NADINE DORRIES: My time as a nurse means I consider dying is not the top

As an 18-yeard-old trainee nurse I was working on a paediatric ward during a whopping cough pandemic. Parents were only allowed to visit for two hours a day: 2-3pm in the afternoon and 6-7pm in the evening.

At 4am one morning – I was on nights – I was in the Ward Office where a junior doctor was on the phone to the Sister on the ward opposite, a children’s surgical ward.

‘There was a little girl on the landing, about four years old, looking for her mother,’ he was telling her. ‘She went back in through your door, do you have her?’

I left the office momentarily and when I returned I found him staring at the handset. He looked up at me: ‘They don’t have a little girl on that ward,’ he said. ‘Only babies.’

He looked like he had just seen a ghost. In truth he had.

Nadine Dorries was a trainee nurse when one of her colleagues on the ward believed he saw the ghost of a girl

I was reminded of this unnerving event while reading about the experiences of Julie McFadden in Saturday’s Mail and The Mail on Sunday. As a palliative care nurse, she has been at the bedside of numerous dying patients and seen and heard many things that she cannot explain, from the presence of a comforting ‘angel’ to the reassuring visions experienced by people in their final hours.

In my nursing days I was frequently witness to the unexpected, the spiritual or just plain ghostly. I have held the hand of more people than I can remember as they took their last breath and it was the greatest privilege to do so.

I have been sitting in darkened rooms, in the early hours, aware that the end was imminent. I have turned down night lights and closed doors to shut out noise from the ward and then pulled a chair up close to the bed. I have kissed a brow, and whispered to someone they were not alone and that I would not leave them. In those moments I stopped being a nurse and it was then that things might happen… things unseen and difficult to explain. It would begin as a feeling, as if someone had entered the room, but no one had. 

A sudden smile on the face of the dying or a whispered word, often a name, and then an awareness of a presence ebbing away and taking with it the life force of my patient.

I have faced similar situations in my personal life, too. In her final hours, my mother-in-law, who was being treated for a brain tumour, sat up in bed as I fed her shepherd’s pie. We laughed and talked and I believed the surgery had worked. I didn’t recognise the pity in the eyes of the nurse. I stupidly didn’t recognise the phenomenon for what it was – terminal lucidity, the sudden surge or a rally which happens in a small number of patients and lasts long enough to say the unsaid.

My mother-in-law and I told each other how much we loved one another and how important she was to all of us, especially her grandchildren. It lasted an hour and was one of the most important hours of my life.

And I will always remember my patient Grace. Her four daughters sat in vigil around her bed as she lay dying at home. One day, she tapped my wrist and I bent my head to listen to her. ‘Get rid of them,’ she said.

I was in my twenties, the daughters double my age. They had been bickering the entire time they were in the room and it occurred to me that the poor woman just wanted to die in peace. I sympathised with her so I plucked up the courage and suggested they all go downstairs. They meekly agreed. I heard later from the night nurse, that Grace had peacefully departed in the early hours as her four daughters slept.

Julie McFadden says her experiences have convinced her that death is nothing to be afraid of. That is certainly what my 97-year-old uncle believed. He was a wonderful man, a devout Catholic who, long before he passed, told me that dying was the thing he feared least in life.

Two months ago I attended his funeral on the west coast of Ireland. The weather was fierce as always. Cold and grey, the rain lashed down with the force of stair rods.

As we hurriedly filed into the church – as much to escape the driving rain as any desire to be punctual – I was already dreading the walk back out to the graveyard on a hill looking out across the Atlantic towards Croagh Patrick, a mountain of pilgrimage where St Patrick was said to have spent 40 days fasting on the summit.

Unlike many family members who live in Ireland, I haven’t yet grown a set of gills and I find that special Irish combination of wind and rain daunting to say the least.

Nadine with her late husband Paul. Just after he died a female deer ran into the garden belonging to the family, who are all addressed as Doe

The service was due to begin at midday sharp – and my uncle was the first there, the candles around his coffin piercing the gloom. His wish had been granted. To spend his last night on Earth, alone with God, in the church where he’d worshipped almost every day of his life.

The choir sang us in. The two priests officiating took their place at the head of the coffin. At 11.59 the choir fell silent, the bell chimed the first peal of twelve and… suddenly, the gloom lifted as a shaft of sunlight pierced the stained glass window and fell in a pillar of colour to land on the oak coffin which glowed the orange of flames.

The congregation gasped, and one of the priests grinned. ‘There you have it,’ he said as he pointed to the beam of light. ‘That’s his first class ticket to heaven sent straight by God himself, right there.’

For me there is so much about death that we cannot explain or understand but if seeing is believing, then I am a believer that death is not the end. We don’t need to rush to it or embrace it, but as my uncle counselled, let us not fear it and take comfort from the reassurance – imagined or not – that those we have lost seem to want to pass on.

I have written about the death of my husband Paul before in this column – but never about the moment of his death.

He was a strong-willed man who didn’t want to leave us any more than we wanted him to go. Our bedroom was south facing, with a balcony looking out over the garden, and we had wheeled the hospice bed to the doors. It was a warm June day when he left us. In his last moment, he sat bolt upright. Within moments, the room was dark and the heavens opened.

We have a long running family nickname – we are all addressed as Doe. Hi, Doe. Fly safe Doe. See you later, Doe.

Within seconds of him taking his last breath, a female deer ran into the garden and looked up to the balcony. A sight we’ve never seen before, or since.