Article
Comment
Death & life
4 min read

A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.
a pile of feathers.
Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.  

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further. 

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.  

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much. 

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain. 

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.  

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though? 

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.  

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world. 

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.  

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep. 

Article
Assisted dying
Care
Comment
Easter
5 min read

I know who will be most affected by legalising assisted dying

Contemplating lent revives hard memories and raises fresh fears.

Ryan is an ordained Priest in the Church of England, currently serving in south London. 

A close up of a forehead bearing an ash cross marked on it.
Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash.

“What’s that - a face tattoo?” 

These were the words of one person as I walked past them on the streets on a recent Wednesday, with the ashes of last year’s burnt palm-branches placed across my forehead in the shape of the cross.  

The cross has been a symbol of hope for over two millennia; that even in the most painful of circumstances, darkness does not have the final say, including in death.  

As a society, we don’t really talk about death that much. Margot Robbie’s Barbie was the quintessential party-pooper when she pondered: 

 “do you guys ever think about dying?”. 

It’s no fun to dwell on death and dying, and for many of us, we put it off as long as we can. That all changed last year with the introduction of the assisted dying bill into the Houses of Parliament. Our national attention was, for a rare moment, captured by death.  

As a parish priest, I’ve seen the finality of burying someone into the ground. I’ve seen the sadness in the eyes of those trying to grieve. 

The words of Ash Wednesday, which remind us that we are ‘but dust, and to dust we shall return’ are echoed in the famous words that the priest recites in those last moments of burial, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. In that moment, amongst the bereaved, there is no escaping the inevitability of death. It is the ultimate statistic, 1 in 1 die. 

Whilst death is of course universal and will affect us all, the impact of this assisted dying bill could have consequences for some of the most vulnerable in society.  

As I reflect on my time as a Priest in East London, this is not abstract theory, but something I lived with each day. I served amongst a hugely diverse, vibrant, community in one of the poorest parts of the city. As I try to picture some the people I’ve walked alongside, I know it is these lives that will be most affected.  

One of the reasons I have concerns about the bill is the prospect of these people being coerced into ending their own lives prematurely, by a world that has already told them their lives are of little value. There are already huge disparities in access to the current provision of palliative care at the end of life, particularly amongst people of colour, the disabled and the poor.  

Of the 500,000 people who die each year, 100,000 do not access the care they need. This number is skewed towards ethnic minorities and those who come from poorer backgrounds.  

There is much confusion and misinformation about what end-of-life care even is. Research conducted by Marie Curie shows that 1 in 5 people from an ethnic minority background believe Palliative Care is actually Euthanasia.  

We only need to look at what has happened around the world when the ‘right to die’ becomes a duty to die. Even with the best of intentions, other jurisdictions show us that safeguards rapidly deteriorate and those who are already vulnerable become even more so.  

I worry that the way in which this bill is being handled - rushed through, little time being given to properly chew over the profound consequences it may have - reflects the wider way we view death. 

By trying to provide a ‘choice’ for a certain group of people, the consequence will be taking away real choice from those who already have little. 

Yet we know that for those who do access it, palliative care can be hugely effective in improving their quality of life, and for some, they can even outlive their prognosis. During Ash Wednesday’s service, I met an elderly gentleman who was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in 2019. He was told he had five months to live. He described every day of his six-year survival since as a ‘miracle’, his eyes filled with evident joy.  

Such a blessing stands in stark contrast to the lonely final days of my 96-year-old great grandmother. She was suddenly taken ill during the Covid-19 pandemic and was frantically rushed to a hospital. Amidst the chaos, exasperated by the restrictions against seeing family that were in place at the time, I distinctly remember confused conversations about placing her in a care home for her final days. It was clear she needed a lot of specialist attention, more than our family could provide ourselves.  As she was discharged to stay with our aunt, she never did reach that care home, as she died at home. She was buried in our local cemetery, with our family watching on Zoom.  

My final memory of my great-grandmother will be the FaceTime call we shared when she was taken to hospital, with the poor data connection and shaky picture. I am so grateful for the few family members who were able to be by her side when she died, but I’ve often wondered whether she fully received the care she actually needed during those final days, in the way she needed it.  

What my great-grandmother didn’t have a lot of at the end of her life was time.  

That’s also true for this bill. Concerns have been raised that only five hours of debate were given to this Bill in the chamber, comparatively short for a change in the law of this magnitude.  

I worry that the way in which this bill is being handled- rushed through, little time being given to properly chew over the profound consequences it may have- reflects the wider way we view death.  

Do we view death - and indeed the dying- as something to be shoved to one side, not spoken about in the hopes we can avoid its impact? Or do we view death as an important moment to review who and what matters most in life?  

Perhaps for some, the fact that Christians devote a period of 40 days to dwell on death may be one of the mysteries of faith. However, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea after all.  Death may bring with it fear, grief and pain and so we tend to avoid it. But do we risk missing out on much more? As we head into Easter, the cross still serves as a powerful reminder that, especially in death, Hope can be found, that Good has triumphed over evil, and Light shines even in the darkest of places.  

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