Caregivers are lonely people. The more fortunate ones may be surrounded by
close family and friends, but many Caregivers are left to struggle with
the pain of a loved one by themselves. My pastoral visits to hospitals and
nursing homes introduce me to wives, husbands and children standing vigils
along the bedside of individuals in a game of hide and seek with the angel
of death. Too often, we remain firm in our conviction that death is the
final defeat; it is our enemy. Actually, my faith suggests the hope that
death is not an end: merely a transition. It remains one of the last
taboos of our culture in which eternal youth and materialism are the
measure of our success as persons. Consequently, death is often left as an
afterthought.
People do make final arrangements, but these arrangements are usually
matters of caskets and gravesites, rather than the content of the funeral
itself. Usually planning for the future involves legal and financial
planning; we consider what we shall bequeath to our children and
grandchildren. These issues are too often merely matters of property and
money. Yet the very fact of our illness and eventual death is a reminder
that what is immortal is not eternal. Matter is temporal; every thing is
finally fossilized except the human spirit. Indeed, as both individual and
Caregiver witness the physical container of life deteriorate, it becomes
important to focus upon the human transcendent content of that container -
the soul.
The funeral can be a service of healing and transition: a celebration of
life and a loved one's sacred and cherished ideals and values. Painfully
absent from the final arrangements is consideration and planning in a
meaningful and respectful service. In community it appears especially
obvious that this aspect of life is often ignored or minimized. Funeral
directors will ask a family, do you belong to a congregation? If the
answer is negative, then a clergyman will be selected from a list. Yet we
will be a bit more careful in selecting a lawyer or physician; sometimes
one invests more research in choosing a hairdresser. Caregiving is
shepherding. It is accompanying someone on a journey (at least part way).
If that journey is to be a good one, then neither the pain, neither the
anxiety nor the anticipation of its destination can be trivialized.
Illness is a journey on a spiritual plane rather than a topographical one.
In order to do this successfully, we must be courageous and loving. We
must dare to speak of our fears and sadness; we must discover that our
shared spirituality provides other modes of communication. By exploring
our feelings about separation and our thoughts about immortality with our
loved ones, we establish a meaningful context for this journey whose
destination is the final reunion that Judaism and Christianity believe
await us.
At the funeral, we realize that pain and anguish are no longer part of our
loved one’s life. Instead, we turn our attention to how and why that
life was lived and what lessons can be derived from their journey into
eternity. The funeral service becomes the last element in caregiving
because it demonstrates the manner in which we honor the human spirit as
much as we tend to the body, which temporarily houses that spirit.
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