O, Come, Angel Band

In my last post, I shared anguish and frustration in trying to help our fighting loved one in sickness. Now she has laid down to rest and wait for death. She looks tiny and frail, more like a pixie troll than the warrior we had last week. We will wait with her, and help supervise the supply of drugs which will ease this passage. I am thinking about how our modern methods of comfort care are probably not too unlike the primal ones.

We have no shaman blowing smoke over the dying one, nor inducing hallucinations of the spirits, though we did have several of us experiencing visions of what was to come, and our pixie troll was calling out to her angel band, and they to her. Our shamans are restrained by a litigeous culture and slow to begin their vigil, but shamans of old had to wait for village concensus that the dying one's time had come. I witnessed this first hand on Guam.

My saddest regret was that we lacked the resources to have let this passing happen at home. It had clearly begun days, weeks before. In a better functioning village, more family is near, and can share the pain of watching death unfold.

We were so close on Sunday night. Her lungs were full of fluid, her oxygen levels way down. But the acid in her blood was causing great pain, and she was vomiting. There were neither enough of us, nor the shaman there, to allow us to bear with her just a little longer, holding her, moaning with her, singing to her as we were. We had to call for help, and it came dressed in fireman's clothing, taking her to the hospital for a little more consensus-building.

Finally, peace came yesterday when hospice services began, with medicines to ease the pain as the death process restarts itself after a day of reversal through drugs and oxygen. The vigil begins again, in a manner sustainable by our tiny and dysfunctional village. Soon the passage will be complete.

When my own mother was dying, my sister and her singing group stood by her bedside, singing the song that is named in this post title. You can help our pixie troll pass on by singing a few notes yourself. Just CLICK HERE.