its relationship with death. I saw how afraid healthcare professionals and many oncologists were discussing death with their patients, let alone providing tools to help them address their fears and worries.
In retrospect, I realise I was also struggling to handle the pain of my chosen vocation. I didn’t know how to grieve the people I cared for who had died and I didn’t know who, or what, to rage at. I felt responsible for what happened to a person, and what didn’t happen. I saw cancer as the enemy, and I joined in the fight. Standing up for what we believe in is the daily practice of oncology nurses, but I had yet to learn how to do that and keep my heart open.
I wanted to change myself and change the system.
After returning to university and completing my MSc in Nursing, I took a full-time position as a clinical nurse specialist, which allowed me to continue to work directly with patients, families and nurses in a counselling role. I have the utmost respect for nurses who become educators, researchers and administrators, but I knew my career path was to be in direct clinical care. I became more and more interested in the emerging field of integrative medicine – an approach to healing that focuses on the whole person (body, mind and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasises the therapeutic relationship of person and practitioner and makes use of all scientifically supported therapies, both conventional, complementary and alternative.
I studied with Dolores Krieger, a retired nursing professor from NYU, every summer for ten years. She and Dora Kunz, a leader in the Theosophical Society of America, developed Therapeutic Touch, an energy healing technique based on the ancient practice of the ‘laying on of hands’. This modality is used for the relief of pain and anxiety, and to ease the dying process. These two women mentored me in this healing practice, which opened me up to what I now understand as my spirituality – a lifelong quest to find meaning, purpose and comfort in the universality of human experience. Without the fear of being engulfed by my own feelings, they taught me how to connect deeply to a person. They helped me to trust the inherent capacity each human has to take responsibility for their healing and happiness.
In 1993 I was inspired by a television series produced by Bill Moyers entitled Healing and the Mind. The sixth episode described a weeklong retreat for people with cancer in Bolinas, California, run by Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen. I phoned Commonweal the following day and asked how I could learn more about their retreats. They happened to be offering their first workshop two months later to teach healthcare professionals how to run a cancer retreat programme and I registered.
After the Commonweal workshop, I gathered together a team of healthcare professionals who were interested in running cancer retreats, and the following year the Callanish Society was born in Vancouver. As I write this preface, Callanish has run almost one hundred weeklong retreats and has become a thriving centre for families with cancer to heal and strengthen into life, and for some, into death. It is a place dedicated to people who have been irrevocably changed by cancer, offering them retreats and programmes to reconnect to the essentials of life. We are committed to helping people talk about dying with those in their close relationships, to resolve past hurts and traumas, and to prepare themselves to die with peace and acceptance.
I hope Radical Acts of Love will give readers an increased understanding of the processes of dying, whether it be around one’s own death, or the death of a loved one. Just as we carefully prepare for a birth, so too can we openly and consciously make preparations for dying, and therein provide some comfort and reassurance about what is, after all, a certainty for all of us. My wish is for this book to inspire hope for families who want to live and love as best they can in the period of time between learning of a poor prognosis and the moment of death itself.
The families in this book represent a small sector of the population and hence their experiences cannot be described in any way as universal. I am cognisant that some readers may not find their own experiences with death and dying represented in these stories and for that I am regretful.
I have tried to protect the privacy of the people in these stories by changing identifying features, or writing composite stories. I have sent stories to surviving family members to read for accuracy and comment. These communications have been deeply touching and have reassured me that love most certainly abides.
I have organised the book into four sections. Each one contains four to seven stories which will illuminate the experience of opening up to death, preparing for it, healing the past, dealing with unfinished business or accepting what is unresolved, making choices about dying on one’s own terms, and learning to draw comfort from nature and the universality of death.
My Cree friend Maureen Kennedy told me that in her tradition, elders collect ‘teaching stories’ from their many years of life experiences.
‘There comes a time,’ she said, ‘when the elders must release those stories into the world. You will know, Janie, when that time comes for you. You have many teaching stories by now, don’t you?’
‘Thirty years’ worth, at least,’ I said, nodding my head.
I believe the time for releasing these stories is now.
Preparing for death is a radical act of love for ourselves, and for those close to us who live on after we’re gone. My hope is that these stories will reassure you, the reader, by providing a roadmap through one of the most important and least discussed experiences of our lives. May these teaching stories, gifted to me by others, heal, nourish and strengthen your hearts and reveal the terrible beauty inherent in living and dying that is your birthright.
I.
OPENING THE HEART TO DYING
‘Peace comes when our hearts are open like the sky, vast as the ocean.’
—JACK KORNFIELD
At a retreat I attended a few years ago, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Soto Zen priest, offered a teaching that has stayed with me. He described how at the end of our life, when the body loses its functions, the heart continues to have an endless capacity to express and receive love. His statement comforts me, to know that even without a healthy body, we still have a worthy function: to give and receive love, opening our hearts in our living and dying so that our beloveds can be sustained by that love, long after we are gone.
I have learned that it is easier to open my heart in the presence of other people, than to do it on my own. Perhaps being open-hearted about any aspect of our life is dependent on our connection with other people. Maybe it is that very connection, especially in difficult times, that activates our compassion and care towards one another and keeps us from feeling isolated and lonely.
I meet people every day who open their hearts to death, their own or another’s; they show us how to remain open to the heartbreaks of life. They encourage us not to close up to pain and loss but to risk opening up to connection.
Opening the Heart to Dying contains five stories about what can happen to your life, and to the lives of those you love, when you open up to your own dying. Each of the five people in these stories made choices about dying that were congruent with the ways they had approached living. By opening their hearts to death, each person became more deeply connected and loving towards themselves and the people they cared about, and consequently more present in life itself.
1
KAREN: Golden Love
‘Karen might be dying,’ Kathy said on the phone one evening in early December, out of the blue.
