One Perfect Day

My daughter, a palliative care social worker and an indefatigable source of stories for this blog, sent me a link to an article in Cleveland.com, which reports a story that first appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the efforts of three hospices to give their patients one perfect day.  (http://www.cleveland.com/brett/blog/index.ssf/2012/05/hospice_patients_treated_to_th.htmlabout hospice patients’ )  Two of the hospices, The Hospice of the Western Reserve and The Crossroads Hospice ask their patients, “If you had only one day to live, what would it look like?”  The third hospice, Malachi House, a hospice for the indigent terminally ill , doesn’t ask what their patients would like but observes their wishes as expressed in ordinary conversation.   All three hospices do their best to make their patients’ wishes come true.

None of the patients have asked to travel to exotic locales or to embark on ambitious activities such as sky diving or bungee jumping.  Most of the patients ask to be surrounded by family and food.  Some ask to experience something that they misss, something that once gave them pleasure: a visit from a cat, a fish-fry, a birthday party, playing the slot machines, engaging in an ice cream social, having one’s hair brushed.

One man asked to go for a drive.  A chauffeur arrived in a limosine, which took him, among other places, to the drive-through window at McDonald’s, much to the patient’s delight.

At Malachi House a man asked for Christmas presents.  He had never received any.  The staff bought him gifts, which they carefully wrapped.  He refused to open the packages, preferring instead to gaze at the pretty paper and ribbons, tokens that someone cared for him.

These wishes were for pleasures which to the healthy seem small, even trivial, but to the dying are important, reminders of the lives they used to live, activities that they once took for granted.    Their desires for the pleasures of everyday life tell us to savor them now while we can. 

I return yet again to Emily Webb in Our Town.  Having died in childbirth, she ignores the warnings of the dead to forget her past life.  Instead, she returns to the morning of her twelfth birthday.  She observes her parents, who neither see nor hear her, prepare for the day.  The everyday life she so longs for, taken for granted while she was alive, now seems achingly precious.  When she returns to the graveyard, she asks the Town Manager, Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?   And he replies, No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.

Few of us are saints or poets, but one aspect of their lives is open to all of us, to realize life while we live it....every, every minute.  Most of the time, each of us is living a perfect day.    What a pity not to realize it now.


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