Cynthia Poen-Stam
12 oct 2022
Caring for someone your own age is a double confrontation and it always gives me goosebumps. Especially if the person has received stamps such as ‘inoperable’ and ‘finished’. Koos lived in a tiny upper house, with a creaky narrow staircase and a tiny balcony. But this place encompassed everything he passionately cared about and only here did he want to die.
I can still remember our first meeting. Koos and I turned out to have a number of common acquaintances, as is often the case with peers in a village. However, the rest of our lives were miles apart. I was in the prime of my life, he was finishing his. He didn’t even look like the photos taken of him a year earlier. 48 years and his end was in sight.
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Whenever I asked him how much pain he was in, he avoided my gaze. “I’m fine,” was his standard reply. He must have been in terrible pain. During an evening shift, when I asked him the same question again, he started to cry. Kos was scared. Not before his impending death, he said he was ready for that. But he was afraid he wouldn’t live long enough to get things right for his girlfriend. They hadn’t met until later in life, were not married and she had no job at the time. As soon as he died, there would be a financial gap and she could no longer knit it around on a daily basis.
Besides mourning his death, she would have a lot more trouble on her plate. So he struggled through his days, biting his pain, hoping that the next day there would be a solution to that dilemma.
His hand in mine
He clung to life for his beloved.
With his hand in mine, I let him cry and talk and all desperation poured out. I tried to think along and sincerely hoped that the ideas and helplines I suggested would make a difference. It broke my heart that he experienced so much stress during that last part of his life. It made me realize more than ever how unequally distributed the world is.
Miraculously, his beloved found a new job that same week and was able to authorize the pain relief. He asked me if I wanted to come over and start it up. Of course I wanted that. I saw with my own eyes the enormous relief on his face. Finally he could surrender to letting go of his life, he had achieved his stated goal. Barely two days later, he passed away in his own precious little house.
Dear Koos, I thought you were a mighty beautiful person.
I wrote about many of the darlings I cared for, and put all those writings into a collection.