If the pictures are "as real as real can get", a story like this one on the role of a Head Nurse in a major city hospital, tells itself. Judy Strickland, bending over an unconscious patient in the unposed image that opened this essay, is the iconic figure of a merciful nurse. But hers was a job that asked as the title implies for “more than compassion.” At the pivot point in the daily flux of a 42 bed medical ward, she was responsible for checking on orders that came in from rotating teams of doctors on a variety of acutely ill patients,
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(continued from above left) overseeing their implementation by her nurses and tracking every treatment program for effectiveness. But beyond those duties, her job also made her an emotional anchor in moments of crises.
One such crises came when a woman, ravaged by years of in congestive heart failure (right) whom Judy had befriended, told the nurse she would refuse any further treatment. In a fractured moment, standing at her bedside Grey captured both the pain of caring in Judy's face(above left) and the patients harrowed expression as in effect, she signed her own death warrant.
"When you have to tell the family--that's when you see death and understand it, written in the faces of the living. That's where you feel the pain of failure. All you can do is offer to hold and hand and help them leave. There's a great emptiness in such moments; I try very hard to forget them..." Judy Strickland.
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