In the Midst of Life

appeared to be related to faults in the immune system. By 1983, thousands of such deaths had been reported. The AIDS epidemic had hit a horrified and terrified America. By 1985, babies were being born with AIDS.
    Elisabeth was sixty, retired from hospital work, but running clinics, retreats and workshops for the dying in her own property in Virginia. She had around twenty acres of land, with large buildings and numerous helpers. In 1986 she received a letter scribbled on a torn scrap of paper:
    Dear Dr Ross,
I am dying of AIDS. I have a baby son who has AIDS, and I can no longer take care of him. No one will take him or touch him. How much would you charge to take care of him?
     
    Elisabeth took the child for no charge and cared for him herself. A stream of letters from desperate parents arrived in her mailbox that year, all saying much the same thing – no one would take the children. One mother said that she had approached more than seventy agencies and been turned down by them all. She died without ever knowing her daughter was safe.
    Elisabeth, ever emotional, ever passionate, boiled with rage atthe paranoia in society, which impelled people to turn their backs on these children. She opened up her home and made it into a hospice for AIDS babies. The respectable and wealthy community of Virginia was in uproar over her work. They called her the Antichrist, the AIDS lady who was trying to bring this dreadful disease into their homes. A town meeting was called and thousands of people tried to get into the tiny Methodist church; they tried to force closure of the hospice, they yelled and booed and hissed, and refused to listen to reasoned speakers. The police closed the meeting at midnight, and Elisabeth was given a police guard to prevent a lynching.
    The hospice remained, but she was persecuted by the locals. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on her lawn, and terrorised her helpers; bullets were shot through her windows and her car was repeatedly sabotaged. She was a woman of spirit, and virtually fearless, but she was getting older, running out of fire, energy and health, and a year later the hospice for AIDS babies was closed. However, not defeated, she marshalled her considerable resources to try to find other people who would adopt or foster the babies. The word spread and soon hundreds of AIDS babies were adopted by loving families who welcomed these unfortunate children. The work continues.
    In 1995 Elisabeth suffered the first of a series of small strokes. Undeterred she pressed on with life, overcoming the physical difficulties with characteristic resourcefulness. She always said, ‘I am ready to die,’ and when, in 2004, a massive stroke occurred I feel sure she was happy to be released from the earthly life to which she had given somuch.

DAME CICELY SAUNDERS
     
    (1918-2005)
     
    If I were asked to nominate one woman as the genius of the last century, I would say Dame Cicely Saunders. At the age of twenty she started nursing at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she was horrified by the neglect of patients who were dying. Many times she heard doctors say, ‘There is nothing more we can do,’ and watched them walk away. She saw cancer patients with constant, intractable pain screaming for pain killers and being denied them for the specious reason that ‘the effect of the drug will wear off as the body gets used to it and increased doses will be required, and we will be creating drug addicts’. Ten years later, in the early 1950s, I also witnessed this sort of attitude. Doctors were trained in diagnosis and active treatment. If cure was not possible, the medical approach was, ‘There is nothing more to be done.’
    Four years into her career, Cicely Saunders injured her back and had to leave nursing, so she trained as an almoner – what we would now call a medical social worker. During this time she saw another side to dying – family involvement, or lack of it, and the effect this had on the dying person. She saw that loneliness, or the feeling of rejection, causes a spiritual pain, which can be as bad, or worse, than the physical pain.
    Cicely Saunders was a deeply religious girl and faith in a loving God was the core of her life. Religious conviction is comparatively rare, and a ‘calling’ even more so. Dimly at first, but inexorably, she felt that she was being called by God to work with the dying, and to lead others in the same path. Prayer and meditation led her to examine the work of