Loss impacts all of us. It is part of the human condition.
When I first began my training to become a children’s nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital, I was confronted with a scale of loss that I had not encountered before.
Children living with rare and complex conditions.
Children dying.
Children dying outside the boundaries of the evangelical faith I had grown up with.
To my fevered childhood imagination, the torments of hellfire were real. I was a good child and mature for my age but I was gripped by an inner fear that I might still not be saved and some undefined but awful eternal punishment would befall me. By the age of 18 I was not so much in the thrall of the evangelical ideology but I still had no container for the suffering I was encountering on the wards of my first placement. I had nightmares that I was burning up in hell just for considering the possibility that Jesus wasn’t real or God didn’t exist or Hindus might be saved too. I didn’t want to go back to blind belief but I was too scared to leave the faith altogether. I asked my question, ‘What about children who die?’ at every church meeting I participated in but I never got an answer that satisfied my soul.
That was a long time ago.
After I graduated as a Staff Nurse, I worked on a paediatric oncology unit where the precepts of allopathic medicine came into question for me. I nolonger felt alarmed for the eternal wellbeing of my young patients, but I did feel that children who are dying are owed a good death. The chemotherapy I was called upon to administer sometimes brought lifesaving results but at others it protracted death into a tortured journey towards an end that no-one was willing to discuss.
I took a detour to the School of Oriental and African Studies where I delved into the nature of health and wellbeing as it was percieved across cultures and through the lens of comparative religion. I took a masters degree at Bristol University exploring Contemporary Theologies and spent 7 years writing my doctoral thesis on Healing in the Ethiopian Church.
I did return to nursing for a while and staffed on an HIV unit for families affected by AIDS.
The years that followed have been spent deep in the trenches of motherhood raising my four daughters and home educating them.
My nursing experiences, my academic forrays and my adventures within the family have synthesised into the work that I do now as a Grief Recovery Method Specialist, End of Life Planning Facilitator and Traner, Funeral Celebrant and Storyteller.
Transforming Loss is a job, a dance, a purpose. It’s unfolding in my work with clients, in my writing and in my heart. It’s a lifelong journey and I welcome you to share a little part of it with me.