This blog is going to be all about End of Life (EOL) care, and matters pertaining to the end-of-life, hence the name!

I am an Australian who is a hospice RN and I work in a skilled nursing hospice in Minnesota. I have been in hospice for the past five years and feel strongly about advocating for my patients as they move toward their end of life.

I went into nursing solely to be a hospice RN later in life. Let me tell you a little of my story that led me to being so passionate about hospice and end of life care.

My parents died when I was young. My father died from colon cancer when I was 11 years old (1975), and my mother died from cardiac disease when I was 22 years old (1986). My older brother (15 yrs older) died, six months after my mother died, from a pain medication overdose (self inflicted). In 1986 after having experienced two significant deaths in one year and being 22 years old, I was raw with grief.  I was open and needing to process more deeply the extensive grief I felt from those deaths. Two deaths in one year would be enough to say I  would be prone to complicated grief, but with the previous death of my father 11 years earlier, I was most certainly faced with a complicated grief. Luckily for me, I had a dear mentor who pointed me toward the writings of Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

So began my life-long quest to find out as much as possible about death and dying in our culture and other cultures.

In 1975, and being 11 years old, I was not allowed to grieve the loss of my father in any healthy way. At that time in Australia, death was most certainly rushed away from the eyes of children. The predominate thinking was to shield children from the “nastiness” of death. I was not with my father when he died in the hospital. I was not taken to see him when we found out he had died.  In fact my mother didn’t even go to see him. The thought of him dying alone in a hospital bed haunts me.  I fought to be allowed to go to my father’s funeral and had a down-right temper tantrum to be included in the procession to the crematorium. My instincts thankfully knowing I needed that much.

Throughout my teenage years, my grief was suppressed and never allowed to be processed. I was never allowed to speak about my feelings about my beloved father’s death, let alone express them. So, when my mother died in 1986, it was not surprising that my grief was compounded by the realization that I no longer had any living parents. All that unprocessed grief from my father’s death was released with my mother’s death. Six months later my brother’s untimely death compounded my very complicated grief.

As a young 22 yr old, I struggled with the overwhelming grief I felt without any real assistance from counseling or other support. My friends were all busy being in their twenties and so their understanding of what was hitting me was limited.  My mentor gently guided me with reading material and  timely conversations that left me thinking. Eventually, I left for Europe perhaps to escape the overwhelming hole I felt in my life. I traveled with a dear friend and together we had many adventures traveling and working in England. We both met our husbands and our lives took off in new directions.

My husband was from Minnesota (I knew nothing about the place) and he and I connected because his beloved grandfather had also died in the previous year. He was working in England at the time and our romance was grand. We were married in England 2 years later.

Our first child, born in San Francisco, was a complete joy for us but when he was just 2 yrs old he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. He was with us for only a short time and died at the age of  5 yrs. It is at that time that my grief fell off the edge but this time, we had amazing support from our community and I had my husband who shared our extreme grief. Our second son (2 yrs old at the time of death), kept us going and then two years after our first son’s death, we had a daughter. We went on and my true education of hospice began.

It is true that our life experiences are our greatest teachers. I hope you find my reflections on end-of-life matters helpful and thank you for reading.

Jan