275K followers on YouTube, 432K on Instagram, and 919K on TikTok. With numbers like these, @hospicenursepenny is an INFLUENCER.
Penny Hawkins Smith, RN, educates and entertains (yes, entertains) her followers with short videos (okay, “reels”) based on her experience as a hospice nurse. She now has brought her earthy take on death, dying, and hospice to written form in her book, Influencing Death: Reframing Dying for Better Living.
Spare me a moment of shameful self-promotion — my Hard Choices for Loving People is one of just four books she recommends in her “Resources” section…I digress.
Like many of us in hospice work, Nurse Penny has learned how to live a better life as she watched her patients and their families navigate the journey unto death. In her words, “Being present with the dying and those they love has brought me joy, happiness, meaning, and purpose.”
HelpMeLeaveMyHusband.com
This outlook did not come easy for her. This book is, in part, a memoir about how a troubled young mother survived her own addictions and reckless living. Her life story is woven into the fabric of a book to help people have a better death and, she hopes, have a better life.
It turns out that Smith was an internet sensation long before TikTok and Instagram. With her first marriage dissolving and having child-rearing and nursing school expenses, she set up a website (no longer active), HelpMeLeaveMyHusband.com. This led to national publicity, including an interview on “The View” and a mention in Time magazine. Who knew?
Practical advice on having a “good death”
The real power in this book comes from the stories of her patients, their families, and her own journey with death in her family. Because of her large platform, Nurse Penny has a good read on what people currently think about death, fear of it, and how to prepare for it.
Questions and comments from Smith’s social media followers appear in Influencing Death, allowing segues to practical end-of-life advice. Here are just a few nuggets of Penny’s wisdom found in these pages:
- “The earliest signs [that death is near] are eating less, sleeping more, and socially withdrawing.”
- “[T]he reality is that thinking about our inevitable demise, accepting it, and planning for it are the best ways to have a good death.”
- “People seem to think that saying words like ‘death,’ ‘dying,’ ‘died,’ or ‘dead’ will cause it to happen. Death is what it is, and calling it by another name won’t change that outcome.”
- “No, they don’t need to eat. They’re dying, and they aren’t dying because they’re not eating. They’re not eating because they’re dying!”
- “He, like many, many family members of hospice patients, was worried that he would cause her to die faster by giving her morphine. I’ll reiterate for the people in the back that this couldn’t be further from the truth.”
- “Being present with the dying and those they love has brought me forgiveness—forgiveness for the people who hurt me and, more importantly, forgiveness for myself.”
“Is there an afterlife?”
When I started work as a hospice chaplain in 1996, two nurses at our agency had authored what became a very popular book, Final Gifts. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley told stories of patients having deathbed visions or telling family members they were going to “take a trip.” It is still selling 33 years later.
Photo by Aamir Suhail on Unsplash
Fast forward to now, when Penny Smith (and two other social-media-influencer-hospice-nurses-turned-authors) address these fascinating phenomena and delve into the question, “Is there an afterlife?” Smith recounts many of these stories in a chapter titled “The Woo-Woo Stuff.”
All these influencer-nurse-authors tell similar stories of dying patients having visions or dreams of dead relatives coming to visit them. These visions are very comforting to patients, although sometimes discomforting to their families. Nurse Penny adds her own experience… read the book to find out how that goes.
Penny is very clear that she does not believe in God, nor does she practice religion. At the same time, she is also clear that observing these deathbed visions and having had her own experience, she believes that we do still exist after death.
Are these visions “real?” That’s not even a good question. They are “real” to the people who experience them. That should be the bottom line.
Thank you, Sergeant
Penny’s story takes us through some very dark places of her addiction journey, including when she spent a night in jail. The next morning, the police sergeant told her, “You are not the same person who came in here last night. You seem very bright. Why are you here? I really hope you can get on the right track because it seems like it would be such a waste if you didn’t.”
I was touched to see him listed with others in the “Acknowledgments” at the end of the book: “The sergeant at the police station, I’m sure I will never see you again, but I do hope if by chance you read this book, you will know how ultimately life-changing your words were.”
I, too, thank the sergeant.
__________________
Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).
Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
James had traveled from Atlanta to attend a workshop at the Lost River Retreat Center in West Virginia, only a few miles from the Schloss. I picked him up and drove to the trailhead. We walked the two miles up the mountain and set up camp near the summit.
As the men gather each week, we hand everyone a name badge. Instead of “Hello, My Name is Hank,” each one says simply, “God’s Child.” We all wear one. Incarcerated and free.
My wife and I were signing papers in the VW sales office when we noticed a long line of people holding propane tanks across the street. My wife commented, “Look at all the people getting ready to grill on Labor Day.” The salesman responded, “Are you crazy? They’re getting ready for the hurricane.”
I had a brother who died a week after being born when I was six years old. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I asked my mother about Randy’s death. When I did, she burst into tears and said, “My father wouldn’t let me go to his graveside burial service.” I never knew she kept such grief just below the surface. I told this 
I’ve witnessed this type of grief firsthand. I was a nursing home chaplain; a co-worker lost a teenage son to a hit-and-run accident. She believed it was murder, but the driver was acquitted at trial. She, understandably, became obsessed with this loss. She even bought a house next to the cemetery so she could always look out on her son’s grave.
I was leaving on one of my daily bike rides recently and needed to pick a new book to listen to. I selected a reread — 
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”
“It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.” 
I was such a scaredy-cat at 8 years old. All I can remember of two particular movies in 1956 was that I kept my eyes closed during the entirety of each film. I have just discovered, through Wikipedia, that 
I just placed the latest “deep field” photo from the new James Webb Space Telescope to my home screen on my iPhone. This is a time exposure photo of a portion of the night sky the size of a grain of sand held at arms-length. Thousands of galaxies appear as we look back billions of years. Each galaxy has billions of stars — each star is not unlike our sun.
I lived a few doors down from Scott and his family for four years. His sisters babysat my kids. I was Scott’s den leader in Cub Scouts. As disease ravaged his young body, Scott graduated from college in a wheelchair. I was so privileged to be a part of his care.
This is how David Brooks starts a recent 
Gradually, for some people, a new core narrative emerges answering the question, “What am I to do with this unexpected life?” It’s not that the facts are different, but a person can step back and see them differently. New frameworks are imposed, which reorganize the relationship between the events of a life. Spatial metaphors are helpful here: I was in a dark wood. This train is not turning around. I’m climbing a second mountain.