How often do we hear as the first response on hearing that someone has died, “Was it expected?” What?! Maybe that is fear talking or a stalling for time until we can figure out what we really want to say when someone we know has died. But given that life comes with a guarantee of death, how can we not expect it? Maybe because we, as Americans, live in a culture that has generally lacked conversations about death.
We do sometimes hear people talk about a bright light seen as they pass from life to death. The good news is that there is a bright light on this side of the journey, and her name is Redwing.
Redwing Keyssar is a midwife to the dying. From the time she sat at the hospital bedside of her best friend in a 3-week coma, she knew what she was meant to do in life. She also realized she needed to go to school for a credential in western medicine in order to enter the field she had in mind. She became a nurse.
There are so many miracle workers in this world. Redwing, being one of them, has traversed an extraordinary journey of almost 30 years starting at the infancy and continuing through the evolution of Palliative Care. She is the author of the award winning book “Last Acts of Kindness; Lessons for the Living from the Bedsides of the Dying”. If you want more, and yes, of course there is much more, just google Judith Redwing Keyssar and your path will be strewn with her wisdom, kindness and humor.
Everything Redwing says about active dying is a sentence by sentence lesson in how to let death inform how we live. Her work has had a broad reach; palliative care, working with doctors and nurses, giving workshops, training volunteers to work with people who are actively dying, speaking and writing. You may be surprised to hear that, in Redwing’s world, talking about how to be with the actively dying, is a uniquely cheery experience. She answers some questions you may have and some you don’t even know you have. Redwing is fearlessly gentle on a topic that has every one of us in life’s plan.
For the joy of it listen to what she has to say on a topic you may not have been comfortable with as a topic of conversation.
