It is terrible that happened to you, Copa.
The Hospice with which I was associated was one of the first Hospices begun in our city and even, one of the first separate, hospital affiliated Hospices begun. It was strongly influenced, from its inception, by Benedictine values and it grew and flourished from there. There is money to be made in Hospice, now. Back in the day when I was beginning with it, Hospice Care was a relatively new concept. After I had completed the training here last summer, my intention was to begin volunteering in Hospice down South. But the application for their Hospice was different; it left me feeling that it was not about comfort and dignity and sanctity so much as it was: one more volunteer = one less person to employ.
So I volunteered at the Gallery, instead.
Maybe that is what happened, Copa. That is a terrible thing to have happened to you.
Cedar
There are nurses who should not have become nurses, or who are working in the wrong parts of their professions.
Maybe it was too hard for that nurse to work Hospice. It can be a very hard thing, to begin thinking of death, to begin assessing for it in every face we see and yet, to love what we do and find meaning there.
I feel badly for you, Copa.
We are taught to step back, taught to support whatever it is the patient and family need. Some of us specialize in family dysfunction, even. Some, in patients in nursing homes, so angry and so alone; we heard from a volunteer who chose to specialize in that way. His task, as he sees it, is to assist the person to verbalize anger, to break through the wall of isolation and anger, if that is what seems to need to happen. He told us that at first, he would just go and sit there with the man. Eventually, he said: "This sucks, doesn't it."
And that was all it took.
And the volunteer was helping us too to understand that our task is just to listen, and to be present, and nothing more.
I do, Copa. I feel badly for you.
