This may be a tacky comparison, and if so, please forgive me, but I don’t feel like talking about the real situation, so we’re going to talk about cancer, instead. Compared to most people my age — and many who are older than me — I have experienced a lot of grief in my [relatively young] life. I have attended a couple dozen funerals (conservative estimate) and could check off multiple items on the Life Stress Inventory.

In fact, as a point of reference, I just took the inventory and scored 508. The quiz told me: “OVER 300 POINTS: This score indicates a major life crisis and is highly predictive (80%) of serious physical illness within the next 2 years.”

Yeah, um, things are a wee bit frazzled in my life right now.

So, back to the cancer analogy. I lost a dear family friend to cancer, and I’ve been thinking about her lately. She was sick for a very long time. Then, she’d perk up a bit, and treatment would seem to be working. Then, she’d get sick again. Then, they’d try some experimental stuff, and she might or might not respond. I had the privilege of talking to her on the phone shortly before she died, and I was thankful to have the opportunity to tell her that I loved her.

In her last days, the focus seemed to be on palliative care. I’m no healthcare professional, but from what I understand, palliative care is when you try to manage the pain, stress, etc. to make someone more comfortable when there really is no hope for recovery.

No hope. That’s a hard thing to wrap my head around, as a believer in Christ. I want to believe that there is always hope. I believe in a God who can (and does!) heal miraculously. Sometimes, for reasons I don’t think I’ll ever understand, that healing seems to come by means of letting that person’s body die.

It’s one thing to provide palliative care, in a physical sense. There are medications available to help alleviate pain, and so forth. But, how do you provide palliative care when the problems aren’t physical? What can you do for a dying relationship, for instance? Hope and pray that things will change? Wait for things to change? Try to force things to change?

And when they don’t …?

There’s no palliative care for relationships. You can try not to hurt people; you can try to ease the tension, but it’s going to be painful, no matter what you do.