Death is a concept that has always been hard for me to discuss and completely accept as a part of my human experience. Facing the idea of your own morality is taboo within our society. This taboo is even more apparent for younger people who have a sense of invincibility.
I have only experienced one close, personal death in my life. My freshman undergraduate roommate passed away due to complications related to cancer. His death shattered that sense of invincibility for me because we shared many commonalities in interests and aspirations. It could have been me who received the diagnoses and suffered the same fate as my friend. Until this moment, I had distanced myself from the idea of death but I now started to engage more with the concept of death. After the initial mourning phase ended, I reverted back to my previous disposition until my volunteer experience at West Penn Hospice changed it.
At West Penn Hospice, I didn’t get the opportunity to establish a close relationship with any one particular patient but the experience related to caring for hospice patients was still meaningful for me. I had the night shifts that allowed me to participate very closely with the care of the patients. The routine became to aid the nurses with re-positioning patients and changing bed dressings. During the re-positioning, I talked to the nurses about the patient and their background. If the patient would wake up, I then had the opportunity to help with mouth care. I moistened a sponge swab with gel and rubbed the swab against the cheeks of the patient. During the process, I generally talked to the patient about the information I learned from the nurse. This was my favorite part of the experience, even though most patients were unable to communicate back, their eyes and demeanor showed that we had connected. The connections didn’t last long but they were still very significant to my experience at the hospice.
The Sunday reflection sessions taught me to appreciate these types of connections and challenged me to continue to facilitate them throughout my hospice experience. The reflection sessions also helped to deepen my spiritual awareness. Death is a necessary physical occurrence that is a part of the human experience but death is also spiritual. Before my experience, I neglected to recognize this spiritual awareness. For my friend’s death, I mourned the physical aspects of his death but I had not realized that spiritually through my memories and interactions that I could still connect. I applied this same thinking to the hospice patients I helped the nurses with. Mouth care become my way of connecting with the patients spiritually and allowed me to have a memory of them past their death.
Watching Being Mortal by Atul Gawande put the information we learned during the reflections into medical perspective. In this video, Gawande identifies that there is no perfect solution to the problems inherent in bodily decline but we need to commit ourselves to the patient’s experience with death. It is important for medical professionals to tailor intervention methods to the goals patients have set for their end-of-life care. This is an idea I will take away with me into my future career as a physician. Overall this experience has definitely heightened my spiritual awareness and deepened my understanding of end-of-life care.