My Friend Camus Said I Suffered Existential Angst

I used to be a college professor. I taught sociology at a major northwest university and was writing a PhD dissertation in political sociology focusing on agricultural social movements. I taught introductory classes as well as classes in social problems, the sociology of power, and social research methods. I liked teaching and I thought that it was important.

But it didn't seem important to others. My students just wanted grades and, eventually, a degree. My department just wanted me to offer as many classes I could as inexpensively as possible. The university just wanted me to keep my nose clean and cater to the students. The athletic department, of course, just wanted me to pass its athletes, no matter how deplorable their academic performance. Very few, it seemed, thought that teaching and, ultimately, learning was important.

At the same time, I was writing a dissertation that required me to become involved with political activist groups. The groups were suspicious of me as an academic researcher and the academic community was suspicious that I was becoming an activist, "going native," a la Carlos Castenada. In between these extremes, nobody but myself and my advisor seemed to care about my project. Several times people suggested that I "just do it" regardless of the reasons, as if writing a dissertation and attaining a PhD was no more than replicating a Nike commercial.

I didn't feel like doing that. I couldn't. I longed to find meaning in what I was doing, to understand why what I did was worthwhile, to me, to students, to the world. I played mind-tricks. "Oh, these students will realize eventually that what I taught them is important. Oh, the discipline will realize the significance of my research." But it wasn't happening. In short, I found myself in a state of existential angst.

What am I doing with my life? Do I contribute? Can I conceive of a world in which people who do what I do don't exist? Sadly, honestly, yes. Yes, I could.

And then tragedy struck. Someone very close to me was diagnosed with cancer, and soon thereafter became terminal. University life stopped; my research stopped. My future stood frozen in mid-air, in the stasis of waiting, waiting to see what cancer could do. To make a long story short, it kills.

In the short amount of time my loved-one had, I cared for her at home. I positioned her in bed and bathed her. I sat up with her at nights when she was too afraid to close her eyes for fear that death, not night, would overcome her. I gave her medicine. I made sure she had the people around her she wanted--her son, her friends--and kept the rest, the nonessential ones at bay. We reluctantly welcomed hospice into our life--nurses, aides, social workers, volunteers--and our life became different, defined as much by a prognosis as what we did or thought. I drank a lot.

In the end, at the end, she got what she wanted: to stay home with her child, not to die in a hospital. It seemed so little but it was my last gift to her. Ironically, she died in our living room.

But I got something as well. I realized that I had an aptitude for taking care of others, for nursing. Why did this shock me? I had been my son's primary care giver all his life, and I took care of the home, the yard, the cooking, the cleaning. I was already a nurse, just a nurse without training, without a license. Did it really shock me that I could do this sort of work and do it with pride and a sense of accomplishment?

I had grown up in the midwest. No one there had ever told me that men could be nurses. No one even held that out in front of me as an option. If I wanted to become a doctor, well, that was fine. But I didn't.

My experience taking care of a dying person taught me about what I wanted most: a sense of accomplishment in knowing that what I had just done for someone made a difference. I craved what teaching would not provide, nearly instantaneous feedback about the quality and effect of my actions, my mark on the world. This, I found in the small circle between nurse and patient, for no matter what I did for my loved-one, she responded. If I moved her wrong, she winced or cried; if I held her hand, she smiled; when I brought her son up into the hospital bed, she thanked me.

I realized that nurses receive this immediate affirmation in their daily jobs. They receive it primarily from their patients but also from communities and a society that respect them and their profession.

In many ways, nurses are like trash collectors. Not many want to be one, but we appreciate those who do. In fact, I can't imagine a world without trash collectors, any more than I can imagine a world without nurses.

But that was, literally, a lifetime ago, albeit someone else's life. I honor that life and its unfortunate end every day I go to work, because it helped me see the value of my own life and it is the reason I became a nurse.