Grace: (noun) meaning refinement of movement.
As a hospice chaplain, my role is to journey with patients and their families on their hospice journey. People enter hospice when there is no longer a curative intervention available to them, or they are too tired to pursue treatment for their disease, and they are offered comfort and peace until it death comes to them.
The phrase “death comes” is incomplete; rather, death approaches the person in a number of ways. Sometimes, people who are on hospice change suddenly from being active and expressive to being silent and pass away in a matter of days. At other times, they continue to ‘walk and talk’ and death comes to them. There are a number of illnesses which may cause these changes, but I am not interested in the medical processes. I am more interested in the manner in which death arrives and the universal presence of a certain grace and organic manner in which people breathe their last.
The journey to death is one that all must take, and the process of dying that I have the opportunity to witness everyday is a beautiful, graceful process. Pain, agitation, restlessness, and confusion are the physical manifestations of suffering that a person may go through. Emotional turmoil, regret, anger, sadness, and being hopeless or lost can be emotional expressions of this process. I have certainly witnessed any and all of the above and I do not deny that death is a rupture from the normative. It is always a surprise and can be a sad, depressing, and tumultuous event in the lives of the family members and friends surrounding the deceased. I do not mean to diminish any of the cultural, religious, and emotional aspects surrounding death here.
Let me add a little more about this ‘grace of dying’:
One of my patients, let us call him JD (not his real name) was 90 years old. He was diagnosed with cancer and initially was very confused, angry, and upset about his illness and his placement on hospice. He wanted to pursue treatment at any cost and felt that his doctors had made a mistake. As his chaplain, I journeyed with him when he initially made several phone calls and read a few articles about his illness. His wife BK (not her real name) was supportive of his decision and was also trying to understand what was happening to her husband and to her.
A couple of months later he internalized that he was going to pass away and that he would not live past a few months. His mind had received enough information through reading and talking with his doctors and with the hospice nurse and he had intellectually found closure. But emotionally he was still fragile: he asked me ‘what should I tell my friends about what is happening to me?’ I told him to speak to his heart before speaking from his heart. He replied ‘my heart doesn’t have the language, although it makes sense to my mind.’ BK also had a hard time finding the words to articulate what her husband was facing. They were preparing to visit their cottage in the country, but were unable due to his illness and BK was angry.
A couple of months then passed and JD had arrived at emotional closure and expression after struggling with how to tell his large group of friends about his illness and cancer. His pastor had also visited and provided some support, and that had helped both JD and BK find the emotional language to express their experience. JD proudly talked about a few book which he had recently read about death and affirmed that he was ‘prepared to talk about this on top of a soap box in the town square’, indicating that he had the intellectual tools and emotional language to describe and affirm his experience. It really was a beautiful moment to witness, as he had come full circle from confusion to understanding, from anger to wonder, from distance to closure.
Two days later JD died. BK was at his bedside. He died peacefully, and she was thankful that his journey allowed him to process his progression and that he went ‘fully well knowing what was happening.’ That the grace in dying, that is the ‘refinement in movement’ that I saw in this person. I witnessed him go with knowledge about what was happening, I saw him go happily.
