No way to say goodbye

You know my love goes with you, as your love stays with me/It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea/But let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie/Your eyes are soft with sorrow/Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye Leonard Cohen

SOMETHING extraordinary began to emerge in the aftermath of the sad story about the deaths of eight residents in the Maryborough Centre over Easter weekend. Doreen Delaney, the widow of Danny Delaney, one of the residents who died, wanted to speak out. She went on Prime Time to say that she wouldn’t have a word said against the staff there. The chief clinical officer of the HSE came on next and made a point of naming local medics who had done their best to offer dignified end-oflife care at Maryborough.

While the Government and the HSE will have many questions to answer about how they managed the Covid-19 situation around nursing homes, suddenly nuance crept into the story. Over the next 24 hours we would learn that many nursing homes are as much about being homes as they are about nursing. We learnt that the staff there often operate sophisticated levels of clinical care, dealing with people who may have several illnesses, or what we now casually call “underlying conditions” or worse, “comorbidities”. We learnt that they are skilled and sensitive around death. We learnt, too, that they cry when residents die.

The manner of these deaths is an affront to all of us, and is desperately painful for their families. Endings are important. We judge things much more on their endings than we do on the early or middle parts. And a bad ending to a life can haunt those left behind for years afterwards.

Extending life is not the only priority for the dying. Other priorities include: being with family, avoiding suffering, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, making peace. These important things are often lost in Covid-19 deaths. Making it all the harder to put some meaning on people’s final chapters.

This time has caused all of us to reflect afresh on how valued and important older people are in our lives and our society. The cocooning has been painful for them, and for all of us to witness. They have been forced to deny life, to deny the vitality and the involvement and the connections that so many of them had. In the 21st Century, many older people had almost beaten ageing, or at least its traditional course. But now old age and inactivity and sad endings have been thrust on them, along with the terror of their story ending in this time. And all we can do is to keep telling them we love them, and we value them, and their lives and even their deaths mean something. And that we are beating this together.