Posted February 16, 2011

By Father Tad Pacholczyk

Caregivers and health care professionals can and often do greatly assist those who are suffering and dying. Even with careful pain management and comfort measures, however, the dying process can still be agonizing and difficult. Each death has a unique and particular trajectory, but even the most difficult and unpleasant deaths often have powerful graces and remarkable opportunities for growth mysteriously interwoven into them.

Some time ago, I corresponded with a registered nurse about her mother’s final battle with lung cancer. She described the unexpected shifts in her mother’s condition that had taken place over a period of eight days: “…passing through a day of Cheyne-Stokes respirations [a pattern of deep breathing, followed by stoppage of breathing, followed by repetition of the cycle], days of such shallow breathing that death seemed literally one breath away, days of calm coma … culminating in a violent respiratory arrest.” {{more}}

No stranger to death and dying, this nurse had assisted countless other patients with pain, air and hunger management. During her mom’s final hours, she had significantly increased morphine doses per hospice protocols, but with little or no apparent relief. Her mother’s death ended up being very hard. Reflecting on it afterwards, she realized that if she had not been both a health care professional and a person who trusted deeply in God, she would have been, to use her own words, “out of my mind with horror.”

Why certain deaths are so much harder than others is no easier to explain than why certain lives are so much harder than others. It gives us pause, though, to ask whether suffering doesn’t have some hidden but important meaning, however it enters our lives. As we seek to use the tools of medicine to alleviate the suffering of those who are dying, we realize how delicate a balancing act it can be, fraught with difficult decisions about dosages and interventions, and not always guaranteed to work.

When pain and suffering cannot be alleviated, patients ought to be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.

The nurse described how she and her mother had experienced this Christian understanding themselves: “My Mom and I prayed hard and much over this past year. She was expected to die a year ago. As we began to understand that she was actually improving and that she (and I) had been given this gift of time, we became increasingly devoted to the spanine Mercy of Jesus. I am of the opinion that God gave Mom an opportunity to be on the cross with Him.”

Real suffering engages a lot of complex emotions. We may worry that our crosses will be more than we can bear. We may not see how our sufferings could really have any value or meaning. In the end, suffering can make us bitter or it can make us better, depending upon how we respond to it and use it to enter into deeper union with the Lord who suffered and died a hard death for us.

Suffering has meaning whenever we unite it to the redemptive sufferings of Christ. Our sufferings and struggles are an important, albeit temporary, part of our journey. They are a harbinger of a greater destiny and a promise of our transformation.

Pope John Paul II once described it this way: “The cross of Christ throws salvific light, in a most penetrating way, on man’s life … the cross reaches man together with the resurrection.”

Our experience of suffering and death, even a very hard death, offers us mysterious and dramatic graces, with the reassurance that God Himself is ever near to those who carry their cross.

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk serves as the director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.