I recently had a string of days where I felt like I was constantly being interrupted. As soon as I would begin a task or a project or sit down with a cup of tea, the doorbell would ring, the dogs would begin to bark and my phone would begin to dance across the countertop . Or, I would have just gotten on the floor to do my stretches and a knock on the door and a neighbor walking in would take me away from where I thought I wanted to be. I know that all sounds so whiny and ungrateful. So, it happened again and I suddenly realized that the word that was popping up again and again was interruption. And that word carries a very negative connotation for me. 

This whole idea I have written so much about, that being in-the-moment, open and willing to receive whatever comes is incongruent to then feeling annoyed when what has come feels like an interruption. And for this period of several days, I was feeling continuously interrupted. Then I realized that because I was using that word in my mind, and it carried such negative feelings with it, that I was creating a sense of anxiety in my life.

So I'm looking at all of this when all of a sudden it all connected to another part of my life, another piece of something I have been marinating in. And as I am writing this I am really hoping I can bring it all around full circle and also trusting that if I do not, I will be forgiven.

So here's the thing. With the help of a couple of well worded and lovingly presented emails and a conversation with a dear friend who had just returned from her family of origin where a beloved elder is dying, I have recently been encouraged to speak about deaths that have been less than peaceful, or even downright awful. For the better part of a week I've been trying to remember times that I've been part of someone dying where the person doing the dying has done so kicking and screaming at the injustice of it all, the anger at being robbed of more living. And what I can remember are not so much times when the person leaving is railing against it so much as the ones surrounding them might be. It's really and truly the rare person who dies alone. There is almost always some kind of tribe that begins to come together. 

If not immediate family, then a combination of family, neighbors and friends. 

What I believe those who have approached me are really looking for are my thoughts about those deaths that create a ginormous, almost volcanic interruption in the structure of our lives as our lives relate to the one who has left or is leaving. When someone is dying, and a tribe forms, it is like a solar system revolving around the sun. When death comes, the lives of each of those left living are thrown off balance. I have often said, in memorial services that in the moment someone we love dies, the Earth shifts on it's axis.

It's such a profound phenomenon that we enter a time of demarcation for our own lives based on all our living before that moment and then every second after for the rest of our lives.

I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is the ones who expect to be left living when a beloved dies who feel the greatest disruption in their own life, and depending on so many things, that disruption, or even the anticipation of it, brings out sacks full of unfinished sewing projects. Threads that had they been sewn or knitted to completion would be a beautiful quilt ~ a lap blanket of memory that could comfort us. Unfinished, they feel, somehow, like nothing more than just pure sorrow.

Okay. So, I'm sitting and jotting down these thoughts and I start remembering a woman I was with recently who had just been told by her oncologist that trying to contain or slow down her rapidly progressing cancer with more chemotherapy would be wrong ~ that we would be doing her more harm than good and that it was time for hospice; time for her to gather her people and think about what she wants her dying to look like. She had been hospitalized in a very weakened state. We had done all we could for her and she was stable but weak and no one could predict how much time she had remaining.

I had not been there when her oncologist had met with her so I asked her how that had been for her and if she was surprised by it. And she said she was. “And, now?”, I asked. “How are you feeling now?” She was sitting up in her hospital bed with an untouched breakfast tray in front of her even though lunch trays would be along soon. 

A full bowl of runny looking oatmeal had a spoon in it but all the other dishes on her tray were still covered and untouched. When I asked her how she was feeling in that moment she said she was angry. But there wasn't really any energy or power behind her words. The Palliative physician I was teamed with that day and myself were the only people in the room with her. We had each pulled chairs alongside her bed railings because her hearing aids had died and she needed us close in. The room was quiet except for our questions and her answers. I asked, “do you feel like you are being robbed of time you thought you still had left to live?” and she said “Yes. I thought I had more time.” “I have things to finish.”

One of us asked her what some of the things were that were unfinished and it turned out she was a prolific crafter of all kinds and had a lot of projects going that she had though would get finished but the one she identified as a priority was the baby blanket she was crocheting for her first great grand baby. A little girl, born two weeks earlier. A little girl she had yet to meet because the family lived in another state.

The physician and I both, with gentle awareness of the time that was so quickly slipping away asked her if she knew anyone who could finish the blanket if she found her self too weak to crochet before it got done and she said she already knew who that would be. 

Then she told us that the beginning of the blanket was actually in the room, in a shopping bag on the couch. She had chosen the most beautiful yarn, soft and spun in the purest rainbow of pastels. We asked if she might want to work on it for just a bit while all the details and arrangements were being made for her discharge home. When she said “Yes.” we moved the table that straddled her lap and placed the bag beside her on the bed. Her hands were the hands of a woman who has known hard work; aged to perfection and thin from disease. We watched quietly and with fascination as her beautiful, boney fingers tried to remember what to do with the crochet hook, and as we left her I remember wondering how that anger she said she had felt would eventually play out in her dying process.

Perhaps helping her remember something of such poignant importance that needed to be finished had given her something more positive to focus on, something to channel that energy into besides thoughts of feeling robbed, but we rarely get to know how these things play out. And even if she found herself back in those feelings, maybe she would use them to leave her loved ones with words of wisdom.

I know that sometimes feelings of anger can fester into feelings of even bigger anger.

Sometimes the feeling of being assaulted by death, whether because it feels too soon or maybe just because it is happening at all, can blindside us with such an unimaginable interruption of living, that the disbelief, anger, resentment and regret fly out at anyone who comes near. The most unsuspecting and often the most undeserving become the target for the vitriol. Maybe. But maybe the one dying is so unable to control their own fear, they can't help where it goes. I'd like to believe they are not intentionally targeting anyone. That being said, I have seen people who are dying pull away from those they love most; or push away those they love most, in an attempt to make their death less painful for them, when really, all they are doing is making it hurt so much more. 

If you are caring for someone who is lost in their own fear of dying and it is coming at you as anger, and feeling like hatred, it's ok to look them in the eye and with all the love you can muster say to them, “Hey, I am not {whatever it is they are dying from}, I am not your cancer, I am not your heart disease or your kidney disease, I am not that thing you are angry at. I am your friend, or your daughter or your wife. And I love you. I am sorry this is happening.”

The pain experienced when we are doing everything we can to take care of someone we love who is dying and they are ungrateful and unkind and unaware of what it is like for us to watch them leaving, is unlike any other kind of pain we may ever know. It has caused families to unravel when what they need most is a strong fabric of family love. It has caused daughters to question a mother's love. It has caused so much pain. And such unnecessary suffering. And such deep deep sorrow.

If you are listening to this and you come from a family that “just doesn't talk about this sort of thing” break the mold. Be the one to break the silence. Be the one to make it not just alright to talk about death but to actually plan for it. Having these conversations in addition to a completed advanced directive and a funeral that's paid for and an estate that you believe is iron clad does not guarantee that should you be the one to die, your loved ones will traipse through fields of tulips singing kumbaya. 

But it's a damn good start, because in doing all of that, you will find yourself having more and more conversations about how you'd like to be cared for if you have an expected death, where you think you'd like to be, who you'd like to have there. 

We cannot change, necessarily, the way others approach their dying. But in looking at our own, we can give those who love us who might be there when we do it, some place from which to start. And maybe, in doing that, we can actually change the way others approach their dying.

So when I get a little annoyed because of an interruption when I am in the middle of something else or just getting ready to start something else, I stop and wonder what it must feel like to be told you are dying; to behold the reality that your closets might never be in order, your underwear drawer might just have to stay a mess, the quilt might never be stitched. That gives me a pretty good perspective to see a knock at the door or the ringing of the doorbell as something to be grateful for. If I don't want to be disturbed, I can put a sign on the door asking not to be.

And as far as my phone.....well....I learned to ignore that a long time ago.

This is SJ, thank you for joining me. I hope next week or the week after to introduce my friend Akaljeet to talk about her work as a death doula; an opportunity for people to learn what it is and how it can support families as a beloved nears end of life. Until then, may you know peaceful moments in the challenging chaos of life...

love sean