Really? He moved me to tears a third time? It's only twenty minutes long but if you have to watch again to catch the tenderness like one more rose in your bouquet, well it stacks up to an hour. But that seems like a melting flake of time given the topic. 

 

BJ Morris is the director of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. His Ted Talk about palliative care is more poetry than lecture. He sits, unusual for a presentation to a thousand scientists, wearing his favorite chocolate brown sweater. But the easy sway of his monologue helps us over the initial shock that three of his limbs are gone. 

 

BJ explores the necessary and unnecessary suffering that weaves itself into the process of dying. Back when he had his accident in college, the one that blew off an arm and two feet, he spent months as a patient, struggling with learning to be patient. One day it began to snow, and he lay in bed, imagining the white flurries he could neither see nor touch. But the next morning a nurse smuggled in a snowball and placed it on his burned skin. 

 

That was when I started to cry.

 

BJ describes the cold wetness, and how it brought him to a place of both wanting to live and acceptance if he didn't. 

 

His message, which I can only bungle with brevity, is that while all of us have parts of us that are no longer viable, we can choose to crescendo into death, rather than be repulsed by bodies that have lost so much. 

 

His hospital strives to balance humanity with procedures, imagination with standard of care. It is about the people rather than their diseases. So when a woman whose lungs were barely drawing breath asked for French cigarettes, he listened. An elderly woman was comforted by having her dog at the foot of her bed, and the staff smiled. 

 

Marriage is a place of life, and also of death. There are dreams I once believed would flourish, that have withered like a garden with no rain. There are aspects of my ego that have been blown off, leaving me to find another way to walk without limping.

 

Yet I am learning to tease out the strands of necessary and unnecessary suffering.  

 

"Those who trust in the Divine are altogether different. Though concerned about the morrow, yet are they unconcerned, in that they are not anxious, let alone worried, when they give thought to the morrow. They remain even-tempered whether or not they realize desires, and they do not grieve over loss; they are content with their lot. If they become wealthy they do not become infatuated with wealth; if they are promoted to important positions they do not consider themselves worthier than others. If they become poor they are not made miserable either; if lowly in status they do not feel downcast. They know that for those who trust in the Divine all things are moving towards an everlasting state of happiness, and that no matter what happens at any time to them, it contributes to that state."

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