Rev. Dr. Steve Nolan on continuing to learn from those whom we serve

Learning from the Experience of My Own Lack

I had been asked to speak to a cancer support group. The title given to me was: “Coping with the challenges of a cancer diagnosis.” Daunting! How do I help people cope with their experience when I have no personal experience of what they are going through? Could I be that presumptuous?

I did my best. I began by explaining my limitations. I told them about how I receive news of chronic illness, and I shared my observations about people I had recently worked with: one an angry relative, the other an accepting patient. I ended the session by introducing the group to the idea of mindful meditation and led them through a simple body scan.

Then followed the questions, or rather, comments.

The questioner/commentator, a gentle woman who was in her early sixties, began with a reflection on what she thought I had actually been talking about – rather than what I had thought I had been saying. Could she be that presumptuous?

She spoke with a controlled emotion that I immediately realised betrayed her hard won experience. This was not going to be an interesting intellectual exchange about the merits of my structure and content.

She told me that, for her, I had spoken about two different experiences, the experience of being a relative watching someone you love cope with cancer – and the experience of being a patient coping with cancer.

For my practice as a chaplain, and my personal understanding, I wanted to know more about this difference.

“They don’t compare,” said the 60-some woman. “They can’t compare; they’re just not the same thing.”

She shared her experience of caring for her son and how she had become angry, very angry about his illness. He had lived one year with his leukaemia, but her anger from this devastation had continued for five years. She said she had failed to cope with his illness because she was so angry, and as a ‘cradle Catholic’ she felt her faith had not been up to the task of helping her. Somehow she survived.

When she received her own cancer diagnosis things were somehow different. She was not angry. She did ask the question: Why me? But within minutes this became: Why not me? A long journey, on the face of it, in a short space of time; in reality, perhaps, the fruit of her years processing the loss of her young son.

What struck me in my conversation with this woman was my lack of ability to comprehend, not just her experience, but the experience of those with whom I work on a daily basis. I presume, on the one hand, to teach others about spiritual care in terms of being with others in the places even their closest friends fail to go. On the other hand, I presume to be with patients, their relatives, and their friends in those dark, lonely places. And yet now I realise that the existential reality of their experience remains alien, utterly other. My participation in their experience is reduced to that of a concerned spectator.

The debate about boundaries and self-care goes on. But I have been touched by the words of Ram Dass and Stephen Levine:

Ram Dass: When I walked into a room with a person who was dying, there was just the person and me and here we are, and if I’m full of hiding in roles and identities [even the role of concerned spectator] I cut myself off from them and they’re left alone, which is the hardest way to die.[1]

Stephen Levine: It’s the care you have that allows healing. Yet the problem for many who work in hospitals, the fear of becoming ‘involved,’ is the fear of becoming involved with ourselves, of directly participating in our life. It is the difficulty of opening ourselves to another’s predicament so fully that we can feel it in our mind and body and yet stay open to the heart of the matter. Noticing the tendency to pull away, we instead enter the fire that burns through our holding.[2]

When I began preparing my presentation for this cancer support group I had some realisation that my experience was limited. But I hadn’t realised quite how limited, or in what ways. Being there for the other is, in part, about my own spiritual work. For me, this gentle woman indicated a direction in which I might continue my learning.

Footnotes:

[1] Ram Dass (2002), ‘Death is not an outrage’, lecture to the National Hospice Organization, available on tape or CD from: http://ramdasstapes.org/audiobook/dyi_081691.htm

[2] Stephen Levine (1986), Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, Dublin: Gateway, 171.

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