You are making me feel sad

I feel like a fraud as I sit here thinking about how I can depict such anguish and experience through drama, when all I can do is sympathise. I can understand fear and pain- I felt such distress when my son at age three was rushed into surgery with a ruptured appendix and spent the next ten days in hospital fighting the infection. I was so distraught days after his surgery that a nurse took me to one side and told me that I needed to stop crying because I was making her feel sad. I remember it was said with a smile and so I didn’t take offence. I knew that I needed to move past the shock of confronting the possibility that he could have died, but I didn’t really appreciate why it mattered to her until now. Every day she worked with sick children and like ICU spent a lot of time in the company of their family. She had to find a way to protect herself from our distress so that it didn’t consume her. Just hearing the stories of the nurses that I have interviewed obviously moved me but more than that, I found myself thinking of them and worrying for them. To spend long days with patients who are at their most vulnerable and in most need; who rely on you to live- to be needed so much by someone and their family, how can you not form some attachment to them? How can you not grieve their pain? How can you not mourn their passing? I know what it is to feel fear, to feel deep gut wrenching pain and I know what it is to lose someone and something of yourself but not on the same scale, not over a sustained period, not to the point where I could even consider taking my own life.

I will never truly understand the short term and long term effects of the pandemic on these women, who protected people like me, who have given so much of themselves and sacrificed so much of what they could have experienced. I sit in my living room with my youngest son who has now tested positive for COVID, facing another week of being trapped in my home. I look at the pile of dried mud that my eldest son has trodden out of his walking boots before venturing out of the door to forest school and rather than feeling frustrated I am soothed. I may feel at times like I want to tear the house down or walk away from the duty it places on me; but I appreciate it. I appreciate each crack that becomes a crevice to store another happy memory to add to an already abundant store of fun, of love, and of happiness. I do not share in the sorrow and pain that those nurses took back into their homes but I care about it and listening to their stories and finding a way to share them is my responsibility; it is my privilege and it will be my gesture of care to them.