Wednesday afternoons, I spend a few hours doing massage and acupressure therapy at the outpatient infusion center at Baltimore’s Mercy Hospital. (Yes, a Zen Pagan at a Catholic hospital. I wear my pentacle earring, and have a angel pin a patient gave me on my bag. I’ve worked on patients ranging from an elderly Catholic nun to a Siberian shaman from a long family lineage.) I get to work with people there for a variety of conditions, but mostly I’m working with cancer patients.
Sometimes I get to congratulate people on their last chemo treatment, because things are going well. I’ve been in a few celebratory photos. That’s nice.
Some people I work with are on “maintenance chemo”, the cancer remains but their condition is stable.
And sometimes I work with people who have a terminal diagnosis.
People don’t always tell me exactly what’s going on with their cancer — my role is focused on immediate pain and stress relief. But sometimes I’m the one there they can talk to most, as I spend 20 or 30 minutes with them, sometimes week after week, while nurses go in and out and they get only occasional consultations with doctors or physician assistants.
Today I had a new patient, a young woman who told me that she had a terminal diagnosis. I don’t know if this was new news and she was still processing it, or if it was a plain and accepted fact for her. But I did what I could with the skills I’ve learned to ease her pain, and as I worked I reflected on the virtue of offering comfort to the dying.
And then I remembered that we’re all dying, some of us just more slowly than others.
It’s a simple syllogism: Comfort the dying. Everyone is dying. Therefore, comfort everyone. In this time of increasing anger towards the “other” — whether the “other” for you is the blue-haired non-binary person or the red-hatted MAGA voter — it seems a radical idea.
But it was hammered home as I went about my rounds, and worked with a long-time regular patient. She told me that she had just learned that her chemo was no longer working. This is a woman who I’ve spent scores of hours with, whose husband and kids I’ve met. She’s told me about her garden and the Halloween costumes she made for her kids and the challenges of having a spouse with a night shift job. And now after years of fighting cancer, the doctors were saying they could do no more for her.
What could I do?
Comfort the dying.
We’re all dying.
Comfort everyone.
Yes, even “them”.
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