrive in time, some are homeless and without support, others are estranged from loved ones, some simply outlive everyone they know.

The No One Dies Alone movement traces its roots to a rainy Oregon night in 1986.

Sandra Clarke, a nurse at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, tended to an elderly dying man who asked, “Would you stay with me?’

Clarke was especially busy with six patients, according to reports, and promised she would soon be back. But by the time she returned, the man had passed on.

For years, the incident haunted Clarke. Eventually, she discussed with staff her idea of volunteers staying with dying patients. PeaceHealth, the corporate organization of Sacred Heart Medical Center, approved her vision and in 2001 No One Dies Alone was born.

Today, an estimated 200 hospitals are involved.

Wynn first thought about dying alone when he and his family happened to be in Las Vegas and a family member died while they were there. Later, he heard about No One Dies Alone through a hospital newsletter after being treated for a condition that nearly killed him. He recalled dark, sometimes scary nights when staff held his hand and comforted his worries away. “It was like I got hit on the head with a board.

“I don’t want to sound like ‘St. Dave,’ but I wanted to do something that made a difference.”

Busy with family, camping, skiing and a demanding job as an AT&T senior project manager, Wynn offered to volunteer. Soon, he was coaxed into coordinating the program.

That was nearly a decade ago.

DEEP CONNECTIONS

St. Joe’s, as the hospital is affectionately known, averages one dying alone incident a month. That may not sound like much, but keep in mind that death is unpredictable. Some people pass within a few hours, others linger for weeks — and some walk away.

Wynn recalls a woman dying one New Year’s Eve. On his way home from a ski trip with his wife, he agreed to answer the call thinking he would be home from the hospital before midnight.

But midnight stretched to 1 a.m., then 2 a.m., then 3 a.m. Dozing in a chair, Wynn woke to daylight and the woman sat bolt upright in bed asking, “Who are you?”

Wynn stammered he was simply there to keep her company.

Soon, the woman returned to her nursing home.

When a call goes out, an army of some 45 volunteers split into four-hour, round-the-clock shifts.

Wynn recalls his first patient, a woman in isolation dying of cancer. When he opened her door, the odor nearly knocked him over. He gathered himself, sat down, took a glove off and touched the woman’s arm to assure her that she was not alone.

“It’s not always pleasant. Sitting there for hours with a gown and mask on can be difficult,” Wynn, a 61-year-old Anaheim Hills resident, allows, “but every human being deserves to die with dignity.

“I think touch is very important.”

As Wynn talks, I think of my father holding my mother’s hand and caressing her arm just before Thanksgiving as she lay in a coma. As her heartbeat slowed, I too held her hand and gently kissed her forehead.

But I wondered whether we do these things to sooth our souls or for the souls of others.

Wynn is convinced communication — both sound and kinetic — goes back and forth regardless of the patient’s responsiveness.

“When I was non-responsive,” he says of his time as a patient, “I could still think, I was still aware.”

Volunteers talk, watch TV, listen to music with patients. “Each case,” Wynn explains, “takes on a life of their own. There’s a connection.”

Wynn learned one of his patients was a musician so Wynn played classical music. But the patient grew restless so Wynn turned off the music. Later, he learned the man was a jazz musician and Wynn played something off a 1959 Miles Davis album called “Kind of Blue.”

The patient’s lips crinkled into a slight smile.

‘SACRED ENCOUNTERS’

When Bennett learned her father was in the hospital in Arizona, the retired lobbyist drove eight straight hours. But she just missed being there when dad was still alive.

The event prompted the 68-year-old Orange resident to volunteer. “You’re sharing the last stage of life’s journey,” Bennett offers. “For me there’s no more sacred an encounter.”

Both Bennett and Wynn remember every patient as if it were yesterday. One was a 26-year-old woman with a long-term disease Bennett had met at St. Joe’s the year before. Back then, the woman had a tattered stuffed animal. Bennett brought a playmate, a furry toy.

“She was sipping from a straw,” Bennett recalls, “lime Jell-O. I stroked her hair. She could have been my daughter.”

Bennett looked at the young woman and promised, “You will always be my angel.”

“Thank you,” the young woman said before slipping away.

“I still think of her,” Bennett allows, “and that was almost two years ago.”

Then there was the time when Bennett was with a dying woman gasping for air. Her breathing slowed to six breaths a minute. Soon, it was so quiet it appeared she was about to take her final breath.

Suddenly, the patient muttered something. Bennett couldn’t make it out. Another sound, “water.”

Within an hour, the patient sang, “Water, water.” Then she ate chocolate pudding. Soon, she was discharged.

“It’s rare,” Bennett says, “but it does happen.”

The mystery of the in-between.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Good Death: How Do Christians Learn to Die?

by

[B]ut it also struck me that we tend to do Lent in such a way that the emphasis lands on the second half of that sobering statement, not the first. Maybe it’s an evangelical, Pietist, or Baptist thing: we’d rather know what we can do, not linger on who we are. For whatever reason, our Ash Wednesday service was full of the language of repentance, and had substantially less to say about the other pervasive theme of Lent: death.

It probably feels different if you impose ashes on the very young, the very ill, or the very old, but it’s hard to think too concretely about death when you’re face-to-face with someone in the prime of life. After the service, I had to explain to one student that “dust you are and to dust you shall return” is simply a more poetic inversion of the preceding line in the Book of Genesis:

By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
    for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
    and to dust you shall return. (3:19)

(“Oh,” she replied, “okay. Thanks.”)

To be sure, the smudged cross on our foreheads evokes hope; it’s a partial symbol, an incomplete thought resolved by Resurrection. But even for those who live in that hope, death is inescapable.

Worse yet, dying is inescapable. We will be changed “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:52), but for many of us, death will not come so suddenly, or mercifully. It will be preceded by longer periods of physical pain and emotional distress, by the contemplation of severed relationships and work left unfinished, and perhaps by spiritual turmoil or emptiness. And then there’s the lingering impact on family, friends, colleagues, caregivers, medical professionals…

We can celebrate with Paul that our “being given up to death for Jesus’ sake” makes the life of Jesus “visible in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). But mortality can be hard to face.

(If I sound a different tone than usual in this post, it’s because I can’t write about this topic without thinking of loved ones: two friends who died not long ago, one after a months-long battle with cancer and the other after spending several days in an intensive care ward, incapacitated by a stroke; and my grandfather, whose body is giving out at a rate that makes it unlikely that he’ll see his ninety-fifth birthday.)

Fortunately,Christian tradition is full of wise reflection on what it means to die — and even, how do it well.

In fact, I’m treading familiar ground for longtime readers of this blog.  In May 2013, David and then-Bench-er (now university provost) Miles Mullin took turns reflecting on Christian understandings of “the good death.” Miles shared resources from authors ranging from Gregory the Great and John Donne to contemporary journalist Rob Moll. David reflected on a class visit to a monastery inhabited by casket-building Trappist monks.

But like him, I’d particularly recommend the revelatory first chapter of This Republic of Suffering, by Civil War historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust. (Or look for the associated episode of PBS’ American Experience series.) Of a conflict that took three-quarters of a million lives (recently revised upwards from the bad-enough-as-it-is number of 618,222), Faust observes that

Civil War soldiers had many opportunities to die and a variety of ways in which to do so…. As men became soldiers and contemplated battle, they confronted the very real possibility of death. They needed to be both willing and ready to die, and as they departed for war, they turned to the resources of their culture, codes of masculinity, patriotism, and religion to prepare themselves for what lay ahead. This was the initial work of death.

(One more example: a year ago John shared the story of the Gaillard family, Confederates for whom “death and Christian faith were inseparable if sometimes awkward companions.”)

Like David, “I don’t want to over-romanticize premodern death,” nor “trade [modern death] for a nineteenth-century ‘good death.’” But Faust is no doubt correct that “Civil War soldiers were, in fact, better prepared to die than to kill, for they lived in a culture that offered many lessons in how life should end.” For example, Americans on both sides of the conflict read The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying (1651), by the Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor: “His revision of the originally Catholic ars moriendi [art of dying] proved not just a literary achievement but an intellectual triumph that firmly established the genre within Protestantism.”

For Taylor, dying well was a lifelong activity. “In the church of Rome,” he scoffed, “they reckon otherwise concerning sick and dying Christians than I have done. For they make profession, that from death to life, from sin to grace, a man may very certainly be changed, though the operation begin not before his last hour….” Instead, Taylor spends nearly sixty pages advising a “General Preparation towards a holy and blessed death” before actually getting to dying itself. And this was all a sequel to his Rules and Exercises of Holy Living.

Today there is little about secular or Christian culture in this country that encourages reflection on anything like the ars moriendi. The art of dying couldn’t seem more foreign. “Once an intimate family affair,” Miles observed, “death and dying are now outsourced in America.” And Faust admitted that her readers might feel that Civil War soldiers “often seem to have been trying too hard as they sought to present evidence of a dead comrade’s ease at dying or readiness for salvation.”

Yet these soldiers’ “Victorian and Christian culture offered them the resources with which to salve [their] deep spiritual wounds.” And that’s true of Christians living through earlier chapters in the story of the church. So instead of giving up chocolate or Facebook this Lent, perhaps we postmoderns should devote ourselves to a different discipline, and spend time studying a couple of these older reflections on how Christians face death and dying.

Complete Article HERE!