Beginning July, 2010, I volunteered for two years in a hospice. It changed my life in ways I am still trying to fathom.During this year, I have written about some of the experiences and I will share them here.
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I had first seen G about three months ago at the hospice. A good looking young man. Tall, fair, sharp featured. Yet I was reluctant to stand there near him. The scars of his disease were on him. The blanket had been removed as he was feeling warm and seeing a grown man in diapers was not easy. His wife was with him, a smiling young woman. I felt admiration for her fortitude. I moved away without talking to G.
Next week, as I was walking down the corridor, a nurse called out to me, saying that there was someone I needed to talk to . And it was him. I walked in, telling myself that since I was there I could not walk away and should face the situation.
I sat down next to him, not knowing what to say. A young man dying of brain tumour, leaving behind a young wife and two small children.But it was not difficult. He was eager to talk. He spoke haltingly in a soft voice and told me how the disease had struck six years ago. He had had two surgeries but the tumour had come back and that the doctors have ruled out surgeries now. He was not particularly well educated. He said his wife now worked as a beautician in order to support the children. There was no help from relatives. He told me that he loved reading the Ramayana and was a Hanuman devotee. He had memorized the Sunderkand though he could not remember it now. He asked me if I knew what the trinity of Brahma,Vishnu and Mahesh signified. When I answered in the affirmative, he asked if I knew that they are one and that creation,maintenance and destruction go together. I thought then that even though he was quite young, it was probable, that he had been able to accept his impending death. He had been able to make meaning out of the six years of his suffering. A thought arose in my mind, of the probability, that along with the circumstances of its birth, the soul also chooses its mode of death. We all desire a quick painless death but a prolonged painful death might well be a fast track route for invaluable learning. I thought of the possibility that this six year long tryst with pain, both physical and emotional, had been chosen by G himself, by his real Self.
When I saw him the week after, he was unable to speak. I sat next to him and spoke of how the soul was the real occupier/owner of the body. And how the real G will not die and will leave the body when the time comes. I gave the analogy of the clay pot being the body and the air within the soul. After the clay pot is smashed the air within blends with the air around. I told him that the disease has not and can not touch him . It can only ravage his body and that will be renewed. I explained that the soul takes a body, an identity for the purpose of gaining human experience. It learns about attachment, the subsequent ,inevitable letting go and evolves in the process. He listened intently to everything and responded by his head movements. I said to him that I was aware that he knew all this and that I was just repeating it . He nodded in acceptance.
The next time i saw him, his eyes had a unfocused, wondering look as though he was looking at something the rest of us could not. He kept reaching out as though he was touching something , examining something.Sometimes he gestured as though he was bringing something closer to examine it better.He smiled, mumbled as though he was speaking to someone. He was very cognizant of my presence. I asked him if he felt any fear . He shook his head in the negative.I asked if he knew what there was to know. He nodded. He looked peaceful, unafraid.
I felt a lot of love for him.The emotion surprised me a little as I had not known him for long and had not talked much with him. But the love I felt was very strong. I hugged him, held on to him. I instinctively kept my hand on the upper part of his chest and kept stroking. I felt as though he was someone very close to me but this feeling was not accompanied by any feeling of grief or fear for his impending death. He was covered with bedsores, lovingly bandaged by the nurses. I felt no pity. I did not wish for him to either live or die.Though I could empathize with his pain I felt no desire that he should be relieved of it.Somehow, I knew that he had benefited immensely from his suffering and pain. He had experienced enormous losses, letting go of so much, so early in life. That this had made him richer than me and there was no cause for me to pity him. The love I felt for him is difficult to describe in words. I could have stayed there for hours. I did not want to leave him and go home. I felt uplifted , purified , calm, moved to the depths of my being.I wanted to express this love to G but hesitated. In our culture, it is not really done to express love in words.
When I came home, the feeling stayed with me. A feeling of fullness, of love. Small irritants no longer bothered me. I felt as though life was much bigger, much richer than what I thought it was. I tried to understand this feeling. It slowly sank in that there was some kind of non verbal communication between G and me. Possibly, he was in transit between this world and the next one, experiencing the joy and peace of the Spirit. Somehow, he could communicate that to me. What I experienced with him was unconditional love.The purest form of love possible. Elevating, purifying, inexpressible in words.
When I visited him next, the experience was the same. But this time I made myself express the love I felt for him. I told him again and again that he was my brother and that I loved him very much. That we will meet again. He smiled and nodded in acceptance.
On my next visit , I was told that G had passed away, the previous morning.The nurse told me that she had seen him the evening before and he had appeared to be at peace.Though I did not feel any grief, I felt moved and wanted some form of closure. I sat on his bed, quietly, for sometime and thought of him.I felt calm.
The counsellor at the hospice had told me that the best form of closure for me would be to talk to others who knew the patient. I met a doctor friend of mine who works there. G's death had upset her. She had witnessed the aftermath of his death, his wife's grief. She told me that G had been in tremendous pain in his last days. We shared our experiences and derived our personal meanings from them.The interaction helped us both.
I have been a volunteer at the hospice for about a year and a half now. My first interaction with the patients had caused me to go into post traumatic stress syndrome. After that, with each subsequent visit, the trauma lessened. Even then,occasionally, I experienced a certain degree of trauma and heaviness when I saw some patients, especially the young ones. A young eighteen year old girl , the only child of her parents lay dying. And I thought how cruel the Almighty could be. Though I spoke of the indestructibility of the soul, I hoped for a miracle which would thwart death. But my experience with G changed this. It changed the way I perceived death. I then understood that we are all programmed to abhor death. The sight of a dead body makes us instinctively flinch, look away, move away. Thinking of death, talking of it is considered morbid, depressing. This abhorrence keeps us enmeshed, entrapped in illusion. Its one of the fundamental tricks of Maya, one of Her most effective practical jokes. We celebrate birth, which is a soul taking on the limitations of a body and identity and the suffering inherent in this imprisonment. And we mourn death, the soul liberating itself from limitations and regaining its free, blissful state. What could be stranger than this ? G helped me in cracking this programming, to some extent. The realization is now dawning on me that a person dying young could mean a shorter period of incarceration. The soul learns its lessons and discards the body after its purpose has been fulfilled. I do not feel traumatized during or after my hospice visits now.
I am still trying to gain a better understanding of my experiences with G and other patients. Quantum theory says all matter is energy. So say many Indian scriptures (The Yoga Vashishtha says the human body is not solid but made up of ever changing vibrating particles). So, I am an energy field. Every thought, feeling or emotion in me is in the form of energy. And when my thoughts, feelings and emotions change, so does my energy field. Fear( of death or of anything else)is present as energy in my energy field and can be communicated non verbally. So, when I lose this fear of death, my energy field no longer contains this energy and that too is communicated non verbally. In the presence of a person who has overcome or lost the fear of death, another person experiences similar feelings.This communication seems to be not on a mental level but on a feeling or intuitive level. I am now able to experience this non verbal communication when I am with patients at the hospice and elsewhere. Words become redundant at times. Who or what I am matters much more that what I say. The non verbal communication works both ways. I gain riches beyond measure.
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