Hospice volunteer training

You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but to live until you die.
--Dame Cicely Saunders, British physician who started the modern hospice movement at St. Christopher’s Hospice near London in 1967.

Spent the day in training to become a hospice volunteer. The mission of the agency with which I trained is “to facilitate access to dignified end-of-life care and quality of services that allow our patients and families the hospice option to live life richly, deeply and meaningfully for as long as it lasts.”

That last phrase, “to live life richly, deeply and meaningfully for as long as it lasts” sums up my attitude toward my own life as well as everyone else’s.

This lovely woman is the volunteer coordinator, a visual artist (that’s one of her own canvasses behind her). She was inspired to begin doing hospice work when her grandmother was dying. She asked her grandmother, “What do you want me to know?” Her grandmother whispered, without a moment’s hesitation, “Love, compassion, and forgiveness.” After her grandmother died, she began a series of canvasses on that subject.

The job of the hospice volunteer at this agency and at this moment, is to provide companionship. Two-thirds of people over sixty in the USA live alone. Many in their final months of life are unable to live independently, so some are moved into a hospice, where the aim is to keep them pain-free and able to enjoy what they can, for as long as they can. The volunteer’s job is to meet the person where they are and to be present with them: perhaps to read to them, to hum or sing a bit, to hold hands, to look out the window, to listen, to bear witness, to BE, and be company.

What a privilege to be present for that transition.