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My late mother is still working—her precious remains are helping to train medical students

Contrary to the belief of some, donating a loved one’s body to medical science is anything but cold—and there is still closure

Grace Vaughan’s mother, the late Rose McKenna

Grace Vaughan
Wed Jun 15 2022 - 06:00

We recently said goodbye to our dearly beloved mother. “She’s just off to college,” my uncle said, salving our pain with some graveyard humour. She was going to UCD to teach — by helping train medical students with the donation of her precious remains.

A nurse all her life, my mother’s wish was to keep working after she passed away. Her initial desire was to become a doctor but it was the 1960s and such an education was not affordable to all. So she decided on nursing and left for England at the age of 18 to start her training. Her father didn’t want her to leave and gave her £15 — the price of her fare home should she get homesick. Not giving homesickness an opportunity, she spent the money on shoes and other items as soon as she got to London. She wanted a chance at setting a path of her own choosing.

A few years later, my mother returned home to take up nursing in Belfast’s Royal Hospital. It was now the late 1960s, during a very troubled time, and she recalled vivid and sad memories of tending to the maimed and injured bodies of young men from both sides, Catholic and Protestant, in the Royal’s operating theatres. She was a Catholic, and members of her own mother’s family had been hauled from their beds by the Black and Tans back in the day, but there was no taking sides in the theatre. Each man was some mother’s son; all deserved the same quality of care no matter what “side of the house” they hailed from.

Grace Vaughan’s mother, Rose McKenna, as a young nurse

But there were other, more domestic battles. In a time when questioning everything was discouraged, my mother — having worked in hospitals in the UK — found it hard to adjust to Irish laws pertaining to family planning and women's autonomy, or lack of. Still, she took the traditional Irish route — go ahead, get married, but when you leave the altar, leave your career too — because it was law. Banned from continuing her vocation, my mother went forth and multiplied, as the Good Book said, and had six children, also losing one child in the process. After having my brother — her sixth child — she re-entered the workforce. But it wouldn’t be easy. Having spent so long away from the hospital wards and theatres, she had to retrain — which she happily did as she loved progress in all its forms.

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Death is not an easy passage for any loved one left behind. And the loss of one’s mother, for many, can feel like the ultimate abandonment. For me, as long as she remained on this earth, I would never grow up fully despite having children of my own. Even in death, my mother took care of everyone else, slipping away quietly in my sister’s warm and loving home — forever the nurse, never the patient.

In hospital, just days before, while hooked up to machines, she would tell whatever nurse was on duty in ICU: “Youse worked like hell during Covid, now go have your wee break, I can look after myself.” On a WhatsApp video call, when she had stepped down from ICU and moved to a medical ward, she dropped our conversation to tell an elderly man to get himself back into bed or he would fall and hurt himself again. When reminded that she was now a patient too, she responded with a staunch “I’ll always be a nurse first”.

And, as it turns out, a nurse last. She is up there in UCD now, looking after science and, by proxy, humanity with that precious body that we will never get to hug again. That curious mind of hers was as open and as deep as the widest ocean. With her selfless parting gift, my mother broke with tradition by opting for a bell jar over a coffin when she departed.

People have asked and wondered about the lack of “closure” when it comes to donating the body of a loved one. Contrary to the belief of some, body donation is anything but cold. At the end, we got to lie in bed with our mother, still in her pyjamas, just like when we were kids and older. We got to kiss her goodbye, sing to her, say the things we needed to, because we weren’t off making tea and ham sandwiches for mourners, however good-intentioned, that she barely knew, or maybe wasn’t overly fond of.

In the end my mother did it her way, and in a way that was also best for us. And in that lab where she lies now, I doubt there’s a bell jar big enough to hold that beautiful, warm heart.

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