(The Nationalist, 30 August and 13 September 2002)
Some years ago I was helping out with chaplaincy work in a hospital for a few days. In one of the wards, I saw a woman patient who was clearly seriously ill. I went over to chat with her for a while. She told me she had cancer and didn’t expect to live long. I couldn’t help thinking she was right, since she did indeed look as if she would not last long.
I asked her how she felt, and I’ll never forget her answer: ‘I feel so lonely; I have no one’. In conversation, she told me that she was single and had no living brothers or sisters. There were relatives but, for whatever reason, they had not come to see her. Perhaps they were busy.
I spent some time with her, listening to her story and trying to be sympathetic. Then I had to go; there were other patients to visit.
I often thought back to that meeting, and I still think of it with a sense of failure. I did not give her the help she needed. Neither did anyone else. Her fellow human beings, to whom she looked for solidarity and support in her moment of greatest need, as she faced the supreme test for any person, had let her down. She had to face death alone without a human hand or face to ease her passing.
Could the nurses not have spent time with her? If that is your question, I can only ask whether you have been to a hospital recently. The pace is frantic, and the idea of a nurse having time to sit down with a patient through her last hours is a fantasy, a beautiful one indeed, but only a fantasy; they don’t have the time.
What kind of people are we, what are the priorities we have chosen, what kind of society have we created, that we do not (should that be can not or will not) make the time to reach out and help someone like ourselves, a human being, in the moment when they need us most? Have we become a things people rather than a people people? Are we possessed by our possessions and by our desire to acquire more? An Indian by the name of Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote, ‘An incessant ‘progress’, never ending in contentment, means a condemnation of all people to a state of irremediable poverty.’ Our GDP has grown richer, but maybe our human relations have grown poorer.