The Importance of a Life: Remembering and Grief at the Holidays

When I worked in home hospice I spent most of my visits with family sitting or standing beside a hospital bed.  In the bed, lay a beloved person who, not infrequently, would die within the next couple of days or even couple of hours.  Sometimes this was my first visit.  Many times the patient was so weakened and near death that they were barely responsive.  Sometimes their breathing was ragged and we all knew that any breath could be their last.  Anxiety often ran high.  We are not accustomed to people dying at home, and we are not much accustomed to death.

I felt daunted.  The role of 'social worker' tugged at my insecurities - What could I do to help when there was so little time left?  What resources did I have to offer?  Wasn't I really a nuisance, distracting from the moments they all had left together?  What did I have of my self to offer?

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A client recently said to me that the majority of Christmas is about nostalgia.

Long, dark and starry nights, the smell of a wood fire, Christmas carols and lights, cookies baking, if we are lucky - snow...family events that seem to change imperceptibly from one year to the next, even the stories and movies we know - like A Christmas Story - the story itself is as nostalgic as our memory of watching it and cackling when Ralphie's dad says "Frag-ee-lay."

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Many of my clients and many people I know grieve more deeply at this time of year.  The nostalgia of the season makes the absence of the person or people you love different - maybe you feel lonelier.  Maybe you even feel destitute.  In this grief, much of what you feel is separate from the rest of the world, who seems to be connected to one another and also clueless to the pain and grief that haunt the shadowland of the season.

Yet I also know that many people who aren't grieving are not clueless.  This doesn't give the rest of us the credit we deserve.  We feel inadequate or uncertain (like I did by the bedside of hospice patients in the first year or so of my work).  So we 'non-grievers' might not say anything to our neighbor who lost a son, or our friend who lost her mother.  We might think things like, "Maybe it will upset him if I bring it up."  Or, "She lost her mom a few years ago, she's probably moved on."  Or, "I just don't know what to say."

A client recently share this with me:

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Working in hospice was a great gift to me for so many reasons.  One of them was that it forced me to do things that were really difficult and which I felt totally scared to do.  One of those things was stand by the bedside of a dying human being.  Maybe it was a dying dad, with his college-age daughter and a collection of neighbors and friends around him because he had no other family.  What I learned, was to ask about a life.  Tell me stories about your dad, I would say.  Tell me how you all became friends, I would ask the friends.  I would learn a little about the person who was dying and I would ask for even more stories - "It sounds like he never met a stranger," I would observe.  "It sounds like you all had some amazing vacations together."

I came to believe this did two things...one, was provide comfort and meaning to the family.  It's called Life Review in hospice terms and telling stories from our lives means that what we did and who we are matters.  This person made an impact.  The world is different and better (hopefully) because this person lived.  When we face the death of someone we love, there is no end to the comfort we get in knowing this.  It doesn't take the pain away, but it fortifies us a little.  Two, I believe that the dying person could hear these stories too.  I believe it would do something good for me, if I was dying, to hear good stories from my life and know that the people I loved were sharing in these stories.  I believe that knowing our lives have meaning might help us die peacefully.

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Dying of a disease and dying suddenly elicit a different texture of grief from family and friends, but it is all still grief.  If you know someone who is grieving and you have a special story about the person who died, I encourage you to share that story with the grieving person, maybe, especially, at this time of year.

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I found out unexpectedly this year that my third grade teacher, Ann Birmingham, died in 2015.  I'd been looking to connect with her on facebook - just thinking about what an influence she'd been on me and thinking I'd let her know.  What I found out is that I was three years too late - and she was a young woman in her 60s, so this was particularly surprising and sad news.

If I would have been able to talk to her, I would have said this:  "Mrs. Birmingham!  Hello!  Do you remember me?  I was in your third grade class in 1980-1981.  I thought you were so glamorous!  You always had manicured, dark red nails and you wore Jordache jeans and sometimes you wore black and I didn't know any ladies who wore black when I was a kid.  You quoted Saturday Night Live - Roseanne Roseanna Danna, and said "Nevermind" in a singsong, goofy voice like Gilda Radner.  And when you got mad at the class, sometimes you would turn to me and wink, as if I were included on a joke with you and you weren't mad at me at all.  I also remember when I wrote my friend, Jenny Nielson a note that said, "Mrs. Birmingham is in a bad mood today!  I wonder if she is on her p."  (That was our code word for period - how scandalous.)  And you confiscated that note and you never said a word about it and I thought I was going to get in a lot of trouble because it felt so disrespectful to you.  I remember you treated me like a 'grown up.'  You encouraged me to read books that were challenging - even a Wrinkle in Time and The Hobbit, which were for much older kids.  You were one of the first women I knew who didn't seem to fit a mold.  I looked up to you and I know you were a big part of my ongoing love of school.  Thank you."

I will try to find a way to share those anecdotes with her family.  Even three years later, I know that people still dearly miss their loved ones who've died. 

Sharing stories from a life, remembering the lives of people we've cared about and telling those stories is an act of connection.  I am connected to you, you are connected to me, we are connected to the past, the present and we are also connected to the future in ways that bring comfort and uncertainty.  We give a gift when we share a memory with a grieving person - the gift of a loving connection, sometimes arriving at the time that person needs it most.