DQ: How often do you engage with or witness death in your work?

DQ: How often do you engage with or witness death in your work?

Thanks a lot for sharing with us your topic 4 DQ 1 discussion post where you managed to give a very eloquent account of your experiences with death while working in a level 1 trauma center emergency department as well as at a personal level. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for you and your colleagues having to witness all those deaths in the ER department. Also, accept my sincere condolences for the loss of your girlfriend and friends. May God comfort you during this trying time and may He give you infinite peace and strength to help you through this difficult time.

At the moment, I do not work as a nurse. In my current job as a dorm Resident Assistant, we don’t deal with death at all, and the only time death is even talked about is in the context of suicide or medical emergencies, which we are trained to deal with. I do deal with it a little bit when I go to clinicals for my RN courses, since so far we have done most of our clinical hours at a nursing home. We do not get enough time caring for those residents to get attached and be terribly affected by their deaths, but we see the aftermath from both the nursing staff’s perspective and from the families’ perspective. For me it has affected my view of death in interesting ways. I feel like seeing it as an outsider looking in has made me a bit jaded, I still care for the person and their family but it doesn’t affect me much emotionally. I already am fairly accepting of death, especially if I know the person shares my beliefs about salvation, since I believe that if you are saved then death is not the end of your spiritual life, but you get to go to heaven and spend eternity there. It is a little harder for me when I don’t know for sure what they believed or I know they didn’t share my beliefs, because I don’t know if they’ll go to heaven, and sometimes when it’s someone I am fairly close to I feel like I could have introduced them to Jesus.

I have only experienced death at work from a distance. I am a 4th semester Associates degree nursing student. I’ve been in the hospital when patients have coded and passed away but none have been under my care when it happened. I have assisted with postmortem care once during my 2nd semester. I had no interaction with the patient before he passed was just asked to assist after death with the postmortem care. The few times I have been at the hospital when a patient passed away I asked if it was expected. One patient had terminal cancer and the other just got transferred from ICU to the floor and was considered stable. Personally I have only lost a few family members in my lifetime and only one who I was close to. It was hard when my uncle passed of a sudden heart attack. I have no clue how I will feel when I lose a patient under my care. All I hope is that I can have done everything in my power to prevent their death. Paul Hoehner explains death perfectly when he states, “Despite the great strides to alleviate pain and prolong life in even the most serious of illnesses, the death of the body remains one of the central, universal, and inevitable outcomes of life” (Hoehner, P. 2020).

Hoehner, P. (2020). Foundational Issues in Christian Spirituality and Ethics. In

                   Practicing Dignity: An Introduction to Christian Values & Decision Making in                

                  Health Care (1st ed.).  Retrieved from: