Karen Dempsey

So I would go and sit with people for the last seven nights of their life.

And a lot of that involved speaking to people in the lead up to their death and also their families and how they were navigating death and dying.

Simultaneously, I was also working in the Rotunda, which was around birth.

And sometimes a death would come before birth.

Maternity hospitals are really complex places because you have birth and death happening.

Thankfully, fewer deaths.

And I don't want to alarm anybody that's ever listening.

But it's a fact of life and we all know it in various ways.

So I was speaking to people

about their beliefs and around life and death.

And particularly in the Rotunda.

It tended to be a younger demographic because it was women of childbearing age.

And there was one particular woman I spoke to at the wee hours of the morning, 3 or 4 a.m.

She was miscarrying and she was trying to rationalize how she was understanding this.

And she said, Karen, I didn't think I believed in God.

but I don't know where my baby is.

What do you believe?

And when she said to me, what do you believe?

I thought,

I really empathized with what she said because I was kind of similar.