Visiting Death
Oct. 5th, 2007 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talonkarrdeIntro: for my psychology fieldwork class, I am volunteering at a local hospice. I am acting as nothing more than a person to talk to and help the residents of the hospice; they already have social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, and religious workers...our responsibility is simply to be there if they need to talk to someone.
Links: Pallative Care, Hospice
Being at a hospice is nothing like any other healthcare experience I've had, either on the side of the patient or the provider. This may be rightfully so, because the residents (not patients!) of a hospice are there waiting for the end of their life, instead of trying to prolong it like everywhere else. In hospitals and even nursing homes to a degree, the focus is to keep the person alive – with technology, with surgery, everything they can do. At a hospice, the focus shifts to ensuring that they are comfortable and can, in doctor-speak, put their affairs in order in the time that they have left.
The most obvious aspect of the hospice is the general mood of the patients - it’s a general mood of quiet down-ness. Perhaps you see this in a hospital’s long-term ward, where they keep people that may be there for months or longer, or a mental institution, where some of the patients know that they won't be out for years; I wouldn't know, I've never been to either. The mood in a hospice is not denial, anger, or sadness, nor is it the Tuesdays with Morrie-like acceptance or Randy Pausch's exuberant celebration of life that society likes to see. If anything, the lack of any at emotion at all at their impending exit from this world.
To me, as a teenager, as a EMT, as a risk-taker, this is absolutely confounding. If I knew I were going to die in a year or less, I would do anything I could, experience everything I could — I would go scuba diving in a reef, go helicopter skiing, take a road trip across America and visit friends that I haven't seen in a long time. It's what the Make a Wish foundation does - it allows terminal kids to do anything they want to in the remaining time. And perhaps it's only the media, but you see this in terminal kids - a lot of them are sad sometimes, happy others, but they are emotive - they will cry, and rage, and laugh, and comfort their parents. What's difference between the young and the old, that the old will quietly wait for death and the young will fight against it every day of their life? I feel that if we were told we were going to die, we would respond with anger, or fear, or anything but a sort o mute 'eh, whatever' feeling that I got from the residents.
But I'm young, and one of the benefits of youth is the ability to do these things - the body still works. For the hospice patients, the youngest of which is in his or her 60s, they no longer have the ability to do most physical activities, which could explain their sitting around. But even if you subtract the physical aspect, I expected more mental activity - a smile, questions of who we were, and sharing of their life story. Maybe my expectations are false - because of books like Tuesdays with Morrie, society's experience with the elderly is only of those that go out heroically. Maybe it was because we were not tarrying long, and for those that are dying, it is inefficient to attempt to converse with those that are not important to them.
Again, if I were dying, I would jump at a chance to influence someone young - share with them my mistakes, tell them of my successes, and generally try and give them some preparation of their life to come. Even if my experiences don't directly translate across to what they might face, it might still be useful - you can never tell when advice originally intended for one situation might be useful for another.
But you know what? Life isn't really something that you can (or should) be prepared for. It should be lived, it should be experienced, it should be celebrated. And perhaps my time at the hospice will be used not just learning from those that have walked the paths before, but also teaching that you can fight death by leaving a legacy. I'm no social worker, therapist, or psychologist; I won't walk in the door and think that I can make a people that are four times my age start waking up with a smile on their face and tell me everything about them, but what I can do is listen and speak, and just be alive. I will listen to anything they have to say, and tell stories about myself and my life, and just encourage not facing death without living the best life they can.
It may backfire - it can be painful to be reminded of things they used to be able to do, to be reminded of the brightness of life when they're facing the darkness of death. So you walk the balance - to be a light without blinding. But whatever else, the one thing a hospice doesn't need is another person who's just doing this for classwork and doesn't care, another person who sits around complaining that the residents won't talk to them.
And one last thing I can do is pass the stories on (with permission, of course). In the same way that advice may come in handy when we don't expect it, stories can affect those that we never thought they would, in ways we can't imagine.
Links: Pallative Care, Hospice
Being at a hospice is nothing like any other healthcare experience I've had, either on the side of the patient or the provider. This may be rightfully so, because the residents (not patients!) of a hospice are there waiting for the end of their life, instead of trying to prolong it like everywhere else. In hospitals and even nursing homes to a degree, the focus is to keep the person alive – with technology, with surgery, everything they can do. At a hospice, the focus shifts to ensuring that they are comfortable and can, in doctor-speak, put their affairs in order in the time that they have left.
The most obvious aspect of the hospice is the general mood of the patients - it’s a general mood of quiet down-ness. Perhaps you see this in a hospital’s long-term ward, where they keep people that may be there for months or longer, or a mental institution, where some of the patients know that they won't be out for years; I wouldn't know, I've never been to either. The mood in a hospice is not denial, anger, or sadness, nor is it the Tuesdays with Morrie-like acceptance or Randy Pausch's exuberant celebration of life that society likes to see. If anything, the lack of any at emotion at all at their impending exit from this world.
To me, as a teenager, as a EMT, as a risk-taker, this is absolutely confounding. If I knew I were going to die in a year or less, I would do anything I could, experience everything I could — I would go scuba diving in a reef, go helicopter skiing, take a road trip across America and visit friends that I haven't seen in a long time. It's what the Make a Wish foundation does - it allows terminal kids to do anything they want to in the remaining time. And perhaps it's only the media, but you see this in terminal kids - a lot of them are sad sometimes, happy others, but they are emotive - they will cry, and rage, and laugh, and comfort their parents. What's difference between the young and the old, that the old will quietly wait for death and the young will fight against it every day of their life? I feel that if we were told we were going to die, we would respond with anger, or fear, or anything but a sort o mute 'eh, whatever' feeling that I got from the residents.
But I'm young, and one of the benefits of youth is the ability to do these things - the body still works. For the hospice patients, the youngest of which is in his or her 60s, they no longer have the ability to do most physical activities, which could explain their sitting around. But even if you subtract the physical aspect, I expected more mental activity - a smile, questions of who we were, and sharing of their life story. Maybe my expectations are false - because of books like Tuesdays with Morrie, society's experience with the elderly is only of those that go out heroically. Maybe it was because we were not tarrying long, and for those that are dying, it is inefficient to attempt to converse with those that are not important to them.
Again, if I were dying, I would jump at a chance to influence someone young - share with them my mistakes, tell them of my successes, and generally try and give them some preparation of their life to come. Even if my experiences don't directly translate across to what they might face, it might still be useful - you can never tell when advice originally intended for one situation might be useful for another.
But you know what? Life isn't really something that you can (or should) be prepared for. It should be lived, it should be experienced, it should be celebrated. And perhaps my time at the hospice will be used not just learning from those that have walked the paths before, but also teaching that you can fight death by leaving a legacy. I'm no social worker, therapist, or psychologist; I won't walk in the door and think that I can make a people that are four times my age start waking up with a smile on their face and tell me everything about them, but what I can do is listen and speak, and just be alive. I will listen to anything they have to say, and tell stories about myself and my life, and just encourage not facing death without living the best life they can.
It may backfire - it can be painful to be reminded of things they used to be able to do, to be reminded of the brightness of life when they're facing the darkness of death. So you walk the balance - to be a light without blinding. But whatever else, the one thing a hospice doesn't need is another person who's just doing this for classwork and doesn't care, another person who sits around complaining that the residents won't talk to them.
And one last thing I can do is pass the stories on (with permission, of course). In the same way that advice may come in handy when we don't expect it, stories can affect those that we never thought they would, in ways we can't imagine.
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Date: 2007-10-06 06:16 pm (UTC)I used to volunteer in the geriatrics ward at Somerset Medical Center. I guess it's different in some way, as you said, because the majority of patients there are focusing on getting better (though isn't it telling that the phrase is just "getting better" instead of getting well or completely cured?). But there was this woman once who seemed perfectly content to remain where she was. She had all these people come and visit her, day and and day out- and I would think it'd be a pretty good indication of how full her life had been, but there was just this. quiet-down ness? As you say? I don't know. She was elegant, but not heroic, in her waiting.
Another thing, I guess I wanted to say, is that I can see myself wanting to enjoy my last year of life the same way as you would. Because right now the only philosophy I can see fit to ascribe to, no matter how cliche, is that of carpe diem. In truth, though, I don't know how much of that is influenced by fiction, by society, by life's expectations that all human beings should treasure every minute of every day that they're alive and foster that survival-instinct... Because really, there are so many books and movies and people that talk about death, and facing death, it's like, no one's really going into it untouched anymore. We've all got preconceived notions of how one is supposed to face the subject. ::shrugs:: Kinda feels too contrived, somehow, if one were to talk of valiance and heroics now.
On that note, I was reminded of Dylan Thomas' poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377