I recently escorted a man to the end of his life, right to the edge of the world, so to speak. It was a very private moment, and for that reason I almost don't want to talk about it; it seems like it’s something that should reside between the two of us and God. I hope he'll forgive me if I do share about it, though, without naming him, or saying too much about the circumstances.
It was a hospice death, and I was his bedside companion. I'd been watching for quite a while, and he was at last in the end-of-life breathing pattern. It's spoken of as Cheyne-Stokes breathing, infrequent shallow. I was speaking to him, and praying over him. I know from experience that people can hear right to the very end, and probably understand. I told him he was beautiful. Because he was. I'd been there since well before dawn. And now the sun came through his louvered blinds, around eight in the morning, and splashed on his craggy face. I told him he was beautiful and that I was privileged to be with him. And he let go.
What happened after that was a lesson for me, in the beauty and richness of the way we as humans understand death. I want to share it with you.
Mark quietly drew his last two breaths. I watched for a couple minutes more, and then told the nursing staff. They came, and set in motion the medical checks and the documentation. And they put one of the the hospice blankets on him, one of the handmade quilts that have been donated. This is a hospice for the homeless, and we have 20 or 30 of these, that go on the body when he or she is taken out. They come back to us eventually. We do this to signify that these people are going home from a home, with our love. We have another custom like that, about a blue butterfly that moves from their door when they're in active dying, to a big magnet board of blue butterflies, that conform, after a ceremony, into the number of people who have died with us. (We're now up to 127.)
Our doula arrived. A ‘doula’ is somebody trained to help with the practicalities of the end-of-life journey. Whatever anybody may tell you about death it is a big deal. There is a lot to do, inside and out, and while we in the companionship team wait, she's there for the practical matters of getting the person’s life in order, whether with sentimental, personal things that need doing, or institutional things, like contacting landlords, or trying to find loved ones, or arranging for cars that need disposing of.
Our doula is a resident, somebody who came to us to die and then didn't die. She went off and got trained to serve instead. Many of the people who are on staff in our hospice are residents like she is. We like that, because they know what the journey is like. She is very, very gifted, one of the really generous souls on this planet.
She came in with Roger. Roger is a cat. Roger is a girl cat, somehow named Roger. We have two such cats, and a hospice dog, a fat little senior citizen called BooBoo. Roger is kind of eerie. Roger knows who's about to pass. And Roger will walk down a hallway and hop on somebody's bed when there's about a day left in their life, and refuse to leave. It's so reliable that the CNAs on staff watch for Roger, and then they know something's about to happen.
She came in with Roger, who, interestingly, had not come to Mark, and she tried to put Roger down on his bed. Roger yowled and jumped off and ran away.
And she said, yeah, sometimes Roger does that.
Then she said that Roger sometimes gets upset. You'll see her crouching after a death, looking anxiously in corners of the room, eyes darting. She said, ‘I think Roger’s seeing spirits’.
It's very common for people to talk about the spirits of people leaving when they die. It's also very common to talk about other spirits coming to escort the dead away. You can see discussions of this out in YouTube paranormal videos, that show bright orbs flashing around deathbeds. People like to interpret these as souls or spirits. It’s also common in hospice work that we see ‘visioning’, where people will tell us that their dead relatives have arrived, and intend to take them ‘home’.
This doesn’t look like hallucinating, or hypoxia, or drug reactions. (We know what those look like.) Nor is this necessarily confined to a person’s last moments. Visioning can start weeks before a transition into death, while a person is up and around, thinking and behaving normally. We don’t know for sure what’s going on. But we each interpret them in our own way.
Our doula understands that there are spirits present. They're doing something, and pretty soon they'll be gone.
We have a Buddhist chaplain on staff who sees it differently. She says that whatever ‘spirit’ means, what's really happening is less of a continuing identity after physical death, and more (to use her language) of a soul’s return to its origin, as a drop of water back to the sea. In that way of looking at things, you forget who you are, you become nothing again, and you go back to the source of all of us. You may come back, she says, to be someone else.
I have a Seventh-day Adventist friend who lost a child to a terrible accident early in life, and he had somebody say this to him at the birth of another child. That person, meaning to comfort, said he saw the dead child back again, in the eyes of the new child.
My friend’s reaction to this was visceral. It was the wrong thing to say. He told me, ‘I need to know that my son, the one and only person who will ever be my son, when he rises again, will be not only himself, but his perfected self. He'll be back to the person he was meant to be, and he was created to be, and he was called to be’.
Here are three very different ways of looking at death. One is a kind of a spiritism, almost an improvisation, based on what can be seen and what seems generally reasonable. The second is a more philosophical take, which probably also seems reasonable to some observers of death. And the third is a more traditional, biblically-based one, in which the dead, to use Jesus’s language, are asleep until resurrection.
It’s a rich tapestry, as the expression goes, of how humans can understand the terrifying mystery of death. It's interesting to me that people hold their particular understandings all the way to the grave. They don't run away. At the end of life we speak our truths like we mean it.
As a companion in dying, of course I don’t intrude with my own convictions. But I think the existence of these convictions is very beautiful.