With a nurse comfortably seated among friends at a dinner party, conversation is never laboured.

I am blessed with at least four nurse friends.

Without fail, when there is a nurse at the dinner table, at some point during the evening his or her audience will be lifting their chins from their plates.

Wiping tears from their eyes.

Rubbing their sides with the ache of laughing too much (is there such a thing?).

Anecdotes from the hospital ward tend to be intensely shocking, downright funny, if not rather humiliating.

With the matter-of-fact countenance that only a nurse can master, they will tell you that a patient projectile vomited into the face of a new intern, what strange object was found in the intestines of another patient by X-ray last week and the odd things children poke up their nose.

Names are never exchanged _ the golden rule.

But nurses see another side too.

They have the privilege of sitting with people in their last moments.

Speak with any palliative care nurse and they will tell you of a common observation in those who know their days are few.

A dear and eloquent friend of the nursing fraternity told me of a fear expunged in the clutching of bedsheets, grasping the hands of anyone near, holding tight to the tangible.

``It's their way of qualifying that they're still here, connecting to the physical,'' she explained.

We don't need to pretend that faith in God is on a downwards spiral in the Western world. Still, as much as 85 per cent of people suffering from disease pray, studies show.

What are people clutching at?

What are they afraid of?

Why pray when they have denied the existence of God through their lives?

Clinical psychologist Robi Sonderegger says contemporary thinking and theories are draining hope from our psyche.

Think about it.

From the age of comprehension we are told that we came from nothing _ the big bang theory _ that we are nothing more than a fluky smattering of atoms, and that after life we revert to nothingness in death. That is, nothing more than compost.