We had all just started our shift when the code bells alarmed. We ran to the room, and someone was already performing CPR. After several rounds, our Attending Physician sadly announced the time of death and we braced ourselves for the mom’s agonizing screams. Our chaplain, social worker, respiratory therapist, care partners, and physician colleagues beautifully came around the mom in their own ways. But it is the nurses who remain closest, who tenderly clean and wrap the child, who facilitate the mom’s one final terrible goodbye, who bring the child to the morgue. We tell the parents, no, you don’t want to walk with us to the morgue. That final heavy piece of end-of-life care in the hospital is for the nurses to shoulder.

*

“Hello Mr. G! How are you? Oh I’m doing really well, thanks for asking! I’m calling with good news! We have the item you were inquiring about.”

Just moments before this business rep went behind the curtain in her child’s hospital room, she had been quietly watching us work to stabilize her child’s vital signs, making adjustments on the ventilator helping her child breathe, and titrating medications to keep the blood pressures from becoming too low.

What if the customer became disgruntled about something in the transaction and gave this woman a hard time? I found myself ready to go to bat for this mom if I needed to. The customer on the line had no idea where this mom was calling from, but I knew. I was there in the room with her, sharing her concern for her very sick child. But you’d never be able to tell from the professional, cheerful tone she had to maintain on her call. What a lonely burden for this mom to carry in the world.

*

These were just a fraction of the intense stories from one recent singular 12-hour shift for me in our pediatric ICU. I moved from room to room as resource nurse, coming literally face to face with one tragedy after another. The accidents I always fear for my own children. The situations that force you to take a hard look at your worldview, that make you wonder what you can actually come to peace with, and still profess a faith and hope that once felt easier, pre-nursing.

*

I showed up in church the next morning, disoriented and muddled with the weight that still lingered from the day before. I greeted the woman sitting next to me, and tried to keep the focus on her. I asked about her line of work, how long she’d been doing it, what she enjoyed about it. She tried to ask what I do, but the greeting time ended, and I felt a strange relief that I didn’t have to answer.

The pastor moved into the sermon, and as soon as I saw that it was about the story of the Good Samaritan, a wave of deep emotion rose up from seemingly nowhere. It was the story of the Samaritan man who went to a badly injured person on the side of the road, and sacrificed of himself to help this suffering stranger. It was also the story of others who chose to turn an ignorant eye to a suffering world, who opted for self-protection and the admitted ease that came with it. I felt so seen by God, as if He was telling me, “I see those of you who go with hearts wide open and willingly suffer with those who suffer. I see you, I see what you do and what you bear.” I kept quietly wiping tears away throughout the sermon.

As the service came to a close, I told the woman sitting next to me, “It was nice meeting you; have a great week!” She paused and said, “Wait, you didn’t tell me what you do for work?”

It only took me saying, “I’m a pediatric ICU nurse,” for me to choke up and look away. I know the usual response we get when we tell people what we do, usually a mix of empathy/pity, “I can’t imagine” disconnect, and often some respect as well. Usually, I can deflect and minimize the hidden weight that I carry, but this time it was too fresh, just below the surface.

I collected myself after a moment. “Sorry. Yesterday was a hard day at work. It’s just…a little raw right now.” Thankfully, she was gracious and not too terribly awkward about it all. She had spent some time in her younger years as a tech in a cardiovascular unit, so she had more idea than most people of what I was referring too.

There is a particular loneliness that our patients and families bear, one that is attached to extraordinary, unimaginable suffering and loss. As the ones immersed in their world, tucked away behind hospital walls, we share the burden of their suffering, and the burden of that particular loneliness.

I am surrounded by a gracious community in my church and at home with my husband and even my pre-teen kids, who try very hard to make space for understanding my realities and experiences. But truth be told, as with any kind of extraordinary suffering, there is always going to be a certain kind of loneliness attached to it, and I am realizing that this loneliness is simply a part of the cost we pay for the privilege to be up close with our patients and families as their nurses.