Sixty Years a Nurse. Mary Hazard

especially if it was neglected. This made me feel much more responsible, and assiduous, when dealing with wounds after this experience.

      Sister Tutor, who was a very kindly woman, could see that we were deeply affected by this kind of encounter with death – a boy who had died too soon out of both an accident and human frailty. She would tell us that we would have to get used to seeing all sorts of things in our hospital lives, and that dealing with death was a major part of it all. Sometimes we would see things that would upset us for days, other times we’d see something that would stay with us for life. Even though some of the sisters and staff nurses were quite callous and hardened, and barely paid any attention to the dead and dying, they nonetheless respected that there needed to be a dignified way of dealing with the passing of life.

      Helping people to die was seen as an important aspect of the job, and so Sister Tutor taught us how to approach it with human kindness and thoughtfulness. One day, shortly after the incident of the youth dying from the hidden head injury, she sat us all down and said, ‘Don’t ever let someone die alone. We didn’t come into this world alone, and we should never leave this world alone. When someone is approaching their final hours it’s so important to sit and be with them as they go, especially if they have no family.’ Indeed, she taught us to sit and ‘mop their brows, comfort them’, she would say, ‘hold their hands and soothe them’. She taught us to care, to spend time with people, to make them comfortable, to talk to them and to ease their passage into death. She was a wonderful, sweet influence and a nice woman, to boot, and her important lessons about something that had frightened me a great deal, at first, have stayed with me all the rest of my nursing life.

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       Yes, Matron; No, Sister