Edges are everywhere.
The end of a marriage. The adult child who has become a stranger. The diagnosis that rearranges the operating system of your life in a flash and doesn’t ask permission first. The friendship that dissolves so slowly you can’t name the day it ended.
Until we know differently, we move through these passages, most of us, (I sure did) with our eyes tilted away from what is actually there.
I work at the far end of the edge where life finishes. What I have come to know is that what people may need most when they are dying is not comfort in the way we usually mean it. It is not reassurance that everything is going to be okay. They need a witness. They need someone who can be fully present with what is happening, without flinching, without managing it into something easier.
Sounds simple. It’s not so simple.
Culture, family, and schools have trained us to help by doing something. Fill the silence. Say the right thing — whatever that is. Fix what’s broken, and by G**, if we can’t fix it, we must at least appear to be fixing it. Sitting with someone who is dying and doing none of those things, simply being a steady and unflinching presence, requires unlearning almost everything we were taught about what it means to help.
Being matters more than doing.
I sat with a dying woman who’d stopped talking. In the days before, we visited each morning, telling each other about our respective evenings and our dreams. Today she was without words. I whispered a greeting and said I’d sit with her a bit if that was all right.
I got an affirmative nod. I crossed my legs and pushed my big red shoe against the rails of her bed as a way to connect. I didn’t reach to touch her, not because I didn’t want to, but because she was softened in a way I didn’t want to disturb.
We sat for a while, eyes closed, sharing the air and energy between us. Her sheets rustled. When I opened my eyes to look, she was reaching her hand toward me. Of course I took it. She pulled in a way that caused me to stand and get closer. Her eyes still closed and head unmoving, she pulled my hand to her, kissed it, and placed it against her cheek. No words needed.
The presence of someone who is not afraid to be in the room, who is not already somewhere else in their mind, who will look at you and stay looking: What if that is the energy people carry with them to the other side?
Witnessing is not watching. It is not standing at a careful distance and observing. To be a witness means letting the reality of what is happening actually reach you. It means being changed by what you are present to, rather than insulated from it.
There is a cost here. There’s supposed to be. This is how we learn about ourselves and find new ways of being.
This is not only about death.
I believe the skill we practice at the bedside is a skill for the whole of life. Every irreversible passage has an edge. Every ending we cannot stop is asking us the same question: Can you stay? Can you be here for this? Can you let it be what it is without looking away?
The relationship that is ending. The parent who no longer knows your name. The version of yourself you thought you would be by now. These are edges too.
We so often flee them in the same ways we flee the dying room. We do this by staying busy, by finding reasons not to think about it. We hurry for it all to be over so we can get to the part where we have processed the hard stuff, moved forward, and become wiser.
Here’s the thing: You can’t move through the edge without being in it first. To paraphrase Brene Brown, if you numb yourself to the pain, you will in equal measure numb yourself to the joy on the other side and miss out on some of the goodness — hard as it is — of living.
Staying at the edge of what you cannot change is not weakness. Maybe it’s the whole point.
When you sit with someone who is dying, you are practicing an essential human skill. You are learning, in the most concentrated form possible, what it means to love something you cannot save. To be present with an ending. To let the fact of impermanence land in your body as information rather than threat.
Living life this way changes you. It is supposed to change you. And it makes life so much richer.
What and who you become, on the other side of that change, is someone who can stand at edges. You become someone who does not need to flee every irreversible thing. You become someone who has learned that presence is not nothing.
Presence is everything.
One of the kindest, most compassionate human acts we can do for each other is not to rescue, fix, or find the next great intervention for someone who is staring down an edge. It is to be present as we are able and to trust in their capacity to do what they need to do.
Standing at the edge of what you cannot change and being open to all of it? This is what love does when it has run out of other options.
This is what remains when everything else is gone.
Dr. Martha Jo presents The Map of Dying in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.
Dr. Martha Jo Atkins, PhD, is an end-of-life psychotherapist and doula, and has spent her 30-year career helping children and adults negotiate end-of-life and grief. She is the founder and first Executive Director of the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, and served as Executive Director of Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying in San Antonio. She is the author of Signposts of Dying and the founder of Dying School, designed to deepen conversations and abilities to care for friends, family, and ourselves at end-of-life. Her TEDx Talk, “More to Dying Than Meets the Eye,” has almost two million views.
Beautifully articulated. Thank you 🙏🏻