|
As Amanda Burr, RN, recalls, it was 1969 when it became
fashionable for caregivers to tell people the truth
about dying. She was a nursing student at Columbia University
and had just seen Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, MD, author
of the seminal On Death and Dying.
"You didn't have much openness to discuss it among
patients and families," Burr said.
Since then, Burr's nursing career has been a tour from
New York City to Sun City, Calif., where she's an ICU
staff nurse at Menifee Valley Medical Center. For all
the death and dying she's seen along the way as an emergency
department and hospice nurse, her approach to discussing
the end of life with patients comes not from nursing
but from the ministry.
Burr, 54, had been a nurse for nine years and was working
in Arizona, she said, when "I was minding my own
business coming out of church one afternoon and something
said, 'Go to seminary.' "
"A call is a hard thing to describe," she
said, but inside of six months she was enrolled in seminary
and serving as a campus minister at California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona. Through the course of
eight years, she earned a master's of divinity degree
and a doctorate of ministry, all the while working as
an RN.
"One of the things being in the ministry has helped
me do is to really be able to talk to people about end-of-life
issues," Burr said. "It's a fearful subject
for most families," especially do-not-resuscitate
orders.
"I don't flash my credentials," she said,
in talking with families about patients' physical and
spiritual needs and quality of life vs. quantity.
Burr said that once, while working in the ICU at Granada
Hills Community Hospital where she spent 10 years, the
family and friends of a dying patient wanted to come
in and sing hymns. Her response, not only as an RN but
as then-pastor of First Christian Church of Reseda,
was, "If this is a person whose life is singing
hymns that are familiar to the heart and comforting
to the soul, then we need to let you come in and sing
a few hymns.
"Coming from New York, that kind of thing isn't
done," Burr said. "Out here in Southern California,
which is a much more conservative place, believe it
or not, people are more open to that and the hospitals
even are."
Burr, who is waiting for a call to pastor at another
church, said she has officiated at former patients'
funerals and has sung and delivered homilies at memorial
services. "I'm a very good preacher, known for
my storytelling," she said.
That figures. From the hospital to the pulpit, she
has a sense of the theatrical. She is as comfortable
in front of 150 parishioners and in the limelight as
she is counseling a few family members in a quiet corner
of the hospital.
At times, she's a comedian and quick with a laugh.
Judiciously used, humor can help even intensive care
patients over the hump, Burr said. She recalled two
weddings at which she officiated.
The first took place on skis at Lake Tahoe. In the
second, a couple took the plunge off a high dive at
Magic Mountain. Tongue in cheek, Burr said she takes
weddings seriously, but does them anyway.
For four years she has been president of the local
theater company in Hemet, Calif., where her favorites
are "The Madwoman of Chaillot" and the role
of Mama Rose in "Gypsy." Among her other acting
credits are an "under five" appearance-that's
less than five lines-on an episode of "Days of
Our Lives," and a Toyota commercial.
At one point, while working as a nurse, minister and
actress, Burr said the question was, "Can you decide
between the three things that you're doing which one
you want?" And her answer still is, "No, I
can't. I want all three."
Contact Phil McPeck
at getpjm@aol.com.
|
