Editor's Note
by Martin E. Marty
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"The end of life" may mean many
things, but it means at least two.
This issue is devoted to a comprehensive
and helpful address to care in the
last days when people are terminally
ill, and have heard from physicians that
the end is near.
That meaning of "the end of life" is
not completely disconnected from everyday
concern about an end. It is possible to
approach this meaning with a measure of
good humor. We postpone confrontations
with the final reality with lines like these:
Life is a sexually transmitted disease
with a terminal prognosis.
Blind pianist George Shearing was
once asked, "Have you been blind all
your life?" He answered: "Not yet."
Schopenhauer says that we spend the
first half of our lives living in such a
way that, in effect, we are "writing the
script"; then, during the second half of
our lives we are interpreting them.
The problem, both the wags and serious
calculators say:
How do we know where the turn from
"writing" to "interpretation" should
come along? For some, it may be at age
eighteen, but the owner of that life
will not know that until death is at
hand at thirty-six; the forty-five-year-old
cannot know she should start
interpreting for a countdown that will
end at ninety.
Get serious. Which is what we do at
the real, imminent, "known" end of life.
Yet even there, some people of profound
spiritual outlook, moored in a faith tradition,
surrounded by family and friends
and chaplains who care, can afford a
touch of levity, or can provide it.
Thus we hear of an aged mother
of four past-middle-age daughters, who
were visiting her at the end. The pastor
led them in prayers and left the room.
The girls kissed their mother, held
hands, formed a figurative protective
tent of arms over her, and looked down
with eyes filled with tears—and love.
So her moment for a last word came:
"Too much lipstick!"
Anthologies of "Famous Last
Words" include corollaries to that kind
of talk by people who are conscious
that they are engaging in it. Hugo Rahner
has written of a certain personality
type, God's "grave-merry" person. He
or she has taken the measure of the
cramping borders of life and, aware of
finitude, including imminent death, can
still affirm, can utter or signal the "Yes"
gracefully, grace-fully.
Even where there have been
chuckles and affirmations, however, the
end of life represents the greatest challenge
of life. One faces what Karl Rahner,
Hugo's brother, called "the abyss of
mystery." Some who indulge in extreme
sports may have "daredeviled" with the
risk of death. But when they confront
not an abyss between the glaciers they
are traversing or the canyon below
where they are rock-climbing, but the
chasm beyond their last mortal breath,
they merit an utterly serious form of
care.
My wife and I once flew to China
next to an emergency room nurse anesthetist
who had retired after thirty-six
years in a major city hospital. One of her
tales had to do with a Saturday night.
The squads brought in a gravely
wounded gang leader who had been
stabbed repeatedly by rivals. The surgeons
wanted to have a try at saving
him. He "smarted off" to the nurse as
she came near him, even as his breath
was waning.
She took a chance: "In a way, the
power of life and death in respect to you
is in my and the surgeons' hands. Don't
you think we've had enough posing? It's
time to get serious." He became quiet,
and then mumbled, "Do you know the
one about the 'green pastures'?" He
entered surgery with Psalm 23 in his
ears and mind.
What she said and did is a lead-in
to "A Special Report," which follows.
Edwin R. DuBose and his colleagues
have brought together resources for
dealing with the late stages of care in
hospices, hospitals, special care units, or
homes. What I take from the discourse
on spirituality is that caregivers have to
be expert and empathic listeners before
anything else. They cannot be walking
encyclopedias of religion or anthologists
of "Great Spiritual Quotations."
They have no right to intrude on the
delicate and frail consciousness of the
dying. That means that they cannot
come parachuting into the sphere where
ministry and caregiving occur with their
own answers to life-questions.
Such questions have ordinarily
been nurtured, whether casually,
intensely, or even in remote pasts—the
sort the gang leader must have known in
a Sunday School of his youth; and this
means that more often than not they
have been cultivated in some sort of
religious community: a synagogue, a
church, around a youth-group campfire,
in classes. Some others, however, are
spiritual in the do-it-yourself sense,
sojourners who have not known such
community. Among them are those who
may bring resources richer than those
cultivated in indifferent and casual religious
communities. In every case, they
need and deserve the most attentive
care. And that care begins with listening.
At the end of Leoš Janácek's opera
The Makropulos Affair, the heroine, a
most beautiful woman and beautiful
singer, "has to die." She is 337 years old,
an age reached because she drank an
elixir whose formula has now been lost.
Everything has happened to her. She is
vain, corrupt, bored, and she is indifferent
as to whether she lives or dies: it's
all the same to her. Then she turns to
the others on stage and says that they
are "fortunate mortals." Fortunate,
because, she sings, "you get to die.
Therefore you can celebrate humanity,
achievement, and love."
At the end of life those who are
involved with spiritual care, as givers
and receivers, are celebrating humanity,
achievement, and love. This special
report elaborates.
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Second Opinion #10
Publisher: Park Ridge Center, Chicago
Date: April, 2002.
ISSN: 0890-1570
112 pages.
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