Susan Hill Susan Hill

The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness

[iStock]

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always ensured that nobody died alone. She sat holding a hand, listening, reassuring. Now on leave, she is writing down some of her experiences with the dying.

A wise priest I knew said that no matter how strong your faith, your view of what happens at death and ‘the life of the world to come’ should be an agnostic one. But he still recounted some remarkable things he witnessed when sitting with the dying, and my nurse friend described similar experiences. Unbelievers, whose one certainty is that we are snuffed out like candles, will deny that these accounts have any meaning, attributing them to self-deception or hallucination — that is the atheist position, not the agnostic one, but many hold it and they will not have any truck with what follows. So be it.

My nurse friend said that when she sat with a dying patient, even in the bedlam of ITU, a palpable stillness and peace surrounded them, a bubble in which they rested. Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist who has spent much of his medical life studying dying and experiences surrounding it, says the same and that, aside from the medical signs, at some point seconds or many minutes after a patient dies, there is a strong sense that they have now ‘left’ — the soul has finally parted from the body and gone on. It is the same sense a friend had after she came in from work one evening and found her husband dead in his armchair. He had not been ill, there had been no warning. She said: ‘I knew he was dead straight away, mainly because he wasn’t there any longer.’

‘Uncle Andrew?’

I had the same experiences — of the leaving, and much later, of the empty body — when our infant daughter died.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in