by

Reverend Marcia Howland

 

 

 

In July of 2003, Chaplain Lunt, who was the chaplain at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London graciously toured me through the facility. As we were summarizing our thoughts, he noticed Cicely Saunders entering the front door. “Would you like to meet Dame Cicely?” My heart skipped a beat and I said, “Yes, of course. I never dreamed I would actually get to meet her!”

 

            Shaking her hand, I expressed my appreciation for her work. She replied with “Thank you. It has been a journey.” Our eyes met—steel blue-gray but full of compassion. Graying wind blown hair, a bent over back, and a bit of a limp spoke volumes.

 

            Having purchased her biography to 1984 my request was “I do hope that you will write the next twenty year history as a model for the rest of us who work in hospice.” In British accent she replied, “Oh, no, I will leave that up to others” and, in her 80s sauntered off to visit patients and mingle with the staff.

            In the summer of 1957, from nurse to almoner (social worker), she was qualifying in medicine at the age of thirty-nine and working on her first publication.  Eleven years before, the death of a special Polish friend, David Tasma, St. Christopher’s “founding patient,” never lived there, left a sum of £500 to build a building around “his window” of inspiration.

 

            In the early 1960s, the death of Antoni Michniewicz brought deep brought deep heartbreak, shared only with a few close friends. Another special patient, Mrs. G, died followed by the death of her father. Her layered grief and manifest anger became so complicated that she briefly sought psychiatric help. She remarked later “I got my bereavements muddled up.” realizing that pain psychological and spiritual as well.

 

            Externally she was energetic, a tireless organizer, and a lobbyist for her cause. Internally, she “experienced profound sorrow, yearning, and resentment for things lost, for hopes dashed, for circumstances never achieved.” These two ingredients met in the common ground of her religious faith. It was there that the intermingled flow of public and private life, activity in the world and the strivings of her spirit, which became her life system to overcome grief and create something from it.

 

            Her experiences contributed to a new openness about dying, death, and bereavement which evidenced a needed re-measuring of an incomplete philosophy about individual worth in our culture. After the death of her husband, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a Polish artist, and her role-change at St. Christopher’s she reflected on what had been achieved. Much to be done, with new energy, new insights and a widened field of spiritual vision, she journeyed on with an exacting joy.

 

            “I didn’t set out to change the world; I set out to do something about pain” she expressed. She touches our family at this writing as we grieve loss of a close family friend, hear medical diagnoses of several friends, and prepare for the imminent death of my mother who is receiving hospice care. Cicely Saunders modeled grieving deeply, revitalized herself, and spent her life caring and comforting which in her absence reaches out to us: an exacting joy.

 

Contributing resources: Cicely Saunders by David Clark

Cicely Saunders: The Founder of the Modern Hospice Movement, Shirley Du Boulay

Watch with Me: Cicely Saunders