Читать книгу Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world - Natalia O’Sullivan - Страница 22

Claire Proust is a soul midwife who has also helped many souls cross the boundary between life and death. She compares the process to the labour pains of birth and as a soul midwife provides the practical, emotional and spiritual support for the dying and their families, helping them to face the forces of death with calmness, openness and strength.

As a former nurse, she found that almost all the deaths which she experienced in hospitals were deeply traumatic, thanks to the overwhelming fear of death which often results in unnecessary and invasive surgery and little compassionate preparation for the dying. For seven years she virtually single-handedly ran The Voyager Trust, which pioneered the provision of the holistic and noninvasive care for the dying and bereavement counselling for the families. She believes that the taboo around death in the West is so overwhelming that most people are paralysed by it and yet she found that with simple honesty and compassion most people are able to quite quickly overcome their fears of both their own dying and the deaths of those around them, becoming instead empowered by the experience.

Clare advocates that each person must be given the space and the time to die as they want to die. Each death is unique and, as with labour and birth, each person needs to be allowed to die in their own way.

She describes an incident in one hospital where she was working a night shift which almost restored her faith in the medical profession’s emotional ability to cope with death. An old man was gasping his last breaths. He had lung cancer and was confused and coughing phlegm. He kept calling out a woman’s name and became distressed when she did not appear. One of the doctors on the ward decided to take action. He climbed into bed with the old man and held him in his arms. The old man said, ‘Kiss me,’ and without hesitation, the doctor kissed him and continued to hold him until he died very peacefully. Some of the staff criticized the doctor’s behaviour, but for Clare it was a wonderful lesson in compassion and humility. ‘The world did not end when meaningful physical contact was made with a patient. What did happen was that a tired, ill, confused and sad person was soothed and died in love.’