They're caught up in the busy preoccupation of leaving, not reflecting on what they're leaving behind. Some ask for their coats, others inquire about the bus schedule. Instead of offering some eleventh-hour contemplation about their lives, they request tickets, or boats. They do not behave like perishing actors in Hollywood movies. But hospice staff know that when their patients begin to talk about excursions or travel, they are announcing their departure. Far more significant to them, perhaps, would be the anticipated deathbed confession, something for which they had a cinematic sense-a whispered "I love you" or "Take care of the children" before the head falls back onto the pillow. To families, a desire to go shopping on Monday would have been delusional talk, febrile mutterings of no importance. I said, 'When do you want to go shopping? She said, 'Monday.' I said, 'Fine, let's go shopping Monday.' For me, she was telling me 'I'm going.' And actually, she died that Monday evening." She keeps saying, 'I want to go shopping.' In life, she was a real shopper. They sincerely want to know where their train tickets or hiking shoes or tide charts are. They often haven't said a word in days, and then suddenly they say something focused on travel. They are far beyond the task of making everyone feel better. "This is different." Within roughly seventy-two hours of the end of their lives, many dying people in hospice settings begin to speak in metaphors of journey. one day," said Teresa Dellar, executive director of the residence, in the Montreal Gazette. For the nurses, this certitude is uncanny. Resting her elbows on the wooden dining room table, Monique tells me that most of the people she's cared for over the years have come to know, at a certain point, exactly when they will die. Nurses like Monique have become passionate advocates of creating a hushed, listening space around the dying, because they have learned from experience that the men and women in their hospice beds undergo subtle transformations in awareness and mood. Hospice nurses and doctors see their patients differently than most families-brand-new to the dying experience-can see their beloveds themselves. I never gave the letter to her, and I'm glad of that. I even began writing a letter to her at the time, saying that it was none of her business, that no one who was about to sleep forever needed to sleep in the interim. She shooed us out of Katharine's room one afternoon so that my sister could rest. She's a middle-aged woman with curling dark hair who had seemed bossy to us in our overwrought emotional state. Monique Séguin, was one of Katharine's nurses. When my sister Katharine lay dying, it was presided over by a budgie named Blueberry, who hopped from perch to floor to swing to wall and gabbled at all and sundry. The dining room of the West Island Palliative Care Residence is, improbably, a rather cheerful place. TIME TO GO: Many of the dying talk about quotidian journeys in the days and hours leading up to their death.
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