On Living
Written and Narrated By: Kerry Egan
Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
A StoryHolder tells tales of love
I s’pose I was drawn to On Living because it’s written by a Hospice chaplain, and for a while there, I considered maybe doing that for the latter part of my life, a second act if you will. Then I looked into it, and I saw just exactly how much was needed to become one. …Then I started thinking about it… and the dying didn’t have me freaked out, but the living surrounding them sure as heck did. I mean, what do you tell grieving people about the unfairness of death (Even tho’ it’s the one thing we’re ALL gonna do, so that’s actually as danged fair as it gets), of suffering, of maybe about the why’s and wherefores of it all?
It turns out, if you’re doing the job properly, if you’re Hospice Chaplain and author Kerry Egan, you’re NOT telling anything; rather, you’re listening.
This audiobook is where we learn that chaplains are StoryHolders; they listen to people tell their truths, their fears, their regrets, their wonders. And Egan has been so moved by the stories she’s held close that she’s gathered her most life changing ones and put them together in this compilation. These are the ones that have touched her, that have changed her, and she offers them here, not to teach but to guide us as we bear our burdens and travel through life, ever mindful that we’re all heading to a great unknown.
Dying is a verb to Egan; it’s not who you are, no; it’s something you do. The dying are no different from any of us. They aren’t suddenly struck with wisdom that’s been withheld from us when we’re still healthy and vibrant with life. If you’ve been a jerk during your life, you’ll probably meet your end as a jerk. Indeed, one cruel man, tho’ he bewailed his loneliness at the end, so pushed and prodded and vilified all the hospice workers who cared for him that he did wind up alone, with an unknown chaplain. He’d never managed to learn Egan’s name, but at the end, he wondered where the blue-eyed one was (She’d moved), making her wonder if, at the end, she’d managed to make a connection, however light, however brief. But for the most part, no. The cruelty he dealt to those who wanted to connect with him was enough to keep them away.
While there’s no grand wisdom to be gained from finding we’re to die, it does make us more reflective. Here are stories of those who’ve weighed their greatest deeds against their greatest misdeeds and are now so very afraid. What if pride and fear are intertwined? How does one cope? Egan helps one dying woman who says the best thing she ever did was go back to the home for unwed mothers to retrieve her son, getting herself disowned, selling off everything she owned for money, in the process. Her greatest pride, her greatest joy. Only to go on to marry a man who didn’t love her son—P’raps if he knew that the man he thought was his father actually wasn’t, if he knew he’d almost been given up? What if the way his life turned out made him scream at her that she should have left him in that orphanage? A truly moving story, and Egan helps guide the woman to honesty and peace before her death. All in a day’s work.
There are stories of conwomen living with evil curses, of a man who’d done something deplorable only to go on to live a good and loving life (Life is gray, he tells Egan—never forget that, never think otherwise), stories of the ugly aftermath of the cold, hard reality of a dead body being transported. And those grieving/hyper emotional relatives? Here too. Egan joins the family of a man, comatose as he slips closer to death. She listens to what a loving family man he was, and she tailors her prayers to fit him, only to be later chased down the hall by the son of his first family, whom he’d abandoned—I just wanted to let you know that you’re full of it, so F-You. That prayer you said? No, F-You.
Egan is startled, but she listens. She apologizes, she offers to buy him a cup of coffee to listen to his story, this StoryHolder that she is. She’ll listen, she’ll hold him close. Instead, he shrugs her off and walks into the darkness of the night. THIS is how one handles it, and I could never do that. No, I can only listen to this audiobook and marvel, rejoice in her gentleness. That she comes from a place of sorrow (Having suffered postpartum psychosis, never knowing what was real or not, trudging sluggishly through the haze the meds fuzzed for her), hers is a particularly empathetic approach.
As she relates each story, Egan doesn’t even try to distinguish voices which, while confusing at parts, I’ve decided was a wise move on her part. Imagine if she tried to do an elderly patient’s dying gasps—how annoying and patronizing! No, instead she just relays what they’ve said as she remembers their conversations, as she relays how their words struck her and made her feel at the time. Then there’s the musings on their words and actions, and finally there’s what it’s all come to mean for her, how she’s been changed and has adapted how she chooses to live.
No, Egan’s experiences have me KNOwing I’d never be able to cut it as a hospice chaplain.
Still, there’s always End of Life Doula… so HUZZAH! Cuz maybe dying doesn’t make anyone wiser, but it sure makes them thoughtful. And as this book, the StoryHolder’s experiences, shows, ANYone can learn from a life that’s been pondered, weighed, and embraced with love.
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