Keep You Right Here

To care for others is a privilege, and it is also pain.

To be with somebody through their highest highs and their lowest lows is not something that you can take lightly.

I've sat with people through their dying moments. I've sat with families who don't want to be on their own with their loved one who is hovering between life and death. I've been the one to hold their hand and help them through.

I sat with my best friend while he was dying. This man taught me more about loyalty, friendship and love than I thought was possible. He looked after me, and I looked after him. We clicked straight away and were inseparable. You know some people are just fated to be in each others lives. As he got more and more ill, I spent more and more time sitting with him. Calming him, keeping him company, trying to make him smile. This man had been ill for a long time. He knew deep down it was his final illness, but I was in denial. He tried to warn me, and I didn't listen.

The few nights before he died I stayed with him. I wrapped myself in a blanket next to his bed and I held his hand all night so he knew there was always someone there. Poor man having my sweaty hands all over him.

To sit alone in darkness when you're staring death in the face must be terrifying. And only a few weeks before I had promised him I would never abandon him as so many others had as his illness progressed.

My best friend's body was tired, ready to go, but his mind wasn't. This man was the most mentally strong person I've met. Knowing him was a lesson in stubbornness itself. He was alive, because he wanted to be. He was more alive than most people, more vibrancy and vitality despite his illness than everyone else going about their day taking everything for granted. He was not the type to just die on me.

But he did. Someone else was with him that night but when he called me at 5am I knew it was bad, although when I got there he seemed calm.

I'm a carer, and I've been present at death. People tend to have a moment or a few hours of calmness. It's like they fully realise, and they know. And they know things won't be so bad. I know of people who see visions of passed over friends and family coming to collect them. I know of people talking about 'taking a journey'. Other people get a second wind, where their energy picks up, they can get out of bed and do things. I went into one woman on palliative care a few days before she died, and she was sitting up out of bed in high spirits drinking red wine with her family, saying goodbye.

The calmness didn't last, but we spent the morning doing his favourite things. Chatting about nothing, watching football, listening to his favourite songs. When he started to fall away from me I held his hand and stroked his head and told him he wasn't alone. He was gone before the ambulance arrived. It was quick, it was probably painless, and it was in his home where he wanted to be. It wasn't pretty - death isn't, it never is. But he left us with dignity, he left feeling loved and he left on his own terms.

To be with someone at this moment at the end of their life is a privilege. To help them let go and pass away feeling dignity, warmth and love is one of the most precious things you can do. I kept my promise to him. And I didn't abandon him right to the very end.

Ram Dass said: When all is said and done. we're all just walking each other home.

We are.