A call to action to ease the affliction of loneliness

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2017 (2958 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Troubling.”

That’s what Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen called assertions that the faith-based Misericordia Health Centre didn’t listen to an elderly man in its care and let his wish to die be known to those who could legally assist him.

Whatever happened in the case of Cheppudira Gopalkrishna, we know what didn’t, and what’s troubling is the province and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority didn’t have procedures in place to address competing rights and responsibilities as soon as the right-to-die legislation was enacted.

That larger institutional story has been written about and debated before, though.

What touched me most about this week’s personal version was what the terminally ill 87-year-old former biology and chemistry teacher shared with Free Press reporter Jane Gerster about his feelings on the day before he was scheduled to be assessed for an assisted death.

“Tell them I’m very lonely,” he said in reference to the readers. “If they have people like me in their company or in their circles, to reach out to them, to try and make it a little easier.”

But how? And where to start?

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When I was a teenager, my mother asked me to do something for her that was really about doing something for others. The woman who had been orphaned at birth and grown up lonely in a foster home asked me to go the Deer Lodge Hospital on Sundays and push wheelchair-bound First World War veterans down the halls to the chapel.

So I did what she asked. Even though I didn’t understand it at the time, that was my mother’s way of teaching me the duty to help others. I mention that, both because of Gopalkrishna’s plea, and in the context of something I recall reading almost a decade ago in the New York Times. It was a feature about a reporter who had followed five chaplains on their hospice rounds and the writer, Paul Vitello, immediately had me beside him at the bedside right from the opening paragraph.

“Some of the hospice patients talk about their impending deaths, or about God,” he began. “Most just talk about what people always talk about — u­nfinished business and unanswered questions: regrets over firing an employee 50 years ago, the pet no one has yet promised to adopt, feeling sick to death of being sick yet not ready to die. About Bach: ‘How did he dream up that music?’ one woman asks.”

Then the Times reporter moved to the trend at the centre of the story.

“Listening to final inquiries like these has long been the domain of a family priest or rabbi. But for a growing number of Americans who do not know a member of the clergy, that bedside auditor is increasingly likely to belong to an emerging professional class known in the hospice world as a pastoral counsellor or chaplain, who may or may not be a clergy member. The encounter with a chaplain can be profound and spiritual, and sometimes religious in a traditional way. More and more, though, ministering to the terminally ill in hospice care is likely to be non-sectarian, or even secular…”

Or simply, compassionate strangers who have taken some training and volunteered.

The story went on to explain the reasons behind “the new pastoral model.” There was “a growing consensus in the medical world that spiritual care comforts terminal patients; the shortage of clergy, especially priests; a decline in traditional worship; and the apparently unchanged need most people have near the end of life to make sense of existence.”

“The chaplains listen, mainly; and sometimes, like jazz musicians, pick up themes and try to bring them to new levels,” Vitello reported.

“‘I talked to my mother yesterday,’ said Robert, an 83-year-old man with Alzheimer’s, whose mother had died in the 1960s.

“‘How was she?’ asked the chaplain, Tom Grannell. ‘You haven’t talked to her in a while.’

“‘Pretty good,’ Robert said. ‘She agrees with my father: I’m laying here too long. Time to get back to work.’

“‘Your mother always believed in you,’ the chaplain said.

“‘Yes, she did,’ Robert said.”

Then there were the larger recurring topics or themes the chaplains would hear: unresolved conflicts with relatives, alive and dead; people they loved, the meaning of dreams, pain. And, yes, loneliness.

Last spring, as I sat beside my favourite high school teacher at the Riverview Health Centre, Norm Larsen talked about pain and the meaning of a dream, but not about being lonely. Instead, he recalled being a young man and seeing a white owl in the woods that inspired him to learn more about it and everything else he could.

Norm said he had no regrets, he’d had a blessed life. And, even though I arrived at his bedside not knowing what to say, I realized all I really had to do was listen and hold his hand. It turned into one of the most uplifting days of my life and, hopefully, his own.

Now, as I contemplate my pending retirement — which feels like a different kind of death to me — I’m struggling with what to do until it’s time for someone to listen at my bedside.

Maybe I’ve just found it.

Thanks to that memory of my mother’s teaching, that afternoon with Norm Larsen and the plea from a compassionate stranger named Cheppudira Gopalkrishna.

A dying wish and plea he meant for all of us.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca