Occasionally, I am afforded opportunities to experience life in new and glorious ways. These experiences can either challenge me to change my conceptions or fortify my understandings of the world. Whenever I have the opportunity to do both, I am humbled and excited to grow more.
This past year, I have experienced life through a more lingering knocking of death. Death, I have learned, is not simply an all-or-nothing stage. It is true that at one point we live and at the next we are dead, but there is a middle transitionary phase that makes the distinction less openly discernible. This transition is characterized by two forms: mental and physical. Before I began volunteering through hospice care, I had seen the physical transition to death in the loss of loved ones, old and young. However, I had yet to decouple the physical transition with the mental — that is to say, I had yet to see death as a process in healthy physical state and yet weakened mental state.
My hospice patients suffered from various forms of dementia, debilitating them from engaging in certain forms of conversation or from accessing certain memories. I emphasize “certain” forms of conversations and memories because, as I learned, while in our conversations semantic coherency was not always achieved, emotional coherency always was. I was blessed to have shared in emotionally stimulating conversations in which words were shared but words were almost not even needed — where tone, inflection, gaze, and gesture were all that was required to understand.
I have found that memories are a central component of life. Indeed, DNA is even a form of memory. In the transition to death, a life is still lived experientially through memories — both through the individual’s own memories and through the memories of others who have known the individual. When memories are lost, the mental transitionary phase of death is at its fullest force. And yet, despite its destruction, those who have shared in the memories of the forgetful are able to still live with them. Two of the patients that I volunteered with were married. Both were in periods of transition. The husband, unable to articulate his memories descriptively to me, was still able to speak semantically to and through his wife. Their symbiosis was created through their memories.
I wish that I could have experienced more with them. I wish that memories could be immortalized in safes. I wish that they could be reformed if shattered through diseases like dementia. Perhaps my wishes can come true — perhaps death itself is not even the end of the transition from life. Indeed, this is what my hope and faith dictate. Hospice care has shown me that I want to dedicate my life in some capacity to keeping people alive through their memories — both in life and in death. As a physician, a counselor, and a Christian, I hope that my patients will live through our future conversations. I am already thankful and humbled that my friends who I have met through hospice care will continuously live through me.