I'm back in that wondrous conundrum of writers block, so it's time to unblock. Today I'm going to talk about death. How fantastically lighthearted of you Shannon! You are such a joy to be around!
Trigger warning: discussion of death.
Death is a taboo topic, that some of us have more knowledge and experience of than others. I feel like I have a unique perspective, hence the decision to write about it. I have previously identified as a nihilist. For much of my youth, like many young women, I was preoccupied with death, and had ongoing, invasive, and all consuming thoughts about suicide. This started when I was in primary school, and only stopped when I was around 22 years old, after intensive psychotherapy. I acknowledge the psychotherapy is the product of wealth and privilege. I wonder what would have happened if we didn't have the wealth to support my rehabilitation. I somewhat suspect that much of my illness (12 years of dysthymia) would not have been severe if I had not been private school educated. I also suspect that dysthymia is a disorder that is only common among the very privileged. The sadness stunted my emotional growth, and I am still find it difficult to adjust to social situations where others bemoan their little problems. I don't know how to pursue relationships, I don't like to ask for anything. I have confidence where I feel confident, but I can't hide uncertainty when I'm unsure of my skills/knowledge. I have panic attacks, but only when there are great expectations. I hate authority, not only because the powers that be ignored my illness as a child, not only because I really hate unconstructive feedback, but also because I feel like people who are in positions of authority are only there for the feeling of power.
Needless to say, the illness left a hangover of delayed success, obsessions with rock idols, and a persistent curiosity about how the world works.
I have also studied philosophy, and in my BA, I took 12 units of mainly epistemology based subjects. I have a good understanding of the limits of the human experience, as dry philosophy and logic explains it. I like being reductive, and realising that humans are just a combination of sense data, emotions, and physical presence, well...
While in my earlier, formative years, besides studying a whole lot of disparate things, and seeing a whole lot of rock music, I funded it all with working as an unskilled assistant in hospitals. Some of this involved hanging out in the morgue. And doing the wash before taking peeps to the morgue. I didn't get training for this, this was the late 90s and the turn of the century. I remember when a nurse asked me to help with the wash, I freaked out, and I was told to suck it up and do my job. I remember reading an article that told me that brain synapses continue to fire up to 4 hours after the heart stops beating. I also saw the Linklater movie Waking Life. I used to talk and sing to the corpses as they went to the morgue, because in my head it would be the last thing those human people would ever hear.
I then went and trained as a Registered Nurse. Now this has been one of the bigger awakenings for me. I now know a whole lot of dead people. The thing about chronic diseases, especially ones which involve whole systems of waste disposal, tends to end in the person being dead. Especially if they're old. You get to know these wonderful human beings, and they struggle with their condition, and their lives are horrible, because everything is based on the 5 hours on a machine 3 times a week... but you can bring them joy. Like Nick, with his hardcore Christian values, and his anti-euthanasia, anti-organ transplant opinions, who would light up because I'd take as much time out from my shift to sit and chat with him. He died. I went to his (very Catholic) funeral, and bawled my eyes out. Or Ross, who was over 160kg, and half of his heart was dead muscle, and the day he stopped being able to play golf was the day his metaphorical heart broke, and he'd pass out on the train on the way home and wake up 4 hours later in the same seat having ridden the line from end to end 3 times, he died, and his funeral was beautiful, and his boyfriend gave me a hug and fed us lunch. Or Michael. Oh Michael, I still miss you. How could you die on me? I knew you would. There are some people that I cannot help but love. I got in trouble for saying that I loved you. Nurses aren't supposed to love their patients, not even in a matey, respectful, you're a gay man in your late fifties and I'm a woman in my twenties kind of way.
And then there is the death of people that I didn't care about quite as much, but still made me go home and weep myself to sleep. We waited for Annie to die, we knew that she had because her family started to wail and panic. And then we waited some more, because there is a sense that families really should have as much time with the freshly dead as possible. And then I wrapped you, and closed your eyes, and said my own goodbye. And there is Freddie and Cathy, who suffered the indignity of having their heart stop on the machines, and then the CPR and the crash as the ribs all break, and the relief when you get a rhythm back and set them towards ICU, only to find out they died an hour later. Freddy had gotten the latest model smartphone like 3 days earlier. He lived a wonderful life, giggled far too much, and absolutely violently ripped into nurses on a very regular basis. Oh and then there was another Michael, who decided to die on my last shift. If I had a bigger ego at the time, I would have though that he chose to die because I wasn't going to be there to sit and chat with him about his grandchildren, or the war, or hold his hand and wait for him to get his breath back. I gave him the very best of deaths, the sheer relief that he had when the morphine took over and he stopped gasping for air. 20 minutes before he died, he thanked me, and told me to change the world. Once the family went to sort out the shroud, I took my tea break with him, and had a long sad cry.
I once heard a saying that nurses carry the souls of the dead with us. I feel like I do.
And then I moved to the Territory for a bit. Life is short in the Territory. And people came to the hospital to die, a lot. I remember walking back to quarters from the clinic one day, and there was a car pulled into the Emergency Room driveway, with a dead body sitting on the back seat, covered by a towel drenched in blood. It was the wife of one of patients, who was the brother of Peter, both Jungarai from Utopia. I went to church the next day, and it was strange because there was leadership and deference to the brothers. Alison died the next week. Alison didn't want to have treatment because she was in a bad mood and didn't want to inflict it on the nurses. It killed her. Johnny and Gladys died within a month of me leaving. They both had beautiful faces. Johnny was just so so abusive, and knew me only by Nangala. I was more than pleased with this, because he never bothered learning any of the other nurse's names. Gladys was one of the kindest hearts I have ever met. I would paint her nails every Tuesday.
I've been told that taking death personally is not a good thing for any person to do, especially if you're around it as much as you are with nursing. I absolutely reject this. I remember every patient that I know that has died. I feel like forgetting and minimising death is the point at which life becomes meaningless. There is so much policing of how nurses are supposed to feel. I guess if there wasn't some level of uniformity of how to manage the human condition, especially the ultra sad stuff, else whole wards would be unstaffed for days at a time. I have no idea how hospitals manage to maintain staff, there is so little care for those that care for the dying. I consider myself an extremely resilient human, and yet I have had weeks where I haven't been able to stop crying. Yes, my own sense of authenticity means that I am unable to discharge all of the sadness from every death, or suppress it, or externalise it.
Saying this, I am pleased that I have touched death, over and over again. As part of the limit of the human condition, death is something that happens to other people, to be ignored and denied and forgotten. I am more scared of death now that I ever have been; experience of death does not make it any less terrifying. But I am also familiar with it.
That is something, isn't it?
Anyway, it's late, and I don't want to write about this anymore.
Shannon Out.
Post script: I no longer need to worry so much about writers block. I've (ostensibly?) finished my legal course work, meaning that I don't necessarily need to write an essay ever again. I will, but I don't have to...
Trigger warning: discussion of death.
Death is a taboo topic, that some of us have more knowledge and experience of than others. I feel like I have a unique perspective, hence the decision to write about it. I have previously identified as a nihilist. For much of my youth, like many young women, I was preoccupied with death, and had ongoing, invasive, and all consuming thoughts about suicide. This started when I was in primary school, and only stopped when I was around 22 years old, after intensive psychotherapy. I acknowledge the psychotherapy is the product of wealth and privilege. I wonder what would have happened if we didn't have the wealth to support my rehabilitation. I somewhat suspect that much of my illness (12 years of dysthymia) would not have been severe if I had not been private school educated. I also suspect that dysthymia is a disorder that is only common among the very privileged. The sadness stunted my emotional growth, and I am still find it difficult to adjust to social situations where others bemoan their little problems. I don't know how to pursue relationships, I don't like to ask for anything. I have confidence where I feel confident, but I can't hide uncertainty when I'm unsure of my skills/knowledge. I have panic attacks, but only when there are great expectations. I hate authority, not only because the powers that be ignored my illness as a child, not only because I really hate unconstructive feedback, but also because I feel like people who are in positions of authority are only there for the feeling of power.
Needless to say, the illness left a hangover of delayed success, obsessions with rock idols, and a persistent curiosity about how the world works.
I have also studied philosophy, and in my BA, I took 12 units of mainly epistemology based subjects. I have a good understanding of the limits of the human experience, as dry philosophy and logic explains it. I like being reductive, and realising that humans are just a combination of sense data, emotions, and physical presence, well...
While in my earlier, formative years, besides studying a whole lot of disparate things, and seeing a whole lot of rock music, I funded it all with working as an unskilled assistant in hospitals. Some of this involved hanging out in the morgue. And doing the wash before taking peeps to the morgue. I didn't get training for this, this was the late 90s and the turn of the century. I remember when a nurse asked me to help with the wash, I freaked out, and I was told to suck it up and do my job. I remember reading an article that told me that brain synapses continue to fire up to 4 hours after the heart stops beating. I also saw the Linklater movie Waking Life. I used to talk and sing to the corpses as they went to the morgue, because in my head it would be the last thing those human people would ever hear.
I then went and trained as a Registered Nurse. Now this has been one of the bigger awakenings for me. I now know a whole lot of dead people. The thing about chronic diseases, especially ones which involve whole systems of waste disposal, tends to end in the person being dead. Especially if they're old. You get to know these wonderful human beings, and they struggle with their condition, and their lives are horrible, because everything is based on the 5 hours on a machine 3 times a week... but you can bring them joy. Like Nick, with his hardcore Christian values, and his anti-euthanasia, anti-organ transplant opinions, who would light up because I'd take as much time out from my shift to sit and chat with him. He died. I went to his (very Catholic) funeral, and bawled my eyes out. Or Ross, who was over 160kg, and half of his heart was dead muscle, and the day he stopped being able to play golf was the day his metaphorical heart broke, and he'd pass out on the train on the way home and wake up 4 hours later in the same seat having ridden the line from end to end 3 times, he died, and his funeral was beautiful, and his boyfriend gave me a hug and fed us lunch. Or Michael. Oh Michael, I still miss you. How could you die on me? I knew you would. There are some people that I cannot help but love. I got in trouble for saying that I loved you. Nurses aren't supposed to love their patients, not even in a matey, respectful, you're a gay man in your late fifties and I'm a woman in my twenties kind of way.
And then there is the death of people that I didn't care about quite as much, but still made me go home and weep myself to sleep. We waited for Annie to die, we knew that she had because her family started to wail and panic. And then we waited some more, because there is a sense that families really should have as much time with the freshly dead as possible. And then I wrapped you, and closed your eyes, and said my own goodbye. And there is Freddie and Cathy, who suffered the indignity of having their heart stop on the machines, and then the CPR and the crash as the ribs all break, and the relief when you get a rhythm back and set them towards ICU, only to find out they died an hour later. Freddy had gotten the latest model smartphone like 3 days earlier. He lived a wonderful life, giggled far too much, and absolutely violently ripped into nurses on a very regular basis. Oh and then there was another Michael, who decided to die on my last shift. If I had a bigger ego at the time, I would have though that he chose to die because I wasn't going to be there to sit and chat with him about his grandchildren, or the war, or hold his hand and wait for him to get his breath back. I gave him the very best of deaths, the sheer relief that he had when the morphine took over and he stopped gasping for air. 20 minutes before he died, he thanked me, and told me to change the world. Once the family went to sort out the shroud, I took my tea break with him, and had a long sad cry.
I once heard a saying that nurses carry the souls of the dead with us. I feel like I do.
And then I moved to the Territory for a bit. Life is short in the Territory. And people came to the hospital to die, a lot. I remember walking back to quarters from the clinic one day, and there was a car pulled into the Emergency Room driveway, with a dead body sitting on the back seat, covered by a towel drenched in blood. It was the wife of one of patients, who was the brother of Peter, both Jungarai from Utopia. I went to church the next day, and it was strange because there was leadership and deference to the brothers. Alison died the next week. Alison didn't want to have treatment because she was in a bad mood and didn't want to inflict it on the nurses. It killed her. Johnny and Gladys died within a month of me leaving. They both had beautiful faces. Johnny was just so so abusive, and knew me only by Nangala. I was more than pleased with this, because he never bothered learning any of the other nurse's names. Gladys was one of the kindest hearts I have ever met. I would paint her nails every Tuesday.
I've been told that taking death personally is not a good thing for any person to do, especially if you're around it as much as you are with nursing. I absolutely reject this. I remember every patient that I know that has died. I feel like forgetting and minimising death is the point at which life becomes meaningless. There is so much policing of how nurses are supposed to feel. I guess if there wasn't some level of uniformity of how to manage the human condition, especially the ultra sad stuff, else whole wards would be unstaffed for days at a time. I have no idea how hospitals manage to maintain staff, there is so little care for those that care for the dying. I consider myself an extremely resilient human, and yet I have had weeks where I haven't been able to stop crying. Yes, my own sense of authenticity means that I am unable to discharge all of the sadness from every death, or suppress it, or externalise it.
Saying this, I am pleased that I have touched death, over and over again. As part of the limit of the human condition, death is something that happens to other people, to be ignored and denied and forgotten. I am more scared of death now that I ever have been; experience of death does not make it any less terrifying. But I am also familiar with it.
That is something, isn't it?
Anyway, it's late, and I don't want to write about this anymore.
Shannon Out.
Post script: I no longer need to worry so much about writers block. I've (ostensibly?) finished my legal course work, meaning that I don't necessarily need to write an essay ever again. I will, but I don't have to...
