SOULS AT WORK: When I spoke with his nurse tonight she reported in metrics, the measurable increments of change that define disease process when someone is dying. She noted his food and fluid intake, his physical symptoms including a fever and how they were being managed, and his level of activity. These are the mechanisms behind lifes ebb and flow. As life weeps out, numbers creep in to fill in the spaces once held by loves, work and dreams. The vacuum is now filled with beats, breaths, and degrees, marking the passage home through an inexact yet quantitative science dutifully marked down in the record. But then she spoke of suffering that cant be measured in milligrams or degrees. He has what psychiatrists in other settings have called at various times somatization, social breakdown syndrome, demoralization or despair. She called it soul sickness. Hes sad she said. Although I am uncomfortable using the language of sickness, of physical illness, to describe an emotional and spiritual journey I had a sense of what this intuitive nurse was talking about. Some might say he is depressed but this is different. Its a soul loss, an unsettling gathering of fear, fragmentation, remoteness, a sense of disconnection rooted in aloneness. Its an inner journey, a struggle for meaning, concentrated in the most intensely personal corners of the spirit. It is a soul at work. Eventually words, scents, sounds, textures and memories will remain present yet cloistered under a shroud that fades in and out of awareness. This is the necessary work. The letting go followed by the embrace that reaches out from beyond knowing. These are times when we are called to bear silent but compassionate witness. It is the closest to knowing that anyone gets without lying in the shadows of their own transition. Yet it is still like seeing a small dot of starlight, galaxies away.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 03:54:46 +0000
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