Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

So let’s wonder about this. You are a nurse working in a fairly large tertiary care facility in a small urban center. You are working on a ward that has some young patients. Your community is not large enough to warrant an institution specialized in pediatric care, nor is it large enough to warrant any kind of palliative care ward. It is the end of a typically long shift, at the end of a typically long work week. You have enough seniority to have escaped the night shift, but not enough to get you on days, so you are getting off work some time before midnight. You love what you do a lot of the time, you put up with the rest, and generally you are glad to be able to work at something you can believe in. Before writing your chart notes, you pass by each of the patient rooms you are responsible for. It has been a quiet night, thankfully, and you aren’t expecting much, so you have to stop and double back at the second to last door in the hall, the semi-private room on your left that for the moment has an empty bed on one side and a terminally ill eight-year-old girl from a small town on the other. She’d been admitted two days ago to be treated for dehydration and weight loss, and was waiting now to be stable enough to be discharged home again. Standing quietly at the doorway you can see in the half light from the hall the silhouette of that terminally ill eight-year-old girl, sitting on the edge of her bed, her back to you, staring out the window, the lights of the small parkin...