End-of-Life Sherpa

An under-the-radar Canadian woman: a brief profile of Catherine (Kit) Martin, RN CHPCN(C)

Her hair was tied into a thick braid, draped over the front of her left shoulder and reaching her waist. The silver colour of it contrasted against her black turtleneck. She had a PowerPoint presentation; the projector aimed at the wall.

None of us expected that a collection of slides and a few hours would forever change us.

“Will someone let me know when we get to our break time?” she asked. “I tend to go over the time that’s given me,” she explained. Several said yes. They didn’t.

Her name is Kit (Catherine) Martin, a Palliative Care Nurse Consultant and Educator. She was there to talk about family dynamics around palliative, end-of-life care.

When she left the room two hours later, many of us wrestled with new concepts she slipped into the folds of our brain: a comfortable death; that there is no such thing as closure; and the strange, sad and wonderful things that families do when one of their own is dying.

She told us of a woman who demanded that her mother be allowed out of bed to sit in the lobby for a while. Although moving the mother from a bed to a wheelchair risked breaking bones, Kit supported the woman’s desire. “How can we do this?” she asked the woman. Tension. It seemed there wasn’t a solution. Then came the idea to move the bed with the mother in it. A happy moment.

During the break many of us, feeling moved and somehow changed, shared our impressions about the impact of Kit’s session. If you ask her, she’ll deflect, saying she didn’t do anything special, that she was just teaching people what they need to know.

Palliative care is all about “living a good life until your very last breath, allowing you to live fully until you die,” says Kit. Her entire career has been a mix of caring for the dying and teaching others how to think about and care for them as well.

Kit graduated from Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital nursing school in 1963, back when it was illegal to sit with a patient, back when she was threatened with disciplinary action for ‘conduct unbecoming’ for giving a dying patient a hug. The patient, about Kit’s age, had just been told there was nothing more to be done and he should go home to put his affairs in order. Kit was in the room. Her first mistake was to sit on the bed. Her second was to open her arms to hold him. Conduct unbecoming: she beat the charge.

As a student, she witnessed a physician at Women’s College Hospital model end-of-life care: “She was the only doctor I saw who sat with the patient, asking: What can I do for you today? What do you want? What’s most important to you today? That has stayed with me. I just adored her. Years later, I looked her up and took her to lunch to tell her how important she was to me. She just smiled and said, “People are important, aren’t they?”

Kit’s teaching about palliative and end-of-life care started one evening at dinner. “I grumbled that the health care system didn’t know how to care for people who were dying and what needed to be done. My son said, so do something about it.”

And she did. She developed a course and program for health professionals and care providers and delivered it to staff in long-term care facilities where it’s keenly needed. People tell her, “I was in your class” or “I attended your talk and I’ve tried a few of the things you suggested. I want you to know that it’s helping.”

Along the way, she launched the Palliative Care unit at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre and helped create the designation exam for Certified Hospice Palliative Care Nurse in Canada.

Kit says “Patients have told me, taught me what they need so that I can teach others. That’s the gift they give: a greater understanding of living until we die and of ourself along the way.”

Written by Frances Share

Edited by Lucinda Atwood

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