“Death has become taboo: we are afraid of it, we are afraid of suffering, we feel ourselves alone. And society does not help us to overcome these fears, because it only tries to conceal death, to brush it under the carpet. People try to live as if death did not exist. Previously, in our region for example, people mainly died at home, in the bosom of their family. Now the family no longer feels itself able to assist the dying and asks for outside assistance”. So says Sister Marlyse Cantin, of the congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross of Ingenbohl, in the Swiss canton of Fribourg. Sister Marlyse provides a service on behalf of an association that offers assistance to the terminally ill and to their families. A qualified nurse, Sister Marlyse was the first to provide this kind of volunteer service in the canton of Fribourg, back in 1987. Since 1992 she has been responsible for the training of volunteers who provide assistance to the terminally ill. “We can now count on a hundred or so volunteers she explains -. We accept all those who feel a vocation for this kind of service, but we prepare them by special training courses”. To perform this service, says Sister Marlyse, “you need to have a great capacity for empathy and a willingness to listen. You need to be ready to offer your own affectionate presence to anyone who asks for it. You need to be respectful of the life of the other person and to have completed one’s own process of spiritual growth and self-knowledge. In a word, you need to cultivate a great love for one’s own brothers and sisters”. The association’s volunteers, she continues, “accompany the terminally ill patients in the clinics and hospitals of the region. Recently we were also called to provide a service in an intensive therapy unit. Our volunteers reach where medicine cannot reach; they alleviate the sufferings that are beyond the powers of any therapy”.
