Silences

There are many different forms of silence.

Today, while listening to a patient, she named three.

She talked about being there when her brother died. "Have you ever been there when someone took their last breath?" she asked. I said yes-- and remembered the silence that follows.

She talked about what it was like to hear that her older sister had died, her only living sibling, but the one she had not spoken to in years. Two silences, I thought: the silence of not speaking with one's only living sibling. And the silence into which one hears of her death.

She talked about what it is like for her just getting up in the morning now, at over 90, when her prospects are only for a day spent on her back watching "Magnum PI"-- she says "they are mostly re-runs now," and I think: "mostly"? She says she opens her eyes and looks at the light, and hears herself say, "OK! I'm awake! Now what?" But I think of the silence before she speaks to herself, when she's checking herself out, and the circuits in herself are going from "sleep" to "operational" mode. Before she asks anything of the Universe, there is a silence.

She says, "Only you can I tell: I talk to God." And we laugh about how everyone else might think she was crazy, unless she tells them, like she told me: "I'm Catholic, you know." And I think about the Silence who is that "still small voice," and how well she does to talk to the Silence...

And I pray with her, which she enjoys, and I lift up as many of these silences as I can remember, and ask that they all be Sacred, that they all tell her something of the Presence of God with her, and after each one I name, she says, in her own Catholic way, "Amen." And I am blessed.

Then I come home, to a house full of silence. It is not only the silence of a single man. It is the silence of my home after my son has gone back to college after spending Christmas with me. Last night, indeed early this AM, there were as many as nine 20 year olds in my living room, laughing at video games and enjoying their own company and their own humor. So many, so late, I had to tell them to be quieter... Now, my son is gone again, left my world and gone back to his, where few ask for lower decibals and most encourage more! And in his wake, there is this silence... I am left, to dwell in it for a while... Grateful for his having been here, sad for his going.

It is a small taste, a dollop, of the silence the survivors of patients on our hospice feel...

Silence is unheard, but it is tangible... It is felt... And I am feeling my own silence now....