Comments by "June VanDerMark" (@junevandermark952) on "Dr Rangan Chatterjee" channel.

  1. From the book … FINAL JOURNEYS … A practical guide for bringing care and comfort at the end of life, by Maggie Callanan. Dying people don’t expect us to have all the answers. There are many questions about dying, death, and what may come after that are unanswerable by anyone. In asking such questions, the dying person is really asking for our honest concern and support, and above all for our willingness to share his or her journey as much as we can. The following story illustrates this well. Eula I had been asked to do a presentation to a general hospital staff in Michigan on the topic “How to Be Present for the Dying.” My host had told me that each staff department wore different color of smock, and when I noticed a sea of burgundy in the audience, I asked him which department that was. To my surprise, his answer was “Housekeeping.” Part of my presentation was about how uncomfortable it can be to talk to someone about dying. At that point, Eula, whose burgundy smock carried a name tag reading “Supervisor,” jumped to her feet and waved her arm. I nodded for her to speak. One day, she told us, she had been mopping the floor in a patient’s bathroom when she heard his physician come in and inform him that all the curative treatments had failed. There were no more options; sad to say, he was now terminal. The doctor sat with him for a few minutes, trying to soothe him as he cried, and then quietly left. By now, Eula went on, the bathroom was very clean. She couldn’t stay there, but she was unsure what to do. “So I put my head down and looked at the floor I was mopping, working fast to get out of the room without disturbing this poor man. Then he said right to me, ‘How could God let this happen to me? I have always tried to live a good life. My wife and children need me. Now I’m going to die! He was sobbing. ‘How could God forsake me like this?’” There was an awkward silence in the audience. I asked Eula what she had done next. “Well,” she said, “I leaned on my mop for a minute or so, and then I said, ‘If I had the answer to those questions, do you think I’d be mopping floors?” the audience gasped—and then started to giggle and laugh. “How did he respond?” I asked. Well, he was still laughing when I left the room, but I did stop at the nurses’ station to report this, so they could call the chaplain for him, or whatever.” After the presentation one of Eula’s co-workers came up to me. “What Eula didn’t tell you,” she said, “is that she assigned herself to clean his room every day until he was discharged home. And every day she’d bring him a big caring smile and spend extra time making sure his room was spotless and that he was doing okay.” Eula gave him the very best she had to give, and he appreciated this simple gesture. Dying people do not ask us to analyze, diagnose, or solve their problems. They ask us to understand their anguish and be willing to listen and share their journey, good and bad, as far as we can.
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