As a clinical thanatologist, Nash tries to demystify death. “I want people to use the words ‘dying’ and ‘death.’ They usually say ‘expire,’ but that’s not right. Milk expires. People die….We live in a death-denying culture, where every death is conceived of as a physician’s failure to cure. But death is a natural part of the life cycle. Someone has to be a leader, and I think it’s health care.”
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Despite her profession, Nash is anything but grim. A slender 46-year-old with sparkling blue eyes and snow-white hair, she favors bright colors, skirts, and high heels. Her resonant voice hints at her years as a cabaret singer, and she’s quick to laugh, hug, and compliment. She asks students to call her Kyle rather than Dr. Nash; her authority seems to come less from her PhD than from her experience as a hospice volunteer, where she had to be “present and unafraid” with hundreds of dying children and adults.
She received only a $500 stipend for her first year’s work, yet she audited the school’s first-year curriculum so that she’d understand the students’ experience. Finding her niche wasn’t easy. “During that first year I’d cry in my car every day. I knew what I wanted to do but I couldn’t explain it.” Some faculty at Meadeville intimated to her that she was wasting her time–what could a seminary student have to offer medical students?–and some anatomy instructors considered her superfluous.
In one respect, today’s medical students have it easy: before the 1920s, obtaining and dissecting a cadaver was illegal, yet medical schools required students to complete a course of study on dissection and even to supply their own cadavers. This catch-22 forced students to rob graves with their professors or pay “resurrection men” to steal bodies for them.
“I don’t know if you can teach empathy, but I’m not sure you need to,” she says. “What you need to do is retain it. Most students come in with tons of empathy and idealism. The system and process of medical education can beat it out of them, but if we affirm it and nurture it, at least they won’t lose it.”
