Many people have been taken with the British series, Call the Midwife, which chronicles the experience of a group of Anglican nuns and their protégées in the poorest quarters of London during the 1950’s. Their special gift was to help bring new life into the world with large doses of compassion and savvy that made them realise the causes of poverty.
There is another kind of midwifery that I see every time I volunteer at St. Joseph’s Hospice. As a midwife was called to help usher in life, at Hospice, the staff and volunteers act as midwives as people transition toward death. In our culture, death is often surrounded with fear and the “that about which one does not talk” syndrome. By the very fact that someone has come to hospice, the facts are on the table. Pretence has been replaced by death as a given. That “given” which we all know theoretically, has become stark reality for residents and families at Hospice. Ushered right into the room along with the resident is the possibility of open conversation and a chance for expression of feeling, of hopes, of fears, of curiosity.
Recently during a video, Katherine Dowling Singh who wrote The Grace in Dying, suggested that death is not always pretty but it has the capacity to be beautiful. My experience would bear that out as I am with staff, volunteers, family and residents. Not always pretty. But beauty is another question. The simple beauty of facing truth, of saying things we want to say, of struggling to come to terms with the loss of a future with loved ones, the sadness of relationships gone sideways.
Midwives needed. Indeed, Call the Midwife.
Margo Ritchie CSJ