• Would You Like Bread With That?
When lunch was through, we stayed at the table to speak with the woman sitting nearest us. She had seen the play - everyone saw the play, I didn't need to introduce myself to anyone, people were just walking up to us to talk, it took a lot of pressure off introductions - and spoke to us about the baby girl they had lost some thirty years earlier. No, it never goes away. Never.
We had just enough time to jump to the one seminar I made all weekend, Companioning: A Breath of Fresh Air in a World of Chaos, presented by Jane Heustis. When it began, I wasn't sure if I was in the right room. I worried it might be directed to caregivers only, nurses and midwives, and doctors. And then I remembered I am a caregiver, or at least I realized it perhaps for the first time listening to Jane speak.
Put simply, companioning is simply being there, though there's more to it than that. But listening, and surrendering to the idea that there is nothing to "fix" the situation, those are difficult things to learn. You need to unlearn everything Western civilization has told you is appropriate - looking on the bright side, shunning darkness, not crying. A companion doesn't make excuses, nor takes on any guilt for not being able to perform miracles. The world can wait, the world must be told to wait, and a companion reassures the bereaved that the world will wait, as long as it takes.
Toni and I have become defacto companions, if unlicensed. Hospitals, chaplains contact us when someone has asked for someone to speak to - me, especially, when there are guys involved. It was only a year and a half ago when I met Justin and Laura at the Great Lakes Brewing Co., just a few weeks after they lost Hans. I think I was wearing a tie, I'd just come from visiting one of our actors in a school, I must have looked too professional by half, some kind of fraud. but I knew what I was doing there and I did it. We just talked, for as long as it took.
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