I never dreamed I would ever have anything to do with hospice. When I met my husband Larry, he was very interested in hospice and was taking a Death and Dying course in seminary. He was always talking about death-- not morosely, but about his experiences with dying people. I was of the typical mindset that you just don't talk about death. I grew up in New Jersey, and generally people there don't talk about death either. Out of sight, out of mind, and I guess we believed, it was therefore out of experience.
My first major experience with death and loss was when I was 19. Sandie, a beautiful woman of 39 and my mother's best friend, was diagnosed with melanoma. Since we didn't talk openly about such things at home (and in that way we were not unusual), I didn't know much about her experiences through cancer. We lived four hours away. Sandie sent me letters at college about her treatments, her renewed prayer life, the things she was learning through prayer, but she didn't tell me much about the prognosis or her odds of beating it. I adored Sandie. She was so beautiful, full of life and joy, and taught me so much about life and loving. We had just seen her for a long weekend at her house in New York when we got the news she'd died. A week after hugging her goodbye, we were at her viewing and funeral.
That was a devasating loss to me. I went back to college after a really painful summer of despair and depression. I didn't really have anyone to talk to, nor would I have known how to talk about it. My parents didn't talk about it either, and we all just grieved privately. I went on. I dated guys, struggled through college and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I floundered. It felt like someone had cut out my heart. But I managed to go on.
During my senior year of college, my childhood friend Donna died mysteriously and suddenly. She was six months younger than me, and that was the first time that death felt possible for someone like me-- it'd been bad enough that Sandie had been so young, but Donna was 22. For a long time, I was afraid that I could drop over any minute. When I lived in my own apartment, I was always afraid something would happen and I'd be alone. I developed a chronic depression, I believe, from two huge losses and unhealed grief.
It wasn't until 2004, 20 years after Sandie's death that I was able to truly express my grief. I was in a difficult position, working in a church where there was a lot of pain, anger and sense of loss, and it all felt like I was hit by a train. I wasn't sure I'd recover. But I invited Chet, Sandie's widower who had since remarried, to come visit. He did. We spent a couple of days talking, sharing memories, sharing tears, telling stories, asking questions, and both admitting that neither of us had had the chance to really grieve Sandie's death. Life scooped us up and didn't stop for our pain. And so it became an ongoing pain, a deep pain that just kept bleeding, despite us both finding goodness in our lives. That weekend was the first time I felt like I could truly feel the deep love and deep pain from Sandie's death. It was a gift from God.
2007 was a very painful and stressful year in my church. We suffered a lot of losses, a lot of sudden and tragic deaths. Halfway through the year, I remember saying out loud, "who's next?" I didn't think I could take any more. Then Karen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
I had sat by the bedside of many people who were dying during my ministry, but I still felt completely unprepared for what lay ahead with Karen. Many of those people had not been people I knew well, or they were unconscious by that stage and not able to talk. But as Karen neared death, she talked openly about it. I'd never really talked about it, somehow I'd managed to avoid such vulnerable conversations during the year. But during the last two months of Karen's life, we talked for hours, we cried together, we shared fears and questions, it was all out there on the table. Those were days that in my memory now seem suspended in time-- as if I'd stepped out of the world for those two months and was somewhere else, somewhere intangible, surrounded by Light. I was unaware of Time when I was with Karen during those days. I was gifted with a strength I didn't know I had, to keep going back and facing her decline. I loved her so much.
The night she died, I was there with Jim, her husband. The lights were soft, we played CDs for her, and I sat with her. I cried, I sang, I prayed with her. It was a whole nother dimension and reality. The rest of the world did not exist that night. When she took her last breath, Jim and I were held in some unspeakable peace and grace. It was pure holiness. Pure peace. Pure beauty and realness. That journey would change my life.
Now I work in hospice-- I work with the bereaved families of our patients after they die. Some people don't want to talk, and some don't want to stop. Already I've met such beautiful people. I've heard fascinating stories of lives lived and lost. People say it must be depressing work, and it really is not at all. It's hard to explain. The people I work with at hospice are exceptional people. Somehow it seems that people who work with death and dying people all the time, have a connection to another realm, another time. My coworkers are not pretentious at all. They are profoundly loving and deeply connected to the Spirit. We support one another. We laugh a lot, we even cry sometimes at work, but we are never alone. We all know that special calling to work with the dying, to catch glimpses of eternity from this side. The people we've worked with have given us that. Going to the office is going to a place that is bathed in gentleness, love and spirit. We do have bad days. We do have drama and conflict. But it's all in the context of the greater picture of what we do, and we make it through, all sustained by the loving Spirit of God that bathes us daily and prepares us for our work.
I keep a picture of Sandie on my desk, because I carry her in my heart. She was the first to teach me to live and love, and the world where she lives is not so faraway. I believe it is only a thin veil that separates time and matter from the incomprehensible world of eternity. And God keeps reaching through that veil to give us glimpses, so that we don't get discouraged in this life, and can share those visions in the here and now.
I love you, Sandie.
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