Michelangelo. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God reaches out to hand the gift of life to Adam. We took our own first breath, probably a cry, and entered this world kicking and screaming. But how long will our journey last? And when will it end?
How would you like to die? Perhaps you played the ghoulish game as a child? I did. My friends and I argued about which would be less painful – freezing to death or burning to death? What about drowning, a firing squad, the electric chair, falling off a cliff?
There really is no good way, is there? Actually, everyone I’ve asked agrees that there is. All ten respondents in my informal questionnaire said about the same thing: They’d all like to die peacefully, in their sleep, at an old age. And they’d like their loved ones nearby…
Nobody wants to die a painful death. No one says they’d like to die hooked up to machines in a hospital intensive care unit, a tube jammed down their throat.
So why do so many people die this way? I think there are at least three reasons: 1) The Puritan-Catholic ethic shouts at us to hang on to life, even to suffer, rather than to give up and die, 2) the medical-industrial complex is geared to use its technology to save us (and to charge us for it!) 3) Families and patients often cannot agree when it’s time to stop treatment and turn to comfort and dignity.
And there’s one more thing. Up until recently, there have been no good alternatives to hospital care for the terminally ill.
In 1974, in New Haven, Connecticut, the best choice finally emerged. The first American hospice began service. A year later, Alive Hospice opened in Nashville. Since then, over three thousand hospices have begun operation coast-to-coast.
Still, most people wait to long to avail themselves of the hospice option. It’s a tragedy. In 1982, from a distance, I was aware of my grandmother dying in pain from cancer. My efforts to bring her palliative care were thwarted by relatives and doctors who withheld vital pain relief. "They’re afraid she’ll become addicted," my uncle reported. Imagine that, a 91-year old drug addict!
Just a quarter century later, doctors are still slow to introduce needed pain relief to dying patients. Hospice knows how to solve these problems. And organizations like Alive Hospice solve them with Radical Loving Care.
When it’s time to make our exit, the touch of life we received from God can now be matched by hands of love from hospice caregivers supporting us in our last days.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
Leave a comment