Greg and I had been laughing and swapping college stories for the better part of an hour when the window’s shifting sunlight caught his eye. He then looked over to that side of the room, where just a few weeks earlier, his wife used to lay in her cot. He was silent for a moment, then his voice stiffened. “The hardest thing,” he said, “was when I had to lie to her.”
Until she died of Alzheimer’s disease, Greg’s wife was my patient of regular volunteer visits for a local hospice. I was not to provide medical care in a strict sense. (I didn’t even know how to take someone’s vitals.) Instead, the goal of the visits was just to bring them a smile, a pair of listening ears, and a heart that cared about what they went through. Over some months of visits, I formed a much closer relationship with Greg than his wife, because most of the time, she just needed to sleep, and he needed someone to talk to. When she passed, I continued to see Greg, hoping to provide him some solace. Today, he opened up.
“Before she was asleep all the time,” he went on, “she used to say to me, ‘Greg, take out the dog!’ or ‘Don’t forget to pick up the kids from school! It’s time!’ I tried to tell her at first, that our dog was dead; that our kids are married and have their own kids… but she wouldn’t have it. She’d say, ‘No they’re not! My baby’s not married! Stop bein’ silly!’” Greg glanced around the room at touchstones of former life, which his family had brought to make the nursing home room a little bit more like home: a photo of his wife, beautiful at 35, their favorite dog’s ashes in a small copper urn, a collection of his favorite author’s books. He continued, “I tried to tell her the truth again and again, but it was too stressful. Eventually I gave in and just said, ‘I already took out the dog,’ ‘the kids are at their friends’ house…’ My therapist said they were a good lies, because it made her more comfortable.” He stopped there—perhaps not fully comfortable himself with that conclusion—and looked off again toward the window.
Greg’s simple story crystallizes an undiscussed facet of the struggle with death. Everyone knows death is hard—that’s why we usually avoid talking about it altogether. The Pre-Med Hospice Program provides students with many excellent resources (documentaries and books like Being Mortal, TED talks, etc.) to reflect upon the meaning of a good death. We see how much more beautiful it would be to die at home surrounded by tearful loved ones than in the hospital by blinking gizmos, or even by skilled doctors with the best intentions. However, I learned from Greg, about the quotidian challenges of the living around the dying. The death-process of a loved one and the time after their death are surrounded in moral and spiritual complexity. Greg has to wrestle with his lies he told to his wife. His family too has moral struggles: How long they can afford to spend visiting him each week? And how long they will let him sit, mostly alone, in the linoleum-floored unit of the nursing home? Because of a death, they all have to decide how to respond to a new life situation. I learned from Greg that a person’s death is not only difficult in itself: life around death poses a hundred more questions.