Raising the dying

You may find it ironic that I'm writing a post about dying in a blog that's barely twitched in the past two months.  If this was the first thought that popped into your mind, congratulations  - very clever.  Perceptive, too: it's true that Tom's Passage to India has been something of a ghost-blog of late.  I think it would be an exaggeration to attribute this to writer's block, as the ideas - and even the odd witticism - have been churning out of my mind at their regular pace.  The problem has been actually getting them down into legible form; simply put, the ideas are there, just not the will or the words.  I think I'll ineloquently dub it "writer's glass wall", in that by all accounts, the potential for a solid post seems to be there, but I just can't get pencil to scratch paper.  

To be honest, I'm still not feeling all that creative.  I've decided a good way to kick-start my cranium would be to quote someone much smarter and more intelligent than me, out of the hope that it'll lead to a remotely insightful response on my part.  I'll leave it to you to decide whether my strategy is sound; for now, I pass the baton to Sheila Cassidy, a British doctor best known for her contribution to the hospice movement:

Medically speaking, hospices exist to provide a service of pain and symptom control for those for whom active anti-cancer treatment is no longer appropriate - there isalways something that can be done for the dying, even if it's only having the patience and courage to sit with them.  Most lay people imagine that hospices are solemn, rather depressing places where voices are hushed and eyes downcast as patients and their families await the inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.  Hospice care is about life and love and laughter, for it is founded upon two unshakable beliefs: that life is so precious that each minute should be lived to the full, and that death is quite simply a part of life, to be faced openly and greeted with the hand outstretched.  One of the hallmarks of hospice life is celebration: cakes are baked and champagne  uncorked at the first hint of a birthday or anniversary, and administrators, nurses and volunteers clink glasses with patients and their families.  (Cassidy, Sheila. "Precious Spikenard", Catholic New Times of Toronto, 1985.)

This is actually an excerpt twice removed: I pulled it out of The Road to Daybreak, a memoir by the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen that I currently have my nose in.  In this context, Nouwen is using Cassidy's passage to illustrate that hospices, like the Daybreak community for the mentally challenged that he worked at, are places that "proclaim loudly the preciousness of life and encourage us to face reality with open eyes and outstretched hands", where "the certainty of the present is always much more important than the uncertainty of the future."  (Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak, p. 21). 

More than anything else, this made me think about the way that many people - myself included - conceptualize compassion.  In my last post, I suggested that popular support in the West for development aid signifies the presence of elements of selflessness and empathy amongst it's citizens.  What I've recently come to suspect, though, is that we give largely on the condition that there are prospects for improvement; in the case of development aid, for example, we want to know that children will be given the opportunity to hone their potential in school, leading to more promising livelihoods.  Would we be as enthusiastic about contributing our resources and efforts to the wellness of those who don't have a future in this world in a physical sense?  In other words, would our compassion flow as freely to someone on their deathbed, as it would for a repressed child?

I suspect that the hospice movement addresses a need that has gone largely unnoticed in the mainstream.  Stephen Lewis, in his widely popular contribution to the Massey Lectures, Race Against Time, speaks passionately of the importance of treating those already afflicted by HIV/AIDS, in addition to preventing the spread of the disease.  At one point, he recalls a conversation with a World Bank official who bluntly states the need for a "trade-off" in favour of prevention, considering the impending mortality of those already infected (Lewis, Race Against Time, p. 157).  Although this anecdote may relay seemingly exceptional callousness, I'd imagine it represents the attitude of many institutions charged with serving the suffering and vulnerable.  

I think it comes across as pretty unnatural to invest in the dying in our results-based world.  Then again, the broader idea of compassion doesn't fit that smugly into this paradigm either.  Personally, I feel that if I'm going to ever learn to serve others, I'm going to have to elevate them to a position of preeminence, regardless of their position, potential, or usefulness.