Hospice doctor faces death without fear
Preparation gives him time to be ‘so grateful’
MILWAUKEE – In 2009, cardiologist Bruce Wilson published an essay in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that challenged what he believed to be our blinding dread of death.
It is titled “Doing Death Better.” “Life is to be embraced,” he wrote. “Yet death, whenever it comes to each of us, is as natural as the rising of the sun. We spend so much money and emotional turmoil staving off death, even for minutes or hours, beyond all hope, often beyond reason.
“In our culture, we have some work to do in coming to terms with death.”
Not long after he wrote that, Wilson became a hospice care physician. He has dedicated himself to nudging, sometimes dragging, his medical colleagues in particular and the public in general to stop, take a deep breath and talk about how we would like to handle our inevitable demise.
In February 2017, Wilson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In the months that followed, the disease proved to be indifferent to chemotherapy and beyond surgical intervention.
Wilson, 66, is home with Barb, his wife of almost 34 years. If all goes as hoped, that is where he will die.
Wilson is not opposed to end-of-life medical intervention. Doctors, he said, have an important part to play in improving the quality of their patients’ final days.
What he is opposed to are ill-informed medical decisions based on fear and desperation that too often merely extend a dying person’s misery.
“People say to me, ‘ This must be so surreal,’ ” he said during a week of inpatient treatment at Froedtert Hospital. “And you know, it is sort of odd.
“I’m sitting in the front row, watching myself. It’s afforded me the opportunity to be right square in the middle of it and say, ‘OK, how am I going to react to this reality?’ ”
Wilson, in these final days, has plenty to say about death and dying, but here’s the main thing he wants people to know: “I am so grateful.”
He’s grateful that he has had time to love, to admire, to grieve, to celebrate, to forgive and to be forgiven by the people he cares about most.
“You can’t have that when you have the symptoms of a very aggressive cancer, and you are being eaten alive from the inside and you’re in horrible pain all the time and you develop delirium,” he said. “That opportunity is lost.”
To make the most of the opportunity you are given, Wilson said, you need to prepare.
An advance directive needs to be in place, so your doctors and family don’t have to guess at what you wish will happen as you die.
“So you can mourn together, share the loss together, but also be grateful together for your presence in each other’s life,” he said.
Barb, sitting near Wilson’s hospital bed, said, “The thing you need to understand to really see what this gratitude thing does is — there is a kind of ripple effect.” Sharing gratitude, Barb said, “is such a gift.”
“I don’t have to mourn that he was so miserable, he was so afraid, he didn’t get what he needed, he was so unhappy, he was suffering or in pain,” she said.
It’s the difference between grief and regret.
Here is the hard part, Barb said. Here is what you must do before the time comes, as surely it will, that you can no longer deny that you will die:
You have to live.
“You die how you live,” Barb said. “And if you have purpose and gratitude and all those things, then that is how you are going to die.”
“You can mourn together, share the loss together, but also be grateful together for your presence in each other’s life.”
Bruce Wilson