“With technological advances, we have managed not only to prolong life but to complicate the process of dying,” St. Elizabeth Healthcare chaplain Susan Morgan told an audience of nearly 100 who showed up for the April 26 Cardinal Ambrozic Lecture at the University of St. Michael’s College. The annual lecture is hosted by the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute. Morgan’s lecture was titled “LIving Life’s End” and can be viewed at www.ccbi-utoronto.ca.

By putting our last days in the hands of science we risk losing perspective, said Morgan, who has helped hundreds of people to die at home.

“Death is a spiritual event with medical implications,” explained Morgan.

Teams of St. Elizabeth nurses, personal care support workers and chaplains deliver palliative care to people living out their last days at home. Morgan’s contribution is often to help families reconcile before death happens. She encourages the terminally ill to write letters to their loved ones. Forgiveness, shared hopes and gratitude are uncovered while the medical team manages pain and care workers relieve the burden on families.

“Acceptance of death arises from and is proportionate to the dignity of care,” said Morgan.

The hardest part about facing death in an individualistic culture is facing up to the reality we are all dependent and become more dependent as death approaches, said Morgan.

“It takes a village to accompany a dying person,” she said. “It is hard and exhausting to give care and especially hard for an independent person to accept it.”

Horror stories of a cold, impersonal, uncaring medical system aren’t hard to find, Morgan told the crowd of medical professionals, theology students and elderly people.

Morgan once worked with a 22-year-old nurse who had been diagnosed with fast-moving, terminal cancer. The young woman’s doctor had ended a consultation with her by standing up, heading for the door and saying, “The cancer has spread to your liver. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

But most doctors and nurses really are doing their best in difficult circumstances.

“We can only receive another’s grief and pain to the extent that we have become aware of and accepting of our own grief,” said Morgan. “That is the work of a lifetime.”

When people wish to die it most often is a reaction to loneliness or believing one has become a burden on others. By surrounding them with family and caregivers who take a genuine interest, patients can be moved away from a bitter wish for death to acceptance.

“Even before death, one may feel they are on the edge of the land of the living,” said Morgan. “And this can be a lonely place.”

The Cardinal Ambrozic Lecture is presented annually by the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute at the University of  St. Michael’s College on the campus of the University of Toronto. Ambrozic, the late archbishop of Toronto, was a driving force behind establishing the CCBI a dozen years ago.