by Marie Cooper, Kerene Payne, Eva Paoletti, Sachin Dwivedi and Andrew Adeck. There is a kind of care that no textbook fully captures. It lives in quiet hospital rooms, in whispered confessions, in hands held through the longest nights. On International Nurses Day, the Global Palliative Nursing Network (GPNN) brought four nurses to the stage at the Nursing Now Challenge Global Event, and each one told a story that stayed in the room long after they finished speaking.
Storytellers, Story Gatherers, Story Keepers
As a nurse, Kerene is the backbone of South Africa’s community PC team. She spoke first, and she gave the room a framework that felt like something they had always known but never quite named. Palliative nurses, she said, move through three roles and each one matters.
As storytellers, we sit with patients and draw out the words they are afraid to say, their dreams, their fears, their regrets, and we carry those words forward to advocate for them when they can no longer advocate for themselves.
As story gatherers, we go deeper still, learning not just the patient’s condition but their whole life: the adventures, the loves, the losses, the memories they want to leave behind.
And as story keepers, we become the guardians of the things said only once, in a low voice, in a room where the door is closed. The last wishes. The long-held guilt. The quiet plea for forgiveness. Patients share these things because they know, in the space a nurse creates, they will never be judged. They will only ever be met with love.
The Secret Everyone Already Knew
Eva travelled around the world to write her book, joined us from the UK, and she has come to recognise a particular kind of silence, the silence of a family that has, without words, agreed to pretend. The patient does not mention dying. The family does not acknowledge the truth. Everyone believes they are protecting each other, and everyone grieves quietly and alone.
She remembered the afternoon a man in his fifties, lying in a hospice bed with his wife beside him, simply looked up and asked: “Am I dying?” Eva was trained for this question. But before she could speak, his wife answered. Calmly. Honestly. With so much love, the room filled. Yes, she said. And I will be right here until the end. He wept. He thanked her. And the suffering that had lived between them, unspoken for so long, finally became something they could carry together. Eva left that room knowing she had witnessed something rare and healing: the truth, spoken tenderly, arriving just in time.
When Silence Becomes the Care
Andrew, a nurse working in conflict-affected South Sudan for more than 20 years, told a story where the most important thing he did was nothing at all. He was caring for a young woman with stage IV HIV/AIDS whose family’s relentless hope had left her no room to be afraid. She had fears that she could not speak. Grief with nowhere to go.
So Andrew sat beside her, took her hand, and did not fill the silence. He simply stayed.
After a long while, she began to talk, really talk about the sadness and fear she had carried alone. When she finished, she looked at him and said quietly, “I feel lighter now.” Andrew carried those words home. They remind him, they remind all of us, that presence is its own form of medicine, and sometimes the most healing thing we can offer is simply to stay.
Please Take Me Home
Sachin, a palliative care nurse educator from India, spoke of a woman of forty-two battling Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, who arrived for a bone marrow transplant after a year of fighting. On the day they met, she gazed toward the River Ganga and said softly, “If I die, please put my ashes in Maa Ganga.” It was said with faith, not despair. The day before her transplant, she whispered, “I will die soon. Please take me home.” He had no answer, only the weight of her words.
The transplant offered hope briefly, then sepsis took it away. Her family chose to honour her wish. A twenty-hour ambulance journey brought her home. When she arrived, fear gave way to relief, peace, recognition. She told her husband, “Today I will die.” Prayers, Family gathered. And she left this world gently, at home, her soul beside the sacred river she had always believed in.
When the nurses finished speaking, the room held its breath. Sana Gul, a postgraduate Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, reflected that listening itself had been the greatest lesson, a powerful tool for understanding how grief is carried and shared. Flora Dangwa, a PhD Fellow at Cicely Saunders Institute, called it simply “very, very powerful.”
About the GPNN
The GPNN unites nurses worldwide to strengthen compassionate palliative care through collaboration and shared experience. It empowers champions to lead, support peers, and improve care for patients and families everywhere.
To join this growing community, visit https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/gpnn/
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This article was first published on the St Christopher’s Hospice’s website and is republished here with permission.
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