“between one heartbeat, and the next that never came”

As a reader of my occasional posts you’ll know of my curiosity with conscious living and dying and volunteer engagement in end-of-life care. A recent column by John Crace in The Guardian speaks directly to both. May his words be of benefit to you and — high time? — provoke a conversation among family and friends. 

Mr. Crace writes: “The only thing any of us can be certain about is that we will die. Most of us – myself included – only manage to cope with this knowledge by burying it deep into our subconscious and living each day as if we and those we love are immortal. I’m much less of a hypochondriac than I was 20 years ago and I’m still not sure if that is a sign of improved mental health or whether my levels of denial about the inevitability of death have dug in deeper.

“Rachel Clarke should be essential reading for all of us. […] Dear Life is the story of her work as a palliative care doctor at a hospice in Oxford. It is in part a love letter both to her father, whose life and death she describes with great tenderness and unflinching directness, and her patients, but it is also a touching and profound meditation on what it means to be human.

“If it sounds depressing, it isn’t. Rather it is uplifting. We can’t all choose the manner of our death – some will be gentle, some violent, some quick, some prolonged – but we can choose how we live with that knowledge. As Clarke writes, the only difference between the dying and the rest of us is that the dying are aware just how little time they have left. It is the love that we choose to invest in each other despite the inevitability of the accompanying grief that really counts. It is a remarkable book. Pre-order it now (Little/Brown, March 2020).”

To which reader eileanmore posts this comment:

“I’m nearer to the stage exit than the stage entrance! I have cared for relatives , watched with them in the hours before death, seen tranquil passing and the reverse. My Taid in particular I recall with great love. … I was chirping around his bedside … we’d moved him into the living room so he didn’t have to use the stairs, and he was sitting on the side of his bed.

‘Cariad, I’m so tired, I just want to see Nain again,’ he said. I replied, ‘I know’, which of course isn’t really true … one only understands loss and heartache fully when it occurs personally. I went into the kitchen to get his warm milk, and when I returned, he had gone. Still sitting there, with his chin in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. A graceful passing, between one heartbeat, and the next that never came. This house is old, and has seen many inhabitants leave the stage. I hope I am so lucky.”