Transitions: A Nurse's Education about Life and Death

Transitions: A Nurse's Education about Life and Death is a collection of stories from Becki Hawkins's patients over the past thirty years of her career. She started off as a nurse's aide, became a registered nurse, and began her career in oncology. A couple of years later she also started seeing hospice patients. She also did outpatient oncology nursing, home health/hospice, became a hospice chaplain, and later a hospice volunteer. She now sees patients on a volunteer basis. She began writing a feature column, "Beyond Statistics," for a local newspaper when her husband told her one evening after her shift at work, "Please don't tell me about it. Write it down." The first article was published in 1986. These stories are the patients' stories and their education to Becki as she visited them about the transitions we make in life and in death. Some of them involve patients in the nursing home, others in the hospital or an outpatient setting, and many others in the patients' homes. Some of the patients were strangers, some were friends, some acquaintances, and some were family. You will find humor, heartbreak, wisdom, and frequent spiritual allusions in Transitions. The author reminds us that life is brief and fragile, and laced with story after story of how each of us is "learning" in this place that one patient named "Earth School."