May her memory be a blessing

There have been a lot of deaths recently. Maybe that sounds strange. Of course I’ve had a lot of patients die; I work in hospice, after all. But, as any medical type person can tell you, sometimes deaths come in clumps. When there are so many so close together it feels like whiplash. Because in the meantime, as patients are dying, I’m getting new referrals every day. I feel like some kind of hospice robot: “Hi, I’m Elizabeth, I’m a social worker from hospice, I’m just calling to introduce myself…” The weight of all this loss does pull me down sometimes but more so, I’m afraid I will lose some sense of importance in my work. That I will become numb to the endless death as a way of protecting myself but as a result, I will also lose some empathy.

But yesterday I lost one of my favorite patients. At the beginning of my practice, I would have been too afraid to name her that way; I thought you couldn’t have favorites. But my very wise hospice preceptor told me at the beginning of my hospice career that “one out of every hundred can really get to you; more than that, you’ve got a problem. But you’re allowed one in a hundred.” I keep those words close to my heart for days like this. The patient I lost over the weekend was one of those hundred, the first one in a long time, in fact. Her death really hit me.

That’s hard to say, honestly. It’s hard to explicitly acknowledge my grief when I lose a particularly dear patient. I suppose it’s because I’m afraid that I’m too close or burnt out or not doing it right. It doesn’t happen with every patient, of course; that would lead to burnout. But when it does happen, when I lose a patient I particularly liked or even loved, what should I do? How can I memorialize a loss that isn’t really mine? The waves of death have numbed me a little of the years but then this lovely lady died and it knocked me over a little. It reminded that I’m not actually a robot. I am, it turns out, just a person—a person who sometimes misses patients who have died. I know they are remembered by the people who loved them but I want to remember them too. I want to acknowledge the loss of someone special to me, even if it isn’t really my loss to bear. It is allowed. It is part of what makes this work so sacred and beautiful.

So here’s to her—and to the few before her, those other “ones in hundreds” that float up in my memory today; may their memory be a blessing.