Tales of a Volunteer

Cittamani is a Buddhist organisation formed to meet the needs of people dying in their homes. It is not income-assessed. Nurses’ and volunteers’ regular visits enable most people to die in familiar surroundings near people they love—not in a hospital or nursing home bed. Not in a “broom cupboard”, as my mother described my father’s hospital room.

If it be not now, yet it will come …

            —Shakespeare, Hamlet

Non-medical trained volunteers “sit” in homes so the carer can have a much-needed break: shop, go to a movie, drink coffee with friends. This small space of freedom, to one who is grounded and stressed, truly revitalises. I could see it in the face of one woman who went to a movie and came home with a spring in her step. Her bedridden husband lay quietly in front of television which, ironically, was advertising the advantages of a local funeral parlour.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—T.S. Eliot

Was he past caring? Did that disturb him? Did he notice?

My husband observed a similar situation in a lighter manner: “We live conveniently close to all impending necessities—and can roll down our hill into a retirement village, nursing home, crematorium and cemetery at the bottom, in that order, and all within metres of each other.”

My first Cittamani “sit” was with a middle-aged gentleman fully in control. He brought me tea and biscuits and asked me about myself. He told me how he had built an empire in the construction business. How times had changed. How the town had changed. Before long the lines between “patient” and “volunteer” blurred. Such were the differences between clients!

I read much of the night, and go south in winter.

—T.S. Eliot

Some patients were embarrassed to require “company” from Cittamani. Persuaded only to help their carer, they kept to themselves in another room. I saw little of them as I sat knitting and reading, taking in the furnishings of their home, the view from their window. Every hour I approached them tentatively to see if they needed anything.

One man I “sat” spent much of his time in front of television watching cricket. His encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian and international Test cricketers, their life stories, batting and bowling scores, went back decades. He would have beaten the “unbeatable” English quiz team “The Eggheads” were he questioned on cricket.

His other singularity was that he refused to die. He moved house and was doing well. I finally stopped asking about him and decided I would probably die first.

One obese old lady, shy and wordless, reclined next to me in front of endless DVDs while her daughter caught the bus into town to replenish supplies. Beneath the humbleness of their home, restricted lifestyle, bleak circumstance, pervaded an uplifting sense of the motivation of love. There was no isolation.

One client was not old. In her forties, she had given up work after her diagnosis and moved into her son’s house. Living alone when ly ill is to encounter a new and despairing kind of loneliness. Most people can face anything, even death, if they have congenial company. The lady had numerous friends who came and went all morning, with the comfort of small talk.

 as we lie close on some gentle occasion:

every day won from such

darkness is a celebration.

—Elaine Feinstein

When carers returned, walking out of these residential homes filled me with liberation. I had known this freedom before, when finishing my shifts in a local hospital. After nursing various people who could not walk, who would never walk, who faced a long rehabilitation, who were in palliative care, who were confused and needed constant supervision, here I was walking home with plans of what I would do next. The pleasure of movement. Of thought. Of anticipation. Of health.

Nursing suited my physical person. I almost ran between patients, up and down the corridors, in and out of the sisters’ station, not only to finish work on time but because I liked the pace. Energy was life. In nursing and everyday life I was in my own Byzantium.

As a fifteen-year-old volunteer nurses’ aide in the 1950s in the USA, I remember a hospital patient with a illness who lost control. From his bed he screamed desperately again and again, “I don’t want to die!” No one on the ward could escape his panic and despair. Could they not have sedated him? I decided then not to pursue a nursing career. It was too removed from real life. Looking at it years later with a different perspective, perhaps it was too near.

Discontinuing my volunteer work in a palliative care unit because of my cancer diagnosis in 2013, I was surprised by the social worker’s immediate and fierce reaction. It was not the expected commiseration. “Don’t forget the world outside!” she exclaimed. “Ever!” She knew the closing in, the obsessiveness that can come with serious illness.

Where can I go

without my mount

all eager and quick.

How will I know

in thicket ahead

is danger or treasure

when Body my good

bright dog is dead.

—May Swenson

Friends and I volunteered to present a concert: piano, song and poetry reading for the residents of a local retirement/nursing home. When we arrived in the lush pastel lounge room of “Garden Views” no one awaited us. Minutes passed. Would we sing to ourselves or pack up? Then at exactly 10.30 a.m. there came a stirring. A line of elderly women, and one or two men, filed in jerkily on a forest of walking frames. They were followed by wheelchairs and finally recliners, whose ceremonious arrival made their occupants look like celebrities on a barge.

I sat next to a lady on oxygen. Every thirty seconds the cylinder made a noise like the release of pressure brakes. She brightened when we talked, telling me she’d come from Roma. But could no longer travel back. Where was I from? Short-sentenced as it was, we warmed to our conversation. But my next inquiry met with silence. I turned to see she was asleep, head on chest, as were most of the audience for the rest of the concert! When I read my poems (no longer nervous), one or two faces looked up brightly, politely. One sang softly with the piano.

At interval the home’s manager asked the audience questions about the past, triggered by the 1920s and 1930s music. When she promptly answered her own questions, I felt, sadly, that we are all children together. However, we are here, not alone and silent in a room.

thin sheets an easy load for spindle bones …

—Geoff Page

Now I too am aged and ill, I recall the old I’ve known. They are as varied as any age group. Many defy their stereotype. Circumstance breaks some but not others. Some are lucky. Some keep that vital thread of interest in people, events and the natural world. Others are wise from living through change and continuity, accept death or defy it. Those who avoid death for years without medical explanation raise hope in others.

One profession knows the old intimately. They have a hard, maybe sometimes rewarding task.

Today I do not want to be a Doctor …

Those who are well are sick again,

the dying think they will live

the healthy think they are dying.

Someone has taken too many pills.

A woman is losing her husband …

The asthmatics are smoking.

The alcoholics are drinking.

The diabetics are eating chocolate …

Everyone’s cholesterol is high.

Disease will not listen to me.

Even when I shake my fist.

—Glenn Colquhoun

Two different thoughts come as answers when I am afraid. A child-like tribal comfort is found in the knowledge of not being alone. Even the baby before conception, and you cannot get younger than that, will die like the rest of us.

And, on a less primal note, after years of volunteering with Cittamani, palliative care units, hospitals and now faced with a life-threatening disease, I have become my own volunteer. I counsel myself. I know that a routine, a home, a loving family, the cultivation of friends, interest outside myself, work beyond retirement—whatever it is—heals. All these things give a measure of peace.