Читать книгу A Gift of Love - Tony Cointreau - Страница 7

The evening dusk was falling outside the hospital window as I sat on the edge of my beloved Aunt Tata’s bed and prattled on about the inconsequential happenings of my day. After years of caring for her through devastating illnesses, I was not able to acknowledge the fact that she was in the last hours of her life. Finally she looked into my eyes, and in little more than a whisper, said, “Goodbye, my darling.”

I quickly kissed her and got up to leave, for fear that I might tire her if I stayed. That night she passed on with only an intern at her side.

It was at the cemetery, when I first saw the coffin, that I understood that someone I had loved all my life was in that box and would never come back. At that moment I was forced to summon all the self-control that had been drummed into me from an early age—a discipline dictated by phrases such as “Men don’t cry” and “Bluebloods never give in!”

Now it was over, and I had missed a precious opportunity—the last chance to express my affection and appreciation for a life that had so enriched my own.

In my heart I knew she would gladly have allowed me to share in one of the two great transformations of life—her death. But in those last days I had been too frightened to face the overwhelming emotions that I had been taught to sublimate since childhood.

Later on I remembered that that last evening had been the only time she had ever said “Goodbye” to me. Until then she had always left me with the words “Au revoir”—“Till we meet again.” By saying “Goodbye” for the first time, she showed me that she understood the agony I could not face and loved me enough to send a gentle message that took me years to comprehend. She knew me so well that she had no doubt that I would someday learn to accept my emotions and face the deaths around me with a courage born of unconditional love—the same courage and unconditional love that she had shown me all my life.

This was not a quick transformation or an easy lesson to learn. Each time I ran away from the inevitable when it was happening to those I loved most in the world, I vowed, “Next time I’ll get it right!”

My father, Jacques, was born into a prominent but small French family that had created an international success with Cointreau Liqueurs in the late-nineteenth century. By the time he came along in 1901, their modest origins had been forgotten, and although they had a habit of pinching pennies, they fully enjoyed a privileged lifestyle.

My mother, Dorothee, on the other hand, came from an aristocratic Boston family whose fortune was long gone when she was born in 1900 (she went to her grave without my father’s knowing that she was one year older than he). Her family’s aim in life was to keep up appearances while making do with what little they had.

My parents, who were approaching their forties when they married, were very much in love and well suited to each other. They lived in their own affluent cocoon and shied away from the harsh realities of life that might threaten the emotional armor that they had built up around themselves.

Slowly, over the years, I learned to follow my parents’ example and did my best to close down my own emotions, attempting to hide the feelings that lay just under the surface of my too-sensitive skin.

I was thirty-eight years old when I first read about Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa’s home for destitute men and women who were picked up from the gutters and slums of Calcutta and taken to a place where the worms were carefully removed from their bodies; where they were washed, clothed, fed and put in a comfortable bed with clean sheets. But most of all they had someone to hold their hand and love them before they went home to whatever God they believed in.

One man asked the little nun, “Why are you doing this?”

Mother Teresa’s answer was characteristically simple.

She replied, “Because I love you.”

His last words on earth were, “I’ve lived my life like an animal, and now I’m going to die like a king.”

I did not need to read any further. My heart had already begun to race. In an instant, I knew that the dormant possibilities for the more meaningful life I had been seeking could become a reality. Somehow I had to find a way to follow this road wherever it might lead.

Ten years and what seemed like a lifetime later, I took the plunge and made my first pilgrimage to where I felt my destiny was leading me. I didn’t know why, but I had no doubt that I had a “calling” to share in this work with the dying.

I was forty-eight years old when I arrived in India in November of 1989, saying, “My dream has finally become a reality.” However, it did not take more than a few hours in Calcutta for me to realize that I was totally unprepared for its unrelenting poverty. For four days I was forced to remain there, waiting for an available flight home and trying to deal with the emotional crisis that Calcutta had precipitated. I did not realize the importance of it at the time, but this experience in Calcutta miraculously opened the floodgates of my pent-up emotions, and permitted me to cry for the first time in my adult life.

Upon my return to the United States, my partner Jim Russo and I immediately went to visit his sister, Louise, who had become like a sister to me as well. She was in a hospital in Vermont, dying of cancer at the age of fifty-nine. Now, unlike other times in my life when loved ones were dying, I was able to stay with Louise until the end, holding her hand and telling her how much she was loved.

A few months after Louise’s death, I picked up the phone and called a hospice in Greenwich Village in New York City—a home that had been opened by the little nun who had inspired me from the beginning—and asked if they could use a volunteer. The home was for destitute men dying of AIDS, a disease that in 1990 was a death sentence. At that time the medical community did not know how it was transmitted or have any effective way to treat it. Fear and ignorance were rampant, and even my own doctor advised me not to go there—it was too dangerous.

I told him, “If we can’t do this for other human beings, then there is no hope.”

On April 4, 1990, I began to volunteer at the hospice called “Gift of Love,” which had been opened on December 24, 1985, by Mother Teresa as a birthday gift to Jesus. Because of the enormous stigma of AIDS, most of the patients had been abandoned not only by society but also by their families. As Sister Maria Lucy, the nun in charge of the home, said to me when I first went for an interview, “Tony, we are their families!”

These dying men, who had never been given much of a chance in life, taught me during the next twelve years not only about the many ways to help others die in an atmosphere of peace and love, but also how to enjoy the richness of living our lives fully until the very end.

It seems that our society considers what should be the normal transition of death to be a taboo subject. We tend to pretend that it does not exist. But in denying the reality of what is happening, we not only rob the dying person of any feeling of comfort, we also insist on creating a make-believe world where nothing ever changes. The truth is that all life is change—constant change. Without that, life would be stagnant and not really worthwhile.

What we often think of as the most complicated of situations is really very simple. With a little common sense and a lot of love, facing the fearful situation we call death can be transformed into one of the greatest of gifts for ourselves and our loved ones.

Of course, in no way would anyone imply that there is no emotional pain involved for the caregiver. The pain of a loss can be excruciating, but it need never defeat you. It can tear you apart, but you can rise again, and if given the opportunity to aid and participate in the final days, hours, and moments of someone’s life, you, the participant, will never be the same either. Any love and comfort that we give leaves both the giver and the receiver in a different realm than before.

There are many taboos born of our fear of the unknown. However, with some basic information to start with, and the opportunity to break out of the mold for even a few moments, we can open the door to a new understanding of others and to the reason we are put on this earth in the first place.

My not having been able to face the reality of death and dying throughout my early life is not unusual in our society. But during my twelve years volunteering in Mother Teresa’s homes for the dying, I learned the invaluable power that exists in:

 Listening

 Touching

 Choices

 Humor

 Taking nothing for granted

 Non-judgment

 Respect

 Music

 Unconditional love

 Faith

The importance of all these and more became clear to me as I tended to each unique human being in my care.

Because the patients at Gift of Love were given the freedom to express their thoughts on the process of dying as it was happening, no one was forced to feel alone—ever—thereby lessening the fear of the unknown and even sometimes the physical pain. If the mind is at peace, the physical body will not feel the same agony as it would if it were rigid with fear.

In my years of working with the dying, I—who had been so filled with terror at the thought of human mortality—helped more than one hundred men during their final months, days, and hours. This book is a distillation of some of the things I learned that helped them. And I discovered that every day is a miracle and that the journey never ends.