World of Good Blogburst, Hospice Style

Thanks to A Tic in the Mind's Eye, we have the World of Good Blogburst. This week's entry at The Scratching Post is about Hospice.

Several years ago I worked with a librarian in our technical library on some research. In the process of working with her, it came up that she volunteered at Hospice. I told her that I could never imagine doing that and how impressed I was with her. She told me some of her stories from her work and it made me want to do it myself.

Volunteer work goes on all around us. Maybe it is so common to us that we don't even recognize it. Like beauties of nature that we hurry by, the time and care of people volunteering to help others is something that deserves some thought. Instead of stopping to smell the roses, maybe we need to pause in our busy days once in a while to relish our neighbors' generosity.

Excerpted from Hospicenet.org:

Volunteers ... provide comfort and enrich the quality of life for those served. Volunteers serve on a regularly scheduled basis and provide the following:

Support services - companionship, friendly visiting, active listening, bedside sitting, letter writing.

Sharing hobbies and special interests -- reading, gardening, listening to music, sports, travel, crafts, etc.

Assisting with errands - grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions and supplies, banking.

Transport patient/family - appointments, shopping, social outings.

Homemaking tasks - light housekeeping, dishes, laundry, meal preparation, child care.

No task is too big or too small for a hospice volunteer, but often the most important thing you can do is just "be there" for patients to reassure them they are not alone, to hold a hand, to offer a smile, or to just listen. It is not easy work, but the personal rewards are enormous. The strength and courage of patients provide a constant source of inspiration, and volunteers usually feel they gain more than they have been able to give.

Hospicenet also has some stories from surviving family members. The stories are way too complex to paraphrase, so let me link to one of them here and give you a tiny excerpt. At the Hospice website, at the bottom of this story, you can find links to the others. This story is about a woman's mother who was dying of cancer.

Then, on what turned out to be the last day of her life, our hospice nurse came for her daily visit, and brought with her a stranger to us, a young intern who was doing his hospice rotation, something recently added to the training of doctors. This was obviously his first hospice experience, and he seemed ill at ease to be there, but he watched and listened as our nurse compassionately cared for Mom and for us. I had a sudden realization (I believe it is God speaking to me when that happens) that this stranger whom Mom had never met was the ONE whose life she was supposed to touch before her work here was done. And then she died later that same day.

I am convinced that God sent that young doctor to Mom's bedside to help him learn how to deal compassionately with the dying patients and their families he will encounter in his future. It enabled me to give some meaning to Mom's suffering and death, even when it seemed to serve no purpose. I believe my Mother was able to reach out to someone even at the end of her life.

Wow. As I write this, it is dawning on me that everyone involved was giving of themselves to others. Even the dying woman, supposedly the recipient of the care, was able to help someone else.

Today, try to take some time to stop and smell the roses. Better yet, take some time to appreciate the people around you.

Please visit our previous World of Good posts about the US Navy, the Royal Australian Navy and some Catholic high school students from Nebraska.