I saw recently that Barney Frank, the former Democrat representative who died yesterday, had entered hospice care.
There seemed something so healthy about it. He had finished his last book. He knew he was dying. He was seeing friends and making use of the time he had left.
Here’s how Politico wrote about those last days, as he was in them:
Frank, who served in the House from 1981 to 2013, said he feels “very good — no pain, no discomfort,” but has entered hospice care as he deals with congestive heart failure. He is remaining in his home in Ogunquit, Maine, where he moved with his husband after retiring from Congress.
“At 86, I’ve made it longer than I thought,” Frank said. “At some point, my heart’s just going to give out, and it’s reaching that stage. So I’m taking it easy at home and dealing with it by relaxing.”
And here he was in the New York Times:
Barney Frank, the retired Democratic congressman who represented Massachusetts’ Fourth District from 1981 to 2013 and is now in hospice care, is not wasting a minute of the time he has left.
Mr. Frank, 86, has been hosting a parade of friends and former colleagues at the modest hillside home he shares with his husband, Jim Ready, in Ogunquit, Maine, where lobster buoys dangle from the trees beside the driveway. He is also offering his fellow Democrats some parting thoughts on what he thinks they need to do to win again, a subject he reflects upon at length in a new book due out in September. . . .
I’m thinking less about the fact that I’m going to die soon than I thought I would. My heart is giving out, but I’m not having any pain. And I’m pleasantly surprised at the resonance this message is having. Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.
Our politics is such — especially with the spread of legal assisted suicide — that it’s hard to imagine that the word “hospice” is not intimately associated with horror. Of course, we tend to think of death that way — if we can get ourselves to think of it all. Death, however, is the natural end of life. And it comes. And there’s a richness that it can bring, if we let it.
We don’t have much of a conversation about palliative care. We don’t need to if medicine itself simply expedites death when it deems it economically or otherwise useful. But that’s not medicine, which is about helping people live. And dying is part of living. Palliative care and hospice is about that — making the living of dying possible.
God rest the soul of Barney Frank and console those who love him. You don’t have to endorse his politics or his lifestyle to appreciate the wisdom in his living to the end, with the gift of a public witness of it.
Dr. Lydia Dugdale has a book called The Lost Art of Dying. It is important. It makes clear that to fight against the culture of death that would have us embrace physician-assisted suicide, for example, is also not to insist on prolonging life by any means necessary. Barney Frank’s last days seem a testament to dying well.
Some of us grew up praying to St. Joseph to help people with a happy death. I pray we just saw some of what one looks like.