He was gone in an instant, slipping away quickly, slumping to the floor, releasing life…perhaps sensing in that last swift-ebbing consciousness, a distant ringing.
I was calling my father back, telephoning to apologize for arbitrary nastiness, unwarranted temper, directed at him an hour before. He wanted to see his grandchild…”come with Laura for lunch…” he had asked.
I was tired of the questions, the concentrated concern on the events of the month before. I circumvented answering his concern with sullenness and storm.
Now here it was again a life ending. Despite my recent crushing contact with death, with the birth of a stillborn child, I still did not understand dying. That inert creature, haunting as he was, had not become definite, a personality, evincing a presence so tangible, so exact that his loss could create an immense void. My father, suddenly irrecoverable, unreachable, did.
“The death of a loved one is like an amputation,” Madeline L’Engle writes in her forward to C S Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Lewis himself, in his palpable pondering, in a voice passionately suffused in suspended time, writes, “…no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear…”
The hospice movement first began to arrive in America in the mid-twentieth-century, and has become in many places not just a palliative to the mortally ill, an easement unto “death with dignity,” but a vital gift to the lives, the caregivers, the families left behind. Hospice has come to mean more than help for the dying. In many places, such as in Waterville, Maine, hospice offers arms upholding the staggering, psychologically struck living.
“The idea was mine,” Richard Russo tells me, about how the book A Healing Touch, started.
Dale Marie Clark, director of Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville Area (HVWA) recalls it was a friend of Russo’s who introduced him to the center. Impressed by the vast array of services offered, Russo looked for a way to benefit the agency and awaken public interest in the intimate caring hospice provides. HVWA also serves 27 other communities.
“Talking to Dale, a collection of hospice-involved stories made the most sense,” said Russo, in an interview. “So I asked writer friends of mine to participate. Dale an her staff connected the groups of writers to “families who would feel open to talking about their stories.”
“The six of us writers each interviewed three or four individuals or families with the intent of choosing one to include in the collection,” Russo said. Deciding on who to choose was hard. “We asked each other for help in panicked phone calls-they all so wonderful.”
Readers may be surprised at the linkage of the shared subjects, the varied ways these half dozen writers’ stories connect to hospice. The stories are varied as the services hospice provides. “There’s pain and loss, yes, but also laughter and love, faith and hard-won understanding. Life, in other words,” Russo said.
Although there are hospice services statewide, Russo only knows what the Waterville Hospice offers. They are geared towards grief therapy and helping survivors. “One of the purposes of this book is to let people know that hospice is not just about those who are terminally ill, but for the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, siblings let behind.”
In working on the book, the writers in each case become more involved than they originally imagined. The tellers’ stories became the writers’ own. “They intruded into us and we into them. They became too important to get wrong.”
You ask Ed and Debbie Crocker how many children they have and they respond, four. Erik would be 30 now, if he had not died instantly in a late night encounter with a tree at age 16. “It’s still four,” his parents say. “He’s still part of the family.” It has been years, “…the overwhelming grief…the paralyzing sense of loss…”
Russo writes about his long-time friend Lee Duff, and Duff’s wife’s early onset Alzheimer’s. Ann comes home late one day. “A funny thing just happened,” she tells Lee, rushing into her kitchen. “I couldn’t remember how to get home. Deterioration is rapid.
Russo visited Camp Ray of Hope, an affiliate of HVWA, where families and individuals find they can reach out to new, grief-stricken lost souls.
“Susan Sterling leads us in a workshop where memory pillows are being made,” Russo writes. “Sandra Kervin’s quilt hangs on a wall in the dining room-a quilt made entirely from her son’s clothes-his jeans, his car keys, his baseball cap, his fishing license. Sterling had not imagined she would be so moved: “I tried to find my way along a path of grief with words, reading and writing. Sandra has stitched her way…”
Wesley McNair tells of an anger management workshop Stan Spoors led as a volunteer at the camp. “He got the idea of breaking plates…Each time they lifted a plate to break it they had to envision the person or thing that made them angry about the death…Rage is a natural part of the grieving process.”
Hospice is all about loss and we desperately want an anodyne for loss. These six brave writers become immersed in some of life’s most profound depths of despair and the struggles gather what is left of family unity and self-sanity. And yet this is not a depressing book. It brims with hope and joy.
One December day 11 years ago, my husband of 12 years somehow found his way home. He had no memory of who he was, who I was, an as yet glimmering ghost of a massive brain tumor seemingly overnight changed a wry whimsical man-a hearing man who married a deaf woman without any knowledge of the enormity of deafness-into an angry unknown creature.
We had been planning to move to Maine that year. Hospice in New York was slow, then near nonexistent in helping us. In Maine arms reach out to all kinds of situations-slow deaths, suicide, young drivers, the whateverness of circumstance are just that. Volunteers and hospice facilities reach from there, from the need.
But in New York we lived on a boat. Harvey wanted to die on the boat; I struggled without much help until his last two weeks when I had to break my promise. I had no Camp Ray of Hope volunteers, until finally a very kind physician put Harvey in a small hospice section in the same nursing facility my mother had dwelt in for eight years.
I spent every day in that small shaded room, typing, reading, feeding him the only two sustenances he accepted. His right side paralyzed, he pressed into my palm with his left hand the American Sign Letters W, then I…He wanted both-wine and ice cream.
I would get a small vanilla/chocolate Dixie cup from the nurse’s station, the wine through a bent straw. They did not know about the wine. Who will do this for me, someday, if I linger?
A Healing Touch is beautifully written. I have the urge-even these many years later to throw a few dishes, lots of them-and perhaps slip the last one into the creek as one woman did, and find a nearby shoulder to cry on.
All six authors are donating their royalties to the Waterville facility. Down East Books will also donate 10 percent of the book’s proceeds to the hospice.