Anyone who works in health care knows that some of the most honest conversations happen outside the hospital building, especially with patients who smoke. Out in the sun, away from their room and the routine of the ward, people loosen up. For a brief moment, they can simply be.
At McCulloch House, a winding garden path runs between the building and the brick fence that separates it from the road. On one shift, I was looking after a woman in her late forties who was sitting out there having a cigarette. She looked thin and pale. I knew she had young children, and knowing her prognosis, my heart was heavy.
I leaned against the wall beside her and asked how she was going. After some routine check-ins, she said she had a question but wasn’t sure how to ask it. I encouraged her to try. With a wavering voice, looking me straight in the eye, she said, ‘I’m not afraid of being dead. I’m afraid of actually dying.’
I was still early in my time working in palliative care, and I felt myself searching for an answer worthy of her. After a moment of reflection, these words came out of my mouth: ‘Meditate on the feeling of love, bring your consciousness into your heart, and wait there.’
I can’t explain where that answer came from, only that it felt right. She nodded, and we didn’t need any more words.
I was rostered off for two days. When I returned to the ward, she was unconscious in a room close to the nurses station. I was surprised by how quickly she had changed, and I wondered whether she had already begun that inner process after our conversation, and whether it had helped her let go more easily. I will never know.
What I do know is that I felt at peace. She had been given a direction, something to hold onto, and I like to think it helped her cross the threshold gently and unafraid.
Beyond Symptoms: The Anthroposophic Nurse in Palliative Care
Anthroposophic nursing adds a deeper dimension to palliative care, inviting us to see the whole person, not just their illness. When we care for someone, we perceive them through the lens of the fourfold human being: the physical body, the etheric (or life) body, the soul body, and the “I”, the essence of who that person truly is. Through this lens, the person is no longer simply a set of symptoms to be managed. We are meeting them as the sum of everything they have lived: their experiences, their relationships, their personality, their loves and their dislikes.
