Towards the end of last year -- about this time last year, actually -- I had three family members die in hospice care about a month apart from each other, thankfully on all different sides of my family so the brunt of the trauma was rather evenly distributed (a rarity in serial deaths in my family!). Shortly after, I heard a story told by a hospice nurse (on This American Life, or Fresh Air, or Snap Judgement -- somewhere, I can't recall exactly where) about going through her day, how she makes it, what her patients go through, what the families go through while dealing with the grief of losing a loved one. After having seen so much of it from the family perspective, hearing this nurse's story got me thinking about what it must be like for her, which was a decent coping mechanism for me at the time. This is what came out of that time: a sort of mix of all three family members that died, and the various circumstances that surrounded their deaths, as well as the family's reaction to their passing, all seen through the eyes of a nurse taking care of them all.

Been toying with this story for about half a year, and finally decided to stop fussing over it and just post it. So here it is!