Angels in the ICU
story for a woman knocking on Heaven's door
MY DEAREST FRIENDS,
How are we doing? In Monday’s newsletter, I promised an essay on the first fruits of volunteering to sit with patients who are dying.
I want to begin with the Corporal Acts of Mercy - a scriptural framework for servitude that spans all human touch.
These seven displays of fellowship have their roots in Jesus’ sermon on the Last Judgement, written in Matthew 25. They include feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, burying the dead, among other acts of almsgiving. At the conclusion of his preaching, Jesus famously declares, “...What you did not do for the least among us, you did not do for me.”
The Corporal Acts of Mercy are the most basic means of nurturing core human needs: being heard, known and loved.
These foundational acts of love allow us to intimately bear witness to the Spirit alive in our neighbor. Through selflessly tending to crude, physiological necessities such as hunger, thirst, and shelter, the fruits of Love are revealed at the surface of each primal desire.
In this essay, I’ll share the story of a patient, Bee. For each half hour I spent simply sitting with Bee, she was seen and she was heard. For each person now reading her story, she is known. This is the least we can do for our brothers and sisters.
In early September, I began volunteering with a program at my hospital centered around visiting terminally ill patients without family or friends to visit them. The director of the program, a female Episcolpalian priest, trained our small cohort of volunteers on both pragmatic and spiritual matters. What to do if the patient begins to code, the physical stages of death, head-to-heart communication.
Our lessons on maintaining watchfulness and permeability of self to others were enriching, of course. But rightfully so, you cannot train someone on what to do, think, or feel, when a person in front of you is dying.
Just a few weeks ago, I met a patient who will stay with me for the rest of my life. I will call her Bee. It was my first volunteer shift, and she was the second patient I had met. Upon entering her room, her disposition immediately weakened my heart. Despite her humbling, unknowable discomfort of being wrapped in tangled intravenous lines of machine and medicine, she turned herself on her side to face me completely. Bee focused purposefully with speaking, aquamarine eyes.
Our conversation was troubling. She expressed austere frustration with being totally reliant on her caretakers and refused to accept her inability to pee or dress independently. Bee was paranoid, believing that someone was coming to kill her violently. When I reflexively told her I was so sorry, she said, “Sorry is not going to save my life.”
The visit lasted about 30 minutes, consisting mostly of silence broken up with awkward commentary. In her eyes I sought the truth of her spirit, a bank where grace could bubble at the surface. She shared the date of her upcoming birthday and her now-cancelled plans to travel to the California Redwoods. I smiled, discerning she’s a Libra, and prayed silently she would be alive to win over her day.
I returned to Bee’s room once more. The following week, her nurse warned me that she was “aggravated and declining rapidly”. When I came to sit with her, she looked at me with the same ephemerally blue eyes and a gaze darkened with oceanic suffering.
Her eyes rolled back shortly thereafter. During her few moments of falsely lucid consciousness, Bee mumbled indistinctly and reached her arms out to grasp the nothingness in front of her. Not understanding her motions, I repeatedly offered her a water cup only to waste her energy on refusing. I do not know what she said or whom she saw. I want to believe she was receiving the angels resident to the critical care ward.
Bee passed away two days following this last visit. Despite the staggering inevitability of this event, our connection existing solely because she was dying, I felt completely blindsided. Sitting in her room, I knew she might die in front of me. I did not realize this meant actually being gone, that Bee would lose the wholeness of her life.
When I said I wanted to sit with dying people, I did not realize this meant sitting with dying people. Attuning to Bee, locking eyes, clutching hands, accepting the pain she graciously declared, I unconsciously convinced myself she would spontaneously recover. Exiting her room the final time, I prayed I would see her again in a week. No one close to me has died before. She was sitting, breathing, staring, in front of me, surely she would not die.
Death is absurd. It plucks away our loved ones without warning or reason. Death is highway robbery.
This is what Bee’s death taught me: we are not inclined to give others permission to die. Witnessing her skin-wrecked agony and delirium, not once did an intuitive spark prompt me to allow her this peace. We would sooner cling to last resorts; hooking up loved ones to mechanical respirators and cardiac bypass machines than have them leave. This is why we sign “Do Not Resuscitate” and “Comfort Measures Only” papers before our vitality escapes us: to preemptively curve the chase of death.
Confronting the necessity of her passing would have, at least, made Bee’s death understandable. In this way, the breathless presence she left, this horrible emptiness, could morph into regenerative peace.
I will and will not ever get over Bee. Her eyes will remain on the face of my heart for the rest of my life.
And yet, Bee is not the only patient I’ve sat with who has since died. I met a disgruntled man in the cardiac ICU who yelled at me for not being able to locate and put on his pants. He was confused, oblivious to the reality that he was a patient in critical care. He passed away the day after this encounter. Another woman graciously spoke to me about her love for the musical RENT, and the cast’s astrological signs. Upon hearing that I’m an Aries, she said, “You are the fire.” She was discharged to hospice following our last visit.
Death is tragic and death is unreasonable. And yet, redemptively, Love remains our guiding light, not reason.
I love these patients dearly. I am learning to bare my soul as to invite the reckless integration of our emotional bodies. This flow of self includes permission to die – a feat I am still learning, a feat capable only through supernatural Love. No matter how senseless, how inexplicable their suffering, through Love alone, they are released.
Thank you for allowing me to tell Bee’s story. These words allow her to live just a little longer; as long as I have your attention.
Much more is to come (semi-weekly basis?). The leaves are changing. We’re alive to witness daybreak once more. Be strong, my friends.
Love y’all,
Abby