In his usually excellent column for Mint on Sunday, Charles Assisi writes today about the time after he was told that his father was nearing death.
It is a brilliant essay, where he talks about the “ecosystem” that had developed in his house over the last 18 months when his father was bedridden, and how each part of this ecosystem reacted to this news of impending death.
The part that I could connect with, and which I want to focus on in this post, however, is about the friends and relatives who came visiting. Assisi writes:
Until out of no place a steady stream of visitors started pouring in. To put it bluntly, a farcical affair. All of them looked horribly solemn. I suspect mum may have called some friends and, unwittingly, they may have called everybody else.
This concept of visiting someone on their deathbed has come to be known in my family as “the ticket”. This follows a flippant comment my grandfather had made several decades ago, when he quipped after one such visit that he had “given his ticket” to the person on his deathbed and he (the person my grandfather visited) was now free to go!
And ever since, in my family whenever someone goes to visit someone seriously ill or old, the conversation alludes to whether the “ticket has been given”. And so “did you give the ticket?” or “I gave the ticket and came” have become standard phrases after such visits.
Of course, there are people who get offended by this seemingly flippant way of referring to the last visit to someone before their impending death. They think it is impolite and rude to talk about the ticket, as if it implies one person’s wish that another person were to die. But the ticket givers seldom make such wishes or judgment. Whether they’ve given the ticket is their assessment of whether the person on the deathbed will see them another time.
I also agree with Assisi that for the family of the dying, this constant stream of ticket givers can become an annoyance. The ticket givers think they’re doing a favour by visiting and possibly offering their solidarity. However, most people overestimate their own abilities in making other people feel better, and don’t realise that relatives of the dying are sometimes better given their space as they prepare for life without the soon-to-be-departed.
And so I remember when my mother was in the ICU (almost exactly seven years ago) when a bunch of relatives had come to the hospital, possibly to give her “the ticket”. And I’d gotten really pissed off because the hospital discouraged visitors to the ICU, and I’d to beg and plead with the nurses to allow these visitors to see my mother.
That day, I remember being rude to these relatives, and asking why they bothered coming. I also remember turning them away saying the ICU wasn’t taking any more visitors that day and they cannot see my mother (who had lost consciousness by then, so she would have no way to know these people had come). I’m sure they’d’ve gone back and reported that they’d done their bit to give my mother her ticket.
Not that she needed their send-off.