Dear loves,
My stepfather had cancer. A rare form with terrible odds. Thankfully he also had a small and very close support group of families facing the same diagnosis. They rallied for trials, they celebrated extra months and mourned one another’s deaths, and they shared one particularly helpful resource. This book.
Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying
By Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley (hospice nurses)
When it arrived I devoured it in a day. I ruminated on it. And I’ve recommended it to others again and again. Any reverence I have for death, any bit of ease I have with being in the presence of it, I got from this book. Seriously. Go get this book.
The lesson that helped so much when he was passing was this: the dying are often waiting for their loved ones to say something before they can pass.
And when my stepfather was in his final days, what Maggie and Patricia wrote rang so very true.
In the middle of the night, on the day before he died, my sister called me from his bedside, a makeshift hospital bed in our childhood home’s family room where we spent hours watching M*A*S*H and celebrating Christmas.
“He’s talking about being with the babies. He’s talking about being with the babies you miscarried,” she said.
Just as Maggie and Patricia said would likely happen, he was showing signs he was ready to pass. In this case, he was starting to see what was on the other side.
I tried to sleep another hour or two, but by 4 AM I was in the car and heading a few hours north. I couldn’t not be part of what I’d been reading about. And more, I couldn’t not be there with my family.
He was resting when I got there and we spent the day and night keeping him comfortable. The hospice nurse reviewed what to do if the pain got bad for him, or gargling got bad for us. And I slept on the sofa near him that night.
While all of this was progressing, my heartbroken mom, already a widow once, was working to stop all of this.
As she had been doing for seven years – seven years of trials and treatments, of support groups and watching its members die, of putting all energy into the business of Not Dying – she was working on getting him into another trial. Another shot at bringing him into remission. She told him the news, still not quite accepting that his time had come.
But as the hours passed, the signs that he had no more fight in him were undeniable. In addition to talking about what he was starting to see, his skin was changing, and his breath too. Thirty hours after my sister called me about “the babies”, many hours after hospice assured us he would pass soon, my mom finally said the hardest and most important words she’s ever said, words that were heartbreaking to hear. “You can go. You can go. The girls will take care of me. You fought so long and hard. You can go.” And minutes later, he did.
He had been waiting for these words, for the assurance from his loving wife that he could go.
Our story isn’t unique. I saw it again with my own eyes when my cousin was dying, and I’ve heard stories from others of the power of our words. And while it’s never not heartbreaking, it is magic. It is God.
If you’re walking alongside someone who is dying, I strongly recommend the book.
with great love for your life,
kristin