[Please note: Today's GUEST ESSAY was submitted by Bobbye R. Terry Executive Director, Odyssey Hospice and represents her views]

   One of my favorite verses in the Bible is found in Isaiah 61:1, the beginning verse
of The Year of the LORD’s Favor: The
Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is
on me, because the LORD has
anointed me to proclaim good news to the
poor. He has sent me to bind up the
brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom
for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,…

   What better time to share this than at the
beginning of the Christmas season.

   This section of Isaiah is a
mission statement proclaimed by an unknown prophet to bring about restoration
to God’s people, to renew and vindicate them so they can resume active roles as
witness to God. Jesus later read this scripture in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19.) To me he was telling his people that it was and
still is what they are to do: Restore those who have been besieged by the
tyranny of life.

    No matter what your faith may be,  if you are a hospice worker – someone who has chosen to serve the dying – you are
fulfilling a similar mission. The people we serve, regardless of their position in
society or ability to pay, have been attacked by an enemy, one that often
stalks its prey – sometimes undetected for a long time until it is discovered through
symptoms now out of control.

    Terminal illness claims
its victims, stealing everything they have: their possessions, their familial
and friendship ties, their memories, their health and, ultimately, their lives. We, as
clinicians do the best we can to comfort and ease the physical pain of final illness. Support staff is there to support those in the throes of complicated emotional and social dysfunction and depression. They also assist with
the sometimes challenging task of shoring up self-esteem.

   Yet, perhaps the largest
commitement is focused on the spiritual care and bereavement coordinators, our "soul
surgeons", who must bring hope to those who have lost it. The soul surgeons seek to explain a concept that is difficult for all of us:  What is life beyond this realm?

   Sometimes
the dying receive that message, resting comfortably with the knowledge they can
surrender to a higher power. Some, with little faith on which
to rely, may not accept the calm finality of physical life and, like fish beached,
have no air to breathe. They fight against the inevitability of organ failure,
believing that is all there is, a finality with no light at the end of the
tunnel.

   Yet, all you have to do to
know otherwise is spend some time in our inpatient unit with those actively
dying, feel the presence of more than human beings occupying the space, watch
what happens within those walls when a patient dies at peace. 

   If we have done our jobs
well, light will shine into the hearts that are gathered there. And once a
small ray of light shines, even into a pitch black room, darkness must abandon
the space.

~Bobbye Terry

Thanks to Bobbye Terry for submitting today's guest essay.