End of Life: Our Fear of Pain
TEXT: Hebrews 2: 5-11, 14-18
Sunday, August 18, 2002
This series on death and dying was not written to be morbid. It was written because these are issues we will all face in our lives. Although you may not leave here inspired, you will leave informed on how to make a decision on what I consider to be three of the most profound moral issues of our day. The first issue is the sanctity of life, the second issue is human sexuality, and the third issue involves this cluster of moral issues surrounding a natural death or deciding the timing of our death for ourselves. If this subject causes you tremendous pain so that you can’t remain in the sanctuary, there is a chapel downstairs. I encourage you to go down there and then after the service I encourage you to come forward and pray with me. I will not shake hands today. I will be up front for those who really need to have a prayer for healing in this area.
Three weeks ago we started a series defining what it means to terminate life and what choices exist for Christians. We can do about anything except taking our own life or the life of a loved one. We can keep ourselves or our loved one comfortable, we can withhold treatment, or we can administer high doses of pain medication when the intent is to relieve suffering but not to take the life of another person.
Today I would like to deal with the issue of pain. The stories of pain that some of you are feeling right now are remarkable, and how do we deal with pain? If the only Christian death is a natural death, then what do we do if we encounter this issue of pain? Isn’t meaningless pain cruel, and what are our options? How can we watch our loved ones suffer? Or, is there hope on this issue, and there is. For the Christian there is always hope.
Medically, no one knows when the end really is near. There is a thing in medicine called “spontaneous healing.” And there is a thing in church groups known as “divine healing.” If we are to experience death as a Christian, even then there is hope because death has been robbed of its power and we will not die. We will experience eternal life. I can make a promise to you that you will be healed no matter what. The medical profession cannot guarantee you healing. God can. Most often, healing takes place in this life, but sometimes it takes place in the afterlife.
What do we do about the issue of pain? When we talk about pain, what pain are we referring to? There are many different types of pain when a person is at the end of life. So often, we confuse other types of pain for physical pain. We see our loved one suffering and ask, “Can’t you relieve their pain?” We think it is physical, but it isn’t always physical.
There are at least five different types of pain:
1. One has a physical root.
2. There is also emotional or psychological pain, and sometimes this kind is worse. This is comprised of the feelings generated by going through the dying process or by watching our loved one go through the dying process. We can experience incredible emotions of frustration and panic and fear and assurance and joy and hope.
3. There is relational pain, the unfinished business in our lives and the regrets that we have about our relationships.
4. There is a fourth pain that isn’t spoken much about and that’s spiritual pain. This is the dread that one feels when one realizes that he is mortal and that he will die. That can be a very difficult, horrible experience for some.
5. The fifth pain that people never talk about but which is very real is financial pain. I can’t tell you how many people, looking at a dying parent, asks, “Can’t you relieve their pain?” However, they want their loved one simply to be put out of their misery, but the real misery is the thought that the inheritance is being drained and they can’t see the medical profession getting it. The real pain for some is financial, and if you doubt that just watch the wrangling that goes on after the death of a loved one.
To confuse things even more is the issue of the level of pain. How intense is it, because it is different for everyone. Everyone has a different threshold of pain. I learned this as a parent. We were on vacation and one daughter got stung by a bee. I’m in the house and hear this blood curdling scream, and I thought that she had lost an arm or was hit by a car. As I ran to help her, I found out that all the commotion was due to a bee sting. Another daughter will get the same bee sting, she’ll come inside and rub it, and then go on her way.
An elderly woman in a nursing home was screaming in pain and the doctors were trying to find the source of her physical pain. The family was upset because the doctors couldn’t do anything for her. This went on for weeks, and no one knew what to do because they can’t find the source for her pain. One day a cleaning lady was in the room, dropped her sponge by the bed, and reached down to pick it up. She looked at the woman in bed screaming and reached out to take her hand. She sat with the woman and held her hand, and the screaming stopped. She was screaming because she was lonely. She was experiencing relational pain, not physical pain.
How real is the pain and whose pain are we talking about, because that can be very confusing as well. Is it the pain of the individual who is suffering, or is it the pain of the family member who is observing? I’ve seen loved ones die pain-free, but during the counseling afterwards the family talks about how horrible it was to see their loved one in such intense pain. What pain are we talking about? The pain they were experiencing was emotional pain and spiritual pain.
When I worked in a cancer ward, I saw individuals die pain-free but the family thought it was a horrible experience. I saw a gentleman who chose not to take pain medication because he wanted to be conscious with his family. The family spent his last days together reading scripture and singing songs. In the moment of his dying, they were worshiping and praising God as he breathed his last. The family cried tears, not of pain but of joy because it was the most beautiful thing they had ever experienced. They had experienced the power of God in a room with a person they loved.
What makes the difference between a person who dies restless and cursing and a person who dies at peace and pain-free? The answer is in the confusing mix of the amount of medication, the person’s pain threshold, the level of the care received from the family, the inner strength and disposition of the person, their relational health and their spiritual condition. This mix is unique to everyone and is undefinable.
When we talk about the issue of pain, it is important for us to be very clear whether we are talking about your pain or your loved one’s pain. Are we talking about physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, spiritual pain, financial pain or relational pain. It is important for us to be very cautious and discerning about our conclusions.
Pain is a very good and positive thing. I know that seems foreign to people’s thinking because in our culture, pain is something to be avoided at all costs. There is a reason why God put in our bodies the ability to sense pain because unless you experience pain, you will die very young. God has put sensors all over our bodies so that when something breaks down, it can be diagnosed and fixed quickly. It is important for us to listen to those sensors. We have physical sensors, emotional sensors, relational sensors and spiritual sensors. When we experience pain, it is a warning signal that something in us needs to be fixed and you need to become attentive to it.
What happens when the “Check Engine” light flashes on your dashboard? What happens if you ignore it and keep on driving? You will fry the engine, ruin your car, and it will die an early death. The same thing is true about any pain we feel wherever it’s at. This is God’s warning light and you need to pay attention, find the root and deal with it.
We will talk about three areas of pain and how to deal with it.
The first is the easiest–physical pain. I have experienced this three times. Once I fell from a three storey building and broke my back and shifted the whole spine. The other was with my wife in our third miscarriage. The other was with my daughter, Alison, after her second kidney surgery. She went through spasms that lasted 24 hours a day for three days. It is easier to experience excruciating pain than to see a loved one go through it. You can deal with your own pain, but you are helpless to deal with someone else’s pain.
Through these experiences, I learned something that was saddening. That is the fundamentalism within the medical profession that one-size-fits-all when it comes to pain medication. Alison was allowed to suffer tremendous pain because a label on a bottle said, “Once every six hours.” The medical profession fails to take two things into account: One, everyone’s threshold of pain is different. Two, everyone’s metabolism is different. Some people will go through pain medication very quickly and they need more. Some people process it very slowly and they don’t need as much.
There are a lot of issues the medical profession has to deal with, but the answer is not to take a person’s life when dealing with pain. That is one answer that is being offered today. The answer is simply to reform the medical profession. Twelve years ago I worked in a teaching hospital and I was told at that time that we have all the medications needed to keep people from experiencing excruciating pain. All we need to do is teach doctors how to administer this medication. That’s the remedy, not the taking of a person’s life but to educate ourselves and reform the medical system on this issue of pain management.
We need to have doctors working with us that we know and who know us because doctors can regulate pain medication when they know your history. It is important for us to develop a long-term relationship with a doctor.
When you are with a loved one who is near the end of his or her life and they slip into a rhythmic pattern of breathing, it can seem very painful. All the studies performed about this, however, tell us that it is not. The person is uncon-scious and is absolutely pain-free. By the grace of God, they could be in heaven, or they could be experiencing their most cherished memories in life, or they could be walking with Jesus. If you choose to be with your loved one until the very end and you experience the very intense, noisy sounds of the body shutting down, realize that the person is pain-free and unconscious.
What do we do about emotional pain? This can be caused by grief, by the sights, sounds and smells of a hospital. So often we see the IV’s and the bruises and the illness and we think this looks painful, but it is not. I put a glass through my hand one time and have the scars from it. Every time I look at the scar, I feel pain but my hand does not hurt. It is not real pain but emotional pain. There are the feelings of regret and of being a burden to a loved one. There is the pain of imagining what they are going through and the pain of the unknown.
Is it right to put our loved one to sleep so that they can avoid this issue of emotional pain? No. The answer is to listen to the alarm that is going off in your heart and in your mind and discover the root cause of it. Learn from this, allow God to teach you from it, and allow Him to heal us.
The Apostle Paul experienced physical pain and he asked God to take it away. And God said no. II Corinthians 12: 7-10 tell us why, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness so that Christ’s power may rest on me. For when I am weak, there I am strong.” Paul learned to rely upon God through his suffering.
Jesus in Hebrews 5: 8-9, said, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered. Once made perfect, he became the source of eternal life for all who obey him.” Even our call to worship reminds us that God experienced suffering through Jesus and he learned to be sympathetic towards us.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stated that grief is an emotional pain and that we have something to learn in all five stages. If we allow ourselves to learn, we will come to a point of acceptance and absolute perfect peace. The answer to emotional pain is to face it and to learn from it.
The last pain we will deal with is spiritual pain. For those who advocate the taking of a life or the taking of one’s own life, it comes down to this issue. This is the cloud of fear and dread, the dark sky we feel within our soul when we talk about our mortality. Is the answer to avoid the question, “What about God, what about the afterlife, what about Heaven, what happens when I die?” In his book, Scott Peck describes a woman named Victoria. She was a dignified woman who was well off who gave instructions that near her death she wanted her family to be with her while she took sleeping pills and died. What stands out in this story is the fact that she did this with the motivation to avoid physical pain, but the reality was that she didn’t experience much physical pain. She did experience “excruciating, humiliating effects from chemotherapy.” The family had advocated the taking of one’s life, but they said this after the experience: “The fact is that a suicide is a suicide, over-determined, sad and somewhat toxic. It touches everyone. It is a let-down.” As a result, none of the family members have been able to talk about their mother’s death since.
The most troubling thing about this whole issue of avoiding death and dying is the fact that people leave God out of it. Peck says, “When we die, this is a powerful business and it is here at last that we are beginning to discover our heady domain.” The question is, is it really our domain? When you take your life, you are saying in effect that it is your soul and there is no giver of it. This denies God. Peck picks up on this later in his book, saying:
“There are two reasons I am critical about euthanasia. One is distinctively theological and relates to all suicide in general. As our creator and nurturer, God is as much a shareholder in our lives as we are ourselves. As creatures with free will, we have the power to kill ourselves. Whether we have the ethical and moral right to do so is a different matter entirely. Through the act of suicide, one sets the limits of one’s death without reference to the life giver. This is a denial of God and of God’s relationship with the soul. To kill oneself in order to avoid the existential suffering of aging and dying is to short-change oneself of that learning. It is also, I believe, to short-change God who designed us for such learning.”
What’s the answer then? When that spiritual alarm goes off, we need to seek God’s answers to this question. If you get your house in order, it is a very beautiful thing. Time and time again, when a person discovers God in their live, it is a beautiful passing.
What have we learned so far? We have learned that there are many types of pain and it is important for us to be clear about the type of pain. Pain is a warning light to remind us that something needs to be fixed. We shouldn’t neglect it or run away from it. We need to seek solutions. For physical pain, it is pain medication. For emotional pain, it is a counselor or perhaps a pastor. For spiritual pain, it is God’s promises to us.
I would like to conclude by giving you God’s answer to this issue of spiritual pain. “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you and brought you close to himself by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”
Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me all who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. You will find rest for your soul.”
Is your soul troubled about this issue? If so, come to Jesus and give him your burdens.
