09/29/2026
Vital reading!
In the ICU, she learned to read dying off a monitor. Rhythms, pressures, oxygen saturations. The numbers told the story long before the body did, and the machinery of rescue often made the body's own signals harder to recognize.
Then she moved to inpatient hospice, and the monitors were gone. For the first time in her career, she watched the person instead of the screen: the long pauses in breathing, the slow build and fade of Cheyne-Stokes respirations, mottling at the knees, a pulse growing faint at the wrist. No alarms. The rooms were quiet.
The word that kept coming to mind surprised her, but it came anyway. Peaceful.
In a new personal essay, Alexandra Augustus Brown, MSN, RN, a former ICU nurse who moved to inpatient hospice, writes about night shifts spent honoring preferences instead of chasing numbers: the reliable bowl of cereal, the sandwiches carried down the hall at two in the morning, the four hours a family's tradition asked for and received.
"A peaceful death is good nursing, and it deserves the same pride we take in every save."
What does a peaceful death look like on your unit?
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