CHAPTER 1
Professional and Personal Life
The development and creativity of my private nurse practice is intertwined with my personal life story. What follows is a combination of my personal journey and what I wrote in a six-book series, A Passion for Caring, for nurses who wished to follow my holistic practice.
After completing my nursing training at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, in February 1961, I travelled to Canada and worked in an orthopaedic ward in a Catholic hospital. I have no recollection of death ever occurring in what seemed to be an exciting new world.
Following my Canadian experience, I travelled to Edinburgh, Scotland, for midwifery training and experienced the joys and wonders of the birth of new life. The memory of the first birth I attended is still with me as I recall the proud young mother holding her newly delivered baby while talking to her husband on the bedside phone. I now see similarities in the experience of a "good birth" and the experience of a "good death." Both are charged with emotion and signify a life change that will not only entail long and sometimes arduous struggles, but also bring rewards.
After my time in Scotland, I hired a car and drove from Edinburgh to London with a map of the route as a companion. I overnighted somewhere along the way before making my way to Trafalgar Square, where I was to return the car before meeting an old school friend who had agreed to give me a bed. Looking back, I marvel at the adventurous spirit of this little country girl. Years later, and after my divorce, I made the journey in reverse, this time from London to Edinburgh in a hired car and with the intention of reclaiming some of my youthful sense of adventure. By that time I was in my late fifties, and it was a little more difficult to find the right road. At one stage, I found myself in the carpark of a large supermarket instead of on the highway I was seeking. This was before Google maps became a reality. Today, when I wonder at how information travels on the internet, I can appreciate the vastness of the mind of God.
In London for my first time, and after completing part one of my midwifery training, I worked for a private nursing agency, taking care of many rich and famous people as well as being at many births. During this time, I had a significant experience of death when the agency sent me to nurse a fifty-year-old woman who was dying of breast cancer. This patient was being cared for at home by her only child, a young woman in her mid-twenties — my age at the time. The experience was etched in my mind by its awfulness. I was instructed not to mention the word cancer and to express hope for recovery and confidence in the doctor. We did not name or monitor medications; we just administered them in blind faith because they had been prescribed by the doctor. The tension I experienced of keeping up this pretence and not knowing what to say to comfort the daughter and mother, who were being parted by death, was great.
When the mother died, the daughter suffered the loss profoundly. Her mother had not been allowed to help her with practical instructions for a future without her. My heart went out to this girl, and I accepted her invitation to stay in the apartment with her. Not knowing anything about a normal grief reaction, I seemed to get it all wrong. When I cleaned the walls of the bathroom, she did not show appreciation; rather, she took my actions as a reflection of inadequacy on the part of her mother. My cooking was wrong; my company was sought, but my actions were resented. I left, but the memory stayed stored in my mind for many years until the death of my own mother when she was seventy-nine and I was in my early forties.
Several weeks before my mother's last Christmas, I was walking by a dress shop when I suddenly thought of her. I went into the shop to buy her a dress for Christmas. In hindsight, this was synchronicity at play. When I arrived home, she was still on my mind. As I lived in another state, I decided to phone her. No answer. I felt uneasy. I tried to phone my brother who lived in the same country town where my mother lived. No answer. I phoned her doctor, who told me that he had admitted my mother into hospital for tests as she was unable to swallow. I arranged for her to be transferred to another hospital where the tests could be completed sooner by a surgeon I knew. I organized care for my children so that I could travel to be with her.
What alerted me to her need? I was her only daughter, and I had come along late in life, after a stillbirth and two sons. My mother's first baby died. I understand it was a breech presentation, and it must have been a very painful time for her. The baby was a girl. My mother was thirty-eight years old when I was born, and she called me Joy. I was her pure joy. Perhaps because my star sign is Sagittarius, I have always been an adventurous soul. I left home for boarding school at my own request at the age of fourteen. After boarding school, I went straight into nursing and lived in the nurses' home for four years before I ventured overseas. I had been invited by friends to join them in Spain on a holiday, as I was missing the sunshine in London. In Spain, I met an Australian man and, following an exciting courtship, we married in London. My mother must have missed the daughter of her dreams, but she accepted who I was and tried to support me. Looking back, I feel I could have been more dutiful and attentive, although the boarding school habit of writing a letter home each week remained with me. Somehow, she was prepared to pay the price for my freedom.
Following surgery, my mother was diagnosed with secondaries in the liver and an unknown primary tumour. The surgeon broke the bad news gently as he held her hand and told her he was not able to fix the problem. The private hospital staff accepted the fact their patient's daughter was a nurse who wished to be involved with her mother's care. "My daughter will shower me," my mother told the nurses. When I went to the hospital to take her home, she wore the dress I had bought during that long-distance thought connection.
We both knew that time was limited. My previous experiences of death were no preparation, so I trusted intuition and was strengthened by my mother's faith in me. My mother fought all her life for a balance between active involvement in church and community, and depression. As a small child, I felt I had two mothers and often wished, with a heavy heart, that the good fairies would take my sad mother away and bring back the one who played "Over the Waves" on the organ as I went to sleep. Music and painting were large parts of my mother's life. She played the organ for the Methodist community and was proud that one of her paintings won a prize at the Brisbane Exhibition. I now know that music and art are languages of the soul.
My mother struggled with manic depression, which forced me to be independent and self-reliant. At an early age, I learned to use the treadle Singer sewing machine to make my own underwear. I, too, was to have difficulty with my first pregnancy. My eldest son was born in London. I suffered from toxaemia and, in order to give birth to a live baby, I was given a general anaesthesia and a forceps delivery under a general anaesthesia. This caused distressed for both me and my baby. I refer to the event as my first near-death experience. Being a mother gave me much more appreciation for my mother.
When my mother came home from hospital, she chose to sleep in the front room of her small, cream-coloured brick house. This house had been built with a ramp to the back door as a homecoming for my father, who had become a quadriplegic several years before. My father died in the local small-town hospital, so his homecoming never became a reality. The front room had been kept for visitors, but now it was where my mother chose to end her days. Her garden was her pride and joy, and she knew all the botanical names of the plants in her care. The day we arrived home, her gardener came, and she could hear the reassuring sound of the lawnmower. I picked flowers from her garden and placed them in her room. The atmosphere was becoming a sacred and peaceful space. She was home. Neighbours called, and well-wishers phoned to receive the news that jaundice was setting in, and it was just a matter of time.
The local doctor made house visits and was supportive of my wish to keep her at home — at least until she became unconscious. The Uniting Church minister visited and read familiar Bible passages to her. Perhaps her biggest comfort was her little tape recorder and the Scottish tapes of empowering songs and hymns, which she played especially in the early hours of the morning when she felt most vulnerable to negative thoughts. One night she completely lost her composure and was bemoaning her worthlessness. I begged her to stay strong so I would have happy memories of our last days together. She said she was trying.
Now I say to dying parents that they are about to give their children a most precious gift, the gift of example and courage. Stories are told about the need for children to release their parents, and "letting go" is encouraged. "I'll see you tomorrow, Mum," may mean Mum will be there because that is what will please her daughter. "Mum, I know that you are having a struggle, and although I love you and will miss you, please let go if you are ready." These words are an example of how to let go in an embrace of love. So often I have said, "Love is letting go."
My mother and I had only a week together, but each moment was special as I sorted through her belongings, knowing that the time I could spend away from my four children was limited. She told me who was to have her paintings, her dinner set, the electronic organ she took to old folks' homes for sing-alongs, and her clothes. The nursing homes she visited were for other people and, although she was nearly eighty, she had never thought of being in one herself. While sorting through her desk, I came across a letter to Santa that one of my brothers had written, and I found letters of utter despair written by my mother when she had lost her connection with her God. I filled many garbage bags with what I thought was rubbish, and I put aside the special requests. I chuckled to find that she had kept her old set of dentures! I now know that haste in these matters is not a good idea, and I now regret so much having thrown out the sheet music which she had kept from her youth — including my favourite, "Over the Waves." One brother chided me for having thrown out clothes and linen which would have been useful for working on the trucks in his transport business. It was a time of high emotion and not a time for making rational decisions. My childhood memories, good and bad, were flooding over me.
My relationship with my elderly parents, my father's death — which l discovered later in my life to be a matter of unresolved grief — my rebellion against the religion of my parents, and the relationships within my own family were all issues which were surfacing. Through all this were the demands of hosting the visitors, nursing my mother, involving my two brothers in the decision making, providing food, and being concerned with the activities of my own family. I was short of sleep, and I hired a nurse so that I could spend a day with my family who had arrived at our local seaside house for a holiday.
Before I left, I organized and documented my mother's medications and opioid injections. I knew nothing in those days about hospice or the principles of palliative care, but I knew that I didn't want my mother to suffer. She was worried about her bowels — which to her mind, had to open daily — and I even organized those before I left. I gave her my word that I would return in twenty-four hours. When I did, I was greeted with a most unhappy mother who asked me why I had taken so long. The night nurse had not kept up my mother's regular injections for pain because, in her opinion, it was too early! Too early were words that would ring in my ears years later when I heard similar fears of morphine being expressed. How can it be too early to be comfortable when one has a terminal illness? How can it be too early for the relief of physical discomforts which hopefully will make way for regaining control of the mind and providing a pathway for connecting with the spiritual world?
From that moment, my mother's condition deteriorated. I could scarcely move her feet to get her back to bed from the commode chair. The district nurses came to help, putting my mother on an alternating pressure mattress and inserting a catheter in order to avoid the strain and stress of going to the toilet. The doctor asked if I wanted her moved to hospital. To my mother's way of thinking, nursing homes and hospitals were places to visit other people, and I remembered the many months of hospitals visits she had made to my father before he died. There was no way I was going to agree to move her from the security of her own bed in her own home and all that was familiar to her, no way could I abandon her to the care of strangers. There would be no more bad experiences with hired nurses. She was my mother, and I was determined to see it through. My elder brother came to support me, and we were both with her when her breathing stopped. The district nurses had just been to wash her and sit her up on her pillows. A few minutes after the realization that my mother had died sank in, the nurses appeared again. Something had told them to come back, that I needed them. A neighbour appeared and took my brother and me for a cup of tea while the nurses contacted the funeral directors and arranged for the transfer of her body. I felt as if we were all in God's guiding hands. When I returned, the bed was empty and the bedspread had been neatly replaced on the bed. It was as if the event of a few hours earlier had been erased. It was then that numbness set in.
Like a robot, I made phone calls and looked forward to lots of rest and the comfort of my own family. Later I would learn about normal grief reactions. Much later, when I began to learn about hospice care, a lot of what I experienced at this time made sense. What I did know was that I had somehow been there when I was needed — as if I had fulfilled a bargain that we had made when I was given, without guilt, my freedom to go to boarding school and to travel all those years ago. In hindsight, I realize that survival then took over and that the demands of a young family largely put my grief on hold. I took comfort from the number of people who came to the funeral service and from the letters and cards that I received and diligently answered.
For many years, moments of sadness would surface at random. They came on the golf course, they came when I received flowers, they came at my children's end-of-year school activities, they came when I wanted to share something special. The feeling I had through all my adventures was that my mother was always there — I was just like a baby playing peek-a-boo — and that while other people cared for me, no one cared in the same way. A mother's death is tied up with our own sense of beginning and ending, our own sense of love and nurture, our own sense of sacrifice and lifetime commitment. A mother's death for me was also a reminder of our ancestors and the karmic imprints we carry from their lives. These imprints derive from many lifetimes. It seems the soul's journey is never done.
From an energy perspective, a mother's love is clearly realized as an aspect of the divine feminine archetypical energy. I was a mother of four children and had a strong spirit of independence and survival, yet it was humbling, painful, and very inspirational to play a part in supporting my mother at the time of her death. It wasn't at all like the death I had experienced as a student nurse, or like the death in London of that other mother who had a daughter my age. It was an honest occasion, and I wished that more people could have this intimate knowledge of death. Energy is creative, and if I choose to allow it, the divine will influence what I create in a lifetime. Being out of alignment with divine will is what some people call "sin." Another possible definition of sin is a refusal to become conscious of our divine nature. Mystical principles are to be found in the hearts of all religions and ancient sacred scriptures. They are, in their essence, the truth.
Many years later, and following my divorce at the age of fifty-four, I had a significant dream. I was buying a ticket to enter a large concert hall. When I attempted to join the other people who were lining up to buy a ticket, I was told to go straight in as my mother had paid the price. At that time, I was very much on a spiritual quest. It was a time when contemporary mystic and author Caroline Myss was making visits to Australia as was Jean Houston, who is a world-renowned scholar, philosopher, and leader in human capacities. I was also studying Buddhism and Taoism. One of the Buddhist teachings that has stayed with me from that time is that pain and suffering come with attachment.
