Sublime

‘When she can no longer eat and is visibly uncomfortable, that is the time,’ Mark tells me. ‘I am on standby for you,’ he reassures me.

She needed someone who might quiet the shrieking wean, who might help her resurface after she was hit with the waves of her grief.

Stephen Levine, revered for his pioneering work with conscious dying,

She is yelling. She is raging. I listen. “I am so angry. So angry! I hate this,” she repeats. My task in this moment is to mirror back to her the emotional storm at hand. This way I can honor both her anger and her grief. At best, she has days to live and she craves decades more. I try to sit in her hell.

What Dr. Jo has discovered by companioning people in their darkest descent is that human beings have a deep need to be present with our losses rather than turn away from them.