What Hospice Workers Learned About Saying Goodbye
Not everyone has the chance to say goodbye to someone who’s dying. But when they do have that opportunity, it can be one of the most intense moments of their life.
Bay Area illustrator Wendy MacNaughton is familiar with this process, from spending time with her aunt—who had Parkinson’s—before she died. At first, Wendy was uncomfortable being around her aunt. “I’d never been at the bedside with somebody who was dying, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid to really sit and be with her,” said Wendy. But for Wendy, “drawing is a way that I am able to look at things and to be present with people,” she said. “So she started drawing her aunt every day as she was dying.” Days after her aunt passed, Wendy received a call from the Bay Area Zen Hospice Guest House inviting her to become their artist-in-residence.
The “universe steps in, as it sometimes does,” she said. During her residency, Wendy wrote and illustrated the book How to Say Goodbye. The book, as she describes it, contains “the wisdom of the hospice caregivers: how to, in a way, be present with somebody in the last days of their life.” San Francisco NPR station, KQED, spoke to Wendy and nurse Ladybird Morgan. Ladybird is the co-founder of the Humane Prison Hospice Project and has worked in end-of-life care for two decades. The two shared their thoughts on how to navigate the difficult process saying goodbye:
Keep these 5 phrases in mind
I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
Goodbye.
- Be present in the moment …
Requests may have deeper meanings—especially around food
A listener named Erin called in to describe her experience as a kitchen manager at Zen Hospice Guesthouse. She said the experience was a lesson in learning how “food isn’t really about food. It’s about all these other things happening.” Erin described asking someone what they wanted to eat and “it would be [an] opening to talk about [how] they escaped the Holocaust, and [how] they want some chicken matzo ball soup.”
Remember the scope of the world
Even though the experience of being at the bedside of a dying person can feel small-scale and intimate, Morgan stressed the importance of remembering our place in the wider world when death is on the horizon.
This article is from KQED in San Francisco. You can also listen to this story.