Intuition and Death

As I grew up, my mom worked as a hospice nurse. I paid attention to everything, asked tons of questions, and learned more than I think I even realize. One of the things I learned, and I believe to be true, is that people know when they are going to die. A premonition or sense of intuition. They might not be able to tell you, or themselves, but they get themselves and/or those around them ready in their own ways.

So, I find it interesting when my patients talk about death, especially their own. Last week, I had a patient start talking about her impending death, telling me that she didn't think she was going to make it. Medically, there was really no reason for her to say that. Yes, she was weak, but she'd been in the hospital for 3+ months and in the ICU for a solid month of that stay. She'd pulled out of all of that and was one step from going home when she looked me in the eye and told me she wasn't going to make it. It was chilling. She quoted poetry to me, Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "Requiem" which is the epitaph on his gravestone:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longs to be.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

As a therapist, as a medical professional, my job is to get her back to her daily life, to get her home alive and well. I countered with a poem intended to put some fight back into her, using the words of Dylan Thomas "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against of the dying of the light.

Maybe it was a feeble attempt to motivate her. A fruitless attempt to even try. Maybe she just knew better than I, in that intuitive way that people know, how they are truly doing.

In my remembrance of her, my acknowledgment of her, I leave you with the quote she told me on the very first day we met, as told by her and written down by me that same day...

"They may not be mine - the loaf, the kiss, or the kingdom - for beseeching,
But I know that my hand is an arm's length nearer the stars for reaching."
Anonymous