The Kindness of Strangers
She knew that all around her patients were getting high-priced, technologically sophisticated state-of-the-art care. But for this old man, she thought, state-of-the art care would not have meant more machinery. It would have meant a hand to hold.
“I was overcome with guilt and frustration,” Clark says, as she tells the story. She had been with hundreds of critically ill patients and had seen many people die, but this man had specifically requested her presence, and she hadn’t been there. Encountering her today, it’s hard to imagine that anything could unsettle this woman for very long. Vivacious, almost exhaustingly energetic, she is the kind of person who makes her own weather, a category-defying woman who quotes Mother Teresa in one breath and recounts the plot of a B-grade horror movie in the next. She has a lively, animated face framed by dazzling silver hair, the tips of which she dyes jet black.
But back then, feeling she had neglected some essential human responsibility, feeling that she had lost touch with why she went into nursing in the first place, she was at a loss. “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I just knew something had to be done.” What happened that night almost twenty years ago on her floor at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Oregon, was not just a revelation; it was a calling.