“We light this candle to remember and honor those we’ve had the pleasure of serving“

We meet with our interdisciplinary team once a month. This team consists of nurses, a psychologist, a chaplain, a social worker, a medical assistant, a receptionist, and a bereavement specialist in addition to our physician and nurse practitioners. It is only these few times a month that we are able to get the entire team in the same room as some of our providers operate near exclusively inpatient (like me) vs. exclusively outpatient. This meeting is often shrouded in logistics (running lists, scheduling follow up, etc.) and I’ll be honest, sometimes I zone out. However these last few weeks our wonderful social worker and bereavement specialist have carved out time for us to truly reflect on what we do.

They’ve bought for us composition notebooks, you know, the ones from grade school. Every week there is a prompt and we are tasked to reflect on it and respond. After that, our bereavement specialist reads through the list of patients who our service touched that passed the month prior. We are given ribbons where we can write names of the patients who we knew, and tie our ribbons to a memory wreath. At the end we light a candle and recite a mantra for those we’ve lost. I’ve loved this exercise so much that now I look forward to our team meeting.

I realized I’ve cared for almost 200 patients that have passed away since I started in palliative care a little over a year ago. I’ve been carrying a lot of secondhand grief on my shoulders, and the and I thought I could use this blog to jot down thoughts on memories from some people whom I crossed paths with… and what they mean to me (anonymously of course, with identifying information changed).

• My sweet soul. You looked me in the eyes when you realized you were going to need to be intubated in a few hours, and we knew we would not be able to reverse this. You were hoping natural remedies would be effective because chemotherapy was so scary. You said to me, “I guess I made the wrong choice”, and I didn’t know what to say back except hold your hand. I rarely find moments where I am at a loss for words, but this was definitely one of them.
• My mama!! I have no other words to really say, but I see your sweet eyes and smile as I write this. You asked me if you were dying and when I said yes, you smiled. You batted your eyelashes at me and asked me what mascara I used instead of responding. That’s you, always has been, and will continue to be.
• Of course I saved the best for last. My Radio star, my favorite favorite FAVORITE man, his wonderful family member, and I said our final goodbyes. The family member called me 8 AM Monday morning as soon as I got to my desk, and asked me to come by immediately. When I arrived, they filled me in on how things went south with hospice, and said “I was waiting until Monday because I knew you would fix everything like you always do”. And I did. I wish those moments could have been spent at home where you wanted it to be, but I’m selfishly glad I got to be there to say goodbye minutes before your final moments. Keep on singing.

I’m not able to go in more detail than this, but I will say that writing this made me feel really, really good. I think I’m going to see this up monthly. Let me know if you found it interesting! Until next month.