The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

by Frank Ostaseski

This was so clear to me when I was in the hospital recovering from my heart attack and surgery. People would come in to be with me—doctors, nurses, aides—and oftentimes, they were so busy doing whatever task they had to accomplish that they wouldn’t see me. I was touched all the time, but rarely did that touch feel healing. Mostly I was “monitored.” I’m sad to say that my health care providers often had more of a relationship with the devices and machines they were using than they did with me. The staff tried to manage their anxiety through well-constructed professional scripts and coping strategies that were meant to create a buffer, keeping my suffering at arm’s length. It rarely worked. Their anxiety simply got passed on to me. No one really asked me how I felt, only, where was my pain on a scale of one to ten? Did I have a bowel movement yet? Was I doing my breathing exercises? I was information to be charted.