Death and Dying, II

The tiny town I live in on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State is really an amazing place.  Twenty of us have become the care givers for a friend who is dying here.  I know some of the folks on the team pretty well, others merely by sight, and the rest, hardly at all.  Nevertheless, we have all joined together to give our dying friend the best care we can so that he can leave this life as he chooses.  We have had several meetings about how to accomplish this, each taking on separate tasks, including scheduling, email updates, email tree, etc., and in each meeting our goal is to do the things that Steve requests.  As that changes, we need to change as well, because the most important thing is to respect his process.  The key word is process, which means what he wants, and what he needs, will change as this end of  life experience progresses.  Here am I, who’s always been afraid of death, helping someone to die.  Each visit he is weaker, but each visit has included a discussion about some issue that seems pressing to us both, as well as  jokes about the lives we have each lived and the choices we have made, both positive and negative.  At this point I take his lead, because these days he is more tired, and is moving inward.  Our group of twenty talks about this change, and helps one another figure out our roles day by day.  Steve guides us, as he should, and we guide one another.  I do still hope I am not on shift when he takes his last breath, but if I am, I’ve been told, I will see that it is a gentle thing, this ‘passing’, and be less afraid of my own.  So far the experience has been quite extraordinary.  And though I wish it were other, and that Steve would be with us for many more years, I am also coming to accept that this is not to be.  His process, our process and my process.  I am learning how to honor all three.  Would that this country had a different way of dealing with death and dying so that hanging on as long as possible wasn’t necessarily the goal, but moving towards the light, with friends and family who care about us and help us get there was accepted and seen as both worthwhile and necessary.