I've just watched the Australian Story documentary about the Australian writer Nikki Gemmal's struggle to understand her mother's suicide after her mother had suffered for years with chronic pain. By her own admission, Nikki did not understand her mother's agony, her pain, or her need to alleviate her pain by suiciding without troubling her family. Nikki's story raised many issues that confront all families when it comes to planning for pain or death. But one of the saddest issues raised was the lack of communication between family members.
I've lost a grandmother and a father to heart disease; a mother, a brother-in-law and a niece to bowel cancer and a beautiful husband to emphysema.
I said "Good-bye" to my Grandmother the day before she died. I had visited my brother-in-law and my niece in palliative care the morning before they died. I was on a plane home when my father died and I will always regret not having made that trip earlier.
I was with my husband when he died. The nurse sitting with us said: "Talk to him. His hearing will be the last sense to go". I spent the last minutes of his life telling him how much I loved him, how much he had enriched our lives, how much I had loved the years we had spent together. He died quietly and calmly and I feel eternally grateful that I shared that last moment with him.
I was at my mother's hospital bedside when she died. Her last words were: "Have I been a good mother?" I told her she had been the best mother any daughter could have asked for.
I live eternally with the grief and loss of my family members. But I have had the privilege of sharing the deaths of my husband and my mother. I believe both died knowing how much they were loved.
Nikki Gemmal didn't have that privilege.
I would urge anyone confronting the death of a loved one that you reach out and communicate to them your love and your care. You may not change the inevitable outcome, but you will provide those dying with the emotional comfort they crave. And you will be able to let them die knowing that they know how much they were loved.
Grief is profound. It never leaves you. But if you can share both the living and the dying of your loved ones, then I believe you acquire a greater understanding of the existential meaning of your own life.
Tell the people you love how much you love them before they have to face their death.
