“’Nataliya, bring me a glass of water, please’. So I bring it, but she is not drinking it, she is looking up. ‘Mrs. Anna, why don’t you drink it?’. ‘Nataliya, it’s not for me, it’s for THEM’. I paused for a second, I felt something big and frightening was about to happen… after a few seconds she had passed away“.
Nataliya, a care-taker, was talking to me in great distress, she was not a believer but what she had just witnessed at the passing of her patient had shaken her to the bones. ”This is how it really went on, Mrs. Anna was seeing people on the other side”.
Death and dying have been top on my mind for me these days, as I am preparing for a trip overseas to attend the memorial of a life-long friend and, coincidentally, I have been holding conversations with a loved one, who is assisting a friend in her terminal phase. That is such a difficult and selfless task. Not only are you confronted with a loss but, even more unbearably, with your own mortality by proxy.
”Talk to her, even if she seems unconscious, touch her, try to reach her in every way you can, this is what they want while they are still with us,” I am suggesting, remembering the words of a terminal patient at her hospital bed. ”Doctor, the worst part is feeling so lonely, people have stopped talking to me, they don’t know what to say, they avoid me as if I were already dead,” a patient disclosed.
We all have an innate resistance to come to terms with what is the natural process of death and dying. Approaching this from a non -religious, non-spiritual angle is quite challenging. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross ( 1926-2004), a Swiss -American psychiatrist trained in New York, did, becoming a world-recognized authority in ”Thanatology”, the science studying the phenomenology of the end of life.
Her book ”On Death and Dying”( 1969), a world-wide bestseller, is still the most accredited frame of reference on the subject. Kubler Ross collected the interviews of hundreds of patients that she had followed through the process of dying up to the last moments of their lives and concluded that they all shared the same experience: they were seeing their loved ones meeting them on the other side.
Last month another publication by a well-known journalist and war reporter, Sebastian Junger, drew the attention of the press: ”In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.” The author is an avowed atheist, trained by his father, a physicist, to believe only in the empirical method of science. In this memoir he describes how, while struggling for his life after a ruptured aortic aneurysm, he saw his deceased father calling him to join him on the other side. And how his father’s quantum physics teachings helped him to make sense of that experience.
End of life, what happens when we get there : a fascinating and daunting question, suspended between the physical and the metaphysical. We are crossing a barrier here into the nebulous territories of the still unknowable, of the very mystery of existence.
