Nobody should die alone. The most important part is that you are with the dying person – the dying person should not be left alone, if possible. Not always is it possible to accompany a loved one on the last way – both my parents died far away from me. My father suddenly, when I was eighteen and away in boarding school – his heart gave out. My mother in Germany, of lung cancer, when I went through the rigors of medical internship in Boston. I remember sitting at night at the bed of a dying patient, and thinking that I should be sitting with my mother.
Many people feel uncomfortable in the face of sickness and dying. Not everybody finds wonderful last words and gestures. Here is what you still can do – naturally – for a dying loved one.
First, however, what you should not do:
• Discuss the ways the person hurt you in the past: It is too late now. Try to grow up before the person dies – work out your own problems
• Go through their things and snoop around. Even if you were the lone heir: Wait until afterward
• Keep friends and relatives away from the dying person to hog her/him for yourself
• Don’t press your personal afterlife believing and articles of faith onto the dying person
What you can do – naturally:
• Sit still at the bedside
• Hold hands: Touch can still be taken in when all the other senses are long gone
• Give a cold sponge bath – lying unwashed in bed is a horrible burden for many sick people
• Sing. I sang for my first, beloved mother-in-law when she was already unconscious. I think she heard me
• Keep the room warm, aired and uncluttered – at home, in the hospital, at the hospice
• Bring pictures from the past that the person might still enjoy – but only a few selected ones – don’t lug into the sickroom whole photo albums
• Forgive if the person was not what you expected from her/him in the past. He/she had her own history – and you might not know all the essential parts – for instance, how this person was hurt when he/she was young
• Remember the past - as long as the person can still talk. This might be your last chance. But don’t push it – take the cue from the dying person, not from your own urgency
• Zip up a light, delicious meal – or just serve fruit. This is not the time to restrict a person to a diet – this is now pure enjoyment
• Read aloud – if he or she can hear it or not: Share what you like to share
• Tell the person what he/she means to you. Sum up your relationship with the dying person – but not financial problems and time constraints the dying puts on you. Your own stresses (and they might be great and overwhelming) you have to work up alone or with other people in your life. Your own life is on hold while this person moves toward death
• Wash the dying person’s feet. Then rub coconut oil into the skin
• Talk about positive things from the past
• Listen to whatever the dying person has to say – if you like it or not
• Pray if the person wants to pray. Shut up if the person does not want to pray
• Declutter the nightstand without getting nosy or possessive
• Brew an herbal tea: Chamomile, holy basil, peppermint, stinging nettle. – or whatever you have at hand Ask the doctor if there are contraindications
• Endure the impending loss – you can – and will - cry later But you will take satisfaction if you stayed strong when you were needed to be strong. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
龙年快乐Happy Dragon Year 2012!
January 23, 2012
The Chinese New Year begins today – time for miscellaneous thoughts and new resolutions! 龙年快乐 read character by character, means “dragon year happy happy” – pronounced long nian kuai le. What I find fascinating is that both “happy” terms are spoken with a down tone. In my ear that double happy-happy sounds less than a Western easygoing, lucky-feeling happy but grimly determined: You better be happy – or else! I might be over-stating it, but to me the Chinese kuai! le! shows perfectly the difference in the Chinese approach to ours: We expect happiness, well, to “happen”, for instance in a relationship. The Chinese know it is hard work … Just finished the Scripps Conference on Natural Supplements here in San Diego – taking advantage to me being right here in California (for only another week now!). Here are some thoughts I am carrying home from that wonderful conference: • Listening to the results of modern science (the conference was for physicians and health practitioners and the talks were evidence-based – using modern science; no touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo). It seems, my thoughts on health have well held up during those many years I am thinking about what our bodies and souls need. The only point where I am more radical is in fat consumption: Most health practitioners are still fat-phobic. I am not talking bacon dripping fat, ice cream and cream puffs here – I am talking olive oil, coconut oil, fish oil, and never say no! if somebody puts foie gras on your plate – it doesn’t happen that often! - George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950) had this to say: “No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office“. • Let’s correct that touchy-feely part: Turns out, we alternative practitioners know that body and soul belong together, and at the conference there was a healthy amount of hugging, laughter and tears going on. Because if one thing has become clear – through our old failings and brand-new science: One can’t go it alone. As a physician, I need like-minded colleagues; as a fat person, you need friends, family, community around you to make a dent in your weight – or whatever health problem you are tackling in the moment. • Obesity is a good guess of mine because, firstly, now more than a quarter of Americans are grossly overweight – half are only overweight - and all conditions that physicians usually label as single diseases are coming together: heart disease, diabetes, depression, arthritis, obesity (Mark Hyman called it aptly “diabesity”), cancer – they are ALL ONE, namely a wrong lifestyle. Wrong food, heavily subsidized and advertised by your own government, with your own tax dollars. Time to take matters into your hands and “own your health”! “Own Your Health”, of course, is the title of Roanne Weisman’s book about alternative medicine. She wrote it after overcoming a stroke with the help of many different alternatives, after mainstream medicine had told her she would stay disabled and had to adjust to it. Boy, were they wrong! • The old excuse that it is “all in the genes” cannot be used anymore. Yes, a lot of your weight might be determined by your genes – but only if you allow it to be so. The new science of epigenetics teaches us that genes can be switched on and be switched on – and guess, who does the switching? Your food does it, and you moving your butt around, that does it. Isn’t it marvelous? • It takes a village to raise a child – you have heard it. It also takes a village, or a tribe, or your church group to change your health habits. Line up with a friend to start walking during lunch hour – five minutes in one direction, five minutes back. And be part of the solution, not the problem: Whenever you bring cookies or brownies or a potluck – don’t go to the old recipes! Explore new options without sugar, dairy, white starches. I always see that deviled eggs are the favorite of everybody – and they is nothing wrong with eggs, especially if the are organic, from free-walking hens. Bring cooked greens with olive oil and garlic, pepper and salt – they are delicious cold or hot! Educate your friends – don’t give in to their sugar-icing cravings! They will thank you. • If we would not eat alone and always at a table (not in the car, not in front of TV, not in bed), we likely would be slimmer. In olden times, if you grabbed the biggest piece of meat, your mom would slap you and say: “Don’t be greedy!” If you asked for your fifth pancake, your grandma would say sharply: “Now is enough, dear!” And since nobody catered to their little hurt feelings, children found home less congenial than the outside and their friends. We always asked if we could go “outside” – whatever it was, it was not inside with the parents (your parents made you uncomfortable because they always wanted to prepared you for life), and it was not in front of TV, computer or game boy. When I was a child, our first TV came with a key – whatever happened to THAT technology?? - and we children could not even turn it on when the grown-ups were out working. Of course, we children soon figured out that the key was kept in the bar, behind the bottles. But it was a high-risk gamble – and TV was never half as exciting as our friends outside. We had one fat girl in class, in all of my thirteen years of school. And that poor girl, we all pitied her – but we wouldn’t play with her. • “This body is not a home but an inn, and that only briefly.” Seneca (4 BC to 65 AD) said that. I think we have to start talking about what is needed: That people take their own health in their hands. Your doctors can only assist you – not do the work for you. So let’s start by calling fat “fat” – no more pussyfooting around it; physicians have long enough colluded with patients and avoided the “F” word: “I won’t call you fat, if you stay my patient”. The health care system is falling apart under the burden of health care costs brought about by overweight people (don’t forget – I still am for a national health care system!), the Earth is brought down under the burden of too many people who consume too much, and all our wealth so far has brought us very little real happiness it seems – if we judge by how many people are on anti-depressants. • Bad news: Before you die of being overweight, the Earth might have died of pollution. Definitely, future generations – they are your kids, my kids, our kids and grandkids! – are in danger. Newborn babies have been found to have more than 200 industrial chemicals in their umbilical cord blood, right when they are born. The womb has not protected them. We are finding out the hard way that you can’t dump dirt there, and assume you are safe here. We all have only this one Earth – and do you want to be responsible for babies born with birth defects? Global warming is real – so is overpopulation and increasing environmental diseases. • And what do they mean by “natural supplements”? I am glad to report that they do not mean artificially manufactured vitamins or new-fangled molecules, but they promote (mostly – no industry is perfect!) clean, whole, fresh herbs preserved in a bottle of tincture or capsule as well as possible. And if you are waiting for that miracle pill that might do the work for you – dream on! Real health is work. And didn’t you know it: Being sick sucks much worse. Real health takes very little: A bit clean water, a few simple, fresh foods, a good night’s sleep – every night, a few herbs to treat little things early, abundance and walking and dancing and laughter with friends. Music, art, books. Ask more of this life just than a heavily mortgaged house, a car and a career! A happy, hard-working New Year to you! Read More
… And Then You Die: Hazel Rowley (1951-2011)
March 21, 2011
Hazel Rowley (1951 - 2011)
A few weeks ago I had chosen this title for a blog entry because I wanted to tell (again!) how short and precious life is. Then I had no inkling that my friend Hazel Rowley would die in New York on March 1st, unexpectedly.
Hazel was a fellow writer and biographer. Only last fall, her new Roosevelt biography had come out: “Franklin and Eleanor” - a book that I couldn’t put down, reading till late in the night. In November, on her birthday, I met her for the last time. She was full of sparkle and wit, and doubts and insecurities, and dazzling intelligence; nobody would have foreseen her sudden death.
When I asked her if she was planning another couple’s book (before “Eleanor and Franklin” she had done Sartre and de Beauvoir in “Tête à Tête”, she laughed and said that she was done probing deeply into the relationships of people. She had found lasting love and felt secure in it, ready to probe other issues. She said the McCarthy era interested her.
The period between book projects is always a brittle time for a writer. In short order, the love fell apart, a resistant bug settled on her heart, little pieces of the infectious growth broke lose, settling in her brain, and putting her into a coma, from which she, mercifully, never awoke – Hazel Rowley would not have wanted to live with half a brain.
Born in London, raised in Australia and England, she roamed the world – in Paris she lived for nearly two years - before settling in New York early in the millennium. When Hazel was young, Simone de Beauvoir had become her hero: a woman who wrote about women’s disadvantages in a male world, and who opened new paths for women of our generation; Hazel wanted to be where Simone de Beauvoir was: an woman writer, and an equal partner in a lasting relationship.
Christina Stead was Hazel Rowley’s first subject. Stead had made child abuse the subject of an autobiographical novel – in 1940! Christina Stead was a fellow Australian; her American publishers famously – or notoriously – made her set her novel “The Man Who Loved Children” in America. Hazel felt kinship to her lonely compatriot, a writer, a woman with a complicated love life, a woman often on the edge of society. And a woman who carved out for herself an independent literary existence – even before de Beauvoir.
Hazel’s second biography took on the black author of “Native Son,” Richard Wright, who in his life found no real home and only scattered success, ending up (and dying) in Paris, much too young. This is the only book by Hazel Rowley I haven’t yet read; I assume it was Simone de Beauvoir who directed Hazel to this American expatriate writer in whom de Beauvoir was greatly interested. But think: A young, rather unknown Australian white woman writing about an American black man – how dare she?!
Paris is also the setting of Hazel Rowley’s third book “Tête-à-tête”, the book about Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship. The two famous writers don’t get away scotch-free – this reader felt rather repulsed by their sexual predatory shenanigans. But as Simone de Beauvoir had been the one who showed us that traditional women’s roles were not written in stone, Hazel Rowley wanted to know if promiscuous sexuality would be worthwhile and livable - if you ask me: no - exploring the Sartre/de Beauvoir relationship objectively, without taking sides.
Her new book “Franklin and Eleanor,” probed another famous relationship. To me the book seemed especially timely, because the Roosevelt’s Great Depression and the present Great Recession share some commonalities, which takes the book to a higher level than even “just” being about male-female relationships. Eleanor Roosevelt had built a public and private life for which she had no role models – she did it with what was given her: her wit, her caring, her curiosity.
Neither Simone nor Eleanor were abstract feminists or men haters. On the contrary, men were invited into their lives. But they never gave up being a person and pursuing their own goals in life.
At her memorial in New York recently, so many people spoke eloquently about Hazel’s wonderful, bright presence – she had nothing lukewarm about her. Unable to speak in tongues myself, I played “Songs Without Words” by Mendelssohn for Hazel – badly, as always – but she would have wanted me not to chicken out.
Hazel had many more books in her, it was so clear – how I wish she had more time! Read More
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