A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life

By Patricia M. Nesbitt and Kristin Camitta Zimet. Baltimore Yearly Meeting, 2024. 212 pages. $18/paperback.

“What happens when we die?” my friend John Fatula asked in the final weeks of his life.

With A Tender Time, Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s End of Life Working Group has given us a wonderful guide to facing our own death and a guide for when we accompany loved ones on their final journeys. In the first part of this book, Patricia M. Nesbitt and Kristin Camitta Zimet invite us to begin with ourselves, with a glance at Mary Oliver’s question about what we will do with our “one wild and precious life.” Chapter titles like “Completing Your Life: Spirit-Led Aging”; “Reaching the End: Spirit-Led Dying”; and “Gifting the Future” set the tone.

With aging comes the need to make hard decisions. For example, I tossed my car keys in a drawer on my eighty-seventh birthday this past April—wasn’t easy. Other boxes to check? Power of attorney. You need someone to make decisions regarding your healthcare when you can’t; you need someone to manage the disposition of your estate according to your last will. What do you want done with your body when you die? (I hope to have a green burial at a local burial ground.) What about your memorial service? (I want someone to read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”)

We suffer losses: those things we can’t do anymore. But we can still do stuff. Nesbitt and Zimet gently remind us of the ways the glass is still half-full, even when it is half-empty. I marveled at feeling a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders when I quit driving and could stop worrying about causing an auto accident.

Perhaps most importantly, we must tend to the state of our soul. The wisdom distilled in A Tender Time encourages us to live with an attitude of compassion for ourselves and others as we face unresolved situations with family and friends. We can just let those hurts go. It is sweet to bask in the joy of living each day with a sense of gratitude for all that life gives us.

Back to John’s question: “What happens when we die?” Well, of course, we don’t actually know. It seems that the best we can do is use the metaphor of going on a journey. Nesbitt and Zimet include lovely stories of people having a sense of being welcomed by family and friends as they lay dying.

The second half of the book shifts away from facing our own aging to the many issues involved with being a caregiver. The authors give a detailed picture of what that’s about, including how relationships can get turned upside down, as in the case of caring for a parent: you switch roles. When you are a primary caregiver, you’re like the midwife during a birth, intimately assisting the labor of transition, hands wet with human fluids. They note that it can bring out the best, and worst in you. All your spiritual resources are called upon. They write that our most important service as a primary caregiver is simply to be fully present, emotionally and spiritually. And they instruct, in the midst of all the things you as a caregiver have to do, be sure to take care of yourself, which includes asking for and accepting help from your friends.

I love their suggestions about the role of the caregiving friend. First of all, if you think you might be a caregiving friend, don’t wait until you’re being asked. They write, “Go ahead and offer. It will be a gift to yourself as well as to your friend.” I served as a caregiving friend to John, who lived with the complications of Lewy body dementia for several years. We met for lunch every Tuesday in 2013. We talked and talked some more, sometimes with blurry eyes and runny noses, other times, just laughing at ourselves. Priceless! How did we get started? I remember saying to him, “John, I have an idea.” The year turned out to be his last; John passed away that December.

In the final section of A Tender Time, Nesbitt and Zimet have compiled a “Treasury of Resources,” 25 pages of queries and suggestions, and another 25 pages of selected readings (over 200 titles) on all the topics covered in the book. A Tender Time is a crucial resource for Friends today and should be in every meeting’s library. And, oh yes, don’t forget: Your meeting is there for you. Just ask for support. It’s what they do.

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Brad Sheeks, retired from hospice nursing, is a member of Newtown (Pa.) Meeting. He is the author of “Care of the Dying: A Spiritual Discipline,” published in Friends Journal in July 2004, and “Tuesdays with John,” published in Pennswood Village’s Village Voices newsletter in 2023.