Rest In Peace

Rest In Peace

I walked into the break room to get a drink and found Pam, the midwife, sitting at the table staring blankly out the window that overlooked the parking garage. As a labor nurse, I worked with many providers including midwives. I didn’t work with many of them often as each practice had several and I was only working 3 days per week which didn’t always align with their 1 day spent on labor and delivery per week. Pam was one of the sweetest midwives we had, often making strong bonds with her patients and serving as a true, genuine, loving midwife. Most of her patients didn’t know that she had a painful secret. She lost her 18 year old daughter only 2 years prior. We knew, though. I didn’t work with Pam until over a year after her loss so I don’t know how she got up and came to work and functioned in the midst of the most painful event a parent could experience. The other nurses told me about it shortly after I started working there but Pam also told me about it. She was very open. “Mandy,” she would say, “should still be here with me.” 

Amanda, “Mandy’ was 18 years old when she went on a date with a friend’s boyfriend’s friend. It’s probably pretty common, your friends want to include you in their lives so they ask their boyfriend to find a nice guy for you. They went to a neighborhood restaurant/bar and after a few hours, they went to his house where he lived with his mom. At some point during the evening, Mandy either took, or was given, a hefty dose of ketamine. Once they got to his house, there was a sexual encounter, doubtfully consensual and then Amanda was left slumbering until she ceased to breathe. No call to 911, no request for help from his mother, no rescue attempts were made and thus, any hope of saving Mandy dwindled as the minutes ticked by. Eventually, her date also fell asleep, only to wake to Mandy’s lifeless body in his bed, cold and stiff. Calls were finally made but it was too late to even try. Pam had been on call that night and slept fitfully in her call room, feeling something wasn’t right. When she got home, she was notified by 2 local police officers who were waiting for her at her front door. Being a single, busy, working mother, she was left to mourn, alone, in a quiet house. By the time I met her, she was back to work and doing her best to get out of bed every morning, helping women in their own journeys to motherhood. 

These days, Pam relives the incident hourly. She is never not thinking about it, willing time to go back to that night so someone could stop the date, or call 911, or his mother would check on them and find Mandy in need of help. She openly talks about how she wishes he just called for help, that she wouldn’t even have done anything about the drugs or the date rape had he just have called for help. Of course, that is only because these days, she knows the alternate outcome. Once, I said, “Pam, Mandy’s suffering is over, she would never want you to continue to suffer.” But Pam just obsessed and obsessed about that night. If she wasn’t friends with the girl who’s boyfriend set her up… If she had cancelled because she had a mild sore throat and was feeling tired… If Pam wasn’t at the hospital that night, she would have known Mandy wasn’t home at curfew… (Cell phones were in their early days then and not everybody had them yet.) If only he wasn’t such a coward, if he wasn’t afraid of the consequences of his actions and put Mandy’s safety first…

Months went by and Pam was always distracted, off somewhere else except when she was actively working with a laboring mother. She would hand a new mom her baby girl and say “cherish your daughter, she is the most precious gift you’ll ever receive.” I would have to look away so no one saw the tears I couldn’t hold back. I told Pam, “we can’t go back, we can only go forward and learn from the past.” But she couldn’t. To her, time stopped that night. Her only goal in life was to figure how to go back and change that outcome in any was possible. It was impossible for her as a health care professional and a loving mother to imagine that her daughter would die under such circumstances. Why didn’t he call when she was still breathing? In court, the boy said he didn’t know she was in distress, he just thought she was snoring. He did admit, however, that he was unable to wake her after multiple attempts. He just figured she would sleep it off. The hatred Pam had for him was monumental and grew exponentially when the jury gave him a light sentence and she knew he’d be free in just a couple years to prey on another daughter. She was beaten down and powerless and this 

One day, about a year after meeting Pam, I walked into work to sad faces and whispers. “What?” I said. “Pam killed herself last night, she hung herself in her garage.” Her suffering was finally over. She could finally move past the events of that night. My mind instantly took me to a cold garage where Pam stood, rope in hand, rethinking the night that changed her world. Where she ended the obsession that had consumed her for more than 2 years. I pictured the pained look in her prematurely aged face, the desperation she must have felt as her trembling hands configured the rope and placed it over her head. I couldn't stop the image of tears streaming down her face as she believed she was mere minutes from seeing her baby girl again. I worked my shift and repeated these thoughts as i drove the 30 minutes home. I realized Pam's suffering was over but ours was just beginning, not like losing a child, but the kind of suffering that comes with knowing a sweet, selfless lady spent 2 years trying to reconcile her grief and pain only to lose that battle. I miss Pam all the time and I know her patients do as well but I take solace knowing she’s with Mandy, and hopefully is resting, finally, in peace.

Kimberly Scheffer