Sometimes my sister and I will sit with a cup of tea and she’ll tell me of her day at work. She’s a mental health nurse working at a nursing home with elderly people, many of whom are in the early stages of dementia. She whisks up and down the halls all day checking on each person living there and ensuring their health needs are met. Most of the residents are alert and chatty while others are confused and bed-bound; but all still have the sparkle of life in their eyes.
My sister’s is a tough job and one that I’ve always felt was a calling rather than a career. It takes a special person to work in a caring profession, ensuring comfort and giving dignity and voice to those too weak or otherwise unable to look after and live by themselves. She comes home tired and yet comforted in the knowledge that the people she has left are in a good place where people have their best interests at heart. I’ve told her that she’d better get my name down on the list of residents for when my time comes. She laughs. “I hope Jacqueline is doing ok this evening, she was a bit peaky yesterday,” she’d say to herself more than to me. So even when she’s not at work the people she cares for are always on her mind.
Those who work in such professions are the unsung heroes of the world. If I could turn the entire world system upside down, these are the people I would put at the top, giving them the carefree existence of the wealthy and letting the bank managers and stock brokers peddle in feelings instead of money. Such is the unjust world we live in. But at least there is a certain element of satisfaction and pride that comes from tenderly taking a human being by the hand and leading them to the peace that comes with death after a long life.
Watching a parent or loved one disintegrate into the afterlife is one of the hardest things any of us will go through, but ensuring their care to these strangers who know exactly how to bring them relief and tend to their needs, is a great comfort. They save for us the memories of our loved ones as the way they were at their full strength and give us the freedom to remember them like that rather than have images of indignity and weakness burned into our minds. They allow us to keep the good memories and save us from hurtful ones. And they do this with tenderness and good humour.
Being faced with mortality on a daily basis changes a person at their core. Everyone is different, but for those who have been touched by death, whether through losing a loved one or coming close to death themselves, there is a fundamental loss of a part of themselves. A loss of that part of life that insulates us from the deepest feelings of loneliness and nihilism. The safety net of life as it is, is stripped off and the overwhelming knowledge of how precious and fragile every moment is, comes creeping in and sits forever in the mind as a coating, an emulsion that flavours every emotion and thought.
There are positives to this, and although many of us may long for the carefree days of life before death came to collect, there are other days that bring contentment and even joy. It is for those days that we all live.
Christina Curran is a journalist currently studying a Masters in International Relations at Queen’s University, Belfast.
