Status Updates From A Good Death: A compassiona...

...your vigil at the deathbed can provide comfort. You can even encourage the person by giving them permission to go. The idea is to tell the person it is okay for them to go, not to tell them, ‘It’s time to go’. Death is about letting go and, therefore, their choice.

Love and grief are intertwined. Some say you can’t have grief without first having love. So maybe the more we love someone, the more we grieve when they die. We lament, we implore fate, the gods, God just to pass us by when death comes. We fight the grim reaper. We survive the inevitable prospect of our death by blocking it out. We live audaciously so we can be filled with thoughts of life, not death.

Tensions can arise over issues that appear small to others but are important to the family. To expect everything to be joy and light as you are with someone who is dying is not realistic.

Frequently people experience agitation close to death. Hopefully this will be brief, if it is experienced at all. Managing the patient’s anxieties about death in the early stages of dying can help reduce agitation, and medications can help too.

By being involved with the dying patient’s comfort, your family can feel you have provided real care and this will help you with your bereavement.

Encourage life review, if this is what the dying person wants. Life review is a verbal reflection by the dying patient, sometimes quite long.

We have the romantic notion that the family is the unit that nurtures us and protects us the most. In reality, it is the unit that can also cause us the greatest suffering. This needs to be acknowledged.