Sacred Passages volunteer Karla Hunt (Photo by Jay Paul)
“We’re all just walking each other home,” said the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.
Yet some people have no one left to walk beside them, at journey’s end.
They’ve outlived their loved ones, or never had much family to begin with. The bonds of friendship may have frayed. Sometimes, there just isn’t enough time for relatives to get there.
So they lie alone in a hospital room.
Then the door opens. Someone is here, to walk that final mile.
Twenty-eight volunteers with the Bon Secours Health System have undertaken a sacred duty: to sit vigil, in four-hour stints, with patients who otherwise would die alone.
The companion enters the room and introduces themselves. Although the patient is not usually awake or able to speak, “there’s definitely a conscious intelligence there,” says Karla Hunt, who has volunteered with the Sacred Passages program for a year and a half.
Hearing is often one of the last senses to fade. Hunt and the other companions assume the patient can hear them, and they never speak about the dying person as if they’re not present. A nurse shares necessary information, such as contact precautions and the patient’s religious affiliation.
Companions silence their phones. They may turn on the hospital TV channel that plays soothing music and images.
They dim the lights, to create a sacred space. The room may smell unpleasant. Dying’s not neat. It’s OK. You get used to it.
They might read from a book that offers spiritual comfort, or from the Bible. They can pray aloud, in accordance with the dying person’s religious beliefs, or pray silently.
Volunteer Ken Diana, a garrulous 85-year-old, struggled in the beginning to figure out what to pray for. “Do you pray that they live?” he asks — live, in a pain-wracked or failing body? “Or pray that they die?”
He found his answer. He simply prays that God’s will be done.
A companion might wipe a patient’s eyes. They might rub some Vaseline on cracked lips, or hold a still hand for a little while.
Beyond that, there is nothing they need to do. The threshold is a place beyond doing. The body cannot, any longer, be repaired.
They only wait.
Some vigils last less than a day. Others last several. Rarely, a patient does not pass away. One woman, after five or six days, suddenly sat up. She eventually recovered and went home.
“She walked out of that hospital,” Diana says, marveling. “What did I say, about God’s will being done?”
For volunteers, the hard part is not the waiting. Four hours goes by in an instant.
“The hardest part is that no one else is able to do it,” Hunt says, “the idea that this person doesn’t have anyone. And that I’m the one.” But Hunt, who was recently ordained as an Episcopal deacon, has come to a new understanding: To the dying, she is family. “I am here representing the family of God,” she says.
Diana has wondered what makes him qualified to be the one who sits with a dying person. “Well then, I asked myself, ‘Who else, if it’s not me?’ ”
In 24 years in the Marines, he says, there were many times he called out to God, pleading, “I need help!” Volunteering as a companion is a way to give back the grace he received so many times.
Sacred Passages is based on the No One Dies Alone program begun by critical-care nurse Sandra Clarke. On a rainy night at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Oregon, one of Clarke’s patients asked her, “Will you stay with me?” He was an old man with no family. He had a do-not-resuscitate order and end-stage multi-organ disease.
Clarke replied, “Sure, as soon as I check my other patients.” An hour and a half later, she returned and found the man had died. Clarke felt awful.
“It was okay for him to die, it was his time — but not alone,” she later wrote. That experience led her to establish No One Dies Alone in 2001.
The Rev. Robert G. Shenk, Bon Secours’ lead chaplain for special projects (Photo courtesy Bon Secours)
Bon Secours adapted the program for its Richmond-area hospitals in 2015. Volunteers need not be Christian, but they are required to be spiritually grounded and must be a member of a local faith community.
The training, which lasts 12 to 15 hours, teaches them about the physical and emotional process of dying. Volunteers learn how to create sacred space, and how to reckon with the inevitability of their own dying. After a death, volunteers go through a debriefing with a chaplain, in which they talk about how the vigil proceeded and how they felt.
A vigil for the dying is more than a mere experience, says the Rev. Robert G. Shenk, Bon Secours’ lead chaplain for special projects. It is, at its heart, “an encounter with the holy.” The vigil keeper need not grasp for anything. “To let go is how things happen,” Shenk says.
Since the program’s inception, volunteers have held vigils for around 30 patients across the Bon Secours system. Volunteers aren’t required to be there between midnight and 6 a.m. Some come anyway.
“I don’t think you do this work unless you’re spiritually aware,” Hunt says. “You do believe. And you know that this is a journey.”
“For me,” she says, “it’s more of a reassurance that this life is not the end.”
If you are interested in becoming a volunteer companion with the Sacred Passages program, contact the Rev. Robert Shenk at robert_shenk@bshsi.org.
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