Marc and Noreen Levison, an EMT and an ER nurse respectively, spoke to the late great Chicago writer Studs Terkel for his 2001 book, Will the Circle be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.
Here's how part of the conversation went:
Noreen: When a person looks at you and says, "I'm going to die" they usually do die. That's what my experience has been. Somehow they know their life is going to pass. What I found is going to help them most is to be there with them.
Marc: And here's a little boy, the gang banger that was a tough guy on the street two minutes before he took two nine-millimeters to the belly, and he's got maybe an hour...here's this kid that was the toughest kid on the street and now he's looking at ya, and he's got that look in his eye like, "I'm a baby and I'm scared to death."
Noreen: When someone comes in in cardiac arrest, and the paramedics are pumping on their chest...their heart has stopped. There's not too much we can do. You try not to look too deeply at the person's face because you know every person that passes by you affects you in some way. Most people who come in in cardiac arrest die. What people see on TV is not what really happens.
Marc: You can't let death go without thinking about it. You have to intellectualize something like what happened here and who was this person.
Noreen: The hard ones are the people where there's no identification. The junkie that comes off the street and dies and nobody knows who they are. I think: "Oh, that's such a waste of life." It's the people that don't have anybody. Those are the ones that have really struck me.
Marc: My father died of lung cancer. He went on wherever you go, peacefully in the night without too much suffering. About forty-eight hours before he died...something happened where emotionally I knew this was it: my dad was going to be dead in a day or two, and I'll never see him again. It just ate me up and I broke down and cried for about a half hour. It was a terror inside of me. It dawned on me that this was it, and the daddy I had when I was a little boy, the smells, the feel of his clothes...all the memories... There is nothing the doctors can do, nothing anybody can do. It's so permanent. I won't be able to call him on the phone. I won't be able to drive over to his house.
Noreen: In our ER, someone dies and we also prepare the body. We take out the tubes and all the other things that we've done to people, so the family can come in.
Marc: They don't want to see their loved ones with all the medical equipment still in there.
Noreen: When I was a brand new nurse, I wasn't prepared for the response of the families.
Marc: The death howl is indescribable. The mother that was just told her kid is dead. It echoes through the halls of the building.
Noreen: Inconsolable...the howling, the screaming, the falling on the floor, the almost seizure-like activity. (And) we see a lot of prayer.
After I read this...I had this thought...that the dead cannot hear you scream; they cannot hear you wail; they cannot hear you cry. They can't even hear your prayers. They cannot hear how passionate you are about their life. They're dead.
And I thought that it's good to value people in death...but it's much better to value them in life. Marc finished with a similar thought:
Marc: Being on the front lines of death makes me more grateful...and when we have our arguments, as all married couples do, or I yell at my kids, it makes it a little bit easier to say I'm sorry quicker....to appreciate, "Don't sweat the small stuff"...because I've seen some (expletive) stuff happen.
What does this have to do with leadership?
"I do not believe," said Woodrow Wilson, "that a man can lead who does not act under the profound sympathy with those whom he leads-a sympathy that is an insight-and insight which is of the heart rather than the intellect."
