the ongoing balance

I get really used to seeing people die. It's my job. I know the signs that it's impending, I (usually) know what to do to manage symptoms. I am present with grieving families and I've allowed people to maintain hope even when I know that it's not going to save someone. Families need hope. And though I can tell them the clinical presentation of their loved one, who the hell am I, as their hospice nurse, to take hope away from someone?

I've lost lots of patients. Well, all of them really, except for the current ones. And every now and then one of those patients works their way up through my clinical boundary, shines through my clear lines of "not my life" and "my life". And they get in. I tell myself as a nurse that this is never a good idea, but as a human being sometimes, I realize, it is inevitable. My tuesdays and fridays for the past two months have been spent with a very special lady with lung cancer . She was a beautiful woman who made me sit at her dinner table and have lunch with her. Who made me jewelery. Who took my face in her hands when I left and told me she loves me. And yesterday she died. And though clinically I knew it was bound to happen, I had found myself doing the thing I almost never do in my job...have hope.

So this weekend I've been shaking this off. My friends and family may not notice it, there have been no tears, but there is a certain melancholy that I am working through. I hung a little necklace she gave me, with beads shaped like an angel, on my window so that the light shines through it. And I'd like that little angel, that necklace, that light, that memory, to continue to shine. To be there in the room where my child sleeps. Where life continues on. And its a reminder that death and birth are all an ongoing balance.