Of Birth and Dying
by Laura Jones
When I don’t have anything
else to do, I like to help people have babies. I used to help
people have babies every week, but birth assisting, like birth-giving,
requires the endurance of long hours in awkward positions
and the sacrifice of large amounts of sleep (and at least
a few meals); you have to be pretty hardy to do it regularly.
I found it impossible to handle birth assisting while holding
a full-time job, so I haven’t helped with babies for several
years.
But this summer I found myself
unemployed and I had time to help lots of people have babies.
I worked with my friend Karen’s labor support and postpartum
service, providing care for teenage mothers and their newborns.
And I got to assist my old friends Kip and Kristin with the
birth of their first child… a truly nerve-wracking experience,
since that was the first time I’d ever assisted at the birth
of anyone I knew well.
I’ve never helped anyone
die—but my friend G. has. Having lost many friends and lovers
to AIDS in the 1990s, he’s held vigil over a lot of bedsides.
Though he doesn’t help people die with the same frequency
these days, he’s well aware that people are still dying. And
since he believes dying people need their friends around,
he tries to be present whenever possible.
We spoke at length this summer
about the similarities between helping a person give birth
and helping a person die. The Chux pads and vomit, and the
frequent changing of sheets. The ice chips and soft lighting.
The attempts to make someone in pain as comfortable as possible.
The way time becomes meaningless, six hours gone in what feels
like fifteen minutes. And the waiting. The work of both birth
and death requires assistants to hold space for the one laboring
to bring forth a new life or surrender their own—and that
usually means long periods of waiting.
Despite the hand-holding
and the massages and the sips of room-temperature water, you
can’t really do what you’d like to be able to do. You can’t
stop or change the process, and you can’t do it for them.
So you, as a chosen support person, have to put aside the
feelings of helplessness and do what you can: keep them comfortable,
and just wait.
Some birth or die at home;
others birth or die in hospital environments (freestanding
birth centers and hospices are nice in-between options when
you can get them). In both cases, the work is easier when
the worker is respected and allowed to do what they need to
do to get the job done. G. tells me stories of deaths that
were like parties, complete with music, food, and an abundance
of guests. I’ve attended births where four generations of
the family’s women were all crowded together in a laboring
woman’s room, chanting and singing to help the woman relax
and "go into the pain" instead of fighting against it. Noisy
indeed, but when this is what the birthing or dying person
wants, nothing could be more helpful. Living can be such a
lonely business, so people should have all the company they
want as they bring babies in or as they go out.
Those who find greater comfort
in privacy should get to have that as well. One of my favorite
births involved a very young woman who only wanted one person
to sit with her and hold her hand. No guests, no music, no
conversation—and, most importantly, no other people in the
room unless they absolutely had to be there. So we spent fourteen
hours in complete silence, breathing deeply together when
she needed to breathe deeply, dozing together when she was
between contractions. The birth of her tiny daughter was almost
equally quiet, and I’ll forever respect the medical staff
who were willing to alter their normal routines and provide
her with the privacy she needed in order to feel safe. Likewise,
G. has stories of extremely quiet deaths, where the silence
in the room afforded his loved one the serene environment
he or she needed in order to most peacefully let themselves
go.
One of the things that you
can’t have when you help someone die is the feedback. "It
helped so much to have you here; it was so much easier than
doing it alone." These thank you’s, whether spoken or communicated
non-verbally, are one of the sweetest rewards of birth assisting.
While those of you who have helped people die never get to
hear those words from your loved ones after the fact, you
should know that your presence made a difference for them.
It takes great bravery to
sit with someone at the end of life—much more so than to be
present for the beginning of life, which almost always involves
gain instead of loss. But at the end of the day, the skills
you use in both appear to be largely the same: good hands,
a good heart, and the willingness to be there for someone
who must step away from the life they’ve known forever in
order to get to their new one.
Please welcome the following
babies: Raymond L., Gregor R., DaeShawn M., JaQ’uaan S., and
Sophia May.
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