One of my clients said, on her deathbed, “This is so beautiful…and so warm. There is light, everywhere.” Lomi, age 76
1: “Please forgive me! Please forgive me!” Ruth exclaimed.
“She was sitting up with her eyes open wide,” Diane Button writes in her powerful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living.
The seventy-year-old Ruth was experiencing severe distress and agitation. Diane, who serves as an end-of-life doula, was attempting to calm her along with her colleague, Clarence, a chaplain.
Ruth would then “lie back down and fall asleep,” Diane writes, “only to be woken just minutes later with a look of terror on her face.”
Ruth’s sister Dorothy was also in the room. She shared with Diane and Clarence that her sister “was raised in the Catholic Church. Even as a young girl she looked forward to Sunday Mass, Holy Communion, and even to confession, a practice of privately confessing your sins to a priest,” Dorothy shared.
Ruth sang in the choir during high school and would often lead the family in saying the prayer before meals.
“However, everything changed when she left for college,” Diana writes, as Ruth became ‘a wild hippie child.’ She lost touch with her parents, her sister, and the church in search of something new, something she never found.”
In the last several decades, Ruth had shared with her sister that she felt “spiritually empty.”
While she desired to return to her childhood faith, life was busy, and other priorities got in the way. Marriage, work, children, travel, weekend events, and housecleaning kept her occupied. Her spiritual life remained “on the back burner.”
2: Then, Ruth got sick and was housebound. “She still longed to reconnect to the Catholic Church, but she never did,” Dorothy said.
Ruth feared she had waited too long, she told her sister.
“And then one day, Ruth slipped into a place where she could no longer speak in full sentences or express herself,” Diane writes. “All she could muster was ‘please forgive me.'”
Clarence and Diane each sat on one side of Ruth’s bed. “Clarence took her left hand, and I instinctively held her right hand and placed my other hand gently over her heart,” Diane recalls.
They took turns reciting Ruth’s familiar childhood prayers, and Clarence spoke to her with pure love.
“In the silence, I noticed that all three of us were breathing in unison,” Diane recalls.
Ruth let out a deep sigh, then became calm. “I silently hoped she had found her way back to the spiritual foundation that brought her a sense of belonging in her younger years,” Diane writes.
“I felt the distress when we arrived, and I felt the peace when we left,” she notes. “It made me wonder how much different her life would have been if she had found that spiritual peace earlier and carried it with her throughout her life.”
Ruth passed away later that afternoon.
“This wasn’t the first time I’ve witnessed someone make peace with their religion or their spiritual beliefs with only hours to left to live. It’s definitely possible to find healing and spiritual peace at the end of life, but why wait?”
3: “If there was one bit of advice I would give you about preparing your heart for your final days, I would say to find peace with whatever it is that you believe,” Diane writes.
“And do it sooner rather than later.”
Why?
Because “when we have a spiritual practice that sustains us,” Diane observes, “it brings us comfort and a sense of peace about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It reduces our fears and gives us hope.”
Not doing so has consequences.
“In my experience,” Diane writes, “it is the most difficult, anxiety-producing issue that unprepared clients must face. It can bring either extreme emotional distress or a peace that surpasses all understanding.”
Some people believe that discussing spirituality and religion divides us. That has not been Diane’s experience.
“I find that at the end of life, when we are able to lean into these topics with curiosity and acceptance, they can actually bring us closer together,” she notes.
“I’ve had clients who have spiritual beliefs and practices that I had never even heard of before,” she says. “This has never stopped us from developing a close and meaningful connection.”
Our spirituality is “derived from spirit, something unseen. . . [It is how we are] inspired to know God, a higher power, or a concept of the divine that is greater than ourselves,” she notes.
It “helps us to make sense of our existence and purpose and inspires us to live accordingly,” Diane explains.
“No matter what it is, defining what we believe can offer the inner peace that comes from a life well lived. It’s a mindful, daily awareness of how we belong, how we interact with others, what makes us want to get up in the morning, and how we show up for life.”
Diane’s recommendation?
“Our spiritual practice may be an essential and urgent component of our final journey at the end of life, but we may also discover that spirituality is a meaningful part of your daily life now.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Have I taken the time to explore and define what I truly believe—and does my current spiritual practice actually bring me the kind of peace I would want to feel at the end of my life?
Action: Set aside a quiet block of time this week to reflect, journal, or pray about my deepest beliefs and fears around death, and identify one simple spiritual practice I can begin (or return to) that nurtures a sense of peace today—not someday.
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