SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

Rebecca Dryden says adieu to favorite view

Sentimental Journey program offers last rides to terminally ill

By Jim Sheeler

The day before her 42 nd birthday, Rebecca Dryden peered through the window of an ambulance van as the golden reflections of fall blurred past her face – a face, in contrast, drained of color.

Considering her blood pressure, she should have been asleep, at the very least, she had to be incredibly weak. Instead she smiled each time the ambulance turned another corner up into the mountains, through another brilliant yellow aspen grove.

Though the cancer was surging throughout her body, she was on very little medication. She didn't want the experience clouded.

“Oh,” she said in a thin voice from the back of the ambulance “Oh, that's so beautiful.”

When she left the East Coast, she had told many people she was headed to Colorado for a vacation. In reality, she knew she had returned to her former home state to die.

From inside the ambulance, sitting next to her new husband, she watched as one of the primary reasons for her return appeared through the window.

New journey for Boulder

On that day in October, Rich Armstrong drove the ambulance van that meandered its way up toward the mountains. A paramedic with Boulder's American Medical Response company. Armstrong had volunteered to transport Rebecca Dryden to Brainard Lake as part of the Boulder area's first Sentimental Journey.

Begun about four years ago by two paramedics from American Medical Response in Colorado Springs, the Sentimental Journey program pairs paramedics with terminally ill patients who would like to travel somewhere special near the end of their life, but do not have transportation.

Ein the few years of the program's existence, the paramedics have taken patients to the Garden of the Gods park near Colorado Springs, the Denver Symphony – one patient even wanted to go to Wao-Mart. Some of them want to be driven around downtown, a lot of them just want to go home.

For Rebecca Dryden and her susband of 10 months, Bob Ferrier, there was no question that the trip would be to the mountains. During the entire ride up to the park they sat toghther on a bench seat at the back of the van.

“She wanted to get out in the fresh air, and it's so wonderful they were able to provide that service.” Ferrier said. “Her spirit was so wonderful. When we were hiking, she would pause at every plant, every tree, every mushroom to tell me about it. She'd always be pausing to look at the plants.”

During the journey, the paramedics' primary function is to provide transportation – not medical assistance. They can bring an ambulance or a stripped-down wheelchair van, such as the one used for Dryden's ride to Brainard Lake.

The paramedics volunteer their time. The journey, they say, is hardly just another day at work.

“In this field, we tend to think that our whole focus is on saving the patient, and wouldn't think of letting the patient go.” said Marcia Olson, a community outreach coordinator for American Medical Response. “It's been unique to our own people to think about dying, and how to help this person live out their last days.”

A letter

I ‘m living out the remaining days of my life here in Colorado in an environment of love and support that is beyond anything I had hoped for or have ever experienced before… Somehow I always knew that someday I would come home. That has now happened for me in my heart and it is there that I so strongly feel a connection. My spirit remains strong and grows stronger as my body gets progressively weaker and weaker and I see so clearly now that all that really matters is the peace we all seek.

- from a letter written by Rebecca Dryden to her friends.

Missing sunlight

during one of her first meetings with Rebecca Dryden, Registered Nurse and Case Manager for Hospice of Boulder County Anne-Marie Gordon-Leon was going down the list of standard questions when she noticed a special date. She mentioned to Rebecca that her birthday, Oct. 2 was only about a month away.

Rebecca looked at her and said, “It is. And I'm going to be here for my birthday.”

“She had a list that she was crossing off, and I find it's often that way with people who are dying.” Gordon-Leon said, “Some people wait until Christmas, or they wait until a wedding anniversary and then they seem to be able to emotionally let go and peacefully die.”

As a Hospice nurse, working primarily with people who are dying at home, Gordon-Leon realized there was something else Rebecca wanted to cross off her list, something else she needed to do.

“A lot of (terminally ill patients) miss the sunlight,” Gordon-Leon said. “It's not as bad when it's cloudy or snowy, but when they see the sun, they often get cabin fever, like a lot of us do, and they want to get out and experience it, and a lot of times they can't. (At Hospice) we have volunteers who take people outside and for many, it's the highlight of their day.”

When Gordon-Leon learned of the ambulance program she knew just the candidate for the first ride.

“She didn't need much from me, and I was always asking myself “What can I do for Rebecca? What can I offer her?” Gordon-Leon said, “She was a very enthusiastic woman, and very girlish at heart: we both shared a love of the mountains. When I thought of (Sentimental Journey), I thought it would be something special and when I mentioned it to her, her eyes just lit up, and I knew that I had struck a cord there.”

Last wind

As they pushed her wheelchair down to Brainard Lake, Rebecca hoped she would be able to paddle her feet in the water. Once they reached the lake, she already was exhausted.

Instead of dipping her feet, Rebecca was content to sit near the lake, facing the crisp fall sun, snuggled up with a fluffy blanket. After a while, she asked to be left alone for a few minutes, among the lapping waves and the breeze rustling the few leaves that remained on the trees.

She drifted off to sleep, and then awoke with the sun still on her face.

“What she said was, ‘I'm so glad we've come, it's so good to be here.” Gordon-Leon remembered. “I was just asking, ‘Are you feeling OK?” because she was so pale. She kept saying, “I'm fine, I'm great.”

“She went to sleep, and I turned her away from the wind and she said, ‘I'm so glad you did that, because the wind was starting to bother me a little.' Before I moved her, she wouldn't tell me that the wind was bothering her.

“I think she was being stoic about it because she knew that this would be the last time that she would feel the wind on her face.”

Breathing in beauty

A few days before the trip in the ambulance, Rebecca Dryden and Peggy Quinn left Quinn's home early in the morning as they had for weeks. The two once had worked together as medical technicians in Denver. Though she was born in Kansas, Rebecca lived in Colorado for than a decade – in both Denver and boulder – before moving East.

Since Rebecca's return to Boulder, she would start each day the same way as Peggy pushed her good friend's wheelchair in the brisk pre-dawn air near her northwest Boulder home.

They often traveled in silence, taking in the smells of the early morning. Sometimes Rebecca would ask Peggy to pick a flower from a neighbor's garden, so she could, as Peggy puts it, “breath in the beauty.”

On this particular morning, they turned a corner to find a man coming towards them. The scruffy-looking man wore a blanket on his head to keep warm, and he was singing.

The two women couldn't figure out where the man had come from. They rarely saw anyone during their walks, and never encountered homeless people.

The man continued toward them, singing, until he reached Peggy and Rebecca. He bent down to the wheelchair so he could see Rebecca.

“He looked Rebecca right in the eyes,” Peggy remembered. “He lifted the blanket up and said, ‘They can't take our spirit away from us, can they?”

She was totally present with him, eye to eye. He put the blanket around his shoulders, started singing, and walked off.

She said, “They can't take our spirit away. No, they certainly can't.”

Rebecca Dryden died at the home of her friend Peggy on Oct. 3, 1997, the day after her 42 nd birthday.

From the Boulder Planet January 21, 1998