(THE WAY OF HOSPICE)
Seven years ago, a few months after the death of my dear friend and mentor Don, I came home from a spiritual direction session and announced to my husband that I was going to walk the Camino. Gareth responded, “Well, can I come with you?” I hadn’t really gotten that far in my planning, but was grateful that he was up for it. Moments of pure clarity are somewhat rare for me; I’m much more likely to have an idea that I ponder for months or even years, spending inordinate amounts of time trying to talk myself out of it. Generally, only after a whim has passed the test of exhaustive scrutiny am I willing to commit. Gareth is more spontaneous.
But in that moment, I knew I needed to do something with the grief that I was carrying in my body. I’d lost other people I loved, but Don’s death was the grief that made me honest about what it meant to walk around feeling the wind blow through a hole in my heart. I needed to move, to learn how to breathe in a world irreparably changed by his absence. Gareth understood that intuitively, and also knew me well enough to know I’d need more support than I’d know to ask for.
And so, that summer we spent a month walking across Spain. We caught a train for a portion of it because a month wasn’t long enough at our pace, but I walked about 350 miles (Gareth a little less because of shin splints). We boiled our life down to carrying the bare minimum on our backs, walking, eating, sleeping, hydrating, caffeinating, washing, tending one another’s bodies, and doing it all again the next day. We made friends along the way and some we traveled with for a day or two, some for longer. We gave over to trusting that we’d find what we needed as we went—a bed, a shower, a meal, a stranger pointing the way—and embraced a temporary rhythm of life in which all the busyness fell away. We had one thing to do: walk.
Seven years, and several significant losses later, I found myself across a hospital bed from my father with my mother lying between us. We were two years into that chapter of her cancer journey, and though she’d entered the hospital thinking she had a rather minor infection, it had become clear that we’d turned the corner and were facing her last days. The most compassionate doctor I’ve ever encountered had helped Dad and I realize the truth we knew but dreaded earlier that morning. I’d called my siblings and our spouses, then Mom’s sister. Now Dad took her hand and told her that hospice was the next likely step. I told her it was her decision, but we were all onboard and ready to support her if she chose it.
And so, with a bag in which I’d packed just a few changes of clothes, we stepped onto another Camino. This was her pilgrimage, and I’d be more like Gareth, trailing behind but never far from her sight. Dad would be her constant companion, as he’d been since they were in eighth grade. My siblings and our spouses, my aunt and her family, would be in and out. Gareth would return from Ireland where he was working.
Over the next three days we faced a series of conversations that each cut the timeline we thought we were on by half. We were fortunate to find a placement in a residential facility, where an incredible team of caregivers and volunteers would do their best to make sure we had what we needed. Just like on the Camino, we boiled our life down to eating, sleeping, washing, and a singular focus—profound in its monotony. Exhausting and sometimes grueling, with the knowledge that this time was a temporary gift we simultaneously didn’t want to end, and also didn’t want to last any longer than necessary.
I thought of the Camino often through those days. The only other real experience I’d had of being quite so outside of time, so present to rhythms of the moment I was in, that while I knew the rest of the world continued, it receded to a strange and inaccessible background noise. I knew it was a privilege to be able to step out of the cycle of news and to-do lists, work, and social commitments. I experienced the grace of being marked as a pilgrim—almost as certainly as if I’d had a scallop shell tied to my backpack the way I did in Spain. Nothing else matters here — just do today.
I returned to the intimacy of pilgrim body-tending, keeping track of her bodily functions, and also intimately aware of my Dad’s and my own. Food. Hydration. Sleep. Soreness. Digestion. Exhaustion. Sometimes my siblings were in that loop. Sometimes my spouse. Mostly we were carried by other people’s care.
After Gareth and I made it to Santiago, we decided to fly to Paris for a few days before returning home. The first day we were in the city, we went out for a stroll that turned into a twelve-mile walk alongside the Seine. Yes, our Camino had ended, but even though we were freed from its rhythms, the only thing I could figure out how to do was walk. I remember little of Paris, other than I had an asthma attack on the subway, and we went to a theme park. I don’t transition gracefully under normal circumstances, and coming off the Camino into a big city at peak tourist season just turned the volume up on the surreal.
After mom died, Dad and I spent several days sitting alone in their house, me in my grandfather’s worn recliner and Dad on one end of the cat-scratched sofa Mom had wanted to recover; both of us avoiding the chair where she had spent most of her time for the two previous years. Family joined us, my sister first, then her husband and kids. My brother and his wife. Gareth, who’d gone back to Ireland to lead a retreat, returned to North Carolina a second time. Then we were in a crowd, the funeral was beautiful and exhausting.
It’s hard to communicate the profundity of pilgrimage, the gift and challenge of a period in which a singular focus requires all of you, so much that all other demands disappear. Harder still to convey the strange process of re-entry after such an experience, of finding your way in a world that allowed you the space to step out but expects you to step back in — maybe with an acknowledgment something has changed in you, as long as that change isn’t too disruptive.
Maybe it’s my ADHD, but I thrive in those pilgrimage spaces. I can get caught up in trying to figure out where to focus my attention, and perhaps put way too much importance on being purposeful (even if not always “productive”). The gift of the Camino and of the hospice journey, at least from where I sit right now, is the clarity about what not to be doing. It’s the stripping away of the unnecessary in order to make room for what’s unfolding.
I don’t want to live the rest of my life either on a hiking trail or in a hospice room, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen if I could show up to whatever is in front of me a bit more like I did in those places — not so much with the driven hyper-focus that I often bring to completing a task, but with a gentler, clear-eyed openness to the sacrament of paying attention.
Brian Ammons is spiritual director, coach, teacher, and pastor, with a particular interest in the ways we construct stories about ourselves as we negotiate and rework our relationships to larger cultural and societal stories. Brian is the co-convenor of The Porch and the Order of the Rocking Chair.