The Pain of Reentry

How does one reenter daily life following a life-changing event like a death? Beyond that, reentering the workplace is perhaps the most challenging of all. Woe to the grieving worker who has not neatly sown up the grieving process before the following Monday at 9am!

Returning to work after a three-week absence to tend to my step-father's dying process and death, I gingerly returned to work and was immediately dizzied by the frantic comings and goings of my colleagues. Standing in the office on my first day back to work, it seemed as if I was a reluctant swimmer poised on the edge of a raging river, considering touching my toe to the water yet highly aware that the undertow would drag me under at my first sign of surrender to its horizontal power.

Of course, my compassionate colleagues welcomed me with hugs and kisses and offers of assistance. Several individuals went out of their way by offering concrete tasks which they could shoulder: filling med boxes for my more dependent patients, making phone calls I was reluctant to place. Still, as I sat at my desk, the cobwebs of absence began to clear, and the onrush of details needing attention quickly filled my brain which until that moment had been busy with other processes of a more personal nature.

Stepping (however reluctantly) into the rapids of the workplace, I realized quite readily that my colleagues' stress and my patients' neediness neither lessened nor took a break while I was otherwise engaged with family. Our "disability care management" office is without a doubt a rushing rapid of information and nursing care which has a laudable goal of keeping the most disabled and chronically ill inner-city patients aligned with the overarching pursuit of preventive health, self-care, and crisis management. In pursuit of that goal, we nurses, nurse practitioners, and medical assistants bend over backwards, often pulling out our hair in order to deliver the quality care which we see as necessary to the well-being of our patients. That said, in order to accomplish this goal, it seems widely accepted that our workplace must function like a battleship at full bore, the ammunition (of health) at the ready, and the crew in a constant state of hypervigilant combat against disability, addiction, disease, and poverty. In delivering such care, the caregivers wear themselves pretty thin.

So, in walks the bereaved nurse, fresh from a parent's illness and ultimate death, still reeling with emotion and saturated with stories of my own family's newest evolution. At 9:00 on Monday morning, I again took on the yoke of the needs of more than eighty people, fifty of whom consider me their first line of defense for most any situation related to their health and well-being. And a yoke it seems.

For more than two weeks, the travails of my patients (and my colleagues who cared for them in my absence) were shadows which would flit across my consciousness, yet danced on the periphery of my mind. With the care of my step-father and coordination of his own care team as a top priority, the worries of the workplace slowly sank to the bottom of my cognitive well. However, even as my enfeebled brain again made attempts to grasp the enormity of the task before me, this first week back was an enormous challenge, and the journey from Monday to Friday seemed at first Herculean, but ultimately felt most Sisyphean.

The boulder is now at rest during this blessed weekend, balanced delicately on my desk some twenty-one miles from our home, patiently awaiting my return. Come Monday, it will again be time to shoulder that burden, and also to continue to seek ways which will decrease said burden's impact on my physical health, grieving process, and emotional well-being.

Yes, the reentry is difficult. When the Space Shuttle is reentering the earth's orbit, the fires of the atmosphere will put the Shuttle's outer layer of protective skin to the ultimate test. That skin is all that protects the astronauts within from the searing and destructive heat of the earth's gaseous envelope. And so for me, my emotional "skin" is what similarly protects me from the vicissitudes of nursing practice, the double (and at times paradoxical) challenge of embodying the noble goal of self-care while I deliver care to others in need.

This Saturday evening, I am grateful for the weekend, for the winds of late summer, for the fickle September weather, for the peace that home affords, for the love that buoys me in times of trouble. I also give thanks for the skin which protects me from the elements, be they emotional or physical in nature.

Dying is hard work, but the dying person is eventually (and thankfully) released from that process, moving beyond all notions of corporeal suffering. But here on earth, the grieving must release themselves from their suffering, all the while maintaining the activities which keep home and hearth upright and functional. And here is the challenge: grieve, move beyond the loss, enter a new relationship with the dead, and embrace life anew.