When else to lightly recall the Grim Reaper but in hot summer, in the time of harvest and abundance of everything, when we forget about her and forget like death itself. In November sleet and gloomy twilight we would grow sad, but this way we can still jest and forget the loneliness to which we are daily more and more exposed by the departures of our loved ones to that river Styx, which we will also reach sooner or later but they won't be there anymore, because in the meantime they reached the river Lethe and drank from it the tincture of Alzheimer's.
In my first book, titled I v nemoci si buď přítelem, I cautiously touched upon the then still strictly taboo subject of thanatology. Why taboo? Because – despite the shortage of toilet paper and toothpaste – we were heading toward glorious tomorrows and were tasked with catching up and overtaking our advanced Western neighbors, and death was being pushed somewhere into the deep collective unconscious. Were it not for the fact that occasionally some statesman did die, it would have been completely forgotten. But I had a chapter in there about how normal people also die, that they do not know how to do it (and how could they, since they never practiced it) and that their loved ones do not know how to handle it, nor do the healthcare workers to whom the bereaved turn for support. And that not even glorious tomorrows would banish death from the world.
A patient rushed into the therapeutic group that Bohunka and I were leading and told us how she had obtained my book. When she came to the bookstore, she supposedly forgot everything that could be forgotten and so she said bravely: "Please, I need a book by some Radkin, something like, Die Cheerfully." And for a mere eleven crowns she had what she wanted.
I got my hands on two little books, one earlier, one this year, literally handbooks for those difficult moments, so to speak. I know that service in places where people spend their final days in a state that none of us would wish for ourselves, let alone them, is not easy, and that seeing them off on their final journeys is not among the happiest of moments either. All the more I appreciate what I found in both volumes.
The first one has an editor, but it comes literally from the pens (the plural is apt) of the staff of the Hospice of St. John N. Neumann in Prachatice, as the observations and sayings were recorded during shifts and afterwards. Director Robert Huneš put them together and published them in a volume titled Vinnetou se chce bratřit. Here are a few samples:
- The modern elevator announces in the hospice in a pleasant female voice: "First floor, second floor, cabin going up, cabin going down, doors closing..." A patient rode the elevator several times that day for various examinations. When she was returning to her room, she turned to the accompanying nurse: "I wonder when does this woman ever have lunch?"
- "I have a wife at home, a complete saint. I put up with her my whole life. But you, nurse, you give her serious competition."
- A man was very short of breath, cyanotic, gasping for air even with oxygen, his face haggard. He wheezed. A nurse sat down beside him and took his hand. She looked at him compassionately, whereupon the patient declared: "Nurse, I'd really like to satisfy you, but it's not really working anymore..."
- A newly admitted patient asks the nurse how things work at the hospice. "And can I die here too?" "Yes, if you want to, you can die here too."
- "Everyone here is so nice that I don't even feel like dying..."
- Finis coronat opus, and therefore the director's words: You will not find a sign saying Silence Heals anywhere here. But perhaps a sign with the words: LOVE HELPS, AND HUMOR TOO would be fitting.
The second little book has seen several editions, and was once even taken up by Cesta domů, which can serve as a serious recommendation for it. It is called Vážení truchlící a ostatní hosté; the pearls presented here were captured by musicians playing at funerals and cremations, PUT TOGETHER BY Ladislav Muška, but its real authors are the funeral orators and the bereaved. This symbiosis is already captured in the first entry:
- Could you play that Allegro from the Novoměstská Symphony?
The others are also worth quoting:
- A cruel disease gnawed at him, gnawed and gnawed until it gnawed through...
- We wish you all the best there in the unknown, or wherever you actually are.
- Your departure ruined today's beautiful weather.
- I bid you farewell also on behalf of the small farm animals.
- He worked for forty years at the President Gottwald mine, which was formerly known as Ksindl.
- He apprenticed in sulfuric acid, where he completed his studies with a school-leaving certificate.
- An empty glass was not the meaning of his life.
- She had a nice relationship with our entire collective.
- He was popular for his fine qualities, of which there were precious few.
Memento mori in my text is meant as a reminder of life, and if this reflection proves useful, then introducing these two small but dense publications will have served its purpose. It is good to live so that we have no regrets. Those books about bad balances are also out there – but nowhere near as humorous as these.
MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author's blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php