Thank you very much.
I want to quickly start off by talking about Dying Healed. What I would like to bring to bear on this committee is the importance of volunteerism and its crucial role in our society, especially concerning matters of elder care and end of life care. I think a spirit of volunteerism in this regard would and should relieve pressure on governmental bodies, especially at the federal level, to spend tax funds on expensive programs that could be better run at a grassroots level. Let me give you some background.
In 2015, I began to put together a program called Dying Healed. The name of the program came from something which Dr. Margaret Somerville, formerly the head of the centre for law, medicine and ethics at McGill University, said at a conference that I attended. I will paraphrase her words here. She said that we have to rediscover the value of life at the end of life and that we must impress upon people the importance of making use of this time, not so much to heal our bodies, but to heal our souls, our relationships, our regrets, and our sorrows.
The term “dying healed” is a concept that explains how a person can use the later stages of life to perhaps accept their physical limitations, but use the wisdom of their lifetime to heal their past wounds and become mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. In practice, however, it became manifestly clear to me that human beings are not islands unto themselves and that the process of finding peace in old age or at the end of life is integrally tied to the other people who inhabit our world. I then realized that to really deal with the looming crisis of an aging population, volunteerism had to be at the very core.
That is why we designed the Dying Healed program. The program seeks to reach out to potential volunteers of all stripes and inform them in concepts around the end of life. It seeks to empower everyday people and give them an awareness of the problem and the confidence to do something about it. However, the doing part is more about being than doing, and this is very key to the dying healed program.
To quote directly from our training manual:
The purpose of the Dying Healed Program is not to create professionals but educated lay people confident in the fact that their presence at the bedside of a lonely or dying person is an invaluable service. If a person is alone, suffering in any way or at the end of life Dying Healed volunteers can simply be there with the conviction that their presence can bring love, hope and a sense of belonging to those who suffer.
I want to be very clear here that this program is not intended to replace any currently existing volunteer training program that is being held in our institutions across Canada. Think of this as a preparatory training and volunteer recruitment program, reaching out through churches, mosques, synagogues, community centres, and home-based visitation programs, to give people a first taste of what volunteerism like this might be like, how incredibly important it is, and most especially, how vital the power of human presence alone is to changing the life of an elderly person struggling with social isolation and all that it entails.
In a 2016 study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, it was found that a majority of people who died by euthanasia in the Netherlands for so-called psychiatric reasons had complained of loneliness. The researchers found that loneliness or social isolation was a key motivation behind the euthanasia requests of 37 of 66 cases reviewed, a figure representing 56% of the total.
A tireless advocate for the vulnerable members of our society, Jean Vanier, wrote:
To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefore unlovable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
As we know, Jean Vanier set up homes for the disabled in Canada and around the world.
Dying Healed volunteers are given training and formation in the issues surrounding palliative care, medical aid in dying, the meaning of human suffering, and the power of human presence to heal and bring dignity to others.
I want to share with you my own personal experience of visiting a young man from Algeria who had been a child soldier and prisoner of war from the age of nine to the age of 16. He lived in Downtown Eastside, in a filthy hotel room. I worked with a group of volunteers who went every Saturday morning just to sit with him. His isolation was so severe that at first he could only stand facing the wall, with his back to us, while a colleague and I would sit, barely saying a word. But he wanted us to be there. Over a period of two years, he slowly began to talk to us, and soon, through our regular visits, he began to share his story, and then seek advice and help. Eventually, he got a job and became a functioning member of society. It all began with us simply being there, through the power of human presence.
We must reach out to those who feel that life has no value, to the elderly and the dying, those most at risk of giving up and most susceptible to the new ideas that have come with the advent of assisted death. I am particularly concerned about suicide contagion in nursing homes where one person makes a request for medical aid in dying. How does that affect the others who are struggling with loneliness and its attendant sense of despair?
I feel that society must cherish our elderly, who have done so much for so long for society, yet elder abuse is definitely on the rise. The elderly live longer. With demographic challenges that result in fewer family caregivers than in previous generations, the future may easily tend toward an ever more precarious situation for those most vulnerable people.
The Dying Healed program was launched officially in June of this year and is now in 15 communities across Canada. We are just now getting feedback on the training program itself and the experiences of the volunteers who have gone on to spend time with those most in need.
In short, I want to emphasize that the reliance on grassroots programs such as the Dying Healed program, already working in communities to identify and meet the needs of seniors, will be much more effective than a government-sponsored project. With more funding for our own work, we could, for example, hire a director of outreach and get this program into tens, if not hundreds, of communities across Canada. I do believe that this is a more reasonable and responsible use of our tax dollars.
Thank you.