THE first thing to be remarked on in Michael Kearney's Mortally Wounded is the beautiful and evocative art work of June Fitzgerald, which provides the cover and brings its own powerful illumination to the text. Secondly, we should remember never to judge a book by its title.
This book is not only about healing at the time of dying: it also contains a powerful sub text that is a criticism of our culture of living. This is a book for those who want to live life to the limits from this moment on. If we can live at peace, the author implies, why whirl in agitation? If we can have knowledge, why suffer in ignorance?
Michael Kearney, Director of Palliative Care at Our Lady's Hospice, Dublin, has moved beyond the medical model to provide us with another. This one contains a golden and paradoxical thread that weaves its way through stories of the dying, provoking the question: Why leave the fullness of life until the moment of death?
Culturally, we are suffering the Western disease of the Enlightenment, the belief that science can fix everything. This disease compounds the dilemma of the terminally ill. We believe that science can save us, and "a positive attitude" is our part in the healing process. Yet we know that we shall die, and that in this respect, ultimately science is powerless. "Save me . .. I am dying" may well be two phrases that produce a contradictory, an impossible request. The question is, what is really being said at a time like this: Save my spirit, my body is dying; save my body, my spirit is dying?
Caught in this contradiction, where our terrified egos resist what they do not know and cannot control, our body pain and soul pain can only increase. This is the challenge that Kearney has addressed so successfully, to provide the type of palliative care, incorporating preparatory work in depth psychology, that can make a real difference to how we "live our dying".
In utilising the ancient Greek myth of Chiron, where an immortal found relief from suffering by agreeing to surrender his immortality voluntarily, Kearney hints at the way forward. Surrendering immortality means here that we must turn to face what we have been struggling against and make the Descent into the core of such experience and listen. Only in this way can we make the Return to a more whole Self. This is not an easy journey; it takes great courage not just to face the unknown but to choose to face the unknown. But from the ease histories illustrating this process we can see at work a model that is truly palliative, for both body and soul.
What is also open to us is how we live our living. There are many who suffer from feelings of meaninglessness, alienation, anger, frustration, feelings which most often come under the rubric "depression". Kearney would call it soul pain. Whatever language we use will go a long way to determining our reality and our response. As Victor Frankl says, "everything can be taken from us except that last freedom - to choose one's attitude, to choose our own way". Michael Kearney says: "If ... we can enable the individual to move towards depth, soul itself will act, for there is in depth an autonomy that desires our deepest healing." If only we will allow it to happen. If we are dying to live, I would suggest this book as a good place to begin.
