Nurse honor guard celebrates service of white-capped colleagues

During her long career as a labor and delivery nurse in Indiana and Hawaii, Betty Brassell helped welcome thousands of new lives into the world.

It’s no wonder that three fellow nurses showed up to her funeral in Green Valley on Tuesday to pay special tribute to her life of service.

At the start of Brassell’s funeral Mass, the trio walked solemnly down the aisle of Our Lady of the Valley Parish, dressed in blue-and-red capes and starched white caps, the traditional nurse’s uniform from a century ago.

Leading the procession was long-time local nurse Lorel Caldwell, who carried a decorative Florence Nightingale lamp with its single candle burning.

When the nurses reached the front of the church, they recited a personalized poem about Brassell as part of what’s known as “The Nightingale Tribute.”

Though they had never met the 77-year-old retired nurse, who died on July 25, they knew all about her service.

The three women are members of the Southern Arizona Nurse Honor Guard, a nonprofit group that gives ceremonial send-offs to local members of the nursing profession.

“It’s an honor to come and do this for someone who was a nurse,” said Jan Allen, who spent almost four decades as a critical care nurse and a nursing instructor in Iowa and Arizona before retiring and joining the honor guard five years ago.

“Police have an honor guard. Firefighters have an honor guard. I don’t know why nurses took so long,” added group president LeAnn Leslie-Larson, a Pima College product who has been working as a nurse in Tucson for 27 years and counting.

The free service is offered by request to anyone in the nursing field, from retired career caregivers to students still enrolled in nursing school.

Leslie-Larson said they typically perform one to two ceremonies a month for people ranging in age from their early 20s to their late 90s.

Churches and cemeteries are the usual venue, but the honor guard has also done its thing in such places as Catalina State Park and in front of a mobile home in Three Points.

Caldwell said one of the most beautiful ceremonies she ever took part in was at the Fort Huachuca post cemetery, which sits at the mouth of a canyon at the base of the mountains there.

The honor guard also performs tributes at hospitals and other places around Tucson each May during National Nurses Week.

Last year, they started offering “living tributes” to nurses in hospice care, presenting them with blankets symbolizing the love and care they wrapped people in during their careers.

“Nurses are in the line of service, too,” said Allen, who made her own honor guard cape and serves as both the treasurer and seamstress for the group.

Caldwell’s service involved decades as an intensive care nurse and certified diabetes educator. She retired a little over two years ago, though she still volunteers with the honor guard and as a diabetes educator at a clinic for low-income patients on Tucson’s south side.

“As they say: Once a nurse, always a nurse,” Caldwell said.

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Honor guards for nurses are a relatively new concept. Leslie-Larson and Allen said the practice first started somewhere in the Midwest — Ohio, maybe? — and spread to other states.

“The Nightingale Tribute,” a script of sorts used by honor guards, was created in 2004 by the Kansas State Nurses Association and features an original poem called “She Was There” by nurse Duane Jaeger, one of the association’s members.

The tradition finally arrived in the Grand Canyon State with the founding of the Arizona Nurse Honor Guard, which began in the Phoenix area in 2017 and added a Pima County chapter the following year.

Local members eventually decided to form their own separate nonprofit, and the Southern Arizona Nurse Honor Guard was launched in 2021.

Allen, Caldwell and Leslie-Larson are board members for the group, which now includes more than 50 dues-paying members covering Pima, Cochise and Yuma counties.

The idea is modeled on honor guards for military and first responders, of course, but the nurses take a quieter, more gentle approach. There are no 21-gun salutes or buglers playing “Taps.”

Instead of a folded American flag, the local nurse honor guard presents family members with a white rose and a small replica of the Nightingale lamp in a commemorative display box.

“It’s a beautiful tribute,” Leslie-Larson said. “I know I’ve told my family I want these guys at my (memorial) service someday.”

On Tuesday, though, it was the honor guard president who did the honors, leading her white-clad sisters in the reading of “The Nightingale Tribute” to Brassell.

“Betty is not remembered by her years as a nurse, but by the difference she made during those years by stepping into people’s lives,” Leslie-Larson said.

Then she launched into “She Was There,” with Allen and Caldwell joining her on every other line of the poem to form a chorus.

“When a calming, quiet presence was all that was needed,” Leslie-Larson said.

“Betty was there,” the chorus replied.

“In the excitement and miracle of birth or in the mystery and loss of life,” Leslie-Larson said.

“Betty was there,” the chorus replied.

The nurses finished the ceremony by ringing a chime three times to symbolically sound the end of the watch for Brassell, relieving her of her nursing duties.

And with that, Caldwell blew out the candle on the lamp.