A second chance

My day began and ended with families where the second chance for living was coming to an end.

In the first visit, a woman in her late 50s asked to fill out a Living Will and a Healthcare Surrogate form. She was realistically preparing for open heart surgery, said that she had almost died three times in the last year, and was thankful for decades of remission from Hotckins Lymphoma. At the time, she said, the chemo-therapies had not been so gentle and all of the medicines from that time, which she recognized gave her 30 years of living, were the cause of her current medical crisis, and could kill her this week. She said she was desensitized to the drama of it, and simply wanted to make sure that if she was put on a respirator due to her impending surgery, that it not go on for more than three months.

“I will not be a Terry Schiavo,” she said simply.

She had an amazing sense of balance, and was not angry or seemingly sad at the prospect of her death.

“I learned that each day is a gift,” she said.

The visit at the end of the day was not so cheery. Here gathered a grieving family, as their husband, father and uncle, lay dying of liver failure. He had been a transplant success story for some 15 years and, up until last week, was on the list to receive a new liver. But had he had taken a turn for the worst, and his liver and his kidneys were failing. He was on comfort measures only, and according to the palliative care technician would probably die within 24 hours.

The room was darkened and his wife and his sisters were weeping. Undoubtedly, their grief would carry them to gratitude at some point down the road. They would remember the joy of the 15 extra years that a transplanted liver had made possible. But today, it was about loss and sorrow and saying goodbye.

There is no real comparison between the first and the last visit of the day. Grief and reconciliation are not constant. There is no right way or wrong way to let go of life and loved ones. There is no sure way to maneuver through our painful experiences.

It is this lesson that seems most poignant to me at this stage of CPE: how important it is to meet people where they are with compassion and a curiosity to learn more about the what’s really happening for them. It’s not about fixing the situation; it’s not about providing comfort; it’s about walking together through hard and at the same time ordinary human situations.

Wayne Muller, in “The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood,” explained that we all want to consider ourselves extraordinary – we want to see our problems, our struggles, as being amazingly more complex and difficult that anyone else’s. He comments that we make ourselves significant by our magnitude of our troubles. Really, though, “none of us is more special than anyone else. Each of us was given a particular combination of wounds, gifts, talents and imperfections that merely give texture to the quality of our experience.”

It’s comforting to understand that our lives are ordinary and that we are uniquely ordinary together. Each day we get to face our particular challenges. Each day, we have a second chance at living. While not as dramatic as the two families that I visited with yesterday, we have a second, third and fourth chance to experience the wonder of human life from our very unique perspective.