In July, I started training to be a hospice volunteer. I’ve long been interested in doing this, and had looked into the Zen Hospice (connected to the San Francisco Zen Center) a few times, but the training program was many hours, and then they wanted an ongoing time commitment that would pretty much be impossible for someone with a full-time job to do.
But then I got an email about doing hospice work with a different organization (connected with a chain of hospitals), requiring just six or so evening and weekend training sessions, and a year-long commitment which can be as little as two to four hours a week. This was specifically to do vigil, to sit with people who are expected to die imminently, so they won’t die alone.
As of now, I have one training session left to go, and haven’t yet started volunteering, but I have met some very nice and interesting people at the training sessions I’ve already been to, and the training itself has been illuminating and thought provoking. We did an exercise one night where we wrote down, on 16 little squares of paper, the names of the four people most important to us, the four most important or useful things we own, the four things we most enjoy doing, and the four beliefs we hold most dear.
Then the bereavement coordinator took us through an exercise where we imagined not feeling well and visiting the doctor, waiting a couple of weeks for test results, getting the unthinkable news that we have an inoperable mass, having to leave our jobs, becoming bedridden, having our friends stop visiting as the months pass, etc. At intervals, she had us pick up some of the pieces of paper, read what was written on them, and imagine losing those things: my mother and my iMac, gone! My sister and being able to ride my bike, gone!
It was very sad and upsetting, which presumably is the point; for us to remember that each person we meet will have lost a whole lot of stuff they didn't want to lose, and is in the process of losing more—losing everything.
At the end of the exercise, we pictured taking our own dying breath—a final exhale, and nothing more. I had always thought that I would be practicing bare attention at that moment: this is happening, that is happening. Well, really, I mainly just hoped I wouldn’t die while in a rage about grilling or about my hospital roommate’s weird smell or chewing noises.
It turned out that when I pictured it during this exercise, I did the exact same thing I do when I get on an airplane, which is also the same thing I used to do when I had a bout of extreme terror in bed at night, which has more to do with taking refuge than with simply paying attention. Part of it involves chatting with my Grandma Lee, up there in heaven smiling down at me. It is a form of faith, not in an afterlife, but that some type of kindly energy is always there when needed, even if I have to imagine it myself.
That is now my plan for what to do when I die, if I’m conscious.
And what will I do before I die, today and tomorrow and for the next X number of years? That’s also a good thing to think about. I think about it all the time anyway, but hospice training has made it even more real, so it’s already given me more than I can hope to offer, though I do hope to be of assistance.
They said during training that people who have consciously contemplated dying, such as Buddhists, normally have a relatively easy time of it, as do people with religious faith—people who have no doubt they are going to heaven, where they will be welcomed by God.
The people who have the hardest time, they said, are those without faith, which I at first thought meant me, and those who believe they are going to be punished for something they did—a different type of faith.
When we pictured ourselves dying, I realized I absolutely do have faith, as described above.
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