I vividly remember when I still had, in the words of Joseph Conrad, "the feeling that one could last forever, survive the sea, the Earth and all men." Losing this feeling is undoubtedly one of the moments I wish I had avoided. Living in the face of death is heartbreaking, and I suspect and fear that I will spend the rest of my life trying to accommodate this sentence, looking askance, incredulous, exasperated and somewhat desperate. Perhaps because the certainty that we are not only vulnerable but irrevocably mortal can blunt our will to live and fight, nature endows us with what Conrad described as "a deceptive feeling that draws us towards the joys, the dangers, the love and the vain effort that leads to death".
The life of the legendary psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross could well have been an endeavor to find a remedy for our profound bewilderment and helplessness in the face of death, which she called "the greatest mystery of science", and about which she certainly put forward theories controversial. However, he managed to question the western resistance to death and established protocols and keys that have changed our way of managing it.
Kübler-Ross tells that her passion to understand, dignify and find a meaning to death arose in the corridors of the Chicago hospital where she worked with her husband, in 1965. It all started as an anecdote: day and night, depending on the shifts of At work, Elisabeth was watching a black cleaning lady. He was struck by the effect that woman had on many of the plant's most seriously ill patients. When the lady left one of the rooms of her patients, Dr. Kübler-Ross found that they had changed their attitude towards the disease in a significant way. They were calmer. He wanted to know what was happening there, and his curiosity became so intense that he literally spied on that woman, who, although she had not finished her school studies, seemed to know a great secret.
One day the doctor and the cleaning woman met in the hall. The doctor addressed the woman almost aggressively: "What are you doing with my patients?" She asked. Naturally, the woman became defensive. "I'm just mopping the floor," he replied, and left. For the next two weeks, the doctor and the cleaning lady watched each other suspiciously. One afternoon, the woman stood in front of the doctor in the hallway and dragged her into the nurses' room. It was a curious image, that of this humble woman holding a psychiatry teacher in her white coat.
When they were completely alone, when no one could hear them, the woman told her about her life: she had grown up in South Chicago, in poverty and misery, in a home without heating or hot water, where the children were chronically malnourished and sick. . Like most poor people, she had no way to defend herself against disease and hunger. One day, her three-year-old son became seriously ill with pneumonia. He took him to the local hospital emergency department,
but he owed them ten dollars and they turned it down. Desperate, she walked to a hospital where they were forced to care for people without resources. Unfortunately, that hospital was full of people like her, people who urgently needed medical help. They told him to wait. After several hours, she saw her son drown and die in her arms.
Dr. Kübler-Ross says that it was impossible not to feel sorry for the terrible loss of that woman. But what caught her attention the most was the way she told her story. She was deeply sad, but there was no trace of negativity, reproach, or bitterness in her. It emanated a peace that astonished the doctor.
According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, at that moment she felt like a student looking at the teacher. "But what do you say to the patients?" He insisted on asking the woman. The answer was as simple as it was powerful: “Sometimes I go into the patient rooms and see that they are terrified and have no one to talk to. So I go to them, I touch their hands and I say "Don't worry, I'm here" ».
A short time later, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross got this woman to stop scrubbing the hallways and become her first assistant, the one who gave the necessary support to patients when no one else did, the one who simply and powerfully knew how to accompany. We have learned since then that empathy, the power to feel that the other understands you and is with you, has a very strong impact on the ability of people to overcome obstacles. Not only do we need to solve the problems of others in order to help them: accompanying people from our common humanity is a tool that we all carry within, and that we can use over and over throughout life, express in a thousand different ways : in a hug, in a caress, with words, in silence. Joseph Conrad was also aware of this power when he stressed its importance: "Perhaps only the love of others, and the possibility of being useful and even necessary to them, can give life meaning."