When a nurse dies, the loss is felt throughout the healthcare community. But until recently in the Lehigh Valley, there was no formal way for the nursing profession to honor its own at the moment of farewell. That changed when Denise Snyder, a nurse at St. Luke's Carbon Campus, attended a Nightingale Tribute at a colleague's memorial service. The colleague had died after a long battle with breast cancer, and the ceremony, which involved nurses in traditional caps and capes performing a ritual of remembrance, moved Snyder so deeply that she decided to bring the tradition to the Lehigh Valley.
A Movement Born from Loss
With support from Marjorie Federanich, president of the St. Luke's Carbon Auxiliary, and John Nespoli, president of St. Luke's Lehighton and Carbon campuses, Snyder launched the St. Luke's Nurses Honor Guard as a pilot program. It became the first Nurses Honor Guard in the Lehigh Valley, and its impact was immediate.
The concept is built around the Nightingale Ceremony, named for Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. During the ceremony, honor guard nurses wearing traditional white caps and capes gather at the memorial service of a deceased nurse. A lamp, symbolizing Nightingale's iconic image, is lit. A poem is read. The nurse's contributions are honored. And a community of caregivers says goodbye to one of their own in a way that acknowledges the unique nature of their service.
More Than 120 Nurses Honored
In its first year, the honor guard was called upon repeatedly. By its one year anniversary in February 2024, the guard had honored more than 120 former nurses across 10 counties: Lehigh, Luzerne, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, and Schuylkill in Pennsylvania, and Warren and Hunterdon in New Jersey. More than 130 nurses participate in the guard, volunteering their time to attend services and perform the ceremony.
The scope of the program's reach speaks to a profound need in the nursing community. Nurses spend their careers caring for others, often at great personal cost. The emotional toll of the profession, the physical demands, the long hours and difficult decisions: these burdens are carried quietly and rarely acknowledged publicly. The Nurses Honor Guard provides a moment of recognition that says, You mattered. Your work mattered. Your profession remembers you.
Featured on PBS
The honor guard was featured on PBS's Living in the Lehigh Valley, bringing its story to a wider audience and inspiring interest from healthcare organizations outside the region. The visibility has helped attract new volunteer nurses to the guard and has raised awareness of the ceremony as an option for families planning memorial services for nurses.
For Denise Snyder, the guard is deeply personal. She created it because she saw a need and felt compelled to fill it. That impulse, to see something missing in the world and build it yourself, is the kind of quiet leadership that defines the best of the Lehigh Valley. The St. Luke's Nurses Honor Guard honors fallen nurses, but it also honors the living nurses who show up, put on the cap and cape, and stand as witnesses to a career of service. In a profession that gives so much, it is a way of giving something back.
