A good life and a good death: Santa Cruz nurse reflects on love and loss

Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA)

May 11—SANTA CRUZ — Sunday marked Bonnie Gold's first Mother's Day after the death of her mother, Madelon "Maddie" Givant.

"Here I am in my early 60s ... I can't believe how emotional I was about it all," Gold said.

Gold, a nurse at Dominican Hospital for more than 15 years, understands more than most about hospice and end-of-life care. Through a special arrangement with Dominican Oaks, a subsidiary of Dignity Health where her mother lived, Gold was able to care for Givant and bring her family together with the help of technology in her final week in December.

Gold knows many are not that fortunate. She said staff at the skilled nursing facility went "above and beyond," despite being short-staffed — a feeling she knew well at that time, a time when cases were surging in Santa Cruz County.

"In the hospital, you become the link to a family at the end of people's lives," she said. "I was one of those nurses on the iPad in the hospital doing FaceTime with people and it's very difficult."

It wasn't one incident, such as an unbearable COVID-19 symptom, that caused her mother's death. Givant, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, passed shortly after she started to lose interest in making it through the pandemic.

"The idea of not being able to see family and having so much isolation (was too much)," Gold said. "Really, all these elderly people have so much resilience and so much courage after going through a lifetime of wars and challenges, a lot of death and raising kids. They just tap into it. She couldn't tap into that vein anymore."

One day, Givant decided not to eat — a rare occasion, Gold realized, because she loved eating from the menu and visiting with servers. Then, Givant didn't leave bed; she was in a comatose state where she never felt pain and died gracefully, her daughter explained. She died on her 88th birthday.

"She never woke up, and I never got to see her big beautiful blue eyes again," Gold said. "She knew it was me because hearing is really the last thing to go and the energy of just having your daughter come ... she hadn't seen me in so long, had me be able to touch her, hold her or kiss her."

A new phase

With support from the administration at Dominican Hospital and from her family, Gold took time off to grieve.

"Separating myself from being a nurse and a daughter is a challenge but it provides me with a different perspective," Gold, who has been in the medical field for nearly 40 years, said. "Grieving in general and in our culture is complicated, but everything takes time. People have to allow themselves to go through the stages, the experiences."

Gold's feeling that her mother had a good life and, in the age of a pandemic, a good death allowed her to focus on taking care of herself and continuing her passion — taking care of the sick and dying as a nurse.

Through watching the United States health care system implode on itself, Gold said, she realized she wanted to take on a new gig — geriatric case management. While that case management is unfortunately not covered by insurance, those with the financial means to hire her can be connected to counseling and other therapeutic services. Case management on top of telehealth is the new wave of the future, she said.

"One of the holes in our system is that not everybody has a nurse in their family," she said. "Unless people know how to get in and out of the system, and get all of the benefits the system has to offer, (they go without) the services or don't know how to get them until afterward."

Gold has gone back to school to pursue that gig.

"The message is that ultimately we have to take care of each other in our community," she said. "With an earthquake, the government says you have to be ready to have your own electricity and water for three days. We have to be prepared for this kind of thing (too). This may be another conversation, maybe something we can talk about in the future."

Changes such as involving those on the front lines such as herself in corporate leadership meetings or increasing the numbers of nurses on shift at hospitals nationwide is a starting point, Gold said. She said she feels that coming together at all levels and assessing talents to put to good use should happen sooner rather than later.

"I plan on working for a lot longer. I feel even more reinvigorated and inspired after the pandemic. But I find a lot of nurses ... the pandemic broke them and we lost a lot of them because they became incredibly burnt out. We are trying to get more help, more staff at Dominican," Gold said as the staffing office tried to call during her interview. "The ones of us that are standing are stronger and tighter than ever before."

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