Life after Death

Most waitresses don't have to deal with death. They usually just deal with cranky customers and never see them again. During my first job as a waitress at an assisted living home for the elderly, I would have a cranky customer and then not see them again because they died. And a plaque would show up on the wall and all the waiters would gather around to see who wasn't coming to dinner that night. Their spouse would come down to dinner alone or their group of friends would have a chair empty at their table now. And life would go on.

When I first learned about Child Life during my senior year of college, I was volunteering at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. I was asked to cover for the Child Life Specialist (CLS) on the kids floor and I fell in love with her job. From what I could tell she played games with kids and handed out tickets to museums. She made kids happy. She allowed these kids to be kids when they were facing circumstances that some adults couldn't handle. My friends asked if it was depressing to be around all those sick kids, but it honestly was not.

It wasn't until I started my graduate program that I realized how prevalent death would be in this job. Class after class brought up how to deal with a child dying and how to help the families after their child has died. Professors shared stories about a child dying on Halloween in her angel costume or the CLS who had to actually carry a baby down to the morgue because the family was too grief-stricken to do it themselves.

My first internship was in the Hematology/Oncology clinic of a Boston hospital. I was supposed to receive over 400 supervised hours but I was left alone a lot. I was given the keys to the clinic and it wasn't because my supervisors were neglectful or lazy, they were busy. So instead of being treated like an intern I was given the opportunities and advantages that a full-fledged CLS would receive. I was talking with doctors and supporting families and accompanying children to their procedures. I would have lunch with my supervisor or pass her in the hallway but for the most part, it was just me and I liked it. I was good at it. But at the end of the day, when I got home, I would crumble under the weight of what I had experienced that day.

The most important skill a CLS needs is to be a professional. Boundaries can easily become muddled when working in such a delicate environment. You need to be able to hear bad news in one room, console an upset mother in the next room and then be able to play checkers with a kid in the other room without giving any sort of indication of what is going on around them and this would happen every day.

I experienced the deaths of three patients during my internship and learned of the death of a 4th patient after my internship was completed. This was always the reminder that while my job was to make sure these kids got to be kids; that cancer was cancer, and it was going to do it's job as well. Everyone in the clinic would gather around and talk about the final events but then it was time to move on to the next thing. To the kids who were still fighting for their lives. There wasn't time to grieve.

When I learned about the 4th patient who died, I was completely caught off guard. On the last day of my internship he was still in the hospital but he was on the mend. There wasn't any indication that he would be dead a month after I left. I found out the news right before class, from one of my classmates who was now interning in my old position at the clinic. I was asking her for updates on certain kids and when I brought up Ross, the 4th patient, I was floored when she told me he had passed away months ago.

Boundaries got muddled with Ross and his family. I saw him every day that I was at my internship and we would play card games or Monopoly and sometimes after my hour was up, his father would follow me out of the room and would thank me, teary-eyed, as he told me how important these visits were to Ross. These were the times when it made moving on to the next patient difficult. But I appreciated him telling me that I was making a difference. It was hard to tell sometimes when I spent most of my time playing games with kids, if I was actually helping at all.

It was shortly after I learned about his death that I dropped out of graduate school. It wasn't the main reason, but it was a contributing factor. I had reached my breaking point with a lot of things and death was definitely one of them.

So I'm back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what I want to pursue now. All I know is that I don't want to work in an environment where death is a normal occurrence. I wish I could, but I've just simply had enough of it.


Every once in a while I'll have a dream about Ross. I'll dream about him sitting in his hospital bed in his yellow bathrobe, surrounded by his stuffed animals. He's still bald and frail, but he's always smiling. In my dreams, he is exactly like he was on the last day I saw him.

And then I wake up.

And life goes on.