Medicine and Dying
This is the first of what I expect to be several occasional reflections on how we die, how we live with those who are dying, and how we might do so with greater integrity as Christian believers.
A few weeks before my wife died, the hospital told me I would need to find a nursing home for her, or arrange for her care at our own home (an apartment at Saint Thomas in New York City). I visited a few places recommended by various friends or medical folk. In each place, I tried to imagine visiting her there. Was it convenient to subways? What was nearby? (One was across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.) I tried to imagine what her life would be like; I had been told that she might go on living for years in her diminished capacity. These were difficult things to imagine, and I felt it impossible to make a good decision. In the event, she had to be put back on a respirator; one morning not long later she died, having never left the hospital.
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Nicolas Diat in his book A Time to Die recounts his visit to En-Calcat Abbey (in April 2017), a Benedictine monastery founded in 1890 in the French countryside. Its abbot, Dom David, spoke with him about the deaths of monks, Diat says, “with the intelligence of an artist and the heart of a good, sensitive, and sensible man” who has “lived through painful moments.” Dom David spoke of a significant change in how monks die. “[I]n the old days, in the monasteries, one prepared a long time for death. We said that the whole monastic life was meditatio mortis.” The role of the abbot was “to encourage the old monks to face the end of the road. Today, there is no longer any question of that. At the moment when life hangs by a thread, there is the emergency medical service, the firemen, and before the day of final departure, there are many small departures in white cars or red vans; oxygen, transfusion, antibiotics, then life resumes, for a few weeks or a few short years.”
Dom David appreciates the good that hospitals can do (he himself had been treated for coronary stenosis, which “saved me from a lot of problems”). But he sees also how medical care—“fighting” disease—can deprive monks of precious time in which their calling is to prepare for death. One of his monks, Father Patrice, was approaching his hundredth birthday when a pulmonary infection sent him to the hospital. There the doctors fought the infection and, after two months, they were successful. They sent Father Patrice home, having pronounced him cured—and he died two days later. Diat writes: “The doctors had defeated the famous bacteria they had relentlessly pursued in his lungs. But the poor man had become a weak and emaciated little fledgling.”
Medicine helps us by isolating parts of our body and focusing on curing their ailments. But obviously this cannot go on forever. To do is to treat the patient like “a machine. Surgeons repair a liver, a kidney, a heart, a stomach, until the machine is so worn-out that it has to be thrown in the trash.” Dom David says we need “to stay in touch with God, from whom we get our breath. This link cannot be broken. The doctor provides care, but it is the patient who heals . . . connected with the One who gives life.”
Death can be hard and fearful, for any of us. Diat saw, and heard about, the fears and sufferings and perplexities of many monks. “The man who consecrates his life to God can fear the end of the road. He stalls in front of the door of the brothers staying in the infirmary. The struggle exists; it is useless to hide it.” Indeed, “selfishness, cowardice, and fear of one who suffers are always lurking in a corner of our heart.” Here we face our limits, and our need to entrust ourselves to God—as we care for one another, and as we prepare for our own final breath.
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Out & About. I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sunday, March 1; the services are at 9 and 11:15am. Also at St. Matthew’s on March 1, at 5pm I will lead a discussion of The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for some 17 years. The royal family, not without reason, took the publication of this book as a violation of trust, though readers have been grateful for its sympathetic insight into the girls’ education and life.
On the Web. In Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” the chaste Marina is captured by pirates and sold into a brother. Matthew Lee Anderson has an arresting account of her “realism” in the midst of a play full of magic—and the incredulity of his Baylor students concerning the attractive power of her chastity, an incredulity that underscores our cultural poverty. You can read his short essay here: https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/739-chastity-and-pericles