Caring for the Dying, Part 3 (Preparing for the Inevitable #32)

Gospel Light Society Podcasts

This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death. Trouble, suffering, and death are common threads that run throughout all of humanity. They are inescapable. You will never meet a person who has not, is not, or will not experience these terrible things in life. Yet, we attempt to hide from these inevitabilities, to pretend they don't exist or that they won't happen to us. Our world is filled with news of people dying, children suffering, entire government systems and organizations enduring trouble and turmoil, but we tend to see these as things that only happen to "other people" and never to us. Trouble, suffering, and death come equally to all people, of all races, from every socio-economic status, of every religion, in every country of the world. It makes us all equal. This podcast will show you how to accept these realities of life, and not just cope, but face trouble, suffering, and death in your own life and in the world with confidence, courage, class, and most of all, with faith, hope, and charity. The Bible says in 1 John 5:12: “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” The featured quote for this episode is from Sean Mangan. He said, "Life is too short when you think of the length of death." Our topic for today is titled "Caring for the Dying, Part 3" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll. We continue with the story of Katherine Jefferson and her brother, Bob, who came down with cancer and later died. Katharine and Paul made plans to head to Florida and stay with Bob until he died. “I just felt that I had to be there when he died,” Katharine said. Thirty years ago Katharine’s mother had died in the hospital. Nurses discovered her fallen on the floor. Katharine not only felt terrible for not being there for her mother, she was also saddened to have missed an opportunity to spend invaluable time with her. “There wasn’t hospice then,” Katharine said. Her dad had also died while Katharine was away, and she didn’t want to lose this chance to be with her brother. The day they arrived, Katharine and Paul chatted with Bob while he was awake. But “that was the last clear conversation we had,” Paul said. “He just slid right down after that.” Other family members arrived as well. Of Bob’s six brothers and sisters, three siblings and two in-laws along with two of his three daughters came to be with him while he died. One sister, a nurse, showed Katharine and Cindy how to make the bed while Bob was in it. Together they fumbled through changing sheets while he lay in his hospital bed. Katharine stepped in to help with caring for her brother. “We’d get up at night to change his bedsheets and his diapers,” she said. “That was hard for him,” she said. “Part of our journey is learning to let people care for us in that way.” Bob once asked Katharine how she could do it. “Because I love you,” she said. “I do this because you’d do it for me.” ...