Laura Horn has found what she calls her end-of-life career, “a vocation to last the rest of my life”. In her 60s she decided to train as a registered nurse, specialising in hospice care. “I’m a brand new nurse but that’s not what’s important,” she says. “I’ve had life experience.” After Margaret, her wife of 20 years, died “suddenly and unexpectedly”, Horn understood she had to make a change. She had been thinking about volunteering in a hospice, after her mother and both parents-in-law were given palliative care. Following Margaret’s death in January 2017, Horn applied to the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, which trained volunteers to sit with the dying. They told her: “Wait a year. You can’t do it right away.”
Looking back, she says, they were right. “You can’t jump into something new until you have grieved appropriately.” She had “good therapy” and did what she calls “walking grief – I mean, I walked everywhere”. A year later, she reapplied. “They said, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ and my first sentence was, ‘I know loss.’”
