Sister Death

For a few months one summer and on weekends the following school year, I was a hospital porter at the old Ottawa General Hospital which was then located on Bruyère Street near the Byward Market in Ottawa. My task consisted solely of moving patients in wheelchairs or on stretchers. Most of the time, this was from their room to a department within the facilities where they would be tested or receive treatments and back to their rooms. Sometimes, however, the trip would be one way. I was in my early twenties that summer and the work I was doing would lead to my first encounters with death.

I remember making only three of those one-way trips to the morgue. Two of them were on the same day. In the morning, I received a call from the emergency room. When I arrived, someone pointed to a stretcher in a corner. I was told that the elderly lady on it had wandered out into the cold in her back yard and had died there of hypothermia because she had dementia and could not find her way back inside. As I wheeled her to the elevator that led to the morgue, her wrinkled forehead was uncovered, and I could see her gray hair. When I returned to the office where I waited for the next call, I was completely drained, numb, and felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I just wanted the day to be over.

That afternoon, I received another call from the emergency room. On arrival there, a nurse was waiting for me with a small child cradled in her arms. The beautiful little girl she held must have been no older than 2-3 months old. The nurse insisted that I carry the child up to the morgue in my arms, not on a stretcher. The death of that infant had obviously touched something very deep in her. I was still reeling from the morning and I could not bring myself to do what she asked. It was not fear or repulsion that compelled me to refuse her request and certainly not indifference. It was a total sense of dismay and powerlessness. I brought the tiny body up on a stretcher.

I left both the old woman and that beautiful child with the attendants in the morgue that day, but I still carry them in my heart. These were my first experiences of death, but they would not be the last, far from that. I have encountered death scores of times since. I have also had to face my own mortality.

It is not easy to write about these things and probably not easy to read about them either. But it is in no way morbid to do so. I may never be able to sing praises to God for “Sister Death” as Saint Francis of Assisi did in his famous Canticle to Brother Sun and Sister Moon:

“Praised be You, my Lord through Sister Death,
from whom no-one living can escape.”

However, I am grateful that I have had to grapple with death.  Refusing to think about death and to come to terms with our mortality only allows death to haunt us in subtle ways. More than that, I have come to think that it prevents us from loving fully. If I reject the ultimate fragility that is in my brother or sister, their mortality, how can I love them fully? If I reject that ultimate of fragilities that is in me, how can I love myself as I am? And how then can I love as Jesus did: "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end."?