One weekend as a hospital on-call chaplain, I received a call from a Cardio nurse asking if I would be available about midnight to attend an extibation procedure. Not having a medical background, I had to ask what type of procedure she was talking about and she explained they would be removing a young man from life support. She said that his family would not be present and his grandmother had requested a chaplain to be in the room when he took his last breath. As a chaplain, I agreed to be in the room as a stand-in for the family however as someone with little experience of death, I did so with some trepidation. |