Out of the old

Over at Not A Wasted Word, Noemi is working on moving toward minimalism. It's pretty awesome to behold. Around the Future PharmD household we are in a similar place where we have too many things and want to ditch most of them so we have enough room to be a family. There are plans to rent a dumpster when it's spring so we can easily dispose of the trash/junk/things nobody else wants. It's amazing to consider how much stuff we have in surplus. I'm looking forward to ditching it all and having more space.

It's been interesting how many experiences I've had with hospice or nearly hospice care this year. I didn't intend for that to happen but it has. There has been a case of a very medically complicated patient who is now in hospice after months in the hospital and the doctor in charge who has few hospice patients and maybe never any as complex as this one. The way things happen in hospice is very different than if the focus is healing for a patient and it worries the doctor a lot to be managing this level of suffering and pain, the patient's and the family members'.

A lot of the work that needs to happen in order to let someone who is ready die is about those around her. We need to get used to our mortality and accept that some day we will be at the end of our lives. It makes people panicky at first to see so much of the end of life. A rookie hospice nurse called the pharmacist on call at 3am  on one of my rotations with a rather simple medication question that any less rookie nurse in this practice would have handled according to protocol with no need of a pharmacist to reassure her.

I think a lot of the work of dying is about moving out of the old and into whatever is after this life. It puts things into a stark perspective to serve dying patients. At the end of life, before the sharp decline just before death anyway, the dying get to work clearing away the things that don't matter and reconnecting with those people and things that do matter.

I decided recently to get to work on doing that very thing, because we are all dying. There's no sense waiting for some mystery "future" when things will be different to get rid of things and people that are meaningless and reconnect with the ones who do matter. No day but today is guaranteed so I'm attempting to seize now and get to doing the things I really want - spend time with friends and family and less time managing the mess.

When I worked in a library once, we had a big donation that came with these stickers for us to put in the front in honor of the donor who died young. They had this Mary Oliver quote on them: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" I got really tired of reading it over and over for weeks as we got those heaps of new books, but now I like it again. I try to live with that outlook, that this is my one shot at life and I'm going to quit doing the things that don't matter and get busy doing those things that do. Nobody knows how much time they have left and I at least plan to get busy living well. No more junk crowding out life.