A mother's wisdom

My mom was a registered nurse for about 40 years. During her career she worked in pediatrics, rehabilitation, long-term care and palliative care. I asked her to tell me a bit about her interactions with death during her career.

When she became a nurse in 1967 there wasn't any kind of formal training on how to attend to professional grief, the grief of patient's families, or the grief of patients themselves. It was on the job training at its core.

One memory mom shared with me was about when she did a few shifts as a private care nurse. A patient who was in horrible pain asked my mother to help him die. This has stuck with her. She knows he was in excruciating pain and no one had done anything about it. Mom told me she had always been an advocate to give as many meds as they could. She hated to see the suffering, hated when pain of one of her patients was visible. her pet peeve - when pain was visible. hated to see the suffering

Mom tells me that she thinks that death was always much harder on the people watching - the family. For her and other staff, that had to set personal barriers, had to remove themselves.

The care for the dying patient became mechanical, devoid of emotion. When a patient needs to be flipped on to the other side, it is about the logistics of doing that. When you need to ensure the patient takes meds, you administer the meds. There is "not a heck of a lot of time for emotional reaction", so you compartmentalize and deal with the task at hand.

I asked mom if there were ever any emotional supports, and there were't any that she could recall. A nurse was simply expected to be a jack of all trades, expected to be able to deal with death, and "you step in".

Now, it's not great that RNs in mom's day had to deal with so much without specialized training, but society today has sterilized everything about our interactions - to a point that we simply cannot recall that death is a natural part of life. Messy - yes - but natural.

I'm wondering what it says about us today that we have such a difficult time simply 'stepping in' for our fellow humans?