Turtle Q&A: The Guides – Part One Phyllis Wernz

Part One: Phyllis Wernz, Midwife

You’ve been both a midwife and a caregiver in hospice.  Any similarities?

Yes, when I first went to work in hospice care, it felt familiar.  There are similarities.  The waiting, not having control, being in an altered state of mind.  There is a time frame that is similar, a level of consciousness. The hardest thing, on both sides of the spectrum, is to resist trying to alter it, speed it up.  It’s difficult not having control.

How do people respond?

With birth, people get upset. They want to schedule it because they are anxious and want to control the process.  It’s hard to wait, even when things are proceeding normally. And the job of a midwife isn’t to speed things up.

In dying it’s a little the same.  It requires waiting and patience.  The role of the caregiver is bearing witness, not to try to alter things, though we give morphine, which is understandable, because people may be in pain, and that does have the effect of speeding things up.

Are any women ever calm, not in pain during labor?

Women who aren’t in pain are sort of other-worldly.  They often don’t remember large parts of it.

How about the babies? How do they respond in their first Liminal Moment?

There are babies who are all ready to be born. Their eyes are wide open, they cry and kick and are completely responsive and engaged.  They’re ready.  But there are times when it’s strange to see a baby that doesn’t seem ready to be born, that seems more a part of the other side and isn’t crying, or is weakly crying.  They don’t seem fully alive.

And when a baby is born and is not alive, of course it isn’t a threshold for the baby, but it still is for the parents, even when they know the baby isn’t alive.  It’s the first time they see the baby and hold the baby, the first time they’re meeting their child.  There is a suspended sense of time when everyone waits, waits to see if the baby will breathe, even though we know, judgment is suspended and we wait on the threshold.

Phyllis Wernz practiced  as a Midwife for many years, worked with hospice patients and is currently working with psychiatric patients.