Reflections on a Recent Vigil

I arrived at Holy Name Hospice’s Villa Marie Claire in-patient unit in the mid-afternoon to see how a end of life vigil was going for a dying woman. I would be meeting the patient’s daughter for the first time. On my way to her room, I passed the dining room for the facility and noticed a young woman looking down at the floor, seeming particularly forlorn. There were other people in the dining room, but somehow the way she sat there drew my attention.

When I got to the room, I saw that the daughter wasn’t present, although she had told me that she would be there. I had a feeling that the woman I had noticed in the dining room was the daughter. I walked around the bed to look more carefully at the patient and knew right away that she was imminent.

At that point, I went back to the dining room and introduced myself to the young woman, who was in fact the patient’s daughter. She told me she just couldn’t sit in the room, because the woman in the bed was not the mother she knew and wanted to remember.

“I felt so anxious in the room,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. So, I came out here. I’ve been trying to gather my courage to go back in, but I’m very afraid of what I’ll find.”

Holding the Space
I told her that now was the time to be in the room, because I thought her mother was going to die quite soon. I made sure she wanted to be present for the death, and she did. When we arrived back in the room and I explained what I was seeing, the daughter fell into my arms sobbing. After several minutes her sobbing subsided and she was able to sit in a chair and engage in telling me about her mother and the wonderful woman and parent she had been. Perhaps twenty minutes later her mother died.

Reflections

As I reflect on this vigil, I’m struck again by how ill prepared most people are for the death of a loved one. Our society has done all of us a disservice by estranging us from death and by encouraging a combative, fearful fixation on avoiding even mention of it.

There are signs of change, and certainly the end-of-life doula movement is one of those signs. But the amount of work it will take to make a dramatic shift in our engagement with death is huge. This is the work INELDA is committed to doing. Work that I hope you will also commit to—as a doula or simply as a person who can bring another perspective into your family, your circle of friends, or the wider circle of relationships you participate in.

This vigil also reminded me how vital the end-of-life doula work is even if a vigil is relatively short, as this one was. The daughter of this dying woman would certainly have missed the opportunity to be with her mother as she left this life, if the doulas hadn’t been involved. In discussion with her afterwards, she spoke of how thankful she was that I brought her into the room. In spite of the difficulty she faced in doing that, she would have felt guilty about not being there.

Bearing Witness
The support we gave her allowed her to gather the strength to be present. She also was able to witness the great peacefulness of her mother’s death and never have to wonder if her mother died in pain or some other kind of distress. The daughter’s conversation with me and the other end of life doula that was present when her mother died brought some light into the dying process.

The other doula stayed with this daughter for a couple of hours after the death, until the daughter’s husband and two young children arrived. The daughter wasn’t sure if her children should go into the room to see their grandmother in death. The doula suggested she ask them and tell them what they would see. With some gentle encouragement they were able to go in and not be afraid. I’m sure this would never have happened if the daughter hadn’t herself arrived at a more accepting place in the time we spent with her.

Creating Change
Moments like these in vigil after vigil encourage me to believe that we can truly change our society’s approach to dying. This realization keeps me working on spreading the end-of-life doula approach and the understanding about death and dying that comes out of doing this work.