Being With the Dying

While I haven't posted a blog for a while (which in my case is a very good sign the life is stable for awhile) I thought I would share the remarks I recently made to members of the  Wisconsin Chaplaincy Association during their annual conference, "Spiritual Care: Perspectives and Modalities." It is a topic that I have become very familiar with during the past two decades -- my life as a priest and pastor.

Wisconsin Chaplaincy Association Annual Conference

The Heidel House, Green Lake, Wisc.

Sunday, Oct 14, 2012

I want to thank you for asking me to come here and share my perspectives on my favorite topic -- death and dying. 

My life has prepared me for dying. And so has yours.

Let me begin to explain this with a story.  It happened a number of years ago during my one-year residency in CPE.

I was called to the Meriter Hospital Emergency Room to give a death notification. A married couple was travelling through Wisconsin headed with their three children to the Dells. They stopped for fuel on I-94 north of Madison when the husband suffered a massive heart attack in the men’s room. He didn’t come out for a while and when he was found, 9-1-1 was immediately called. But it was too late.  As I came into the ER one of the nurses pointed me to the waiting room where I saw a young woman sitting  with three children.

Now you have to know more about me. Some of you do. But death notifications, handling dead and maimed bodies was not new to me. I was a police officer for over 30 years. But what I had learned all those years wasn’t going to help me this afternoon.  The terminally ill, grieving and dying don’t need to hear “just the facts” from a Joe Friday.

What I had learned as a cop was to keep cool, just the facts, do it all in 20 minutes or less and get back to real work – which essentially consists of driving around looking and waiting for trouble. Or as a colleague once told me “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.”

Effective policing consists of developing a non-anxious, controlled, in-charge presence, and NO emotional connection. Not your pastoral model. (I have to say that I, unfortunately, have seen this practiced among my colleagues in the clergy.)

So that day in the E.R., my parallel process was in full operation – wife, three children, husband suddenly dies. What’s that like? All my fears when I was a cop. All those police funerals I attended – sobbing wife and children walking down the church aisle following a casket, blue uniforms, stand at attention.

All that came into play. My wife… my children… Now add many years of stuffing feelings and being boy-strong… misty eyes were okay, but no tears -- and certainly no weeping.

But somehow that day in the ER, within a kaleidoscope of emotions, I must of heard God’s word in Ecclesiastes,

“There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” (Eccl   3:4)

This was a time to weep.

After I told them what had happened, I wept with them – deeply. And then I asked them if they would like to visit his body. And the children touched him, kissed him and said “goodbye.”

In group the next day I had the opportunity to do a verbatim on this.

I was never the same again.

Thanks be to God!

In the past, I dodged, avoided and denied death as I served as an urban police officer, parachutist, engaged in full-contact sports, and a variety of other testosterone-laden activities. But that’s growing up male in America. Only the unlucky die.

I often came face to face with death in my prior life: traffic fatalities, recovering drowning victims, investigating homicides, and other varieties of violent mayhem.

But I was lucky. I came out of three decades of policing never having to shoot anyone, not being shot (they missed both times!). Unscathed, or so I thought.

So when I retired from policing to become a member of the clergy, I soon found that I had stuffed a lot of feelings during my years. I signed up for a year’s residency in CPE after seminary. I knew I had work to do.

The major stuffing went on during my years on the Minneapolis police underwater recovery team. A group of police divers whose job it was to recover bodies from city lakes and the Mississippi River which separated the Twin Cities.

During one group session, shortly before I was to be ordained, I thought about those bodies, all those bodies of the children I had recovered. The little children I would bring up from the water and place into the arms of their grieving parents.

Then I thought about what I would soon be doing as a priest, I would again be holding little children, bringing them up through the waters of baptism, handing them to their parents.

But instead of announcing a death, I would announced a message of New Life as these children were “marked and sealed as Christ’s own, forever.”

The juxtaposition was staggering. My deep, buried grief came pouring out. I soon found myself weeping uncontrollably.  Again, an encounter with “the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Only a few months later, my best friend died of cancer. I was then a priest and could minister to him while I loved him. I officiated at his funeral with his family’s priest.

I was coming to see that somehow I was being more and more acquainted with death. But it was a different kind of death encounter than I had experienced in the past.

A few years later my eldest granddaughter, Allison, in her early twenties, tragically died in single car traffic accident near her home in St. Paul one early, snowy morning as she drove to work.

Now this was a new encounter. Facing the fear that all of us who have children know deeply. Into that pain my wife, Sabine, and I entered as we were asked to take charge of the, as they say, “arrangements.”

But more was coming…

Two years later, Sabine, was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. At the time, she was not expected to live more than a year or two.

I thought I was going to die. My grief and fear for her almost overwhelmed me.

This was a new, even deeper encounter with death.

And I have learned a bit more about what it is like to live, walk with a loved one that is terminally ill.

I navigated her unexpected illness face to face with God – I yelled at God, like Moses, told God that I would not let God off from the promises God made. And God never left me alone. God didn’t take away my grief, God just was with me… listening to me… listening to me… understanding me… comforting me.

Then, two years into our cancer fight, my third oldest son committed suicide. I found death can be tasted. It is a bitterness, a gall, that takes time to wash away and each one of us may go through the Kubler-Ross stages but do them differently and in different order.

After his death, for weeks I yelled at God, told God that I would not let God off from the promises God made to me. And God never left me alone. God didn’t take away my grief, he just was with me… listening to me… listening to me… understanding me… comforting me in that familiar person of Jesus.

Through all this I have tried to pay attention to what has happened and what is happening. To be awake and alert. To open my heart. To live into these moments and events. Through this I wrote a ream of poetry and blogged my feelings. Yes, I was learning how to die, too.

Each of us has a story. Some of our stories are short, unfinished. My story is longer, nearing its end.  In each instance it is a unique faith narrative. It is ours and ours only. Narrative has the power to heal – yourself and others as you listen and utter the most important words in pastoral ministry -- “I am with you… we are in this together…”

But to do this, we need to know who we are,  our own faith-set, and work to ensure each person’s faith we encounter is honored and respected. No exceptions.

We live and work in a marketplace of ideas today and a global village of diverse religious traditions – many pre-dating the one you and I may profess.

This has caused most of the traditional functions of a pastor, rabbi, priest or imam, to have been essentially replaced – out-sourced -- today. No longer do people primarily come to us for healing – they go to a physician. No longer do they come to us for counseling or seeking forgiveness or a life-plan, no they go to a therapist, no longer do they come to us for an explanation of how the world works, they go to a wise friend, philosopher, scientist (or “Google” their questions).

I suggest that no one but us is really qualified -- fully and deeply – to be in the terminally ill business. Especially in a world that denies it every day by living like it wasn’t true. Men and women who try to physically change their appearance to look younger, take vitamins, and exercise. And take a pill to either keep their hair from getting grey or to increase their sexual performances to that of an adolescent. For by ignoring aging is to ignore death itself.

We know most physicians don’t like to deal with death and neither do most therapists, philosophers or scientists – nor do some clergy we know – but by default or not, we must. That’s what we do.

That’s our job. The job of a chaplain.

We chaplains are left to perform one of our society’s most important functions – to aid and assist the dying. To help people die. We are the death-responders.

Now I wish I could say that all of us are comfortable with this role. But we must be. That’s what we need to grow into if we think we are not very good at doing this. It’s “job one” for us.

It’s like this: all the other pastoral jobs are gone – they have been out-sourced! Sorry. There is only one seat left for us on this bus.

I look at it like this: you and I are essentially travel agents – the Karons of Greek mythology. Karon was the mythical figure who ferried the dead across the River Styxx to the Other Side.  

And the better we know the territory, the journey, and what death is all about, the better travel agents we will be for those who either request our services or who suddenly find themselves suddenly in our presence.

In the art of ancient Greece, Karon was depicted as a rough, unkempt sailor, holding his ferry pole in his right hand as his left hand received the deceased. He appeared to be an ordinary sailor – not a captain or an admiral – an ordinary person who simply had an essential and  necessary job to do.

And you and I, like Karon, need to comfortable with ourselves, being non-anxious souls who have come to know about the death journey, the river to be crossed, and something about the Other Shore to which we direct others.

You and I should know the territory, the Other Shore – that which any good travel agent is expected to know. For most of us the Other Shore is the foundation of most of the world’s religions. It’s all about the Other Shore, right?

So, we need to know the landscape, direction, and territory.

I suggest we do that  best by paying attention when someone is dying.  Listening. Feeling. Not reading about death or attending seminars or conferences or even listening to people like me, but about being awake and highly alert when we are with them. Being fully-present.

And that means being open, humble, and being a deep listener. Is this not the greatest gift we can give to another person in this busy, noisy, ego-driven, and death-denying society listening?

Real and deep listening… generous listening… gracious listening...

Our presence is to make sure that death, our one last act in this earthly life, remains sacred, holy, and full of both anticipation and possibility and as fear and pain-less as possible.

But we are more than just listening sentinels, travel agents, or ferry-tenders.  We are more, much, much more. That’s because we deal in a realm, an existence, that not everyone can see. To make the Other Shore more visible. To try and describe the life across the river as much as we have come to know and understand it. And to be able to talk about the Other Shore.

As we pole that boat across the river we can talk about the nurturing, primordial, life-giving river we are on. How it has eternally flowed. Its direction and destination always the same.

When it comes right down to it, our challenge today is to help others experience what we used to call “a good death.” But I don’t hear that term much anymore.

That is probably because many of us work in a hospital setting where death is considered a “failure” and not a process through which we all go.

But I still use it in my conversations. I think you should, too. Ask, “What would be a good death for you? How would you like it to be?”
 

For me, a good death means having no regrets. If there are regrets in the lives of the terminally ill and dying we encounter, we should encourage them to make amends, ask for forgiveness, restore the things in their lives which have been broken – that often involves relationships with their children. Doing this helps achieve the inner peace that will be needed in their walk to the river.

As chaplains, they are also things we need to do on a continual basis – make amends, ask and give forgiveness, restore that which has been broken in our own lives; to live “no regret” lives.

When we work for wholeness in our own lives we can be even better help to the dying – and that is to bring the “great possibility” into the conversation as we approach the boat, the river, and the Other Shore.

None of us really knows what happens on the Other Shore – THAT something unexpected and glorious will happen I am sure. How it will happen I do not know. Nor where we actually will go. Therefore, I suggest that we all be  “open to the possibility” – to the unknown – the mystical --even anticipate it.

A good chaplain helps the angry, the doubting, and the fearful as much as we are to help the faithful. We help others consider the promises we believe God has given to all of us.  This is a sacred mission.

After all, we all are dying each day. Some of us are dying faster than others. Each day that passes brings us closer to death. If there is a GREAT AND SACRED MISSION for those of us who serve as chaplains, this is it.

We are the Karons, the death-walkers, who lovingly, humbly, gently take the hand of those who reach out to us during their last steps in this realm.  Our job is to love them and to be courageous knowing and accepting, at the same time, our own anxiety and fear of death.

As we are present with those who are terminally ill, each of us grows a little more as we ourselves let go a little more. We enter with them into a mystical, liminal, and sacred space called death… a space of great possibility. A place where there is no sorrow, a place where God will wipe away every tear.

We walk with them to the ferryboat, stand by them to the Other Shore. And then say goodbye. Our face may be the last human face they see. In these situations, what does our face say to them?

Joseph Campbell once said,

 “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned -- so as to have the life that is waiting  for us.”

Death is letting go of all our great and grand plans. All our earthly hopes. Death permits us to enter into the glorious, yet unknown, life that is awaiting each one of us on the Other Shore.

Thank you for being here today and listening. I have lived much, listened much, experienced much, and believe in Glorious Light on the Other Shore.     

I hope and pray you do, too.