“Lingering” – A word I don’t much like right now as we wait for Death to come

LINGERING: To remain alive or existent although still proceeding toward death or extinction; to die gradually.

            It is a word I have come to hate as I sit by Connie’s bed and hold her hand, which sometimes grips mine as if to signal she knows I am there, and at others is just limply held, warm but not really alive as we have always defined life.

            I do not know how to navigate this death trip. I don’t know how to speak to Death, to ask it what its plans are and when it plans to take her.

            The hospice nurses become substitutes. They give the best of their knowledge which, when it comes to end times, is just a guess since no two journeys into death are the same.

            Lingering. Staying, when there is nothing left to stay for. It is not the soul commanding this but rather just a fading body doing what it does, which is to function at whatever level it finds itself on this day.

            Connie eats, a little. Three small spoonfuls of yogurt in the morning, usually nothing at noon, a few bites of mashed potatoes in the evening, maybe some ice cream. A few sips of cranberry juice here and there. We have suspended active feeding. It is offered and sometimes it is taken, sometimes not.

            The body is fading but it still has enough to draw on that it won’t let go and this is where I, sitting by the bed, run through emotions that end up with me exhausted, usually quietly crying and more than a little angry.

            “I want her to go because she wants to go but I want her to stay and I don’t want that final moment to come but why can’t it come now even though I want to hold onto her forever” and so my mind rambles and roams and I move through this parting without knowing when the parting will come.

            Every human being who ever lived has died and every human being who ever lived has sat at the besides of the dying. I am not unique. I am just another person saying goodbye to the living love and trying to find words to express that love and what the loss of it will mean.

I sit in my apartment trying to write, to read. I run errands with the car and my head on autopilot. I go to the memory care facility and sit and then I come home and sit alone, all the time wondering how long it will be and why it can’t be over and what will come next.

Connie lingers, and so do I. We linger in this empty cold space between living and dying, just as all humanity has done and we both know it is time, but Death, apparently, keeps the clock and has different thoughts and we are both participants and by-standers as a timeless drama plays out on an emptying stage under a single dying spotlight.

“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”

Hermann Hesse

Rich Heiland, has been a reporter, editor, publisher/general manager at daily papers in Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and New Hampshire. He was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Xenia Daily (OH) Daily Gazette, a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year. Since 1995 he has operated an international consulting, public speaking and training business specializing in customer service, general management, leadership and staff development with major corporations, organizations, and government. He also writes the blog stuffonmymind.blog. Semi-retired, he and his wife live in West Chester, PA. He can be reached at [email protected].