Vera Klingbeil

I grew up in a religious family, and when I was 17, I started a course of studies to be a nurse for babies and children. I can’t really say when my first moment of realizing faith was. It was normal. It was normal for us, my family, to pray every day at meals and other times. I didn’t have one of these moments of awakening that all of a sudden happened; it was more of a step-by-step process. There were a few moments where I would look back and remember how far I had come, and there were moments when I worked as a nurse when children died.

One situation was when a child died. The parents were from a poor background, underprivileged, and they knew their child was going to die. They never came to visit the child. My colleagues decided that because the parents had never visited the child, they wouldn’t tell or invite the parents to be there when the child died. I found that very difficult to deal with, and I didn’t know how to react because I didn’t think it was OK that the parents weren’t there.

I was the youngest worker there. Then the child did die…but I didn’t have my shift that day and I wasn’t able to be there. It was an experience that I wasn’t able to share with my friends, or with people who didn’t work in the hospital, because they had never experienced the situation of watching a dying child.

As part of my education as a nurse, I had a teacher who was very helpful in teaching us about how to deal with death. During a class, she asked me about how I’d dealt with the situation and about my personal reaction to the child’s death. I answered her without paying attention to any of the other students in the class, and was so involved in telling my story to the teacher that I didn’t realize one of the other students was crying. I was describing something that happened to me, but this other person was crying. I saw that as a way that God can also cry for other people.