The process of dying often takes a lot of time and most people know they are closing in on the end. Depending on what is causing death, many dying patients understand that they are ready to die. Recognizing that the end is near can be an enormous help to the process of dying and to the family too for the patient is ready to die. When the patient is ready it is important to focus on dying as a natural and inevitable part of living, no longer as something to fight. The greatest job of the dying should be to let go of all material and emotional grasping and to begin to experience relaxation and closure in whatever way one can. According to Dr. Tobin the process of acceptance involves an appreciation of the quality of life rather than the length of time it can be extended (1999).
It is advisable to discuss feelings with family and other pastoral caregivers. The loved one may have a lot of trouble with the fact that one of them is preparing to die. Most of the family may be denying the fact that a loved one is dying, and this demands a change of mind and continuing to fight to live. Family should give support when a loved one is ready to die. No loved one can prevent death; loved ones can only cause pain by hanging on to the one dying. Howard in his book, Facing Death supports this by pointing out that, “it is better to be able to be with patients in their pain, to support them without feeling the blind compulsive to rescue then as from something from which there was no rescue, and to stay with them as they approach death without feeling that one has somehow betrayed their trust”(1996, 35). The greatest gift one can give to a loved one or to a patient is to allow the awareness of ones own pain and loss to deepen solidarity with them as the face illness and death.
What is really the role of the pastor? What can a pastor do or say to the dying patients, and be present to the presence of God, give pastoral care even at the point of death? This means that the pastor as a pastoral caregiver has roles to play in medical crises, including at the time of death. He has to engage in the ministry of presence, truly being with the patient and those gathered around. Another role is the ministry of giving witness to the gospel. He may also play the role of an interpreter, helping the patient and the family understand health caregivers and vice verse. The moral role of the pastor therefore may entail more than helping patients as they make difficult decisions. This includes helping the dying and their families in their hope for a good health. The pastor is able to hear and call forth the deep stories, sometimes gently changing the subject from the preoccupation with the medical narrative to a deeper focus on the stories of the dying person and their family and how these stories fit within the timeless story of God’s life within them. Pastors can listen and encourage as the dying and their loved ones tell their stories and connect those stories with the larger story of faith, of what God has done for the world and what God has done for them. The dying bear witness to the ways that their life is an on - going spiritual quest for and with God.
What is the role of the pastor when dying is inevitable? The most difficult duty of the pastor is to comfort the family when a loved one has died. There is a terrible sense of despair. After the doctor announces the death of a loved one to the family, the next person usually summoned is the pastor for those who are Christians. The pastor is to be with the family to help in making arrangements, to contort, and to answer questions . If the pastor knows the family it would be easier for him to make arrangements and prepare for the funeral service. The pastor becomes a spiritual caregiver who receives the dying into the community that experiences death.
The pastor guides them through the chaos and the loss of the familiar, attends them in living through losses that can either be explained or replaced, listens through questions that cannot be resolved. The pastor, on the other hand, helps in preparing for the care teams from the entire church community. These care teams will help the mourners process their grief together in support to each other. The pastor will arrange for prayers to be said, and there are many acts of ordinary gifts that the pastor should encourage. In the midst of dying, the pastoral caregiver (pastor) should find moments for healing and sustaining, guiding and reconciling, nurturing and educating and modeling death as a normal event, offering benevolent and companionship. It is the role of the pastor to educate participants that life and death, joy and grief, hope and despair belong in the same theological sentence and understanding of God. Death is a guaranteed part of all human beings. The deaths of loved ones, as well as our own death. is a must. The question is not whether human beings face death or not, but rather, how they face it. Despite the fact that death is an inevitable experience for everyone, many dying people react with avoidance and strong feelings of fear and sadness. Few people have learned to develop a facility for talking about death, or talking with the dying. As seen in chapter one, grieving begins soon after the news of a terminal illness and continues long after death. Talking with the dying person should begin at this time when news has been given of the impending death. One may have only a week, months or years to say all that there is to the dying person. But it is necessary to be aware that their life is now time limited, and your relationship with them should give time to interact differently. Saying goodbye in words and in action helps clarify ones feelings about what a particular relationship has meant to a loved one (Wogrin 2001, 2).
Dying is much more than a medical event. It is a time for exchanging love, for reconciliation and
transformation for all involved. It is a chance for the dying person’s loved ones to become compassionate companions on a journey of continuous discovery. Dialogue does not only occur in words. The exchange of meaning can happen through presence, gestures, silent companionship, or touch. This means that the dying are not alone, have not been abandoned, or have not been isolated. It means that the dying have company through their experience. Presence is keeping company with another, as in raising children or sharing in family, friendship, and vocational relationships. This time is a time-sharing in the lifelong and inexorable movement toward the process and acts of dying and death. It is not only logic that one need an ending to relationship that takes place between the dying and the other person, Wogrin says that, “when you don’t take the opportunity to say goodbye you will be likely be left with the challenge to working
through a relationship process entirely on your own, which is a difficult task” (2001, 3). The presence thus is a way of saying, I will absorb your pain and horror. I will not turn from your suffering, I will not mute your laments, I will go gentle with you and wait in peace and silence, I will attend this human process as you enter it and, in a variety of ways, quietly shout of God’s presence.
Being able to join and support people in their final phase of life, and talk with them about what their life has been, who they have been, and how they will ever be remembered is of vital importance in working through the process. This joining and sharing will take different forms in different relationships, depending on the personalities involved. At some point, presence may yield to word (which of course, being grounding the understanding of Presence). A participant may want to know what you think. You will seek prayer and scriptural resources to use at the bedside, in conversation with family members. The dying person may want to talk about what is happening, the feelings concerns and fears. An early problem in pastoral care was the over eagerness for the care- giver to speak, to interpret, to pronounce, to state the theological or scientific point of view as to how the person(s) should be feeling. Wogrin asserts that, “speaking
about feeling makes them much clearer” (2001, 14).
Sometime when people are dying, they are determined to avoid all discussion of death. They may be too caught up in anger, so determined not to die, or so fearful of their own feelings that they won’t get near themselves, let alone allow anyone else near these tender feelings. When saying goodbye it is always good to talk about death, focusing all the energy on talking about the dying person’s life. There is a fine line between encouraging someone to get about and do something pleasurable to help enrich his daily experiences or improve his overall mood, and pushing him or her to do things he or she is not really up to doing. Talking to the dying person in regard to what he or she is feeling is vital. “How are you feeling today?” What is your energy level?” Encourage the person to pay attention to the messages he is getting from his body. Roberts puts it, “the gift to the dying person is an opportunity to fully say goodbye if the patient and the family do not escape into denial. Accepting the painful truth of impending death will allow time to say goodbye in person, in writing, by phone, on video camera” (2002, 63).
At the end of this chapter, the writer discuses how families and individuals react to the death of a loved one. The writer focuses on how grief comes in and later in chapter four outlines way to deal with the grieving family. The death of a loved one breaks a kind of dam within the mind and almost at once. There is a flood of memories, images, incidents, bit of conversation, shapeless feelings, and sometimes-even hallucinations rush forth (Myers 1986, 143). Some people feel a particular intense sadness or revulsion as the memory of their loved one. For others the hardest memories are like death itself. Grief comes in which is hard to bear. It feels as if one will never be whole again. There’s been death. It is someone you loved. You are frightened, confused, angry, distraught, numb, shocked, and dazed you feel helpless, and you feel powerless (Shaw 1990, 1). The permanence of death and the finality of the loss can leave one feeling as if one can never be happy again. The memories, pictures, and perhaps some belongings are all left, which may bring more pain than comfort.
Death as life crises pushes individuals into separateness which burdens family left the more. There are things one can do to help through the impossible aftermath of death of a loved one. Shaw recommends that within the first twenty-four hours to forty-eight hours following a trauma, one should engage in periods of strenuous physical exercise to ease some of the symptoms. Keep busy all the time, to help to body, mind and spirit to be preoccupied. Don’t label one crazy. Scream if you feel the need. Make as many daily decisions as possible that will give you a feeling of control. If someone asks what you what to eat answer him or her. Make a decision even if you don’t know what you what and don’t think you can eat. Keep talking (Shaw 1990, 1-2). Many individuals after losing their loved ones loose their identity too. After losing her husband, Mary (name has been change to conceal identity) says, “I didn’t know who I am anymore, in my family as an individual.” Later, when she tried to label and quantify what she’d lost when William died, she found herself sketching stick figures with limbs missing. Williams’s death had left her feeling like an emotional and psychological amputee. She had adapted to live without him.
Many people feel the unsettling nature of the loss. DeVita observes that, “the identity crisis that comes with the loss of a loved one doesn’t always lead to growth” ( 2004, 115). Almost every emotion can be part of grief. what makes these emotions hard to handle, though, is their unusual intensity. Almost every person in the crisis of death of a loved one, experiences emotions that are not common or that seem strange in the context of the loss. Acute grief usually includes painful yearning for the deceased one. There is excruciating loneliness for the person who died and for the unique relationship that has been lost.
It is advisable to discuss feelings with family and other pastoral caregivers. The loved one may have a lot of trouble with the fact that one of them is preparing to die. Most of the family may be denying the fact that a loved one is dying, and this demands a change of mind and continuing to fight to live. Family should give support when a loved one is ready to die. No loved one can prevent death; loved ones can only cause pain by hanging on to the one dying. Howard in his book, Facing Death supports this by pointing out that, “it is better to be able to be with patients in their pain, to support them without feeling the blind compulsive to rescue then as from something from which there was no rescue, and to stay with them as they approach death without feeling that one has somehow betrayed their trust”(1996, 35). The greatest gift one can give to a loved one or to a patient is to allow the awareness of ones own pain and loss to deepen solidarity with them as the face illness and death.
What is really the role of the pastor? What can a pastor do or say to the dying patients, and be present to the presence of God, give pastoral care even at the point of death? This means that the pastor as a pastoral caregiver has roles to play in medical crises, including at the time of death. He has to engage in the ministry of presence, truly being with the patient and those gathered around. Another role is the ministry of giving witness to the gospel. He may also play the role of an interpreter, helping the patient and the family understand health caregivers and vice verse. The moral role of the pastor therefore may entail more than helping patients as they make difficult decisions. This includes helping the dying and their families in their hope for a good health. The pastor is able to hear and call forth the deep stories, sometimes gently changing the subject from the preoccupation with the medical narrative to a deeper focus on the stories of the dying person and their family and how these stories fit within the timeless story of God’s life within them. Pastors can listen and encourage as the dying and their loved ones tell their stories and connect those stories with the larger story of faith, of what God has done for the world and what God has done for them. The dying bear witness to the ways that their life is an on - going spiritual quest for and with God.
What is the role of the pastor when dying is inevitable? The most difficult duty of the pastor is to comfort the family when a loved one has died. There is a terrible sense of despair. After the doctor announces the death of a loved one to the family, the next person usually summoned is the pastor for those who are Christians. The pastor is to be with the family to help in making arrangements, to contort, and to answer questions . If the pastor knows the family it would be easier for him to make arrangements and prepare for the funeral service. The pastor becomes a spiritual caregiver who receives the dying into the community that experiences death.
The pastor guides them through the chaos and the loss of the familiar, attends them in living through losses that can either be explained or replaced, listens through questions that cannot be resolved. The pastor, on the other hand, helps in preparing for the care teams from the entire church community. These care teams will help the mourners process their grief together in support to each other. The pastor will arrange for prayers to be said, and there are many acts of ordinary gifts that the pastor should encourage. In the midst of dying, the pastoral caregiver (pastor) should find moments for healing and sustaining, guiding and reconciling, nurturing and educating and modeling death as a normal event, offering benevolent and companionship. It is the role of the pastor to educate participants that life and death, joy and grief, hope and despair belong in the same theological sentence and understanding of God. Death is a guaranteed part of all human beings. The deaths of loved ones, as well as our own death. is a must. The question is not whether human beings face death or not, but rather, how they face it. Despite the fact that death is an inevitable experience for everyone, many dying people react with avoidance and strong feelings of fear and sadness. Few people have learned to develop a facility for talking about death, or talking with the dying. As seen in chapter one, grieving begins soon after the news of a terminal illness and continues long after death. Talking with the dying person should begin at this time when news has been given of the impending death. One may have only a week, months or years to say all that there is to the dying person. But it is necessary to be aware that their life is now time limited, and your relationship with them should give time to interact differently. Saying goodbye in words and in action helps clarify ones feelings about what a particular relationship has meant to a loved one (Wogrin 2001, 2).
Dying is much more than a medical event. It is a time for exchanging love, for reconciliation and
transformation for all involved. It is a chance for the dying person’s loved ones to become compassionate companions on a journey of continuous discovery. Dialogue does not only occur in words. The exchange of meaning can happen through presence, gestures, silent companionship, or touch. This means that the dying are not alone, have not been abandoned, or have not been isolated. It means that the dying have company through their experience. Presence is keeping company with another, as in raising children or sharing in family, friendship, and vocational relationships. This time is a time-sharing in the lifelong and inexorable movement toward the process and acts of dying and death. It is not only logic that one need an ending to relationship that takes place between the dying and the other person, Wogrin says that, “when you don’t take the opportunity to say goodbye you will be likely be left with the challenge to working
through a relationship process entirely on your own, which is a difficult task” (2001, 3). The presence thus is a way of saying, I will absorb your pain and horror. I will not turn from your suffering, I will not mute your laments, I will go gentle with you and wait in peace and silence, I will attend this human process as you enter it and, in a variety of ways, quietly shout of God’s presence.
Being able to join and support people in their final phase of life, and talk with them about what their life has been, who they have been, and how they will ever be remembered is of vital importance in working through the process. This joining and sharing will take different forms in different relationships, depending on the personalities involved. At some point, presence may yield to word (which of course, being grounding the understanding of Presence). A participant may want to know what you think. You will seek prayer and scriptural resources to use at the bedside, in conversation with family members. The dying person may want to talk about what is happening, the feelings concerns and fears. An early problem in pastoral care was the over eagerness for the care- giver to speak, to interpret, to pronounce, to state the theological or scientific point of view as to how the person(s) should be feeling. Wogrin asserts that, “speaking
about feeling makes them much clearer” (2001, 14).
Sometime when people are dying, they are determined to avoid all discussion of death. They may be too caught up in anger, so determined not to die, or so fearful of their own feelings that they won’t get near themselves, let alone allow anyone else near these tender feelings. When saying goodbye it is always good to talk about death, focusing all the energy on talking about the dying person’s life. There is a fine line between encouraging someone to get about and do something pleasurable to help enrich his daily experiences or improve his overall mood, and pushing him or her to do things he or she is not really up to doing. Talking to the dying person in regard to what he or she is feeling is vital. “How are you feeling today?” What is your energy level?” Encourage the person to pay attention to the messages he is getting from his body. Roberts puts it, “the gift to the dying person is an opportunity to fully say goodbye if the patient and the family do not escape into denial. Accepting the painful truth of impending death will allow time to say goodbye in person, in writing, by phone, on video camera” (2002, 63).
At the end of this chapter, the writer discuses how families and individuals react to the death of a loved one. The writer focuses on how grief comes in and later in chapter four outlines way to deal with the grieving family. The death of a loved one breaks a kind of dam within the mind and almost at once. There is a flood of memories, images, incidents, bit of conversation, shapeless feelings, and sometimes-even hallucinations rush forth (Myers 1986, 143). Some people feel a particular intense sadness or revulsion as the memory of their loved one. For others the hardest memories are like death itself. Grief comes in which is hard to bear. It feels as if one will never be whole again. There’s been death. It is someone you loved. You are frightened, confused, angry, distraught, numb, shocked, and dazed you feel helpless, and you feel powerless (Shaw 1990, 1). The permanence of death and the finality of the loss can leave one feeling as if one can never be happy again. The memories, pictures, and perhaps some belongings are all left, which may bring more pain than comfort.
Death as life crises pushes individuals into separateness which burdens family left the more. There are things one can do to help through the impossible aftermath of death of a loved one. Shaw recommends that within the first twenty-four hours to forty-eight hours following a trauma, one should engage in periods of strenuous physical exercise to ease some of the symptoms. Keep busy all the time, to help to body, mind and spirit to be preoccupied. Don’t label one crazy. Scream if you feel the need. Make as many daily decisions as possible that will give you a feeling of control. If someone asks what you what to eat answer him or her. Make a decision even if you don’t know what you what and don’t think you can eat. Keep talking (Shaw 1990, 1-2). Many individuals after losing their loved ones loose their identity too. After losing her husband, Mary (name has been change to conceal identity) says, “I didn’t know who I am anymore, in my family as an individual.” Later, when she tried to label and quantify what she’d lost when William died, she found herself sketching stick figures with limbs missing. Williams’s death had left her feeling like an emotional and psychological amputee. She had adapted to live without him.
Many people feel the unsettling nature of the loss. DeVita observes that, “the identity crisis that comes with the loss of a loved one doesn’t always lead to growth” ( 2004, 115). Almost every emotion can be part of grief. what makes these emotions hard to handle, though, is their unusual intensity. Almost every person in the crisis of death of a loved one, experiences emotions that are not common or that seem strange in the context of the loss. Acute grief usually includes painful yearning for the deceased one. There is excruciating loneliness for the person who died and for the unique relationship that has been lost.
