The Road We All Will Travel

I’m struck by the number of my journal friends who are facing, or have recently faced, the challenge of ministering to an ill or dying parent. We are at that age, I suppose. You think you reach independent adulthood sometime before you hit thirty. But that’s not when it really happens. It’s when your parents and grandparents have gone, when you become the matriarch of your own clan. Or you stand, relying on your own strength alone, because the invisible bulwark of the preceding generations is passing away. It’s an odd feeling…a combination of grief, forlornness, and empowerment. You suddenly want to ask your parents all the questions you never did, about being a grown-up, about being wise…the questions you know that, if they were here, you would still not be asking. Because you don’t think to ask until they’re gone. That is when you need the answers.

Then, there’s the challenge of procuring decent medical care for your dying parent. The medical culture of 21st –century America has provided us with a perfect purifying fire. You will need to grab your sword and fight your way through the maze of HMO red tape, Medicare rip-offs, stand-offish physicians who possess head knowledge but have no heart, and health "care" professionals who most definitely do not care. You will be confronted by a team of doctors who each claim some impersonal chunk of your beloved parent—the cardiologist, the gastro-intestinal specialist, the internist, the oncologist… but you won’t have one who deals with the whole person. Primary Care physicians? They’re just there to write the referrals to the specialists. That is, if you can get an appointment in less than a month. In the end, you are as exhausted and drained by the interminable battle with the medicos, as you are by the suffering and death of your loved one. There is something to be said for the strength and wisdom gained from the incessant fight. But I, for one, would rather have spent quiet healing time with my dad, than having had to don my breastplate and helmet daily to sally forth and procure another ounce of help from the recalcitrant medical community.

To all my sisters out there, I can only say—fight the good fight. And know that it’s going to be a fight. There’s a good chance your parent will not have a choice between dying at home or in the hospital. Hospitals don’t want to waste their time on terminal patients. When my dad’s hospice nurse sent him to the hospital in the last week of his life, looking for some treatment to make him more comfortable, his attending physician asked me, "Why is he here? We can’t do anything for him here." Luckily, Dad wanted to go home. It’s a good thing…he really didn’t have any other choice. The hospital was not going to let him stay.

You will probably need to face helping your loved one die at home. It’s not like the movies, my friends…that’s the only wisdom I have to offer. It’s hard work, it’s heart-wrenching…it’s an experience that nothing in our previous lives has prepared us to do. Without going into the less-appealing details, let me just say that you will do things you never thought you could do, and find a strength within yourself that you never knew you possessed. If you make it through to the end, you will have a sense of connection to your parent that you will never lose, and a feeling of having accomplished something every bit as miraculous as giving birth.

Blessings, strength, grace, and power to all of you who are standing at the beginning of that road today. Those of us who have traveled it before you wait along the roadside, ready to help in any way we can.