Tricycle: What can you offer to someone who is dying?
Joan Halifax: Most of what we are 'doing' is listening. Usually, we're not doing guided visualisations. We're not giving advice. We're not doing psychotherapy. We're not administering medications. We are being present. And that presence requires listening - to what is said, what isn't said, even to silence. One person I worked with, a very wonderful man, had just gotten discharged from the hospital and he said, "Thirty, forty, fifty people come see me in a typical hospital day, asking me questions. Not one person sat in silence with me, and that's all I wanted. Just somebody to be with me." That's our true work. It's not applying fancy meditative technologies. It's practising radical optimism. In this work, you need to be fearless. And that's what we give: no fear.
I once worked with a woman with advanced cancer who said "When I pray I feel completely alone, I feel like Christ has abandoned me." So I taught her the essential phowa practice and encouraged her to visualise and invoke the presence of Christ as she did it and to open her heart to Him and to ask for His compassion and His love and His purification. I came to see her the next week, and she said, "Before, I felt alone and isolated and abandoned by Christ. But since I've been doing this meditation, I feel like He's right here in the room with me. Now I'm not afraid of dying."
Christine Longacre: Even for someone with no spiritual beliefs, the bottom line, as the teachings say, is to help the person not die empty-handed. Help them to find a meaning in the life they have lived. To focus on their accomplishments, on what they've learned, on what benefit they got from their life, on what sacrifices they made. As a friend of someone dying, you can describe to them how they have contributed to your life, or how even in their dying, you are receiving something from them. These are all spiritual approaches, supporting someone to prepare for death from their heart and mind.
Barbara Rhodes: Sometimes the hardest thing in home care is just getting people to turn the TV off.
This webpage forms part of the Global Ideas Bank (www.globalideasbank.org).
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