Death may bring wholeness: Remen excerpt #14

Dr. Remen writes of a specialist in palliative care, who described to a group of medical colleagues an experience he had while caring for a hospitalized young man who was dying of AIDS. Both the patient and his family were bitter, rejecting, and hostile despite his efforts to reach out to them. Finally giving up on it, he had simply delivered the best technical care he knew.

At three o-clock one morning he was called by the nurses, who informed him that his patient had died and asked him to come it to pronounce him dead and sign the death certificate. Remembering that he needed to be at rounds very early the next morning, he hastily threw clothes over his pajamas, and began driving to the hospital. 

 

As he drove down the darkened streets, he spontaneously looked up  and saw the night sky as if for the first time. The darkness seemed a silent and holy emptiness without beginning or end. In this vastness, stars hung as countless pure points of radiance. He had never seen the night in this way and was filled with awe and a profound feeling of peace and gratitude. 

His intellect attempted to dismiss this as fanciful, pointing out the need to hurry and take care of business so as to be able to get up early the next day. But he stopped his car by the side of the road anyway, got out, and allowed the experience of awe to wash over him. In about fifteen minutes it receded and he drove on to the hospital under a sky that looked much the same as always. The experience had been brief, but powerful and surprisingly important to him although he couldn’t say why.

Together the group of physicians considered what this experience may possible have meant. Various interpretations were offered, but the one that stopped further conversation was that perhaps the patient, in passing onward, may have found a way to share his present perspective directly with his doctor as an apology and a parting gift. As one of the doctors put it, ‘Perhaps at the moment of death there is a reclaiming of wholeness . . . and the wholeness may pass very close to us.’

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 320.