(Each Saturday, a faith leader in Franklin County offers a personal perspective in this space. To become part of this series, email religion@recorder.com)
Every Tuesday morning our hospice team usually gathers around a conference table — manager, medical director, nurses, social workers, volunteer coordinator and me, the chaplain. Our home health aides are already out in homes, doing the hard work of caring for our patients’ basic needs.
There is the serious business of patients in their last days, some in pain, some frightened and lonely, caregivers at the breaking point, a medication needing adjustment. And there are lighter, inspiring moments: an heroic son or daughter going the extra mile for family, a patient who was the first female police officer in her town, a Holocaust survivor, a faithful dog lying beneath their owner’s bed.
In the last few weeks, with COVID-19 restrictions, we have met remotely using the Zoom program. We now converse within boxes arranged on a computer screen, like the old Hollywood Squares show. It’s good to see our faces, hear our voices, to connect with each other in this time of great risk and uncertainty.
In these days when we’re all having to keep a safe distance from each other — wearing masks, gloves and gowns, social distancing, staying home — finding ways to connect seems more vital than ever. We are finding it is not enough to take physical precautions to protect ourselves and others, but that spiritual measures are vital to boosting our immune systems. Breathing deeply, getting out in nature, listening to music, taking time for laughter and tears, gratitude for food and for those working at the food store.
As we reach out by phone, email or ZOOM to reconnect with others, we may also reach inward to reconnect through prayer and meditation with our deeper selves, our deeper truths that sometimes elude us in our busy routines. As such practices help us feel more love and hope, natural chemicals called endorphins are released throughout our bodies, enhancing feelings of peace and well-being which strengthen our resistance to disease. Reconnecting with the flow of life, it may be said we are blessed with spiritual antibodies which keep our spirits strong.
Hospice nurses bear a heavy load. They don’t punch out at the end of the day or hand off their cases to the next shift. Even with the support of our team, they carry the burden of often being alone in homes, making vital decisions that can affect a patient’s life and death. They bear the brunt when their best efforts aren’t working as hoped — pain out of control, labored breathing persisting, agitation unabated. Like their colleagues in ICUs, ERs and other places of care, they are daily carrying out what the poet Robert Hayden called “love’s austere and lonely offices.”
In the midst of this pandemic, that physical and emotional load is multiplied when a great sense of duty meets the trauma of intractable suffering and ever present fear of becoming infected and infecting people we love. In these times, we can feel more than ever the darkness and disease which threaten the very fabric of our lives together.
People talk today about those on the “front lines” of the pandemic. But wherever we are — staying home with kids, alone in a house making masks, driving a bus or caring for the sick — we are all on the front lines. We can all be part of a larger movement of help and healing, knowing there is a greater power that binds us together — especially when we feel like we’re falling apart.
Ben Tousley lives in Greenfield and has worked as a hospice chaplain for the past 17 years. Tousley has also worked as a folksinger and storyteller and has recorded seven albums of original music.