Passing a cemetery and seeing soldiers in uniform or a flag draped coffin can often say more than words ever could. The deference and respect shown to the fallen and their family are the tributes of a grateful nation.
This week is National Nurses Week and there is a local group similarly honoring nurses who have passed away. The North Carolina Nurse Honor Guard performs the Nightingale Tribute at the memorial service for nurses. They said the service is similar to that of military tribute honors and officially releases the nurse from her nursing duties.
All members are volunteers who want to show their respect for their fellow nurses.
“Our goal is to recognize men and women who have dedicated their professional lives to nursing and to pay respect to fellow nurses at the end of life’s journey for the devotion and commitment they demonstrated in caring for the vulnerable,” the group wrote.
“We show up in full uniform with caps, capes, and we have a lamp that we give to the family. A white rose that goes on the casket and we basically release the nurse from her duties… its very emotional,” group Piedmont Division co-founder Rika Sutphin said. They give the nurse’s lamp to the nurse’s family following the ceremony.
The group coordinates its members in part on social media and when group co-founder Lora Renegar posts the name and location of a service, everyone seems to chime in with whether they can attend. Sometimes the service may be only a day or two away and in another county, but the Honor Guard goes to any service to which they are requested.
Sutphin said if a ceremony is outside of their district, and that area does not have a Guard branch of their own, the Piedmont Honor Guard stands ready to assist. She said members went into Virginia recently to honor one of their own. “We had to go because there was a not a division there.”
She said that Piedmont division covers a 19-county footprint meaning there is a lot of ground to cover. She has the dubious task of looking through local newspapers and funeral home notices to see if a nurse has passed on.
Sutphin said there are more than 100 members in the Piedmont Region and that over half are in the Yadkin Valley. Having more members would help ensure they make it to all the funerals where they are requested.
In late April, there was a day when the Honor Guard honored three nurses in three counties within two hours of one another with members performing the Nightingale ceremony in Yadkinville, Elkin, and Greensboro. Just yesterday members of the group traveled to Burlington to honor another fallen nurse.
Another of the founding members, Lora Renegar, said, “This would not be possible if we didn’t have an amazing group of nurses willing to give their time for others.”
Sutphin said, “We are all nurses ourselves. There are a few of us who are retired and then there are a lot who still work. It’s an all-volunteer group and we pay our dues to be able to buy supplies and we have a pinning ceremony once every couple of years. You have to participate in the services to earn your pin.”
As this is National Nurse’s Week, Sutphin said she is trying to raise the profile of the group to attract more members but also to make sure non-nurses know the group exists.
“We march in parades to get us out there and get us see and we do it with our caps and capes. When I go to these funerals and some of the old nurses are there, they are thrilled and say they wish they knew where their cape was,” she explained.
They also recruit at the funerals themselves, but Sutphin said they do not stay long. “Ours is like a military type of ceremony, it only takes about ten minutes. We try not to stay too long after the funeral because we don’t want to take anything away from the family or the nurse. But, sometimes, the family is full of nurses, so they have heard of us.”
Part of nurse’s week, Sutphin said, is to honor the profession, but she also hopes that it will highlight the importance of nurses as their numbers begin to dwindle nationally. She said the profession was already seeing signs of contraction before the pandemic. “We were hitting this wall before COVID,” she said, and things only got worse with vaccine mandates that drove some nurses away.
While the North Carolina Nurse Honor Guard stands at the ready to honor nurses who have passed, Sutphin said as much attention and praise need to be given to those nurses currently on the job or they may not be there much longer.
“There are very few nurses now that are making it to 65, 66, 70 years and staying in the profession that are by the bedside,” Sutphin related, “I retired when I was 60 because it just got to be too much. I’ve said it before — it’s not the pay, it’s not the benefits, it’s the help: you’ve got to have more help to do what you do.”
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