CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
DYING ALONE? [W, 5-13-20]
My Academy of Parish
Clergy friend, Suzanne Schaefer-Coates, knew an old lady who told her about how
she had been a nurse during the great flu pandemic of 1918. Well, only a
student nurse, really, but so many people were sick, and they needed nurses so
badly, she was pressed into service. One night she was put in charge of a whole
ward, by herself. She told Suzanne, “By the morning, every patient in my care
was dead.”
What would that be like, a
girl not yet twenty… how would you deal with that? All alone.
I think now of the nurses,
trying so hard to take care of patients--perhaps not the only nurse present on
the floor, but still alone in dealing with each patient--and losing them. And I
think of their patients, alone, perhaps without even the rubber-gloved hand of
a face behind a mask to hold on to as they struggle for breath and die.
It made me think of how
the obituaries in the newspapers might change now. So often they said something
like, “He died surrounded by his family.”
Now they’ll say, “He died alone, because the only nurse left had to go
try to take care of someone else.”
That is heart-wrenching.
But perhaps it is not the whole picture.
I heard a young woman tell
the following story in a public worship service, so it’s not confidential: She
was grabbed in the parking garage of the office building where she worked, and
raped. Repeatedly. By a huge man. Six-feet and seven inches tall, 300 pounds.
Each time he raped her he
told her that when he was through with her, he would kill her. She knew he was
serious. She knew she was going to die. So she prayed. Not to be saved from her
assailant, but to be saved from dying alone. “Just don’t leave me,” she prayed
to God. “I know I’m going to die, and that’s okay, as long as you stay with
me.”
I don’t mean this in a shallow
way, but in the ways of faith and hope: None of us has to die alone. None of us
does die alone.
John Robert McFarland
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