Snapdragons & Geraniums

When I first met our new hospice patient Peggy, she stared up at me from her hospital bed and said “Don’t talk to me about quality of life. What kind of life do you call this? I just want to die!” As I took in her emaciated body, her dry cracked lips, and the oxygen running day and night through a tube under her nose, it was hard not to agree.

In her younger days, Peggy had been an active, independent woman. She told me that after her father died in a car accident, she had taken care of her mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She worked as a bookkeeper for several companies and enjoyed traveling and playing golf. Peggy had never married. Nor had she ever joined a church or adopted any traditional beliefs in God or the afterlife. “When I’m dead, I’ll be cremated and my brother and sister-in-law will scatter my ashes in the mountains. Then I’ll be done,” she declared with a finality that brooked no arguing.

I had never met anyone so ready to die. Yet I simply could not accept that there was nothing I could do as her spiritual counselor to improve the quality of her life. So under the guise of “Provide alternative spiritual expression” and “Encourage patient expression of feelings” – two boxes I checked on my hospice Spiritual Care Plan – I began weekly visits.

Somehow, we clicked. Her off-beat sense of humor and dry commentaries on life found an echo in my low key approach to all things spiritual. Though she declared herself antisocial, Peggy admitted, “You can come back any day.” Each time I would leave, I’d say “See you next week,” to which she invariably replied, “I hope I’m dead by then.”

As the months went by, it became apparent that as weak as she was and as poorly as her lungs now functioned, Peggy was not dying as quickly as she wanted. Her oxygen intake increased from two, to five, to ten liters per minute as the seasons came and went. At Thanksgiving, she made a brief overnight excursion to her brother’s house, but ate little, got violently sick, and came back swearing she would not leave her bed again for anything. She stopped eating except for an occasional can of liquid supplement and two glasses of milk at meal times.

“I wonder why you are not dying,” I would ask her in puzzlement. “Do you have some unfinished business? Is there a person you need to say goodbye to? What have you not accomplished in life that you still want to?”

“Nothing. I can’t think of anything. I’ve taken care of it all. I’m just so disgusted with this. I just want to die.”

Gradually, as the year turned I noticed a subtle change in Peggy’s disposition. This self-declared anti-social recluse grew emotionally attached to her roommate, also a hospice patient, who had terminal cancer. Then she asked for a volunteer to come visit. Then a second volunteer. And she accepted a massage. Twice. By Christmas, she asked for and received a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream so she could toast the New Year. Now when I said “See you next week,” at the end of my visits, she would reply “OK. See you then.”

As spring approached, I began talking to her about the change in the weather. “Wouldn’t you like to get outside in a few weeks?” I asked one day. “We could get you a wheelchair?” “Why would I do that?” she shot back. “Because,” I said with conviction, “the fresh air and sunshine will do your body good. And I’m sure it will lift your spirits.” She paused for a moment. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

Two weeks later, her nurse case manager called me to say Peggy had asked for a wheelchair and a walker. “What on earth did you say to her?” she asked in astonishment. “I just said it would be good for her to get out, and she said she’s think about it,” I said, no less amazed than the nurse on the other end of the line. “I guess she must have done just that.”

It took another two weeks of coaxing and planning and an initial excursion around the grounds of the facility with a portable oxygen tank in tow. But finally, Peggy declared “This is easier than I thought.” “Gottcha!” I whispered under my breath. Then out loud, “Let’s do a little flower planting in the courtyard when I come next week.” Over all her objections, I told her I had cleared it with the facility staff. There was a small patch of bare earth just begging for a bit of color. “We’ll plant your favorites. What are they?” She thought for a moment. “I always put in some geraniums and a few snaps,” she replied.

A few days later, Peggy sat in the shade of a Locust tree while I crouched down and planted two bright red geraniums and some colorful snapdragons. “We’ll call this Peggy’s Memorial Garden,” I joked. She laughed at the idea. “I’ll plant them, but it’s your job to keep them alive.” Then we sat side by side and reminisced.

“I didn’t know who I was a year ago when they brought me here,” Peggy confided. “I told my brother to get a gun and shoot me.” “When I first met you,” I reminded her, “you said you just wanted to die. Remember that?” She nodded and we sat in silence until the gauge on her oxygen tank told us it was time to go back to her room.

Until that afternoon, I had not realized the chaplain’s phrase “provide alternative spiritual expression” could encompass planting a few geraniums and snapdragons. Then I thought back to the book of Genesis where God makes human beings and puts them in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And in the middle of the garden is the Tree of Life. Peggy and I tended that tree together that day. Who could say what fruit it might produce – in her life and in mine?

© 2013, Chaplain David Pascoe