Before meeting my new patient, I admired her Ford Mustang. The well-kept red convertible was parked on the street, by her brother’s driveway.
The license plate frame declared: Fly Away!
While unsure it was her car on that first visit, the frame’s message was a solid clue. Based on the medical charts I reviewed, she was a flight attendant in her early forties.
This was years ago when I worked as a hospice chaplain. Most of our patients lived in their homes. I recollect visiting her a half-dozen times. From our first awkward handshake to the final moments beside her hospital bed in her brother’s living room, our patient-chaplain relationship had grown stronger. She learned to trust me. I certainly learned from her as she continued living and loving while cancer recklessly attacked her body. Even at my last visit, her short gray-blonde hair was stylish. Her make-up, aided by her sister-in-law, was impeccable.
She never spoke one word to me.
Though the cancer spread across her once-athletic body, it had started in her throat. Long before entering hospice, she’d the lost the ability to speak.
Long after I first saw that patient’s red Mustang, I worked at another hospice. According to my highfaluting title, I was a Bereavement Support Specialist and did what other staff and volunteers in other hospices do: talk with people after a loved one’s death. Part of a hospice’s requirement is to support the grieving. Every hospice accomplishes that mandate in different ways. It may mean a series of letters are mailed to families after the death. Or—like the hospice where I worked—monthly letters arrive until after the first anniversary of the death. Some hospices make a single after-the-death phone call. Others make multiple calls.
I did a lot of calling.
I phoned, trying to gauge how folks were doing, making sure they knew about our grief support resources. On the phone, long minutes pass with me only muttering, “I see” or “Really.” I wanted them to know I was paying attention, but didn’t want to interrupt their stories or worries. Most calls were brief. A few of the hundreds of calls I made every month caused me to feel that something I said, or how I listened, helped a hurting person find a smidgen of hope in their day.
My parents said I had “the gift of gab.” By background I am a minister (now retired) and spent years preaching, striving to keep people’s attention for at least a portion of a twenty-minute sermon. In churches I served, there was also endless phoning: cajoling folks to serve on committees, work with the youth, or teach Sunday school. Such an opportunity for them!
Talk on, Larry!
And I did. After politely asking a wounded, fragile person if this is a good time to talk, I fulfilled the Medicare mandate to comfort grieving family and friends.
The red Mustang’s owner never said a word.
Our first encounter was awkward with a capital A. I was a stranger. I babbled. I struggled to find questions that allowed her to shake her head “No” or to nod “Yes.” Her doting brother, who had convinced her to move in with his family when the cancer made living alone impossible, hovered in the background. He didn’t want some fool of a hospice chaplain to upset her. This was his little sister. This was one of the last parts of his family that shared his childhood memories.
With each visit, I babbled less and focused on posing simple yes/no questions.
We prayed.
We held hands.
We made lots of eye contact. There were stretches of silence. Initially, it felt stressful. Eventually, it felt sacred.
She had a million-dollar smile. She forgave my mistakes, fumbling questions, and apologies. She never saw my tears . . . though after leaving, passing by her red convertible as it gathered more dust every week, I would weep.
She died less than two months after our first visit. Her brother buried her ashes in a cemetery with a view of the Pacific. “She loved the ocean more than flying,” he had once said to me.
Professionally, I understand the importance of words. Even my simple “Oh, really” contains the power to gently remind a person at the other end of the phone that I am still there, still listening.
But I also know the power of silence. Of touch. Of eye contact. Of shared smiles.
I know some are reluctant to spend time with a loved one who is dying or grieving because they don’t know what to say. So I say, say nothing.
Enter the room. Enter into their day and let them know by a touch, by a nod, by a smile, by a tear, that you are there.
And so are they.
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My book, A Companion for the Hospice Journey, is available at Amazon.