It’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with Rebecca Foster when she’s talking about the
Brazoria County Nurse Honor Guard
.
She tears up easily. Her voice cracks. And she has to pause occasionally. The love is right there, at the surface. Love for her profession and for her fellow nurses.
It’s a love that guides her work as an ICU nurse on the Angleton Danbury campus, and in July 2022 it guided her to form the honor guard, a local chapter of a national organization that poignantly represents the nursing profession at nurses’ funerals and memorial services.
She was inspired to do it simply because there was a need—at the time, the closest chapter was located north of Houston.
“It just wasn’t going to be possible for me to go there to participate in all the services,” Foster said. “We have so many nurses at UTMB, and they weren’t getting honored because we didn’t have a chapter here. And they all deserve to be honored.”
Foster connected with an organizer of other chapters, who got her started on the Brazoria chapter. It started with a Facebook page and grew quickly, with nurses from the area volunteering to participate in ceremonies at the services.
Foster’s effort has since led to a Galveston-based chapter and, just a few weeks ago, to designation as a nonprofit organization, allowing the honor guard to apply for grants and raise funds to support its work.
Honoring roots, tradition
Honor guard members appear at the services in traditional white nursing uniforms, white caps and red-lined blue capes and carry Victorian-style lanterns—the Lamp of Knowledge—to represent Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.
The honor guard conducts Nightingale Tributes to honor the nurse's life and contributions to the profession. The tributes include the Nightingale lamp, symbolizing the nurse's dedication to care and compassion; white roses, symbolizing the purity of the nurse's dedication to his or her patients; a personalized tribute to the nurse's life and legacy; and a last call to duty.
“We light the lamp when we [graduate from nursing school], and we get our last call and extinguish the lamp at the end,” said Hester Goodman, ADC clinical operations administrator and a member of the
honor guard. “And I think that is so circle-of-life symbolic. We light our lamp, and we say we're going to be the best we can be and we're going to dedicate our lives to it.
“And then when we die, we get the Last Call and our lamp is extinguished,” she said. “But it's also absorbed into the rest of the nursing group. We say, ‘We'll continue to carry the light for you. Our brothers and sisters in nursing, they do that. And I think that is such a fantastic way to close our chapter on earth.”
Foster was moved to form the honor guard to comfort grieving families and let them know their loved ones were valued and respected and that they made a difference by serving as nurses.
And to send the same message to the rest of the nursing community.
‘We are worth celebrating’
“Nurses do so much. They give so much,” Foster said. “We suffer physically, emotionally, dealing with death all the time and watching so much suffering happen. And our families suffer as well.
“I want the nurses’ families to know, and I want the public to know that we are worth celebrating and we work hard,” she said. “And I want people to see that this profession is important. And I want to bring other people back into the nursing profession too. I want people to be proud of what they do. And I want little children to see us, and I want them to say, ‘I wanna be a nurse when I get older.’ And so, I hope that's what we're doing.”
The honor guard also provides living tributes and graveside tributes, as well.
Goodman shared about a bedside honor guard service for a UTMB nurse whose battle with cancer brought him to the ADC ICU. As part of the service, Foster extinguished his lamp and gave it to him.
“There was not a dry eye in the room, and the way she comported herself and the way she gave him grace and pride in who he is and what he gave during his lifetime as a nurse was beautiful and touching,” Goodman said.
Another example of some of the other types of services offered by the honor guard is cleaning a nurse’s gravestone to commemorate Nurses Week and Florence Nightingale’s birthday in May.
Foster found a gravestone to clean and reached out to the deceased’s family, who attended the ceremony and held a gathering afterwards. The nurse had passed about a decade earlier, and the family hadn’t been all together since then.
“Her son said he had never had closure, and this was the first time he felt true peace,” Goodman said. “And that is what Becky brings to people. I can't say enough how awesome she is. She wouldn’t say, but I will.”
Honor guard services are provided to the family of deceased nurses free of charge. Prior to the nonprofit designation, Foster personally took on much of the expense. Although Foster works at UTMB, the honor guard is not a UTMB-affiliated entity. Nurses from other hospitals, as well as retired nurses, also are members.
“Becky provided a lot of the startup and probably almost all of the supplies, the ideas for things,” Goodman said. “The rest of us that are members have pitched in, of course, but I'm going to give her the credit she deserves.
“It’s truly a passion project for her. And it's been beautiful,” she said. “Words cannot express how impressive and passionate and generous she is and the impact she has made in people's lives. She exemplifies what nursing is.”
For information on the Brazoria County Nurse Honor Guard, call (281) 387-7557 or email BCnursehonorguard@gmail.com.
For information on the Galveston County Nurse Honor Guard, call (832) 661-7789 or email GCnursehonorguard@gmail.com