Even unbelievers unaccountably yearned for God, questioning or arguing with me about my faith, until all at once they began praying. Grievances they’d spent a lifetime nurturing vanished in a rush of reconciliation. Sins they’d agonized over for years suddenly felt forgiven.
Hospice nurse explains phenomena before death free#
Strengthen Your Faith with Free ebooks on Prayer, Bible Study and More One after another, patients recounted not just visits from absent loved ones but an extraordinary awareness of God’s presence. The closer my patients came to dying, the more their eyes and spirits seemed to open to a reality I only glimpsed dimly. “I needed to tell him I forgave him and loved him,” Hank said with perfect lucidity. Shawn was in prison and couldn’t have visited Hank in body. Then there was Hank who, the day before he died, told me he’d just had a visit from his son Shawn. “He says it’s time for me to go.” A few nights later Frank died in his sleep. “He looks wonderful in his uniform,” he said. Can you see him? He’s by the chair.” He meant his son, John, who’d been killed years before in Vietnam. One day Frank said to me matter-of-factly, “John is here with me now. I came to understand the joy God has prepared for his children.Ĭonsider one of my patients, Frank, a 68-year-old father dying of lung disease. I knew hospice was my calling because almost from the day I started, I met people who showed me just how thoroughly I had misunderstood death. Not even because I took to helping people in their last days. Not just because it felt good working again. I had the time now that the oldest of my sons was at college and my husband was traveling less for work.Īt once I knew I’d found my calling. But they were people I knew.ĭottie was telling me I had a gift. I’d done it for my dad and for a neighbor named Mary Anne. True, I was comfortable caring for people at the end of their lives. You don’t seem to have that fear of death some people have. “I watched you caring for your father-in-law. Soon, Dottie was helping care for Grandfather, ensuring he was comfortable and spiritually and emotionally prepared for what was happening to him. “I don’t know exactly what you do here, but I think I need you,” I said to Dottie. Soon after Grandfather and Grandmother arrived, I was running errands when I saw a sign for the local hospice organization, started by a minister and a nurse named Paul Brenner and Dottie Dorion.
He and his wife, worried about coping on their own, asked if they could stay with us. Then my beloved father-in-law–we called him Grandfather–called one day with the news that he had pancreatic cancer. I worked for a while for a surgeon until I got married and had kids. My calling came about almost by accident. In God’s loving hands it’s the door to peace and everlasting life.ĭiscover Books with Inspiring Stories of Heaven and the Afterlife I’ve learned that death is not to be feared. On the contrary, I mark the day I started work with hospice more than 20 years after I graduated nursing school as the beginning of my real education, an education in hope and joy. If you’d asked me then, I’d probably have said what countless people have said to me over the years: “How depressing to deal with death every day!”īut it isn’t depressing.
In fact, when I entered nursing school in the 1950s, there was no such thing as hospice, the formal program of care for terminally ill people.Īs a nurse I wanted to comfort people and save lives, not be there when they ended. I never planned to become a hospice nurse.
0 kommentar(er)
