Learning from Pain, Living with Death…

By Júlio Bernabé

The Call That Changed Everything

It was around 5:00 p.m. when I received a phone call that changed my life. I remember it as if it were today — a Friday in December 1995.

Receiving a call on your graduation day with the news that you’ve been hired — that’s priceless!

These are emotions for which I still have no words.

After years of late nights buried in books, juggling freelance jobs as a waiter and typing papers for other students, I had finally become a Psychologist.

I ended up in a hospital — a fitting place to understand the meaning of “Being in the world.”

The daily life of a hospital is fertile ground for experiencing intense emotions and learning the meanings of living and dying.

Illness has a powerful ability to confront us with the need for change and redefinition of life.

In the hospital environment, the shadow of hope is everywhere — among those suffering, the care team, cleaning staff, kitchen workers… all are affected by the “life-death” phenomenon.

Despite the expansion of the healthcare network, the hospital has not lost its status. It still holds geographic dominance as the place of healing.

Being so close to pain, illness, and death deeply impacts the meaning we give to life.

The everyday scenes in hospitals alter our perception of time and often awaken dormant impulses in patients, families, and workers alike.

We all share the need to ensure survival in time and space — and we must do so by learning to die and live with death.

But when death knocks at the door, the tacit agreement with life dissolves.

No hospital humanization project can change this condition of being human.

And the hospital, in its institutional silence, continues its empty ritual. Talking about death is always taboo.

The death spoken of in hospitals is merely the end of a biological unit. But the death that walks the hospital corridors is the experience of physical disappearance — the end of a “bio-psycho-social” being.

Recalling Heidegger, life is merely a geographic space we occupy, but human activity is about giving meaning to that occupation.

Each of us gives meaning to the world we live in. I’ve come to call this a “world model” — and each person has their own.

Everyone’s world has its own time and way of occupying space, and this uniqueness is tested in the face of death — whether our own or that of those around us.

The possibility of death makes life anguishing. Yet anguish helps us adapt to living in anticipation. When that anticipation reaches its extreme, it becomes panic disorder. Freud spoke extensively about anguish and its crises.

What drives us and gives meaning to our lives are desires, choices, conflicts — and above all, the confrontation with death.

When I talk to people who say they want to work in hospitals, I always warn them:
“Hospitals demand a lot from our human condition — especially tolerance.”

After years in hospitals, I’ve noticed that many staff members show signs of demotivation, chronic fatigue, apathy, and even sluggishness. I believe this is linked not only to the proximity of death but also to the hospital’s very condition.

The hospital is an environment not meant to be lived in:
“You don’t live here — you patient here.”

The condition of being a patient in a hospital goes beyond the sick.

Healthcare in hospitals must go beyond the needs of clients. We must pay attention to those who care — everyone involved in the complex hospital system.

Considering what we’ve learned from Carl Rogers — that health is the ability to make authentic choices, where our words align with our actions — the humanized role of the hospital involves rescuing the human identity of speaking and being heard, whether patient, family member, or staff.