Dying to tell you: an ending

Lessons on life, love and loss from a British hospice

This Substack series, ‘Dying to tell you’, is a memoir-meets-manifesto, born in the ‘quiet room’ of a hospice that was anything but. From candid cancer tales to dark humour, and stirring scenes of raw human courage, this series is an exploration of life, love and loss as I share - through essays and poetry - my observations whilst working in a British hospice over the course of five years.

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‘Would you like to sit with someone whilst they die?’

I hadn’t worked at the hospice for long at that point and I was spending the morning with Dr Eliza Brooks, shadowing her to find out more about life – or the alternative – on a fourteen-bed inpatient ward. My face scrunched in response. I was working at a hospice, sure, and of course I understood that people came in for end of life care and that I needed to get closer to this truth, but to watch a stranger die?  I’d never experienced death so closely – at all, really –and my heart began to thrash inside my ribcage. 

There was a patient: a man in his sixties, she explained, who had been brought in that morning after deteriorating in hospital. He had no immediate family. No friends. No close neighbours who’d noticed he was missing from home. This man, once full of thoughts and ideas and feelings, was hours from death. And he was alone.

‘Kathy, this isn’t about just sitting there and staring at him,’ Dr Brooks said, picking up on my overwhelming hesitation. ‘Death is a natural part of life and it’s important you see first-hand what happens here. But if you do step in to that room, it’s so much more than an education. You will be doing an amazing thing for someone.’

Dr Eliza Brooks wore elaborate headscarves that moved after the rest of her, skirts that reminded me of seventies curtains, and thick-rimmed leopard-print glasses. I always felt that how she looked on the outside was exactly how she was on the inside: a little chaotic, effervescent, full of colour. She’d worked at the hospice for years and years - an embodiment of knowledge and wisdom and hope - and she had this wild, kooky sense of humour that always forced a crack of dazzling light through the black. Patients loved her. We all did. She was passionate and switched on, always ready to deal with the challenges of hospice life, and capable of presenting the very best of herself at hours of the day when others, myself included, could barely string a sentence together. All of this made her near impossible to say no to. 

Did I really want to watch someone die though? Somebody I hadn’t ever met? Would it not be an intrusion?

‘Could I…. Could I come back a bit later?’ I asked weakly, knowing full well what was about to happen.

‘Oh, Kathy,’ Dr Brooks smiled softly. ‘Death doesn’t wait.’ And with that, she placed a brightly decorated arm on my shoulder and squeezed me gently as we headed down the passageway into the room on the left.

*
I can still picture him now: the smattering of his oily grey hair; the map of deep-set lines at the corners of his eyes. He lay very still, head propped up, with his arms, bruised from blood tests and cannulas and drips, lying softly against his sides. Eliza, who took a seat at his bedside, rubbing her thumb gently over his palm, told me that his name was Mike. There hadn’t been much opportunity for any healthcare professional to get to know him deeply, but he seemed a gentle, kind soul, according to the nurses who had cared for him in hospital. In the days before, when Mike had been more awake, Eliza was told he’d spoken with great enthusiasm about his love of the outdoors. His very own little patch of it in the middle of town. He had been an avid gardener. Had been.

‘He kept admiring the bluebells from his window, apparently,’ Eliza said, glancing out through the propped-open french doors, towards the hospice’s own courtyard garden. A large timber planter nearby was stuffed with their vibrant hues, a cobalt cluster straining towards a sun-drenched spring sky.

I took the seat on the opposite side of the bed to Eliza. This was not the first death she had witnessed, nor was Mike the only patient that she would have needed to think about that day but she sat attentively, quietly and fiercely dedicated to him. I was struck by the tenacity of her presence: how she was here for everyone on the ward whilst on her shift, but there just for him in those moments, and how in control and at ease she was in the situation. How tender and warm.  

I watched her for a while in quiet awe, before turning properly towards Mike. I imagined him with a head full of hair; his identity unchanged by multiple rounds of chemotherapy. I wondered what colour it may have been. A nutty brown, perhaps, with silver streaks beginning to show. I pictured him with a fuller face and a proud smile, cheeks kissed by warm air as he tended to his garden with meticulous devotion, damp soil bedding under his nails. I could see him stood outdoors with an iced beverage after topping up the bird-feeder, proud of the time he’d devoted to ensuring colour erupted from the earth come June. I took his hand in mine. His fingertips: so clean and still, served as a poignant reminder of all that had been lost.

‘Do you think Mike properly understands that we’re here?’ I asked.

Eliza explained that hearing is often the last sense to go, so it was very likely that Mike was still picking up on the things we were saying; on all of the sounds of rich life outside of this room. The breeze caressing the fattening trees outside. The chirping of nesting birds, new life soon ready to warble into the world. The soothing trickle of the water feature at the heart of it all. I liked the idea of it. That in the last scenes of Mike’s life, without somebody here who knew him to hold him close, nature might bring him home. Back to his favourite spot in the garden. To the light and the colours and the fragrant flowers. To spring soil revealing its secrets, and the hope of all good that might come tomorrow. I voiced this aloud, and thought I saw the faintest twitch of a smile.

The three of us sat for a couple of hours or so, Mike becoming increasingly less responsive as time progressed. Eliza, without falter, remained a strong maternal presence, the two of us gently embroidering the space around Mike with periodic talk of bright skies and bees and hanging baskets; of walking in the woods. It struck me that being there didn’t feel like an intrusion at all. In fact, it felt incredibly natural. This isn’t to that the weight of what was happening didn’t bear heavy, because of course it did. I will always wish it hadn’t have been me sat there. I wish there had been a partner, or a friend or a son or a sister, somebody who could recall uplifting stories and memories; somebody who could tell this man everything they knew to be true and wonderful about him. There is a palpable sadness in witnessing somebody without that opportunity. In its absence, there is nowhere else I would have rather been.

Mike died at 10.15am. Outside, the sun kept shining. The bluebells swayed on. The world kept spinning, as it always does. And this human, who none of us really knew; who slipped away as peacefully as you could ever hope for someone, left an indelible mark on it.

I spent half a morning with this man, and yet he taught me the lesson of a lifetime. For all of our differences, we are all essentially the same. Vulnerable, mortal, and eternally bound in those things. I didn’t know how Mike took his tea. I didn’t know if he'd ever married or travelled to far-flung continents, or cradled a tiny baby in his arms. I had no clue what TV show he liked to watch on Sundays. But I felt it. Love. For this complex, inevitably flawed and beautiful human, just like me, who was dying. It was a connection that I have not experienced in any other circumstance; a connection so effortless and innate it is hard to put words to. The thought of it moves me still.

Mike reminded me, and still does, that there is nothing more important than being kind to each other. That really, if you think about it, the simple truth of life is that we’re all just walking each other home.

‘Hey, look,’ Eliza said, as we prepared to leave the room, gesturing towards the french doors. A collared dove had wriggled into flight outside. ‘Enjoy the view, Mike’, she whispered towards scalloped wings, as the small creature flitted away, rising above a landscape beyond, peppered with all of the colourful blooms of the season. We kept our eyes on it until its pearlescent feathers became the tiniest speck on the horizon, before the bird faded into boundless blue.