Death is A lot About Living

Lessons learned from my 10 months in Palliative Care

As a counsellor I have had the opportunity to help people with things I have experienced myself. In the past I have been able to help post-partum moms who have struggled with postpartum depression and anxiety. I have the training and I also have the personal experience to relate to the moms. My personal experience has been helpful. You can see relief on some moms faces when they know you have gone through what they are going through. I have also helped people who are struggling with their health and are depressed and anxious because of their health conditions. I may not have the exact health condition, but some of my health experiences are relatable and people appreciate that you “get it”. Death and dying on the other hand is not something I can relate to and quite frankly I think you will be hard pressed to find a Palliative Care worker who has a firsthand experience with death. Not many people have come back from death to then go on and help people die. How do you support someone who is dying? What do you say to them? How do you say it? My first lesson in this role was to learn I do not need to know what to say, I just needed to be present. What was required of me was not the perfect one liners or miraculous words of comfort that ease all mental suffering, but what is required is my presence. My ability to sit beside someone’s bed or chair is a gift that almost all people who are dying will accept and will accept with willingness. I didn’t need to experience death and dying myself to support and walk alongside someone who is. As you sit with someone and walk this journey with them you spend a lot of time talking and during this time you talk about life.

10 months ago I started this role and in that time 80 people passed away on my caseload. I didn’t get a chance to walk alongside all of them and get to know each and everyone but there were a handful of people that left an impact on me. They left with me their life stories. Each person taught me that death is a lot about living. When someone is dying they don’t spend a lot of time talking about death itself. We do talk about that, but what we spend more time talking about is the life that was lived. I had the opportunity to sit down and write the memoirs of a particularly cherished man on my caseload. We spent a couple hours a day for a little over a week sitting down together. I would give him a topic and off he would go. The stories he told were primarily of his family. His mom and dad, his brother, his cousins, his wife and then his children and finally his grandchildren. He was proud of the family he had built with his wife. Isn’t that how this goes though? Haven’t we all heard this a hundred times? It is true though. People in their finals days of life don’t reflect on how rich they are and they don’t talk to you about all the belongings they have. They talk to you about their people.

I’ll introduce you to a man now who had a lot of people. He had lived a very exuberant life on the road. He had had a couple of wives and a couple of significant others. He was a self-proclaimed ladies’ man. One ex-wife of his was still a good friend. Together they had 3 children and he was in touch with each of them, but there was one child with another partner he was estranged from. He knew her but it had been years since he saw or spoke to her. He was going through the MAiD process and when asked if there were things in his life he needed to do before he died the only thing he needed to sort out was to meet with this daughter again and make amends. I remember walking into his palliative room and surrounding him were his people, they were all drinking beer and to his left was the long lost daughter. When I went to introduce myself he proudly jumped in to introduce her and started to tear up. She had come from BC in time to see him and this was what he was waiting for. He felt at peace and he was ready to pass. When he looked back on his life he had things he needed to do and he was relieved he was able to do it. When everyone was gone and I went to say my goodbyes to him, he told me he was going to haunt our building so that we knew he was always around. He told me he had no regrets and that he was ready to go. After he did pass away, the room he stayed in started having trouble with the door handle and lock. The door also started opening and slamming shut. These were things that had not happened in this room before. The staff and I all had a good laugh that he was just reminding us of his presence. We jokingly talked to the room telling him we hadn’t forgotten about him and just like that, the problems were resolved. I still haven’t forgotten about him, his mission was accomplished!

It has been fortunate for me that the majority of the people I have worked with in their finals days and weeks have had family and friends surround them. I have watched people drop everything in their lives and sit at someone’s bedside day and night caring for their loved one. I have seen how the dying person laying in the bed will be hours away from passing and will wait for their loved one to get to them and when they finally make it, they have some time together and they will then let go and pass away. I have also seen the dying person have someone by their bedside day and night and the loved one doesn’t want to leave their side in case they pass away. The loved one will step out of the room for a moment and then the dying person will pass. I also saw the other side of it, where the dying person has very few supports. These situations have been very hard. One lady we worked closely with, was very sick with cancer. She had no significant other and no children. She had very few friendships and her biggest support was her mom and their relationship was strained. I learned quickly from this situation that when people don’t have a lot to live for (another example of how dying is more about living) they simply don’t try as hard and the limited time they have to live becomes even shorter. When you don’t have people cheering you on, calling you to check in, and helping you out when they can, the reasons to fight the hard battle don’t seem worth it. This was the case for this lady and it made us all very sad.

I have observed that while our bodies become physically lighter as we die, our minds become heavier. The dying person has a lot to process, there are a lot of things to look back on. We can either be proud of it or reflect back with joy or we look back on it with regrets and thoughts that we could have done it differently.

For some people death is scary. One thing I observed is for those that find death scary some of them are scared because they are alone in life and don’t feel safe and comfortable to die because they will be alone in death. For others who are afraid they are afraid because they question what is next after life. Finally, for those that are afraid they are afraid because they have unfinished business in life and they don’t want their time to end before they can do what they want to do.

For the people that are comfortable and ready for death, they are the people who are surrounded by their loved ones and look back on their life with pride and joy. Often they are also the people who are certain on their afterlife, whatever that may be.

Death is final. It is the end of the book of someone’s life. When we look back on our book, what are in our chapters? What story does our book hold? It is my hope for people the ending of our book is an ending we are proud of, despite the struggles and challenges throughout. I am so thankful for my time in this role. I found it a great honor to sit with families and hear their stories and walk this path with them. I will end it with a quote from Making Friend with Death “In the Symposium, Plato says that one of the greatest privileges of a human life is to become a midwife to the birth of another soul in another. But Plato’s wisdom strikes me as relevant here too. Another great privilege of a human life is to midwife someone through death”