There’s a lot people don’t know about dying.
Most people are terrified of it. We don’t talk about it, and when we do it’s with hushed voices and delicate words. Most of us are blissfully ignorant until it forces us to take notice of it, whether it be because of a terminal illness, a fatal car accident or a loved one snatched from our lives. We are woefully unprepared for it. What are we supposed to do? What should we say? You never imagine it happening to you.
It is a sensitive subject, because deep down we know that it is the one thing in all our lives that is inevitable. Death does not discriminate, and it makes every single one of us equal. I was terrified of it too, but after seven years as an intensive care nurse I am familiar enough with death to be able to see it differently to most.
Death is ugly. It’s not glamorous, and most people do not close their eyes and slip away peacefully at home
Death is ugly. It’s not glamorous, and most people do not close their eyes and slip away peacefully at home in their beds, surrounded by loving family. The death I see comes with plastic tubes and cannulas shoved into oozing blood vessels, giant machines that hiss, click and shriek alarms as they mechanise the life of a human being, and a rainbow of bad smells. It comes with cheap fabric curtains, stiff white sheets and sunken, fluid-swollen skin. It comes with an unexpected phone call that drags you from your bed into cold and uncomfortable waiting rooms at 3am. Even if it is expected, it still comes with an icy shock and a deep, gut-wrenching sadness.
I have seen death unite families that haven’t spoken to each other for 10 years – arguments are forgotten, old grudges are meaningless. I have seen death spill secrets that tear families apart. I have seen a woman bring her lover to the bedside for comfort while her husband lay unconscious. I have called security for two brothers who started to fight about inheritance over the top of their dying mother’s body. I have held in my arms a young woman after her father died, who cried tears of relief at a future without his constant abuse. I have caught grown men from hitting the floor when they faint at the sight of their best mate lying unconscious on a ventilator. I have broken the ribs of patients by doing chest compressions as I am trying to resuscitate them, and not regretted a single one even if they don’t make it. One man, after several hours of stoic silence at his dying wife’s bedside, suddenly broke down in tears and told me in detail about the last time they made love before she collapsed on the way to work with a massive heart attack. I have had a chair thrown at me by the son of a woman who couldn’t be saved, even after 50 bags of blood and three hours of non-stop resuscitation. Death makes you behave in ways you didn’t realise were inside you.
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At 22 years old, three months after finishing my nursing degree, I withdrew the life support from my first brain-dead patient – a man only a year older than me, who was hit by a truck while he was cycling to his girlfriend’s house. I cried for four hours straight and had to be sent home early from work in a taxi because I couldn’t pull myself together enough to drive. I had no idea how to deal with my own feelings, let alone provide comfort to his family and friends. I couldn’t fathom why this particular man, with his beautiful girlfriend and his entire life ahead of him, had just died in front of me. The injustice of it haunted me for days afterward.
Not long after that, I spent three night shifts caring for an 80-year-old grandmother who had been savagely raped and beaten with a fire extinguisher in her own backyard while she was gardening. The trauma to her brain was so severe that the neurosurgeons had to remove a third of her skull to relieve the swelling. Her family was devastated, and as her condition worsened on the morning of my last night shift, they begged us to stop her life support and let her pass away unaware of the horrors that she had suffered. We did.
Dying can be an incredibly moving experience to be a part of. Only recently, I was holding the feathery hand of a 98-year-old woman as she whispered her last breath. Usually, I am a quiet presence in the background, gently adjusting sedative doses of painkillers and waiting to hand over tissues and cups of tea to teary-eyed relatives. This woman had no living family left, and had spent the last year in a nursing home without anyone for company. The nursing home told us that she had been a classical opera singer, and had worked for years in a mission hospital in Africa with her husband.
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Now she was comatose in intensive care, surrounded by loud machines that kept her fragile heart beating and her lungs breathing. Now it was up to me to gift her a peaceful and dignified exit from this world, after 98 years of sparkling life. It’s an honour to be present at the end of a life – especially one as long and rich as this woman’s.
Being on such intimate terms with death makes you realise that life is fleeting, fragile and unpredictable. Accepting death is terrifying, but not as terrifying as the thought of wasting the time that you have left before it does. Make sure you die happy.
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I have seen death unite families and spill secrets that tear them apart
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