#34 — Can The Losses That Broke You As A Teenager Also Be The Things That Made You?
This week's caller is a pediatric nurse. They see death more than most people, and they have thought about it more than most people, and somewhere in between those two things they built a belief system that is genuinely their own.
They lost their father as a teenager. A few months later they were doing CPR on their childhood best friend. They were sixteen. That year didn't break them into someone who avoids the topic. It broke them open into someone who needed to understand it.
This conversation goes a lot of places. We end up in a video game analogy about reincarnation that is more thought through than it has any right to be. We talk about what nurses actually do in the moments that matter, which is not what television suggests. We talk about the difference between what you believe and what you hope, and how those two things are not always the same.
And then there is a story near the end about a man who died surrounded only by nurses, because twenty years earlier he had told his children he never wanted to see them again. He had one thing he wanted passed on. This caller still hears his voice.
There is also a moment early in the conversation that stayed with me. The caller is talking about their best friend, the one they lost at sixteen, and they say something about how that loss didn't frame itself as why does this keep happening to me. It framed itself as how do I see this person again. That reframe is quiet and it is not small.
Book recommendation: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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