NONFICTION: STORIES
“What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying” by Karen Wyatt
SILVERTHORNE — Though dead men don’t tell tales, the insights they discover in their final days can give the rest of us a profound understanding of the true substance of life.
Some of those stories are collected in “What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living From the Stories of the Dying,” Colorado family physician Karen Wyatt‘s new book. Wyatt, who lives in Dillon, has devoted more than a third of her 25-year career to hospice and palliative care.
“I view things in terms of stories,” said Wyatt, who has a thoughtful gaze and a mop of ash-gray hair.
“That’s how I interacted with patients. I listened to how they presented the story of their lives, and helped them see other twists and interpretations of their stories. That’s part of the meaning of life, to help them see what they might have been missing in their own actions and stories.”
One example: A patient in her 30s was dying of colon cancer. She was a single mother with two young children and a difficult past. She grew up in an orphanage, got in trouble as an adolescent with drugs and alcohol. Now, dying, she felt awful about leaving her children.
“What will they remember about me?” she asked Wyatt. Would her children see their mother’s life as one giant bad example?
Wyatt talked the woman into sitting down with her to review photographs from her childhood and young life. As they went through the pictures, the woman softened. Together they made a scrapbook of photographs that told a bigger story.
“The photographs showed the play she was in at school, and the vacations she’d taken,” Wyatt said. “Before, she’d remembered the trouble she’d been in. The negative things. The scrapbook became a testament of all the things she’d done, and it gave her a completely different understanding of herself as a person. It allowed her to see herself as having had a good life, being a good person. For the first time, she was able to forgive herself.”
And that concept — to forgive — is at the heart of the seven lessons Wyatt’s book holds for readers. Each chapter articulates it differently — “Suffering: Embrace Your Difficulties”; “Love: Let Your Heart Be Broken”; “Surrender: Let Go of Expectations”; “Impermanence: Face Your Fear” — but the theme that unites these lessons is being able to forgive.
“Forgiveness is the most difficult task for everyone,” Wyatt said. “That’s just how life is. I think all of us could come up with a list of people we’ve had unhappy endings with. But for the dying, they really start to take a different look at that, and wonder if a different outcome wasn’t possible. One of the roles that hospice and palliative care plays is to help people get to the point of being able to forgive someone.”
She and her palliative and hospice care staff noticed that patients who were able to forgive transgressions, or to receive absolution from someone they wronged, were less susceptible to physical suffering than patients who clung to bitterness.
“We saw if they could deal with their emotions, they had a more pleasant death, or a less-traumatic death. We all want for our lives to have had meaning and purpose. (We’re) helping people work through what their lives have meant. Often that means just sitting there, listening, letting them talk it out.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
