Dying Well

Before I Die I Want to …

12 years ago
by Caleb Wilde in

Key quote:

“Preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life.”

Five Reasons we Fear Dying

12 years ago
by Caleb Wilde in ,

 

I’ve often heard it said that we fear dying more than we fear death.  Death takes little time, but dying … it’s unpredictable and unfamiliar and can take months and years.  I think we can quell our fear of dying, but not until we recognize why we fear dying.

Here are five reasons we fear dying:

One.  We’re unfamiliar with dying.

Dying used to happen inside the home, with the family acting as caregiver, the home acting as the place of death.  Now, it happens in a private room in a hospital or nursing home.  With death removed from our common experience, it’s unfamiliar and unknown.

Two.  We fear dying in an unfamiliar place.

Seven percent of American dying and death occurs outside of home and institution.  And while most of this seven percent is produced by a tragic car accident, or random heart attack, the likelihood is that our “dying in an unfamiliar place” will not be of the tragic type.

The institutionalization of medicine means that you will probably die in an institutional setting.  In fact, three out of four deaths in the United States occur in a hospital or nursing home, outside of our home surrounding and outside of the comfort of our family.

Three.  We fear that our dying will be alone.

Often – due to the expertise of nursing staff – family can often arrive for our death, but they miss the dying.  If you have a loved one in a nursing home, I respect your decision.  Yet, to be honest, one of the hardest parts of my job is simply walking through nursing homes and seeing all the aging in crowded loneliness.

Four.  We Don’t Know our Caregivers

With institutional dying, we have professional caregivers who do an outstanding job; but, these caregivers are not our loved ones, farther making our surroundings unfamiliar.  I think we need to  remember that the true professional caregivers are our loved ones and family members.

Five.  We fear being a burden to our families

And this is perhaps the fundamental fear that lies at the heart of the problem.  We think that by removing ourselves from our families (via entrance into a nursing home or retirement community), we relieve the burden; but YOU ARE NOT A BURDEN.  Your dying doesn’t burden family, it’s what creates family.  It allows us to love, it allows us to be a caretaker, and it allows us to let the dying die in a familiar place.

Aaron’s Final Wish

12 years ago
by Caleb Wilde in

This from http://aaroncollins.org/.

Aaron was the type of person that took great joy in unexpected kindness.  Once after receiving exceptionally bad service at dinner, from a rude waitress, he left her a $50 tip. Things like this, given or received, were what he thought left a mark on a person’s life.

Aaron passed away July 7, 2012 just 3 weeks after his 30th birthday.  He left us a will full of his personality. He asked that any debt he owed his parents be repaid should he have money in the bank at his death, but also had the following request:

“Third, leave an awesome tip (and I don’t mean 25%. I mean $500 on a f***ing pizza) for a waiter or waitress.”

Of course, the way he lived his life meant Aaron never had much and didn’t leave much.  We want to make his wish come true. So we are asking for donations to make this happen for him. Any money donated will go directly to this cause.  His hope was clearly that such a random gift of kindness would leave an impact for life.

Once we have $500 his family will go to dinner somewhere and leave it as a gift for the waiter or waitress.  If we continue to receive money, we will continue giving these gifts randomly, so that in his death he can touch the lives of many more people than he had even dreamed of doing in life.

As of today, July 18th, the Collins have received over $44,000 in donations … which translates to 88 (eighty-eight) $500 tips to table waiters.

In death, life.

Scientist Confirms “Old People Smell”

12 years ago
by Caleb Wilde in

We’ve all smelled it.  And like flatulence in church, nobody says anything.

It’s that odd perfume that comes from Great Grandma Eunice when you reach down to give her a hug.

It’s that odor that wafts through nursing homes.

And now science is here to prove to us what we’ve already known.

Old people have an odd odor that is all their own.

And no, it’s not moth balls; it’s not an old person perfume; it’s not the fact that their skin hasn’t touched bath water in a couple days; nor is it the decade old clothes that have been re-worn for consecutive days (I pull that trick in the winter when I don’t sweat).

In fact, notes Johan Lundström, Ph.D., the lead author of the study, the smell of older people is a universal smell that can be identified from Asia to Alaska.

There’s even a word for this smell in Japan: kareishū.

Here’s the explanation for “the smell” from Dr. Lundström:

The root cause of the old person smell is still a mystery, but the study notes that long-term changes to the skin glands may be involved. Lundström suspects it also may be related to an accelerated rate of cell decay. “As cells die at a faster pace, they might give off a different odor that is unique to people with old age,” he says. (from CNN.com)

*****

As a funeral director, I know the small all too well as I frequent nursing homes more often that some of the occupant’s family.  It’s a smell that has always elicited sadness in me.  Sadness for those who sit in waiting, often unvisited by outsiders.

I’ve read before that babies have a certain smell that neurologically encourages attachment in adults.  We can actually love our infants more just by smelling them.

So, what does the “old people smell” encourage?  For me, it’s encouraged a sense of the holy … a sense of both respect and a degree of otherness.  An otherness that’s been created by a recognition of life and death.  An otherness that we can learn from.

Next time you smell the “old people smell”, maybe we should just sit and listen (not necessarily to their words) to the holy that’s apart of the end stage of life.

Abortion as an Act of Mercy?

12 years ago
by Caleb Wilde in

I’ve often spoken about the silent grief of miscarriages.  I’ve spoken about how the mother, and father, will often bear the weight of the grief, when too few friends and family are willing to be sympathetic.  Surely, the grief of miscarriages is a complicated grief process.

And yet, I’m not sure how it rivals the complicated grief that can result from an abortion.

While miscarriages can produce an intense sensation of guilt (after all, the very word seems to imply fault to the carrier of the child), I would speculate that the guilt doesn’t have the same potential as the guilt that can be produced by an abortion.  And in all honesty — since we’ve never had a funeral service for an unnaturally aborted child — I simply have no basis to understand how both the grief and potential guilt is processed.

I can say, as one who has struggled for seven years to have a child, that it’s hard for me to understand how someone can abort something that I see as so precious.  And, on the other hand — as one who also works with at-risk youth … youth who often find themselves pregnant in their early teens — it’s hard for me understand why so many evangelicals are so supportive of the idea of being pro-life and yet are totally unwilling to support the actions of being pro-life.  If we acted pro-life, we may find that the abortion rates we so hate would begin to organically drop without any change of policy.

But no, Christians like to talk pro-life.  We spout the rhetoric so that we can ignore the sacrifice that comes with both finding and supporting those who are unexpectedly expecting.

*****

Emily Rapp with her son Ronan

Is is possible that a person can be both pro-life and abort their child? Here’s a story from over at Slate.com:

This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an “apnea seizure,” this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state. Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week’s seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment—while I’m at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store. I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don’t regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths.

Here’s another: If I had known Ronan had Tay-Sachs, I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision. I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he’d never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.

*****

More properly, I think what Emily is talking about is a type of euthanasia.  Euthanasia simply means “the good death”, which often implies that death be induced unnaturally so as spare the terminally dying from that pain that is sure to come with natural death.  This would have been a euthanization while in the womb.

Emily wasn’t aborting Ronan because she didn’t have the ability to raise him, nor was she aborting him because he was the result of an ill advised but consensual night with a nearly unknown man.  She would have aborted Ronan for Ronan’s own good.

So — at least in my mind — although this would have been an abortion, it falls more in line with the mercy death of euthanasia.

Euthanasia makes sense from the standpoint of a culture of independence and isolation; a culture where a lack of individual pain and individual suffering define the good death.  On the other hand, in more communitarian societies, dying well is dying with your family and friends surrounding you in their love.  In the West, dying well is dying on your own terms, as pain free as possible.

And I wonder if a communitarian society doesn’t have something to say to this situation.

When community is at the center of death, death becomes more than suffering.  It can become a beautiful display of love … a time when the community shines forth its compassion, care and giving. I know this isn’t an either /or situation, as though Ronan’s dying is either individual or communal (it’s both), but when you have community and you’re caring for a the needs of Ronan, love is created.

Is is possible that Ronan has created more love in his short lifetime than I will with my 30+ years of health?

I’ve seen it and let me say that while death is always somehow painful, it’s not always ugly.  There’s few things that move me more than seeing the loving care of a family who have utterly surrounded their loved one in both the dying and in the death.

If Emily had chosen the “good death” (abortion), would her community have had the ability to paint the picture of love and care?  Would the “good death” have stifled artistry? Would her act of love for Ronan — while saving Ronan pain — have diminished love in community?

So here’s my main question: is the “good death” ultimately defined by one’s lack of pain, or by the community of love it creates?

Even though I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that question, I do know that we’ll never know if we only talk pro-life.

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