Care for the Dying

A Practical and Pastoral Guide

Davison, Evans

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878603
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This wise and practical handbook, written by a palliative care physician and a priest with experience in hospice ministry, addresses the needs of the dying, their relatives and friends, and also those who provide support and care.Recognizing that these needs are physical, emotional, and spiritual, Care for the Dying draws on insights from current best practice in palliative care, pastoral experience, and theological reflection. It explores the following:--the availability of care for the dying person--communicating with the family--responding to a request for assisted suicide--forgiveness, reconciliation and anointing --saying goodbyes--the mystery of suffering --dying with dignity--supporting the bereaved--caring for the carers.Throughout, there is a helpful emphasis on understanding the care of the dying as a privilege as well as a responsibility, on the importance of proper self-care and of gaining strength from working as a team. Many people, including medical professionals and clergy, are fearful of what to say or do when faced with approaching death. This resource will deepen understanding and build courage and confidence.

1. An Introduction to Palliative Care

This book is written jointly by a specialist in palliative care, who has spent time at a theological college, not as an ordinand but as an ordinand’s spouse, where she also taught about death and dying, and a theologian with practical experience in this work. The acute need for such a book became apparent in the context of theological training, and this book is a response to that need.

Very few of those who enter ordained ministry have any experience of work with the dying. They feel at sea, perhaps even fearful, as they wonder how best they might serve. They do not know what they will say; they worry about making a situation worse and fear not being able to offer any real support.

Other books approach the pastoral and spiritual care of the dying from the perspective of the specialist, perhaps the hospice chaplain. We wanted to write a book that would offer practical help to those involved in ministry to the dying even if that is not the mainstay of their work, and to write it for lay Christians as well as clergy. This book looks at the principles lying behind the care that patients, and their loved ones, need. It seeks to allay fears by setting out what we might expect to encounter in such a context and discussing what we might say and do. Most important of all, it will put an emphasis on how to be.

The book presents the combination of their two author perspectives: thoughts from a palliative care doctor, who can offer guidance and reassurance, and from a theologian, who can talk about care of the dying from a context where it has been found for centuries, namely within the theological vision of the Church. It is our hope that our combined experience, of the holistic care of the dying and of Christian theology, will provide a useful and reassuring framework, and that you will find encouragement as you play your part in this vital ministry.

What is palliative care?

Before we discuss aspects of the care of the dying in detail, it is useful to take a step back and ask what we mean by palliative care in general. Various definitions have been given, but the ‘gold standard’ comes from the World Health Organization (WHO):

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual. Palliative care:

• provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms;
• affirms life and regards dying as a normal process;
• intends neither to hasten or postpone death;
• integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care;
• offers a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death;
• offers a support system to help the family cope during the patient’s illness and in their own bereavement;
• uses a team approach to address the needs of patients and their families, including bereavement counselling, if indicated;
• will enhance quality of life, and may also positively influence the course of illness;
• is applicable early in the course of illness, in conjunction with other therapies that are intended to prolong life, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and includes those investigations needed to better understand and manage distressing clinical complications.1

It is worth noting that this definition is not disease specific. Historically, the modern-day hospice movement was founded to care for patients dying from cancer. However, it was not long before the emphasis shifted, and patients with any progressive incurable disease were seen as needing, and worthy of, the same care. Today, patients being looked after under the palliative care umbrella include those with heart failure, respiratory failure (from chronic lung diseases) and progressive neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease (more commonly referred to as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS in the USA). In different countries, the spectrum of diseases and causes of death will vary. Infectious diseases, for instance, cause a far greater proportion of deaths in the developing world than in the first world.

As the definition states, palliative care is not only about someone’s final days, as someone approaches death (known as the terminal phase). It begins much earlier. Many patients are admitted to a hospice for control of their symptoms earlier on, and are soon discharged to their homes. The myth that there is ‘only one way out’ of the hospice is just that: a myth. Of course, many come to a hospice for their last days, or deteriorate after an otherwise more routine admission. All the same, much palliative care is focused on maintaining the best quality of life, however long that may be, and not simply on anticipating death. The principles of palliative care can be summed up in the words of Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement: ‘You matter because you are you and you matter until the last moment of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully but to live until you die.’2

The roots of hospice care go back into the depths of history, and to traditions of hospitality that, in Europe at least, have profoundly Christian roots. In its first usage, a ‘hospice’ was a guesthouse and the earliest hospitals (a word that derives from the same root in Latin as hospice) were places where the sick were given hospitality. Frequently, these early hospitals were attached to monasteries or other ‘religious’ houses. Orders of nuns, in particular, have played a remarkable role in the development of healthcare and in the very idea of the hospital and hospice. Taking the Church of England as an example, there is the Community of St John the Divine, whose work was dramatized in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, and the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, who founded the world’s first children’s hospice in 1982, in Oxford.

Hospitals in many countries often have religious roots, even if today they are run by civic government. Within public hospitals, from the nineteenth century onwards, care of the dying (or ‘incurables’) began to receive more attention. An important step was the foundation of Our Lady’s Hospice in Dublin by the Irish Sisters of Charity in the late nineteenth century. This marks a newly acute focus on the dying as a distinct group, needing a particular sort of care. This hospice was followed by another, St Joseph’s, founded by the same order in London 16 years later.3

The growth of the palliative care movement: Dame Cicely Saunders

The pioneer of the modern hospice movement was Dame Cicely Saunders (1919–2005). We can get close to much that lies at the heart of Christian care of the dying through attention to the example set by this woman. She responded zealously, and patiently, to a call that was to change the face of medical care.

After leaving school, Cicely gained a place at Oxford University to study politics, philosophy and economics. At the end of her first year, the Second World War broke out. She began to feel uneasy about studying while the country was at war, and as a result she left Oxford to train as a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her nursing career was curtailed by a back problem, but during that time she came to love being with patients – a disposition that was to lie behind all that she went on to achieve. The next step of that journey was to train as an ‘almoner’: known today as a medical social worker.4

The watershed moment for Saunders came with her Christian conversion in 1945, after which she became a member of the evangelical congregation at All Souls’, Langham Place in London. John Stott became its curate in the year of her conversion and was to become a profound influence in her work. Her new love for God demanded a practical response and she asked, ‘What have I got to do to say thank you and serve?’5 The answer came in the unexpected form of a relationship with a patient, David Tasma, in 1948. He was a 40-year-old Polish Jew from the Warsaw ghetto who called himself an agnostic. He was dying from cancer in a busy London hospital. Cicely Saunders was his almoner.

What started as a professional relationship led to deep love and affection. Their conversations revolved around his unfulfilled life, his physical pain and his loneliness. Together they spoke about what could be done for him and for others in his situation. Tasma brought into sharp focus the desperate need at that time, in the United Kingdom and beyond, for better care for dying people. Cicely’s particular gift was to recognize that dying people experience not only physical pain, but emotional, social and spiritual pain too. This combination she named ‘total pain’.6 Her response was to propose holistic care (from the Greek word holos, meaning whole or entire). She wanted to create a place where dying people would receive care for every dimension of their need. In his will, David Tasma left Cicely £500. With permission from the hospital, she took the money and used it to begin to realize her dream. Her experience with Tasma, as much as this capital sum, laid the foundations of her vision.

Following Tasma’s death, Cicely knew that she wanted to work with the dying, but still needed to test her call. She made contact with St Luke’s, one of the places in London that already cared for the dying. She became a volunteer there and remained so for seven years. St Luke’s had been founded in 1893 by Dr Howard Barrett, at the time Medical Director of the West London Mission, a Wesleyan initiative, working alongside his brother-in-law, the Revd Hugh Price Hughes, their Chief Missioner. St Luke’s was originally known as ‘A Home for the Dying Poor’.7 His desire was to give the dying poor a ‘place of peace’, instead of the squalid conditions where they might otherwise die. This made him the first doctor to set up an institution for patients with incurable diseases. By the time Cicely Saunders volunteered there, it had grown significantly.8

What Cicely observed and learned at St Luke’s came to underpin the modern hospice movement. In the words of her biography:

It was a home rather than a hospital, it was free – patients only contributin...

Table of contents

• Contents
• The Westcott Foundation
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1. An Introduction to Palliative Care
• 2. Death in Christian Theology
• 3. What is a Good Death?
• 4. Self-Care
• 5. The Dying Person
• 6. Communication: Relating to Dying Patients and their Families
• 7. Terminal Care
• 8. Towards the End
• 9. ‘I Just Want to Die’
• 10. Caring for the Carers
• 11. Children
• 12. After a Death
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Prayers for Use with the Dying
• Bibliography