Standing by a Deathbed
An extraordinary essay by Megan McArdle
I have very little commentary to add. I’m just going to share a few paragraphs from Megan McArdle’s open letter to those caring for a dying parent, and urge you to read the whole thing.
American society often downplays the obvious when it comes to death. In movies and fiction it is sensationalized, or sentimentalized, but when it comes to the actual thing, it is often simply ignored, tucked away in hospital rooms and nursing homes so we won’t have to look at it. Movies stick healthy actors in hospital beds, where they gently pass away from Terminal Paleness right after imparting some touching final wisdom. Essayists, protecting the dignity of their elders, focus on the easier, lucid moments, not the brutality and indignity that often surround them.
This left me unready to face death in its true form: the choking breaths that used to be called the “death rattle,” the mottled skin and shrunken bodies, and the horror of watching my father’s color change and knowing I’d seen the moment when his heart finally stopped beating. I didn’t realize I would have flashbacks for months. And I was furious at how badly our culture had prepared me for the hardest thing I ever had to do.
I want you to know the reality so you will not be caught unprepared, as I was, for the fact that there is nothing picturesque or peaceful about dying. But I also want you to know how glad I am that I kept vigil with my parents at the end. Do the same if you possibly can — sleep in their room if the hospital will let you. It is the final thing you can do for them, and it is an unutterable comfort to know that you did your utmost to the last. No matter how unbearable it seems at points, remember that millions upon millions have done it before you and survived. You will, too…
Now I am going to say something that will probably strike you as strange, and which you will almost certainly not understand until you are on the other side of the storm. But I hope you will remember it: Death is not the end of your relationship with your parents. As you help them die, their frailty and your helpless pity will force you to see them as full human beings for the first time, and you will love them better and more deeply than you did before.
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I think it’s both common and extraordinarily cruel for many people’s first vigil at a deathbed to the one they keep with a parent. There’s no apprenticeship.
In the last five years, I have been to the funerals of my father, my husband’s yiayia, and that of a college friend, just a few years younger than me. Only at that last was his body present, carried step by step by his friends, who would have been strong enough to easily carry any weight but this.
I’m curious about your own experiences.
I was never brought to funerals as a child. (And bringing two kids while pregnant with a third to one memorial, I understand why people lean that way. I spent more of the memorial in the hall, where the funeral home considerately installed an excellent sound system, so I heard every tribute). For me, it seems a lot easier to bring slightly hard to corral kids to a funeral Mass rather than a memorial.
In my monastic community, we take turns keeping vigil with a brother as he approaches death. We sign up for a time so that he has someone around the clock. The first time I was in the room though, was for the death of my own (biological) father. I can sympathize with the author of the piece, but fortunately I did have someone who could prepare me. A brother of my community had also lost his father in a way similar to me, and he gave me good counsel, including some practical advice. And for the week my father was on hospice, he and other brothers were available via a phone call. And of course there were continual assurance of prayers. I have noticed since my experience with my father, an unnatural (supernatural?) confidence heading into the rooms of dying brothers. And I have even had a couple opportunities to listen to my younger brothers process their own experiences of being with the dying. And other times the flashbacks make it harder for me to be there, and I get to depend on my brothers to pick up where I cannot go. It’s different because we’re all adults, but it’s similar in that we are treating being with the dying as part of our common life that we are formed to live. Check out the scene of Benedict’s death in Gregory’s Dialogues for where we draw inspiration from for our monastic practice of vigil.
Thank you for sharing this article. This is a topic that I am constantly mulling over!
When I first started working as a nurse twelve years ago in my early twenties, I remember feeling utterly betrayed by my romanticized notion of health and healing, life and death. Even going through nursing school, my bubble was not burst until I began working at the bedside, and found myself facing death with my patients, and straining to make a hospitable end for them and their families. At 23 I was coaching and comforting people much older than me through the death of a loved one, feeling oftentimes like *I* was the only adult in the room.
I have dealt with a lot of anger towards the educational institutions and the veins of Christian thought I was raised in that left me so unprepared to deal with death when it was so unavoidable, but more than that I have struggled with anger that death is something so inevitable and so precious that is siloed away from the rest of life. I have found it incredibly difficult to know how to communicate my disorientation and disillusionment with the popular modern fiction of ignoring death because death and dying simply are not topics that come up without some effort, and the way I think about it now is layered with such visceral, embodied experiences that many could not conceive of.
Talking about death comes with the uncomfortable cost of facing mortality, but NOT talking about it comes with such a greater cost. I cannot count the number of times I have wished that my patients had actually prepared themselves to die one day, that I have wished that doctors suggested ending life-saving interventions in order to guide a dying person towards the inevitable with their dignity and humanity honored and cherished. Although modern medicine has many gifts to offer, every single one of them comes with a cost. The one-sided legacy of evading death that is being passed down with each piece of technology stunts our ability to grapple with hard things, and also our ability to really, fully live. Wisdom comes in not just knowing what can prolong life, but also in knowing our limits, and guiding others to know theirs when it is our place to walk with them.