Anna Marie Henderson and I wrote this song a year ago just when we were figuring out how to thrive in a pandemic. We had been sitting and talking about how it was all going and she told me the story of one of her patients who was very ill and asked her to ‘stop for a minute and hold her hand.’ There is one room on our unit where you can see a small tree growing outside the window and when she was sitting and holding her hand, she saw raindrops falling ‘like teardrops from a branch’ and as time passed the patient was comforted and more relaxed.

We also talked about what is like to work a 12 hour shift in such an intense environment. We work in the Palliative and Hospice care environment and we see so many different types of patients in all age ranges that are getting close to the end of their lives. We spend our days comforting not only the patients but also their family and friends and Anna and I both find it to be very meaningful work that we are blessed to do. We talked about how we come home, sometimes depleted and we turn to our significant others to ‘stop for a minute and hold our hands’ (or our broken bodies from the stress of the day!)

What I love about this song is that it’s a reminder that we are all her and present to care for each other, no matter what the role is. Sometimes in that ‘pause’ is where we realize where we need to take a breath and re-center our focus on what is going on, and it benefits not only the patient, but ourselves and our co-workers as well.

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