Ellen
This story is about a woman I helped care when I worked for Hospice. She and her husband had lived in the house they were in for decades, situated in a remote part of our service area. Ellen was no longer working but her husband was. As she declined and needed more help during the daytime hours while her husband worked, their daughter came home from a neighboring state to help care for her mom.
I was visiting Ellen each week and sometimes we'd talk about her life when she was well and sometimes we'd talk about her current situation. She was slow to warm to my visits, slow to open up, she was a very private, proud woman. Once she trusted that I was someone who was going to come when I said I would and just listen and have tea, she became more like a friend than a patient.
She had managed her life and her family and her home with detailed precision and she was proud of what she and her husband had created and what she had accomplished in her life. Surrendering to the reality of her illness meant accepting help she didn't want to need. As a result, she was reluctant to allow any of us to do much until it became absolutely necessary.
Her hospice nurse lived in the next community. They had known one another slightly but not well. She began providing the care both of a nurse and as an aid, helping her bathe when she was there because she knew it was either that or she would hurt herself trying to to do it alone. She was not going to let another person from hospice in the door and she was not going to let her husband help her. When her daughter finally moved in, she allowed her to be the one to help with bathing.
I came to regard her as quite extraordinary. She slowly revealed her experience in illness as one that had opened her heart and deepened her understanding in ways that before this were unknown to her. I saw her as someone who was feeling her way along the emotional discomfort llness was bringing to her life as though she was learning Braille. With fine, sensitive fingers she moved along the sometimes sharp edge of acknowledging choices she had made along the way of her life and how they were now cropping up.
One day she shared with me that she wished she had known many years ago what she now seemed to understand so completely. She had decided that her purpose in life was to die with grace and Dignity and self assurance. She said she believed she would fall like a feather in to the hands of God when it was time for her to go. She said she felt the gathering of a legion of angels who would wait while she got good and used to the idea and she wondered if they would allow her the time she hoped to have to organize the pantry one more time and see to the state of the freezer or the flower beds before they were put to sleep for the Winter. This was all very beautiful but then she shared with me how she had come to understand that she had lived almost her whole life unconsciously.
That's what I found so extraordinary; this awareness that she had walked through her life with her eyes closed to so many things.
She said she had been watching the loving intention with which her now adult daughter has been caring for her; she brings a tray of food to the bedroom for her mom to eat a snack and puts a small bud vase on it with as single stem flower, a swirl of maple syrup gracefully placed on top of a small bowl of cream of wheat. She said she prepares a bath for her the same way, with love and attention to detail; she warms the towels in the dryer while her mom soaks in the tub; she sits quietly and peacefully in the silence of their home; she greets every moment as precious.
And my friend, the patient, is telling me this with a mixture of regret and sorrow because when her daughter was little she knows she spent far too many nights resenting having to put food on the table for her children, rushing them through their bath time and bed time, always too busy with thoughts of all the other things she thought she'd rather be doing than providing lovingly the care she was providing begrudgingly. She tells me that she always thought there were so many other things she needed to be doing, but now she understands that what she really should have been doing was simply paying attention to where she was instead of worrying about what wasn't getting done. She said she now knew that she had missed a million opportunities to express love in the million different things a mother does every day to care for her family. Telling me about how she now understands all that she missed and all that she failed to give them cause her to cry quietly as she watched her daughter leave the house to walk their dog in a gentle mountain rain. She first came into the room where we were visiting and kissed her mother gently, smiling at her reassuringly.
Experiences like the one I have just shared, are what keep those who work in end of life, doing what they do. When we pay attention to what those we care for can teach us; when someone we are caring for trusts us enough to share their innermost realizations as they near death, we are being given one of life's most precious gifts.
The woman I am speaking of wished she could go back and do it over, but she couldn't. She could only take what she now knew and pass it along in an effort to leave the world a little bit better than it would be if she had died in silence without sharing her new awareness.
As her tears fell, she raised one hand to her throat and smiled at me. I reached out my hand to hers and nothing more needed to be said. Her daughter was coming in from her walk and we had one brief moment, locked in on one another, one mom to another, hoping, both of us, that our time on this planet has made a difference.