Death, Dying, Grief and Fighting Back

July, 1996
"Honey" she said, "would you fix my shot, I'm having a hard time breathing."
"Sure" I replied, glancing at the clock, 04:30 AM... what a way to start the day. The night before, she and I had been sitting up, looking at wallpaper samples and laughing uproariously.

"How about green stripes with blue daffodils and orange crocodiles." and the laughter would start all over again. The last laughter as it turned out.

Her breathing became more labored. I woke my daughter and said "Stay with your mom, I've called an ambulance and I'm going to make sure it doesn't pass the house." I went back into the bedroom.

"I'm going to die," she said. "It'll be ok honey; the ambulance is on its way," I said. We had been through her asthma attacks before, lots of them, all of them scary, some of them terrifying.

I heard the siren and ran outside to make sure it didn't pass, when the ambulance crew and I went inside, she had collapsed. Furiously we did CPR and after a while, she seemed to stabilize. The Ambulance Crew rushed her to the hospital, my daughter and I following. While we were registering her, the security guard came and said the doc wanted to see me, would I follow him? My daughter and I followed him into one of the treatment rooms and after what seemed like a wait of hours but was probably only 10 minutes the doc came in and told us she didn't make it. "I don't understand, is she going to be OK?"

"No, I'm sorry but your wife died. We did everything we could, but we couldn't save her." It was an embolism he said, had she been in the ER when this happened, they couldn't have saved her. My life was over; my best friend was gone, my heart broken.

I don't know how I made it through the next several months; and except for the love of God, my family, my beloved daughter and my friends I probably wouldn't have.

I'm a counselor, a psychotherapist, I'm supposed to know how to handle grief, how to deal with psychic pain and emotional trauma. Hah... the daze I walked through seemed unreal. Friends tried to express how sorry they were. I couldn't hear them. I only felt my own pain and did not understand the pain of others.

I eventually worked through the loss! I met someone, fell in love again and re-married.

I usually don't share the above with any but a selected few, but I've been doing a "Grief Share" at my church, with people who have lost a loved one in the recent past. Because I'm a counselor, and I know what people have been though, my pastor felt that I would be in a good enough place to help others deal with the same pain, grief, loss.

On the way home today, after church, I got to thinking about Terri Schiavo's parents. They are aware, that in a very few days, March 18, 2005 to be exact, the courts will allow her spouse to "terminate" Terri's existence. What a travesty of justice.

In 1987, I began working in a private psychiatric hospital as the program director for the adult psychiatric unit. One of the books we used with clients was Judith Viorst's "Necessary Losses", a passage reproduced here:

"In 1984, I watched three women I loved very dearly die of cancer. All of them in their fifties, all of them vitally in life, they -- all of them in cruel prematurity -- died. One faced her fate straight on -- she knew she was dying, she talked about death, she calmly accepted it. One, knowing death was near and wishing to choose her moment of dying, hoarded pills and committed suicide. And one, the blond-haired, blue-eyed interloper I'd known since birth -- my sister Lois -- fought against her death, until the moment she closed her eyes, with awesome ferocity."

Won't face reality you say? Living (as it were) in a fantasy world you say? Can't accept death as part of life you say? Good Lord, how do I get through to people that think that? Of course, death is a necessary and wonderful part of life. My God, without death life itself would not be possible; but to apply that to NEEDLESS death, death as faced by Terri?

I'm pretty sure that her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, understand that in the normal course of events, given Terri's condition, that they are likely to outlive Terri. But, I doubt if Terri does. And that makes this travisty even more agonizing, Terri is being accorded less in the way of justice than mistreated and starved animals, less than convicted criminals on death row.

If Terri could communicate her wishes, I have no doubt that she, like Judith Viorst's sister would fight with every thing she had to keep on keeping on.

There are people like Lois at every age and with all kinds of fatal ailments who hang on to hope, who fight to stay alive, trusting in will, in spirit, in remissions, in brand-new miracle drugs or -- in miracles. "Don't they know they can't make it?" we may wonder, having heard the grim statistics. But they have heard them too, and what they do is tell us, and themselves, "I'm not a statistic."

In videotapes about a thirty-nine-year-old doctor painfully dying of cancer, he -- and his wife, a brother, doctors and clergymen -- describe his harrowing struggle to stay alive. In his final weeks, refusing to quit, he insisted on being fed through a vein in his neck and as the pain worsened he grew so dependent upon narcotic drugs that he underwent -- observers agreed -- a personality change. Some doctors have said that by his insistence on taking command of his case, this man prolonged his life -- unnecessarily. But just before he died, when asked by his wife if his fight for survival had been worth it, he answered with an unequivocal "Yes."

As Dylan Thomas said:

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."