The Last Drop
As I watched the last drop of my chemo cocktail therapy drop into the tube and flow into my arm I felt relief. I’d run the course. But it was also another end of something, one of the endless succession of ends which makes us wonder if there are more beginnings than ends. Or, when the last drop falls, at the end of the line there is one final beginning. Maybe the beginning to which every end brings us closer.
My medical care throughout the treatment has taught me so much and made the challenge of it so much more bearable. There is a hierarchy of carers, ranging from the silent cleaners, through a number of categories whose job initials I never quite mastered, to the head nurse. Doctors, essential parts of the healing process but distant in the hierarchy reside in their offices. Briefly each morning in the ward I saw their very skilled PA’s (Physicians’ Assistants) who bridge the professional gap between nursing and doctoring. One young aspirant to become a PA visited me and often engaged in more relaxed conversation as did members of the nursing team. She told me she had been a lab assistant but wanted closer contact with the patients whose samples she was testing every day. I sensed in her not just ambition but a stronger calling to healing. I asked her why not medical school. She shrugged and smiled: ‘financial reasons.’
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The healing work of medicine is supported by its science, including its drugs and its rigorous rules of application; but it is not its major element. Drugs may relieve suffering or even cure; but alone they cannot heal. Science impacts the disease but disease affects a mysterious, magnificent organism called the human body. This intertwined mystery of physical, mental and spiritual consciousness needs to interact with the human consciousness of the healer using the science, wherever they may be in the medical hierarchy.
The novel ‘Orbital’, an account of six astronauts circling the planet in a space station, points out that a robot could perform their tasks with fewer errors. But it would not see, feel awe, grieve, suffer or be able to communicate the immense joy of the experience.
Not surprisingly, the human element of healing is largely transmitted by tone and body language. There is also the crucial gift of time to make eye contact, to talk and listen. These times are like curtains drawn to let in sunlight rather than the neon light of a hospital room. Or, at times, they feel like opening windows to let in fresh air, although this only a metaphor in hospitals whose windows are hermetically sealed. I mean simply that these moments of human openness happen when something new and fresh enters the relationship.
If moments like this disrupt the professional aspect of the encounter by becoming too long, too self-indulgent, they would fail to enhance the healing process. Balanced, however, they move the inner and outward perspectives of both parties.
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This is one of two elements of healing I would like to highlight: detachment. It is the strength and discretion to remain at the optimal distance that every kind of relationship requires if it is to be healthy and well-functioning. It contains the self-knowledge and the self-discipline to respect boundaries.
Actually, on my last stay in the hospital, I sensed this most strongly in the mother of a seriously ill patient in the room next to mine. We started a conversation, as many start, because of my footwear, a pair of Lone Star Texan crocs which a mischievous friend here had given me. I was amused by how many nods and approving comments they evoked. Hers drew us into discussion of the political situation. Perhaps because we synched on that, we went deeper. She taught political science but for a long time had also been a hospital volunteer; and she was the mother of a son who was about to be moved into palliative care. While she was with him the skills acquired in accompanying sick people usually helped her to support and prepare him. When she returned home, she said, she became just a heartbroken mother. There is no switch to flick to pass from one to another.
One of the first times I spoke about meditation to a medical audience composed of its upper hierarchy, I felt their scepticism: a monk talking about meditation without a power point. But I think they listened better when I assured them that I was not trying to convert them. One older surgeon made a comment that surprised us all. He said he understood how meditation would make a medical practitioner more compassionate. Early in his career he had allowed this part of himself to show in the relationship with his patients but it became too much for him to handle and he shut it off. He had found the switch although it seemed to trouble him.
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Another of my carers would take my vital signs every few hours. She was young but silently distant. Her task was merely to make measurements. We both looked at the computer screen as the calculations were made. She left without comment. On one occasion she noticed my July date of birth and shot me a sudden transforming smile of delight. ‘You’ve got the same birthday as my boyfriend. So, you’re Cancer, too’, she said with amazement but without a sense of the irony between the word’s medical and astrological meanings. I nodded and recited what I remembered of the psychological characteristics of the Sign and she nodded vigorously as they confirmed the character of her boyfriend. Her feelings for him had not been projected on me, though she now smiled at me knowingly every time I saw her. The random coincidence, however, seemed to have lifted a shutter separating her inner self from her professional work. Her light had entered the previously dark zone of her mechanised interactions. Her work of measuring entered the work of healing.
Maybe there will be a machine one day to measure that overture between human beings but even if there is it won’t be quicker or more accurate than the human recognition and response when this happens.
Personal connections play a necessary role in professional relationships. The wisdom and healing dimension demands it. They may be spontaneous or simple acts of kindness, an extra moment to be present and pay attention, a glance or a tone of voice; or even a deeper personal sharing. As I was saying goodbye and thankyou to one of my carers after my chemo she began to tell me of her mother’s serious illness, her daughterly terror of losing her and the tension of knowing how harsh the treatment was and that her mother was resisting it. As she shed some tears her mobile beeped to call her to another patient, she gave me a brief, understanding look and left.
If detachment is one element of the healing process it needs to be complemented by a bridge over the distance that detachment creates. This channel of consciousness allows the light of the personal inner world to flow towards and into the other. In whatever way it may be conveyed, it is felt as love.
To love without detachment risks becoming self-indulgent or possessive. To love with detachment is love that can grow into a transforming energy, one of whose signs is healing.
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As we mounted the stage, at the beginning of the John Main Seminar, The Good Heart,[1] quite early in my friendship with the Dalai Lama, I was acutely aware of the risk he, especially, was taking in agreeing to spend several days commenting on the Gospels from a Buddhist perspective and dialoguing about them with Christians. When it concluded, with a sense of achievement and progress in inter-faith dialogue, we went alone to say goodbye. Suddenly and surprisingly, I felt the overwhelming sense of an ending. With it came the pain of separation heightened by the strong trust and friendship that must have grown in the previous days. I think I showed the pain of separation and he noticed. He looked tender and then stepped back and laughed and, if I am not mistaken, fondly and wisely wagged his finger at the younger monk for falling into attachment.
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In our global culture, our professional and political worlds are becoming increasingly foolish. Losing connection with the wisdom of human consciousness they descend into spirals of extreme foolishness. The loss of the tension between detachment and the inner light undermines healthy and resilient human relationship at both personal and social levels. Then they can no longer be based on trust, respect and human kindness. In their place comes the extreme detachment of polarisation, objectification, which depersonalises and dehumanises others and will end by exploiting them.
Denial of the fully human involves denial of the intertwining of the transcendent and the immanent that makes us human. A Hebrew poet once sang, ‘the fool has said in his heart there is no God’ (Ps 14;1). Without this aperture of consciousness — an aperture not of belief but of faith in the human — we descend into spirals of self-interested measurement, quantitative assessment, and we end in disenchantment.
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The moments I have described above may be seen as the brief spontaneous reversals of this direction which can restore lost wisdom. They may derive from the ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ or a dawning of something like a presence which we can call grace. Wisdom is the healing of foolishness.
These moments raise us out of the cruelly politicised and coldly professionalised humanity which is flooding our consciousness at this time. Such epiphanic moments also expose the balance of detachment and the flow of inner light between human beings that releases the energy of wholeness. Over the past months I have increasingly felt it as a healing force.
And, you might agree, that what our human world, like our planet at this time, is calling out for is the healing power of wisdom embodied in the human.
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