Yesterday, I gave my favorite lecture to young nurses who are about eight months into this wild profession.

What follows below is a series of posts on Threads that I put up, as I reflected on the lecture.

The lecture was on Bereavement and Caregiver Resiliency, because to this day we still have so few resources acknowledging that nurses play a part in their patients’ stories too. Our grief for our patients is just as valid, in correlation to our limited role in their lives, as the families’ grief is valid for their primary role in the patient’s life.

We are in the room too. It’s not primarily about us, but neither does the story totally exclude us. To hold to stoicism as a standard of professionalism neglects the important reality that this is as human of a kind of work as it gets.

To be navigating all kinds of floods of thoughts and emotions over human stories of grief, suffering, love and loss, and then think we should just shut it off by clocking out for the day, does such disservice to what we experience, what we build with some of these patients and families.

Resiliency is not about being emotionally unflappable. It is about the courage to open our hearts up to humanity, the courage to wrestle with hard questions, the courage to tackle hard emotions, the courage to be vulnerable with our lament, and go back again into the hard stories.

When I say nurses need to have space to acknowledge their own grief over their patients, I’m not saying that self-control over our emotions isn’t necessary when we are tending primarily to our patients and their family members in heavy losses. I’m concerned about the habit we develop of suppressing our emotions over and over, at work and then outside of work. We grow a muscle of suppression.

But healthy grieving is an important muscle to exercise as well, a skill we can and need to learn. Learning to articulate our thoughts, questions, feelings. Recognizing how professional grief manifests itself in us, and then learning to manage it in safe spaces with safe people. Learning a whole new culture in healthcare.

A muscle of suppression doesn’t make the grief magically disappear. It just…suppresses. Until the grief eventually finds its way out, because it always does. It’s like a leaky roof that’s been patched over, multiple times, until the water finds the cracks. Then we realize that the rain of grief is simply a part of life, just like sunshine is as well. We acknowledge it, and need to learn skills in living with the reality of it.

It is always a trek through Los Angeles traffic to deliver this lecture to our hospital’s ongoing cohorts of new nurses. But it is worth all the effort, if this can help change the culture, and empower these youngest nurses to be honest about their professional grief, care for each other, and teach the next nurses after them to do the same.