Around Mrs. O’s deathbed I ran into Mr. S., who works as a Volunteer in Terminal Home Care, a harmless, hairless little monkey, with huge ears and two strangely different eyes. His left eye is normal, with a black pupil, but the window in his right eye is closed. Instead of the tiny black aperture through which the soul is said to look out, your glance is reflected by an opaque sheen: a cataract.
“When are you going to have that eye operated on?” I ask him.
“Never!” is his firm reply, and he looks at me defiantly as if I were trying to rob him of something.
“And why not, if I may be so bold? If you ask me, you cannot see much through that clouded lens.”
“This is an All-Eye. I can see things from Above with it.”
“Fascinating…um…what do you see just now?”
“In you I see much love.”
I cannot stand this kind of stuff, certainly not at the end of a rather tiring day.
“Well, if you look sharply you might discern, right next to the love, a fierce strain of anger, loudly green, bottom left, hissing and all!”
He looks hurt and turns to Mrs O., and her condition.
“She is fully informed about her situation. She already stands with one foot Above.” A welcome change from the “one foot in the grave” idiom, to which my incomparable colleague Barend K. once replied: “Ah yes, but the tormenting question remains: will she step into it, or out of it?”
“Above what?”
“You know perfectly well. Above us. Above ALL!”
As he leaves the room the nurse turns to me and says: “Why do you talk down to that sweet man? Why not pick on someone your own age?”
It is not very kind of me, but I distrust Volunteers in Terminal Home Care, especially when sporting an All-Eye.
I fear that the percentage of slightly unhinged, mentally more or less wobbly fellow creatures in that group is just a little higher than among professionals doing the same kind of work. Please note I said “just a little higher.”
This is because the notion of “really wanting to do something for someone else” carries with it an almost solid guarantee for trouble. Maybe some comment is in order here.
“There is,” in Beckett’s piercing phrase, “no escape from the charitable gesture, that I know of.”
Professionals in health care know this, or should know it. They are always in a position of power towards the weaker persons who need their assistance. And one of the most difficult lessons these professionals have to learn is how not to abuse that power. I don’t know anyone who completely masters this skill, and a good thing too, for otherwise all the fun would be drained out of helping. But most of us succeed to a reasonable degree in keeping the tyrant under or only letting him out in acceptable disguise. Not abusing this power implies that, apart from gratitude, you accept a lot of stuff in the way of complaints, insults and recriminations, which you would not ordinarily endure on the strength of your beautiful soul alone. Something extra is needed here: money, for instance, and all that goes with it.
Getting paid remarkably thickens your skin.
Volunteers are not paid, and this means that at the end of the day they need a larger dose of gratitude and recognition in order to return home with the feeling of having done something worthwhile. I repeat that I am speaking in percentages; please do not misread me. I do not mean to say that all volunteers are like this, or all professionals like that, but a number are, and those numbers vary significantly within these two groups. Putting it succinctly, my hypothesis is that in an altercation with an aggressive patient, a volunteer would sooner hit back than a professional.
So much for voluntariness, to which, in the case of Mr. S., the lure of death is added, a circumstance which exerts a fatal attraction on catastrophiles: people who will flock unthinkingly towards the scene of an accident.
The other category gathering around the dying comprises those of us who are inordinately afraid of death, or at least unspeakably worried about it. (All hands rise.)
Some people go to an airport in order to get rid of their fear of flying. The sight of planes taking off and, more relevantly, touching down smothers their anxieties, and after a few visits they begin to believe that flying is a feasible enterprise. You can imagine the havoc wreaked there if one on such a mission should be faced with a fatal crash.
There are people who need a similar reassurance about the business of dying, and they seek their relief around deathbeds. I know, I am often there myself on just this mission, but paid and therefore less suspect on the point of motivation. And although nothing lands or ascends under those conditions, except in metaphor, deathbeds too can be seen to be a feasible undertaking.
This knowledge cannot be gathered from the one or two deaths the average Westerner actually witnesses in his or her life. No, if you really want some information on this issue you must work in health care. The funerary profession will not help you out here, because compared to deathbeds, funerals are a picnic.
Supposing these motives to be pres-ent in Mr. S. and he wholly oblivious of them, would he therefore be a less consoling presence to Mrs. O.? Not as long as he keeps it all snugly hidden in his heart, which I fear he won’t do, possessed as he is by the sweeping vistas offered to him from the vantage point of his All-Eye.
When I chanced on him shortly after Mrs. O. had died, he spoke to me in priestly fashion: “She is…Above!”
I nodded my assent. Maybe she was.
But he couldn’t help adding: “I pray that one day you too may reach that sacred abode.”
See what I mean?
Bert Keizer is a doctor in a chronice care facility in Amsterdam. His books include Dancing with Mister D and an as-yet untranslated work about Wittgenstein.
