Hospice Story: “I’m Not Giving Up on Her”

Several nurses and aides from the hospice house came up to me to say that they were concerned that an elderly man was in denial about his wife’s dying. The man kept asking the staff to save her and work for her recovery. They asked me to speak with the husband.

As I prepared in my mind, I decided to not assume anything and just ask him, when he looked at his wife what did he see? When I asked that question the man said, “I see a woman who is dying.” Wow, he’s not in denial, I thought. I said to him, “The staff are worried about you, because you never let this awareness be known.” He said, “That’s because I don’t want my wife or anyone else to think I am giving up on her. The only thing I know to do is to keep praying for her to be well. I could not live with myself if I did anything less.” 

I immediately knew he was okay. He shared with me that his coping skill at this time was prayer for a cure. Who was I to take that away from him? He was walking this difficult, delicate path as his beloved wife was dying. I affirmed his coping mechanism and said I would ask the staff to not talk about the reality of his wife’s ultimate death with him, because he was in fact fully aware of it. The husband looked at me and said, “Thank you.”

Sometimes our need to be closely tied to reality is so strong that we forget about allowing our dreaming, poetic, song/movement, prayerful, and spiritual selves to guide us. We need this less restricted area of our being to help us cope with the unspeakable and the seemingly unbearable.