Friday, April 10, 2009

PENDLETON
The sacred art of living and dying
Hospice program helps inmates deal with death

By KATHY ANEY
The East Oregonian

Friday, April 10, 2009


Gerald Smith is philosophical about having a fatal disease.

The Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution inmate knows he likely brought it upon himself, probably during a time of intravenous cocaine use and living homeless with a golden retriever in his Corvette.

But, during the year or so since his diagnosis of chronic Type A Hepatitis C, he's worked hard to heal the demons inside himself with the help of hospice volunteers Miguel Oseguera and Jon Johnston, also inmates at EOCI.

Smith, Oseguera and Johnston sat in plastic chairs in the prison chapel with 20 other inmates learning about the art of living and dying. One of the presenters, Rod Harwood, chaplain at St. Anthony Hospital, said the training has never before gone inside Oregon prison walls. The Sacred Art of Living & Dying is a four-unit program started in Bend by former Pendleton resident Mary Groves and her husband Richard in 1997.

Together, the men in blue, many of them hospice volunteers, learned how to die a good death, and in the process, to live a good life.

"The sacred art of dying is also the sacred art of living," Harwood said.

Learning to diagnose spiritual pain is part of the process. You don't have to look too hard to find mass quantities of spiritual pain in a prison setting, Harwood said, but there's plenty on the outside, too.

Spiritual pain comes when a person feels hopeless, feels a lack of meaning, refuses to forgive or is disconnected from something important, such as a person or a career, he said. The spiritual pain eventually manifests itself into physical symptoms.

"The ancients understood this full well," Harwood said. "They understood this 1,000 years ago."

Harwood often finds the phenomenon with men who retire and feel disconnected.

"A couple years after retirement, they're in the hospital ill," he said. "Oftentimes, they die - they've lost their connection, their community."

An inmate sleeps in the hospice room at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution.Staff photo by Kathy Aney

Western medicine, he said, has partitioned off the physical from the spiritual.

He gestured toward a framed print at the front of the room, next to a burning candle. The scene showed the medieval l'Hotel-Dieu (God's Hotel), a hospice in Burgundy, France. Because the hospice had a glass floor and was built over a river, patients could hear the soothing sound of rippling water.

Just about everything in the hospice - eating utensils, plates and even bedpans - were made of gold.

"They have something to teach us," Harwood said.

Dealing with inner turmoil pays big dividends for both the living and the dying, he said, but it's not easy.

"You have to lean into the pain to find the answers," he said. "If you run away from the pain, suppress it or deny it, you won't find them."

Smith, the prison's first hospice patient, credits Oseguera and Johnston for helping him work through his own spiritual pain.

The men, who have cells next to each other, often talk as they walk around the track and play chess. They pray together in the chapel.

Smith, in prison because of a kidnapping conviction, has had longer to work through his spiritual pain than he thought he'd have. Doctors originally gave him only seven weeks to live. He's survived for more than a year, but he knows the odds of living another year are against him.

"My release date is 2019," he said. "I'm not expected to make it."

Since Smith's diagnosis, another inmate entered hospice care and died. Oseguera and Johnston said going the last leg of the man's journey changed them.

"As a person reaches the horizon, they're seeing things we've never dreamed of," Johnston said. "They can teach us."

Being part of the process "is a privilege and an honor," Oseguera said. "It teaches you how to accept death."

Harwood hopes to offer the program to the Pendleton community before the end of the year.