Connor McDonald Jones | Student Nurse

Death has been something that I have never really thought about up until a couple of months ago. I am studying to be a nurse and part of the course I need to prepare a deceased person to be sent to the morgue. This involved both undressing and cleaning the body. Before taking part, I had my doubts that I wouldn’t be able to handle myself in this type of situation. I have been to an open casket funeral before but have never seen someone right after their death.

The day comes and I am put in a room with another experienced nurse tasked with cleaning and removing the garb of an old man who had passed away 10 minutes before I got there. One of our first tasks was removing an intravenous needle from the man’s arm.

I distinctly remember the moment it got removed with blood pooling out of their arm and myself being instructed to stop the blood leaking out with a cotton bud. It shocked me because in my head it felt like the man should still be alive with blood still flowing, but then soon looking at him seeing no life in him.

Shortly after stopping the blood, I was asked to roll his body over to untie his gown. We were told his name which I then used to tell him what I was doing. In some weird way talking to him made it more pleasant and respectful then not saying anything at all when manoeuvring him. Overall, I felt this experience gave me a new insight into the idea of death and my own mortality in a positive way. Death is something that in my own experience and most cultures are a taboo subject because of the implications of yourself dying or someone else you love not existing anymore. I think depending on your situation in life it can be something that you never think about or constantly think about because of a lifelong illness.

From my own experience in a hospital, I believe death is a normal part of life and as a society we should embrace it. I feel the more we see death as the end of everything then the more we can’t accept death as a normal aspect of life. The fear in death then takes over our attention away from the moment and we become more anxious in our daily lives.

This then brings me to then what happens after death. As an atheist I believe that after death we go back to Earth as part of our own life we take and consume, and in the end we must give it back no matter the circumstances.

—Connor McDonald Jones (2024)

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