Issue No 185
Magazine for the Irfon and Wye Valley Churches September 2016
In the midst of life we are in death
My mother died this summer while I was visiting her in America. It was not something I expected to happen but at the same time it was not entirely a surprise. She discovered earlier in the spring that she had an aggressive form of lymphoma. This was alarming but she had always been tough and she responded well to the chemotherapy she had been given. Not only had the tumour shrunk but her doctors spoke encouragingly of remission. My mother’s attitude was positive but, at the same time, she knew that life is a journey with a beginning and an end and that for her the end was not far away. She had so many good friends and was involved in so many activities that she hoped for a couple more years of life. At the same time, she was letting go of some commitments and had planned to come to Wales in October to say farewell to her family here. When I arrived from the airport my mother looked amazingly well and laughed when I joked that I had come to look after her. She was clearly not ready to relinquish her traditional role of looking after me. A few days later she came down with pneumonia and was placed in intensive care in hospital. It was a hospital she was familiar with: not only had two of her five children been born there but she had volunteered in the hospital for twenty or more years as a lay chaplain. There is often something confusing, isolating and vulnerable about being seriously ill. My mother indicated that she felt lonely in hospital even though we visited several times a day. For some reason (perhaps the medication) her vision became distorted so she couldn’t read and, to help her breathe, she had been put on a ventilator with a tube down her throat making it impossible to speak. This made meaningful communication with anyone very difficult which was tremendously isolating. At first she tried writing what she wanted to say but much of what she wrote proved to be illegible and, frustratingly, she would write over what she had already written. Hand gestures, nods, facial expressions and mouthing words became her best method of responding to what we said to her. When she tired of this she wanted us to read aloud the book she had been reading for her book group. It was a book of theology, Not in God’s Name, by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Two of my sisters and I read to her chapters about sibling rivalries in the Old Testament; about Cain and Abel, Jacob and
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by Revd Carolyn Hall Esau, Leah and Rachel and Joseph and his brothers. My mother had always wanted her children to get on well with each other – which we do. We reassured her that we would always love and support each other. At first my mother made progress. The oxygen she needed became less and we looked forward to her coming off the ventilator; then there was a dramatic regression and we realised that she was not going to beat the pneumonia. Apparently one of the chemotherapy drugs had scarred her lungs and they would never heal. I cancelled my flight home and my siblings and I gathered to decide what to do next. The options available were made plain to us by the doctors. Our mother would never recover and she could not continue to remain much longer on a ventilator with a tube down her throat. If she did her throat would collapse. In order to prolong her life she would urgently need further intrusive treatment including a tracheotomy. The decision not to choose such a course of action was made for us by our mother’s own living will which prohibited any such intervention. On her last day my brother and three sisters and their families and I gathered at our mother’s bedside. My sister Connie told our mother clearly, but tenderly, what was going to happen. The look on our mother’s face was that of love, acceptance, even joy. Her priest conducted a short service in which she commended our mother to God and anointed her with oil. After she left we sang to our mother and talked of past times. The songs we chose to sing were some of those she taught us as children, including, ‘All Praise to Thee My God This Night’, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’, ‘Silent Night’ and a classic from her Lutheran childhood, ‘Beautiful Saviour’. It didn’t matter that we got seasons all mixed up. The monitors tracking her heart rate and breathing indicated that she loved hearing us sing. After a time the nurse turned off the ventilator and removed the tube from our mother’s throat. We continued talking, praying and singing as she breathed unassisted for another hour and a half. Our mother had given us life. The experience we had of our mother’s death was that of accompanying her as she approached a rebirth to eternal life in God’s safe keeping. She left all that was dear to her on earth and went alone, but surrounded by our love, to God, whose love is beyond comprehension, who reaches out to meet us throughout our lives and at death enfolds us in his love. Ð