What a Way to Go!

We leave this world in all kinds of ways. The hardest departures tend to be the ones that arrive without warning, with things still unsaid and unfinished. Nearly as painful is the death someone sees coming but never gets the chance to make peace with, sometimes because they spend their final days alone. None of that has to be the whole story, though. Even a person who isn't family, isn't an old friend, can ease that passage by paying attention to what the dying actually need. Whoever sits with someone near the end is doing far more than a favor. They are handing over a piece of themselves.

I have a friend who has been driving to the hospital to sit with another woman's mother. That woman is stretched impossibly thin: her mother is dying and so is her husband, and she cannot physically be in two rooms at the same time. So my friend fills one of those rooms. Her own husband isn't thrilled about the hours she pours into this. I keep coming back to the same question. Isn't what she's giving, to both the daughter and the dying mother, close to priceless?

The end of a life comes loaded with its own set of burdens, and people in that stretch are easy to overlook. Attention drifts toward the patients who might recover, the ones with a brighter chart. Hospice exists, yes, and it does real good, yet people still slip through the cracks between the systems meant to catch them. There's a story that circulates about a nursing home with a cat who seemed to know. The animal would pad into a resident's room when death was close and simply stay there, keeping watch until it was over.

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