Society & Culture
Maddy reached out to us to offer perspectives of her experience in palliative care.She welcomed us into her home in Fitzroy and introduced us to her furry canine housemate, Pam.Pam made her way to Melbourne from the Northern Territory after being adopted when Maddy worked as a nurse in Alice Springs.Her time in the centre of Australia saw Maddy develop a fondness for Indigenous art which now adorns her walls, filling the space with colour and curiosity.You can see how they try to teach you something. How they offer a story which you are given the choice to perceive or look past.It takes a particular type of person to be a nurse, to sympathise with people in pain on a day-to-day basis. To adopt their problems as your own while pushing any intrinsic difficulties to the periphery.Empathy and sympathy are two friends a nurse must greet every day. And a keen observation of human behaviour is embraced in order to make sense of how we react to situations out of our control.For Maddy, death is a part of her job. Just as bricks are for a builder, or money is for a banker.How to deal with death is a learned skill and one she is still trying to navigate.But what occurs after death, grief, is unfamiliar to her and for it, she has no remedy to ease the pain but to do it openly, and with each other.