When Your Friend Is Dying, perhaps the first part of several

I've been following jaylake's cancer blog with a great deal of concern and sorrow. He is one of a number of friends, some very dear to me, who are facing terminal illness. I suppose it is inevitable as one ages that more of one's friends develop various serious medical conditions. When we are children, most of us have few if any experiences of the death of someone close to us. When we are elderly, most of us have had many and will have even more.

The person facing their own mortality goes through a spectrum of emotions -- from rage to grief to using intellectual thought to numb out. I can't know what that is like. I can only listen with as much compassion as I am capable of. I can also -- and I must if I am to listen in that manner -- be aware of my own rage, my own grief, my own compulsion to offer solutions.

I remember something my therapist told me when one of my children was going through a particularly difficult time and so, so badly wanted to make things better for her. Ask yourself: Am I telling her something she already knows? Is this something she can figure out for herself? Because if the answer is yes, then the purpose of the question is not to help her by supplying information or opinions not otherwise available to her. It is to ease my own burden of anxiety by adding to hers.

I must remember that when a dying friend trusts me with intense emotions, they are not asking for me to solve a problem. They are asking me to listen. To be with them. To ease the loneliness and fear to whatever extend my presence can. To be present with them in this very moment.

Sometimes about the most useful thing I can do is pass the Kleenex.

For both of us.