What I am learning, working in hospice, is that the dying process can be a most profound and healing time - for the patient and for their family and caregivers. To be at home, surrounded by people who love you, making that transition on your own terms - is such a gift. Even if relationships with family have not been the best, it's really not about everything being soft-focus and ideal, but doing our best to at least bring closure to that life.
There is a lot of inner and outer work that needs to be done, and I'm so proud of the people who want to take back that time from the medical establishment and spend it on their own terms.
An analogy I've made for a couple of years now, is that of the birthing process - something once considered natural and normal - time spent with family to celebrate the profound nature of bringing a new life into the world. Then we medical types took over - bringing it into the sterile world of the hospital - family held at arms length. As a culture, we dismissed the spiritual nature of it all - the importance of birth as one of the bookends of life.
Then, young people took back that experience! I was in some of the first labor and delivery rooms when young fathers steped back in - reclaiming their right to be present. I was moved to tears many times, even when those fathers faultered or were nervous. The amazement in their eyes more than made up for their initial shakiness. I wondered more than once, if that experience would be the beginning of a better relationship between father and child than I had grown up with.
Now the same thing is happening with death. We are still scared - many people still believe that their only choices are being in horrible pain or killing themselves - but we're making inroads. Part of the problem is a lack of education in the medical community - Dr.s are, in general, still really bad at managing pain, even though really good pain management methods are well documented. Even worse, Dr.s are still really bad at telling patients what their options are. We in healthcare have a very hard time telling a patient that it's time to go home, put their affairs in order, and do that very important work of the end of life.
Many patients that I have worked with very much want to experience their end of life, and do so with acceptance and grace. Others continue to be conflicted, even to the end. Sadly, the patients who fight hardest often miss the tranquility that can be present in those final days, thinking that if they surrender into acceptance they will be "giving up." Nothing could be further from the truth, or two more opposite concepts.
For me, the bottom line is that I personally am doing the work now of acceptance of death. To live life in the light of dying - knowing that each day is precious, that doing that work is an on-going process, that surrender into the flow of The Divine - The Tao - is far far from "giving up."
