Somebody's Ginny

My friend Gin died a little over a week ago.

She had entered hospice two days before I was scheduled to work, and because I am a hospice nurse, I considered making arrangements to have my shifts covered.  It was too painful.  Too close to home as Gin, another state away, was dying.  How would I have the strength to care for anyone else?

"Go," Michael encouraged me. "Everyone there is somebody's Ginny."

I knew Michael was right.  I woke up at 5:15am on Saturday, checked Facebook one more time to see if there was any updates on Gin (there wasn't), and headed to work.  In what seemed to be a painfully cruel coincidence, one of our patients in our small residential hospice was a woman in her mid-30's, also a mother of two.  I asked the nurse I was working with to be assigned to that patient (instead of me), explaining what was going on with my friend.  She agreed.  But at 9 am, when the other nurse was busy with another patient, the call light went off in the room of the young woman. I walked in as her dad asked me, "Is my daughter okay?  My vision is bad and I can't see if she's breathing."

The young mother had died.  And there I was, in the very situation I had desperately tried to avoid.  I sat with a hand on the back of this sobbing man, at the bedside of his daughter, waiting for her children to enter the room.  I remembered Michael's words.  This was somebody's Ginny. 

As they grieved at her bedside, I walked out of the room and went straight to my cell phone.  There was a text.  Gin had died.

I knew she had. I promised myself that I wouldn't check for an update at work, fearing I wouldn't be able to keep it together for the rest of the day if something had happened.  But clearly I was meant to be in that room at that very moment, and I felt the weight of its significance.  I knew I would find that in some way, maybe this way, I could be with Gin. 

Gin was a midwife.  She helped usher people into life; I help usher people out.  And while I am broken over her death...I'm working to find joy in her rebirth, knowing that Jesus has ushered her in.