Saturday Nights

I did the Saturday night shift, understandingly not a popular one!  But for me, it was a great piercer of the pervading cultural worldview. “We have Saturday night live!” Saturday nights are supposed to be party time, not a contemplative time with a dying person. Yet those were incredible Saturday nights, alive.

At first I wanted everyone to have a beautiful death, but I learned there is no way of knowing how someone will die.

My time at hospice informed my own life in so many ways. To learn to be present, in the reality of the moment, was one of the great lessons. But perhaps, for me, the most surprising was a redefinition of my concept of intimacy. It deepened and broadened with the giving and receiving of love in this care-giving situation. I had recently arrived from the Mid-west, from the corporate world, where my management style had been bottom line and authoritarian to some extent. I realized that if I could treat somebody I didn’t know at all with sensitivity, caring, and love, I could certainly treat my fellow colleagues and employees that way. I learned how I wanted to relate to people.

I repeatedly saw how the gift of unsolicited and unconditional love from the volunteers greatly softened the patients and eased their pain. In many cases, they simply had not had this in their lives. The idea that people, strangers at first, cared enough to come and be with them was a tremendous, awe-inspiring blessing to them.