ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE BÁS SOLAIS - DEATH WITH ILLUMINATION
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE BÁS SOLAIS - DEATH WITH ILLUMINATION – PALLIATIVE CARE INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
A dhaoine Uaisle
Is breá liom bheith anseo i bhúr measc ag an ócaid specialta seo, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhúiochas a chur in iul dibh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin.
I am honoured to join you this morning at the opening ceremony of the Bás Solais Conference. I would like to thank Dr. Michael Kearney and his colleagues on the Organising Committee for their kind invitation. It is wonderful to see that this conference has attracted so many distinguished professionals from the field of palliative care medicine world-wide. This surely must be a forum where the knowledge and wisdom your discipline has already pocketed from past and present experience meets the imagination it dares to have for its future.
The inspiring title for your conference – Bas Solais –Death with illumination, may seem an unlikely title around which doctors and terminal care professionals gather. Yet it quite deliberately seems to insist that we draw our gaze away from the darkness which more often than not surrounds our images of death.
Illumination is more than simply casting a light on a subject. It also calls us to an inner light, to a new and fresh understanding of the subject, to a more profound grasp of the phenomenon and a greater maturity in our comprehension of it.
Despite its inevitability, despite the reality that it is one of the few certainties in life, the process of dying and the phenomenon of death itself, still hold stomach - wrenching fears for most of us, fears so grim, so difficult to articulate, that the subject is often ignored, is almost taboo, even on the most obvious of death-beds.
There is a huge consumer world out there helping us to live well, but dying well is an altogether different thing. Yet it is the very thing we need most reassurance about, this great unspoken desire to die well whatever that might mean. Among you who are the thinkers and visionaries in contemporary palliative care there is a huge resource of insight and distilled wisdom which we need to ransack in order to construct a more coherent, more humanly mature approach to death.
We are fortunate to live in times when life is longer for many of us, when quality of life can be enhanced by the plethora of treatments now available and when the quality of dying can also be transformed from the cold clinicalism of the past with its focus on illness management to a new focus on person and family and death with dignity. Dying was and is always going to be a difficult journey most of us would prefer not to go but we have in the past made it an unnecessarily lonely journey. The palliative care movement has taught us that it does not have to be so lonely. It has broadened the quality of treatment available by emphasising the spiritual and psychological needs of the individual. Its emphasis on the person and the possibilities opened up by seeing dying as a complex and multi-faceted process which can be managed well or badly- these things have challenged us to use the days of ebbing life well and not as if death has already occurred, as if each day was only a day of mourning and sorrow. Here you will be free to talk of many things which sit uneasily together in medical texts but not in real life- the importance of pain management and the healing power of love, the importance of quality professional care and the miraculous power of simple human touch.
Robert Pope’s art exhibition will be on view throughout the conference. In his book ‘Illness and Healing – Images of Cancer’ he reminds us of the importance of human relationships and the power love has to bring comfort and consolation. It’s a story his own life’s experience has taught him well and we are privileged to be able to share his hard-earned insight. At a time when health services are becoming the domain of increasingly sophisticated high-tech medical marvels for which we are grateful it is worth remembering the miraculous power of a smile, a song, a gentle touch, a word of encouragement, an unexpected word of friendship. These are the very human and enduring tools which no machine except the human heart and soul can generate. Yet put us by the bedside of a terminally ill friend and we are strangled by our own inarticulateness, our own uncertainty. We miss so many chances, unsure of who owns this space- is it colonised by the medics, are we entitled to part of it and if we are do we have the skills to use it well. We all need your illumination.
Speakers at this conference will share with us their vast international experience. We are eager to listen and to learn from our international friends and colleagues and to share our own extensive Irish experiences with them.
The hospice movement in Ireland enjoys tremendous respect and support from the community. The exceptional level of voluntary support individual hospices throughout Ireland receive is testimony to the integrity of their mission- they strike a chord with people, a deep chord. From coffee mornings to mini marathons, from daffodil days to sponsored chest-hair waxing for brave or foolhardy men, the general public give generously of their time, finances and machiavellian fund-raising imaginations to support hospices throughout Ireland.
Our Lady’s Hospice, which is hosting this Conference, has a very special place in the Irish hospice movement. Its name is synonymous with a uniquely caring and compassionate embrace of the seriously ill. It knows about dying. It knows all its hidden corners, all its dark places and it has reached deeply into tem drawing them towards the light. It is trusted with our dying, trusted to help us die well. Its dedicated staff deserve the highest praise for their tireless dedication to the hospice movement, their unwavering commitment to terminally ill patients and to their families and their determination to keep finding ways of providing better and better care.
I would also like to pay tribute to the members Irish Cancer Society for their tremendous work and for their involvement in and support of this conference. I am privileged to be the society’s patron and so have some idea of the phenomenal responsibility they shoulder in the dedicated service to the seriously ill. Their support to the Palliative Home Care service has been tremendous, their funding for specialist nurses skilled in the care of patients with advanced cancer, the Night Nursing Service and the provision of Cancer Liaison Nurses in hospitals throughout the country have all brought hope, comfort, support and reassurance to countless sick men women and children and their families.
And finally we are grateful to you for coming here. You come in humility to learn from others accepting that you do not have all the answers. You come in generosity acknowledging that through your work you have a treasury of experience which can only enhance in value when it is shared with others. We hope that in sharing you will find new ways, new ideas and new source of illumination of this great darkness. I hope too that you will leave the conference refreshed, reinvigorated and renewed in your vocation to this difficult, draining but deeply rewarding work at life’s most enigmatic frontier. May you help bring about a world in which the days of dark, dread give way to a time when those gentle words Bás Solais will have a resonance and a reality for a new generation with a new attitude to dying and death.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir.