[Please note: Today's GUEST ESSAY was submitted by Bobbye R. Terry Executive Director, Odyssey Hospice and represents her views]
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is found in Isaiah 61:1, the beginning verse of The Year of the LORD’s Favor: The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,…
What better time to share this than at the beginning of the Christmas season.
This section of Isaiah is a mission statement proclaimed by an unknown prophet to bring about restoration to God’s people, to renew and vindicate them so they can resume active roles as witness to God. Jesus later read this scripture in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19.) To me he was telling his people that it was and still is what they are to do: Restore those who have been besieged by the tyranny of life.
No matter what your faith may be, if you are a hospice worker - someone who has chosen to serve the dying - you are fulfilling a similar mission. The people we serve, regardless of their position in society or ability to pay, have been attacked by an enemy, one that often stalks its prey - sometimes undetected for a long time until it is discovered through symptoms now out of control.
Terminal illness claims its victims, stealing everything they have: their possessions, their familial and friendship ties, their memories, their health and, ultimately, their lives. We, as clinicians do the best we can to comfort and ease the physical pain of final illness. Support staff is there to support those in the throes of complicated emotional and social dysfunction and depression. They also assist with the sometimes challenging task of shoring up self-esteem.
Yet, perhaps the largest commitement is focused on the spiritual care and bereavement coordinators, our "soul surgeons", who must bring hope to those who have lost it. The soul surgeons seek to explain a concept that is difficult for all of us: What is life beyond this realm?
Sometimes the dying receive that message, resting comfortably with the knowledge they can surrender to a higher power. Some, with little faith on which to rely, may not accept the calm finality of physical life and, like fish beached, have no air to breathe. They fight against the inevitability of organ failure, believing that is all there is, a finality with no light at the end of the tunnel.
Yet, all you have to do to know otherwise is spend some time in our inpatient unit with those actively dying, feel the presence of more than human beings occupying the space, watch what happens within those walls when a patient dies at peace.
If we have done our jobs well, light will shine into the hearts that are gathered there. And once a small ray of light shines, even into a pitch black room, darkness must abandon the space.
~Bobbye Terry
Thanks to Bobbye Terry for submitting today's guest essay.
