“I made a mistake. I made the wrong decision,” the wife of the recently deceased man said.
Several years ago, I spoke at the Centra Hospital in Lynchburg, Virginia. There were about 50 people in the room, including members of the clergy, physicians, nurses, social workers, and just plain folks. I divided my presentation, the first half devoted to helping patients and families make end-of-life decisions, and the second half to the emotional and spiritual issues at the end of life.
When I invited the audience to speak, a lady raised her hand and told her friend’s story. Her friend’s husband had been in a nursing home and on a feeding tube. He was not considered to have the capacity to make his own medical decisions, so all the medical treatment decisions rested on his wife.
On more than one occasion, the patient pulled out the feeding tube. This lady suggested to her friend that perhaps her husband was saying he did not want the feeding tube. Her friend always responded, “He doesn’t know what he is doing.” They always reinserted the tube and resumed the feedings.
“I should have left the tube out and let him die sooner.”
About six months after the patient died, the lady visited her friend. The now-widow said, “I made a mistake. I made the wrong decision. I should have left the tube out and let him die sooner.”
At times, I have heard other family caregivers express similar regrets about decisions made. “We shouldn’t have sent mom back to the ICU.” “I wish we had never started the feeding tube.” “We kept the chemo going way too long.”
You can never make the wrong decision
When I hear remorse like this, I always tell people, “You can never make the wrong decision. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time.” In my 28 years of being close to decision-makers, I have never thought someone made a decision intending to harm a patient. People always want the best for the patient. It is only in looking back that they say a decision was a mistake.
I even say “you can’t make a wrong decision” to people in the throes of a decision-making process. I hope to ease the burden they are placing on themselves. These choices can be hard enough. I want to assure these burdened families they can’t make the wrong decision. You just do the best you can with the information you have at the time.
[A version of this blog post appeared in 2011.]
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Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.
Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
Judith Graham
“The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.… Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.… We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
I’ve had the opportunity to officiate many funerals over the years. This was supposed to be one of the “easy” ones. The dead man’s family had a relative who once was a member of my church in Vienna, Virginia, back in the day. None of the family attended that church now — or any church. So, when the man died suddenly of a heart attack at 64, they turned to us for a minister to conduct the service — kind of a rent-a-preacher.
FORT BLAKELEY, ALA. March 1, 2022: What if your teenage son went off to war — fought in one battle — died in that battle — and then you find out his death was actually after the war had ended — AND your side lost the war? Today, we would say parents of these dead soldiers would have complicated grief. Indeed.
Nowadays people handle loveless marriages differently. My friend’s husband left her for another woman after 30 years of marriage. A couple of months after he moved out, he told my friend, “I feel for her what I always wanted to feel for you.” She thinks he never loved her.
Which is the better way? Staying in a loveless marriage or leaving it to find your true love? Or is there a third way? Falling in love with your spouse. It would have taken work and probably therapy. There must have been some small spark of love at the start. Perhaps that was an ember that could have been rekindled.
“I know he would never want to be kept alive like this,” she said to me over the sound of a machine forcing air into her husband’s lungs. He lay motionless, eyes closed. He had been like this for months after arriving at the nursing home from the hospital.
Since she was Jewish and asked this question, I gave her a copy of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 
I listened to all 48 hours of this 900+ page book. It was worth every minute. Grant overcame so many setbacks to succeed as a general and President. Most significantly, according to Chernow, was his conquering his struggles with alcohol, a fact he does not mention in his own memoir. Had the Civil War never happened, history might not have known the name of U.S. Grant. It was his strategy to cut off the Southern states from beyond the Mississippi River with the fall of Vicksburg (July 1863), send Sherman through Georgia (1864), and capture Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. There was no finer moment in his life than when he offered generous terms of surrender to Lee. He hoped to begin the healing of a fractured nation. Sadly, as President, he had to fight the South again as it rose in the K.K.K. We are fortunate, as a nation, that Grant and Lincoln rose to the top when we needed them.
Author Ty Seidule was born on July 3rd into a family culture steeped in the myth of righteous cause for which we Southerners fought. When people said, “too bad you weren’t born on the 4th,” he’d reply that he was glad to have been born on the day of Pickett’s charge (there it is again). Seidule rose through the ranks in the U.S. Army and taught at West Point. Through his academic research and soul-searching, he concluded that the “lost cause” myth of the South was wrong. According to Seidule, the Civil War was about slavery and the Confederate soldiers who took up arms against the U.S. government were traitors. He makes a compelling argument that we no longer need to honor these traitors with monuments or U.S. Army bases.
Like most, I knew of Chamberlain for only a few hours of his life on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg. He commanded the 20th Maine at the extreme end of the Union line on Little Round Top. His troops were under repeated assault and running out of ammunition. Had he failed in defending his position, the entire U.S. Army on the field could have been destroyed in a flanking maneuver by the advancing Confederates. He ordered his men to fix bayonets, and they charged downhill, capturing more than 100 Southerners and saving the day. Many books and movies have captured this one moment. He was a college professor before the war. He became a college president and served four years as governor after returning to Maine. One other moving scene in Chamberlain’s military career was the last day of the war. He was the commander in charge of the ceremony at Appomattox, where the defeated rebels would surrender their arms. In the spirit that Grant set in the terms of surrender, Chamberlain ordered his men to salute their defeated foes, now countrymen once again.
With all believing God is on their side in a war, it is especially hard for the losers to explain what happened. This presented an exceptional problem for the dominant version of Christianity in the South (evangelical Protestant). In their view, the Yankees were more secular, more liberal, more urban, and less devoted Christians. This book by Charles Wilson, a former professor at the University of Mississippi and fellow church member with me in Oxford, explains the mental and theological gymnastics my Southern ancestors went through to explain how God was on their side. God sided with the South because their cause was righteous, but the North’s industrial strength was too much even for God. Dr. Wilson recently gave three lectures on this topic at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in 
