My wife Linda and I recently went to Winnipeg.
That’s where we met 48 years ago and where we raised our family. Our oldest daughter’s family still lives there, as do my wife’s parents.
Linda’s parents continue to mourn the loss of their son, who passed away unexpectedly at the beginning of January. Her father has dementia, so he doesn’t understand the magnitude of the loss, but her mother does.
As a bit of a diversion, we suggested going out for a drive to take a tour down memory lane, including driving by homes that Linda’s parents used to live in before settling into their current apartment.
It turned out to be a journey into the past for me as well. My mother, who had lived with us for a few years about 15 years ago during a rough stretch in her life, passed away in 2013 at the youngish age of 76. As we were driving, we were about to drive past a cemetery when it occurred to me that was where my mother had been interred.
I braked and veered into the cemetery and went looking for her burial spot. She had been cremated, and her urn had been placed in a columbarium, which is like an apartment for the departed – a wall with many units housing urns that contain the ashes of the deceased.
There were several columbaria on the grounds, and I had a hard time remembering where she was, as I had not visited her since Mother’s Day of the year she passed.
Surprisingly, the first one I looked at was the right one. I didn’t stand there long, as Linda and her parents remained in the car, but a flood of memories quickly flashed through my mind.
For reasons unknown to me, one of them was of her final years when she lived in a personal care home. I had mixed feelings about her being there, but her condition was such that there wasn’t much choice. One of the things that made it hard for me was watching how the nurses cared for her. There were one or two who were filled with tender loving care (TLC) but most were cold and mechanical, seemingly putting in their hours solely for the paycheque that awaited them.
I mention this because I have often visited personal care homes since moving to Carnduff in 2014. I’ve also spent time in hospitals as a patient and it appears to me that the ‘TLC’ nurses have converged on Saskatchewan. I’ve yet to meet a nurse who wasn’t caring and compassionate to me or to the people I visit. I’m sure there are some out there but they haven’t entered my world.
Nurses are a special group of people. They usually see people at their neediest, people who are in need of extra tenderness and compassion. Sometimes, this means they see people at their ‘grouchiest’, if you know what I mean.
Nurses face the hard emotions of knowing the ones they serve don’t have much time left, especially in personal care homes. But that doesn’t stop them from making the extra effort to ensure their patients’ homestretch is a time where they’re loved and cared for, masking their own grief to provide joy for the ones in their care.
That cemetery visit held some very special moments for me. Pleasant memories of my mother, along with a renewed appreciation of how fortunate we are to have so many loving and caring nurses in our tougher days. Unexpectedly, it served as a reminder to express my appreciation to all those great nurses around us.
We are encouraged by people who show that they care
Who, whenever we’re feeling low, let us know that they’re there
And when health starts to fail and we start to feel worse
What a lift we get from a tender-loving nurse
