An exract from my book Twenty My Pretty Ponies

As I grew older and looked at religion with an adult’s eye, I gained the usual doubts and stopped going to church, but the basic belief in our continuation ”somewhere else” had always remained. I’m a nurse and I have mostly worked with the elderly throughout my career. I have known and loved and said goodbye to a lot of people. Many of them have been gone a long time but I have never doubted that they are okay. I have had enough experience of death to know that we are collected, met, and shown the way to go. I know we are not left to find the way alone:

I am sitting with her. She is dying. We all know it. She knows it, but she is still lucid, still aware, and we are talking about her life and loves. It is the early hours of the morning. I am working night duties. The early hours of the morning, when the heart lags, are the hardest times to pull the body through when it is weak. Around four o’clock even the strongest of us feel the pull of something aside us, something that weakens and tires. Many deaths occur in nursing homes in the early hours of the morning.

She feels this tug. She is not frightened but does not want to be alone. So I sit with her and we talk.

          “Judy, who is that little girl up there?” she asks. I look to where she indicates, up in the corner of the room. I see nothing.

          “What little girl, Jean?”

         '"That little girl sitting up there. She has lovely blonde hair.”

          “I can’t see anyone, Jean. She must be for you.”

         “Yes,” she agrees. “I think that she’s waiting for me. She has beautiful blue eyes.”

 Jean dies that morning.

* * *

          “I’m not going with them!”

 I am met by a scream as I enter the back door of the nursing home. It is eleven o’clock at night and I am arriving for my shift. I hurry to Nellie’s room, for I have recognized the voice as hers. Tiny four foot nothing Nellie has scaled the bedrails, that are supposed to keep her secure in bed, and is prancing around the room like a ten-year-old, fists raised in the typical boxer’s dance. Nellie has been unable to stand on her own for weeks now. I am astounded.

       “What is it Nellie?” I ask.

        “I’m not going with them. They can’t make me. I don’t know them.”

        “Who, Nellie?”

       “Those three men in the black suits,” she cried.

Nellie died that night.

* * *

He is dying and he is ready. I go to his room to check on him and find him sitting on his chair. He has taken the oxygen mask off and he seems to be dead. I call a nurse to help me put him on his bed and as we lay him down, he begins to breathe again. Without thinking, training takes over and I replace the oxygen over his nose. He lives through the night. I realize I have made a mistake. I have not thought clearly and I have suffered this man, whose time here was well done, to live another day. The next morning I go in to see him. He looks at me and says one word: “Why?”

I don’t know if he is asking what I think he is asking, but I reply, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to.”

 He nods his head as if this is the correct answer. He dies the next morning.

Cliff is a patient who lives upstairs. The next day he calls me in to ask who the three men “wearing black suits and wandering around all night” were. “Everyone overnight kept telling me there was no one, but I’m not crazy; they were there.”

 I tell him that I don’t really know, but a gentleman had died and that maybe they had come for him. He accepts this, and I suppose that he thinks that they were the funeral directors. However it strikes a chord with me, as funeral directors usually work in twos, and moreover, Cliff had said that they were wandering around all night. The funeral directors would certainly not have done that and, what’s more, the funeral directors this particular time had not worn black.

* * *

Arthur is dying, but it is going to take a few days yet. His heart is strong. We’re trying to encourage him to have a drink, but it seems that he isn’t registering our presence. He’s smiling and waving to someone at the foot of his bed. He is so happy. He cannot stop waving. His eyes are bright and alert. He dies half an hour later.