The first time I touched a dead man, my hands shook.
On an otherwise ordinary day in the hospital, his heart had stopped. Despite the best efforts of the nurses surrounding him, his body wouldn’t take its cues from the hands pressing on his chest and pushing air from a bottle down his throat. When it was clear there was no bringing him back, he was left alone.
There were no contacts on file, and he had asked that no one be told he was in the hospital. So his body lay in his hospital bed, growing pale and cold, while others tried to find someone, anyone, who could take on his care.
And then I came by, and it felt wrong to have no one there to say goodbye to him. With the nurse’s permission I went into the room, and there he was, lying still. The pink had left his cheeks but his eyes were closed, sparing me the empty stare that had greeted me from corpses past. I had so little information about this man, but I looked at the lines on his face and I knew that someone, somewhere, cared for him. In that moment, I decided I would care for him too.
At previous visits with a newly-deceased person, I had been too scared to actually touch them. I told myself it wasn’t my place, especially when family was gathered around. Now, though, this man was alone. The air felt heavy and I wondered if some part of his spirit lingered, watching, wondering what I would do. I decided it was wrong that the last time this body had felt hands had been with such force and clinical distance. As I spoke a blessing over him, I stretched out my hand and rested the tips of my fingers on his head.
I knew what I was doing came from a place of compassion and dignity, and yet I trembled as I made contact.
In his book The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser wrote of the soul as “the adhesive that holds us together, the principle of integration and individuation within us.”[1] At the moment of death, that force which holds all the biological and chemical processes within us together as a “body” ceases its work, and decomposition slowly sets in.[2] There are many changes that come with death, within just minutes of a person releasing their last breath: the skin pales and goes ashen as blood pools at the body’s lowest points; the eyes grow cloudy; the hands lose their warmth. But before anything else, the person goes still. It’s the first sign that, no matter what the “self” is, they’re no longer there. All of us have seen sound sleepers, and some of us may have known loved ones on ventilators or who have overdosed and been found hanging on by a thread; we’ve seen motionlessness. The stillness of the dead is different. When I met my first deceased patient, I was surprised at how unafraid I was of the sight of them. I realized that, unlike a person “playing dead,” I have no sense that the body in front of me could leap up and grab for me. The stillness feels like it reaches deeper than the muscles and bones, more fundamental than the heart and lungs. It’s the stillness of the person’s very atoms.
In spite of that stillness, there is a sense of gravity when I walk into the room of a dead person. It’s like there’s someone else there. Perhaps it’s the fact that the lifeless body before me still wears a recognizable face, especially when it’s a patient I’ve known for months. Perhaps, however, it’s because despite being released from the body, the soul remains nearby, watching how their former home is faring in their absence.
Plenty of people I meet don’t believe in a soul, or just aren’t terribly concerned about what will happen to them after death. A growing sentiment I hear when it comes to funeral planning is “I don’t care, I wish they could just dump my body in the woods and be done with it.”
And yet, as humans, we care for our dead. Their consciousness, their spirit, the whatever-it-is that made them them may be gone, but it’s still their face we gaze at when looking at them for the last time. Just about every time I visited a dead patient’s family, their death had happened only hours before at most. I tailored my language carefully: greeting the patient by name; referring to them as a person instead of an object, “the body”; describing keeping them in the hospital morgue as “caring for them.” There comes a moment when the loved ones of a person are able to recognize that death means their person is truly gone, but as long as the memory lingers around the body, I don’t want to be the one to break the spell.
I feel the power of memory affecting me, too. When I found that one of my patients was pale and still upon my arrival, when her forehead was cool to my touch, I was almost certain that she was already gone, but I didn’t treat her body like the empty vessel I believed in my mind that it was. I watched her chest for any signs of breath rather than touch her there so intimately, and when I lifted her arm to check for a pulse, I felt afraid of breaking her somehow, even though her lifeless weight made her feel much more solid than her age and size would suggest. I, like so many humans before me, wanted to treat this body the way I would treat the person; bodies, after all, are a part of who we are.
I know a bit of what happens to a body during and after death. I have traditions and stories and imaginings about where the soul flies off to when its earthy home gives out. What I don’t know is what that same soul is going through as its body winds down.
One of my hospice patients wasn’t on our service for very long before she took a turn. When I’d first met her she had been talkative, even if confused and repetitive. As I followed her case from the more frequent visits by the nurse, I knew she was declining fast. A month and a half after our first visit I found her alone, moaning and shifting in bed as if she couldn’t get comfortable. I sat at her side, took her hand, and called her name. I asked her if she was hungry, thirsty, or in pain, and each time she shook her head. I realized that what she was reacting to was, simply, the work of dying.
Still holding her hand in mine, with the other I reached out and stroked her head and her thin, soft hair. At first I hoped it would be enough to simply provide that gentle touch, but her agitation remained. I remembered, then, her stories of getting her pilot’s license and flying her little private plane as much as she wanted. As she continued in her restlessness, I leaned close and asked her, “Do you remember flying? All those times when it was just you and the sky?”
For the first time since I’d arrived, she went quiet and still. Her breathing became even and her body relaxed. I remained with her, softly speaking to her and reminding her of happier times whenever she began to call out again. As I sat at her bedside and watched her labor, I wondered about what was happening within, in her soul.
Alua Arthur, a death doula from Los Angeles, once demonstrated some of her practices for a client at the very end of life in a death education YouTube video. She showed her preferred methods of cultivating a spiritual and peaceful environment, including incense and soft music. She explained how a dying person’s extremities lose circulation in their final days and described gently wrapping her warm hands around a client’s cold feet. And, periodically, she stroked the person’s head and spoke words of encouragement and tenderness: “You’re doing it right. You’re safe. You’re doing a good job.”[3]
I’ve adopted this language with other hospice patients. At first, it just helped to have some soothing words to say when someone was distressed from what they were feeling. When I told a friend about this practice, she paused at the mention of telling a dying person “You’re safe.”
“Usually someone is safe because they’re nowhere near death,” she said. “What does it mean to be safe if you’re about to die?”
What does it mean to be safe at the end of life? Admittedly, I hadn’t given much thought to it before bringing those words into my chaplain practice, even though I had written about humanity’s fears of death and thus all kinds of vulnerability in my master’s thesis. But even then, intuitively, I knew some things about dying: that it can be lonely, and slow, and confusing. In a retirement home, if there is no local family available, a dying person might spend hours at a time completely by themselves as they labor out of life.
I’ve wondered if somewhere in the person’s mind or spirit, they feel themselves edging closer to the precipice off of which they must fall so they can move on to whatever comes after death. Even though it must happen, and the body is doing its work to make it happen, I imagine it’s frightening. When I tell someone they’re safe, I’m not pretending they aren’t dying. Instead, my hope is that they know that while they’re going through this sacred time, everyone around them is there to comfort and support them. No one will take advantage of them. I want them to not have to worry about anything other than the work of dying, and I will say what needs to be said to help that along. Still, I can’t go with my patients all the way, and when their time comes I’m left wondering what those last moments felt like as soul finally, completely, separated from body.
As I meditate on these stories I carry, I find myself circling again and again around the mysteries of dying. There is so much I cannot know about what the person is going through, and I can only offer the kinds of comfort I think I or someone I love would want in such a strange moment. I have only twice been nearby when a person slipped from life to death, but both times I wasn’t by their side, instead observing a monitor for the moment the heart rate line went flat. I couldn’t tell you about the light leaving someone’s eyes, or the release of the last breath. I can only say what it’s like to arrive after the fact, to look upon a body that only minutes prior had been a whole person, and is now only the remnant left to dissolve into the world.
In time, maybe I’ll find answers for myself about what I believe is happening when I stand at a dead person’s bedside and feel them watching me bless and mourn them. Until then, if that day ever comes, what I know is that their body was once a part of them. It was the way they touched the world and the means by which all who loved and hated them knew who they were. If nothing else, it deserves to be treated with care because of that. If, by chance, their soul has lingered to watch over what happens in the hours after they have left, I hope they’re comforted by what they see. I hope they know that my trembling hands hold their still ones out of love for them, even if I never met them alive. In the greying face and the clouding eyes I see a relative, a fellow human being. Each person is a universe of memory and knowledge in themselves, and with their death that all disappears beyond our grasp. In their transition and in the hours after, that alone is reason enough for me to be tender.
[1]. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York: Image, 2019), 13.
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. DEATHBED PLANNING with a Death Doula, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD8TA5OdJg8.