“You matter because you are you & you matter to the last moment of your life.” – Dame Cicely Saunders.
When the NHS was founded on July 5th 1948, it was a big step into the unknown. The government wanted to provide healthcare to each and every individual and would be responsible for funding. Not everyone was optimistic. The Editor of the British Medical Journal at the time agreed with the logic of spreading the cost of the treatment of illness over the whole community but feared many dangers in a state run medical service; dogma, timidity, lack of incentive, administrative hypertrophy, stereotyped procedure and lack of intellectual freedom. At that time, Aneurin Bevin, a key figure in the formation of the NHS, wrote to all the medical professionals and consoled them saying any problems would be dealt with. You can read his message here.
Death is something which the NHS wasn’t ready to deal with in it
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Hope and it’s relationship with honesty.
Hope is one of the few things in life that can keep us living when there is nothing else left. It is the light that is nearly always on even when every other light may have turned off. Hope can make the dead walk, it can transform the weak into warriors and can give a broken man a reason to believe in tomorrow. However hope given falsely can cause irreversible damage. “People shouldn’t give false hope when there’s none around,” said one of the other volunteers. Hope is extremely potent, a small amount, the size of a grain of sand can shine up a person’s life. But it is highly important that when we share hope with someone bereft of it, we do so honestly. There’s no point telling a person who has just lost their legs in an accident to keep the hope of walking again. Such hope, based on falsehood and nothing, is more likely to have extremely detrimental effects than do anyone any good.
Pull yourself together, and just get over it…
When passing through an illness or the grieving period after the death of a loved one, there are some people who due to a lack of experience and understanding may tell you to pull yourself together, to strengthen up and to get over it. Truth of the matter is, every day you spend bedbound or every night you spend crying the tears of sorrow, you’re telling yourself exactly that. You don’t need others doing the same. After all, sorrow and a person’s way of dealing with it is personal, as is the time it takes for them to come to terms with their loss. The journey of acceptance after a traumatic event is like a daunting climb up a mountain; full of hardships and extremely tiring. If any one needs to make that journey of acceptance quickly, it is those people who tell you to hurry up. They need to accept the fact that you need your time and them constantly pushing, directly or indirectly, will probably make it a lot harder for you.
You talk, I’ll listen.
I’ve always been a strong believer in the power of talking about one problems and having someone who will listen. In one of the training sessions, our supervisor told us to find a partner and tell them something we had really wanted to do or achieve but were unable to do so because of whatever problem. It was the listener’s job to speak as little as they could but give their full attention to the speaker. Each person got approximately five minutes to talk. In a room surrounded by people, the majority of whom, like me, had lost a loved one made me feel comfortable. Most of us had felt the pain that follows after the death of someone dear and could see it in each other’s eyes. When I began talking to a complete stranger, the words flowed by their own accord. Normally for those of you who know me personally will know that I rarely talk about such things. But at that moment in time, the feeling of unity shared as a result of loss, helped me formulate words and sentences I had never spoken before. The other person, just nodded in understanding and that was enough. The calmness and the relief it brings is something which further strengthened my belief in talking and listening. Sometimes we don’t need happy pills or pills that will stop us from dying, but instead having someone who will listen properly and at least try to understand is one of the greatest things we can ever wish for.
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