My Years as a Hospice Volunteer and Counselor

By Margaret Lemberg

Margaret Lemberg spent time with many people during her years as a hospice volunteer and as a mental health counselor. She was often impressed with the overlap in those experiences. She learned more about being a counselor from hospice patients, and more about the possibility of growth and change even at the end of life from older adult clients.

The people and experiences made her life much richer during those years. She wants to remember and honor them through this book. Memories of those people are a great blessing to her. She hopes readers will enjoy getting to know these people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781543499056

Margaret Lemberg

I was born in Winchester VA, while my Dad was away during WW II. When he returned, we moved to Ithaca NY as he completed his PhD. Twin sisters were born there. We moved to Seattle in 1949 when Dad was hired to teach in the history department of the University of Washington. Another sister and a brother were born there. I attended public schools in Seattle, Vassar College (2 years) and completed my bachelor’s degree (majoring in mathematics) at the UW. I later got a masters (special education) at the UW and began teaching in the Seattle Public Schools. I married during that time and my two children were born while I was a teacher. I switched from teaching to working in my husband’s wholesale clothing business. Later, I trained to be a massage therapist. I also volunteered among people with AIDS while working as a massage therapist. When arthritis ended my massage career, I attended Antioch University and got a master’s in counseling. I worked and volunteered at a mental health agency while also volunteering for hospice.

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Copyright © 2021 by Margaret Lemberg.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/20/2021

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Moving on from doing massage

Chapter 2 Almost hospice patients

Chapter 3 Becoming a hospice volunteer

Chapter 4 Kelsey Creek

Chapter 5 Judy

Chapter 6 Anderson House

Chapter 7 Antioch for a psychology degree

Chapter 8 Seeing oneself

Chapter 9 Supervision at SMH

Chapter 10 Pam

Chapter 11 Hospice moments

Chapter 12 Bert

Chapter 13 Internship

Chapter 14 SMH home visits

Chapter 15 Hospice home visits

Chapter 16 Clients for a minute

Chapter 17 Leon Sullivan

Chapter 18 Kline Galland

Chapter 19 Rose

Chapter 20 Mona

Chapter 21 Being part of a team

Chapter 22 SMH clients

Chapter 23 SMH groups

Chapter 24 Working with a group

Chapter 25 Managing a group

Chapter 26 Fred Lind

Chapter 27 Rita on hospice

Chapter 28 Funeral of a client’s mother

Chapter 29 Happy holidays in groups

Chapter 30 Delivering hospice medications

Chapter 31 Responding to therapy clients

Chapter 32 Staying in the present with SMH clients

Chapter 33 Walking for health

Chapter 34 Scripts

Chapter 35 Repeated calls to crisis line, anxiety

Chapter 36 SMH moving

Chapter 37 Intakes

Chapter 38 Supporting a friend

Chapter 39 Ethical will class (11/29/2020)

Chapter 40 Writing progress notes

Chapter 41 Saying goodbye to friends

Chapter 42 Moving on

Chapter 43 Memorial for many

Chapter 44 Listening

Chapter 45 Thinking about aging and death

Chapter 46 To change or not to change?

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My writing is always for my children, and now

for my grandchildren. And for all others in my

life, who love me and trust me to love them

INTRODUCTION

4-Fold Path

1. Show up and choose to be present.

2. Tell the truth without blame or judgment.

3. Do what has heart and meaning.

4. Don’t be attached to outcome.

I don’t recall where or how I came across the words above. They made a huge impression on me. I posted them next to my computer and thought of them often during the years described in this book.

I became a hospice volunteer on the way to becoming a counselor and continued throughout my years as a counselor. This book describes my path and many of the people who came into my life during those years.

1

MOVING ON FROM DOING MASSAGE

At the end of 2000, it was time to move on to something else, since I couldn’t do massage anymore. At least I couldn’t do the kind of massage I had been doing, because of arthritis in my hands. I missed doing massage, and the pain in my hands reminded me of why I had to quit. I had no idea what to do and took some time consider the situation. I was fifty-six years old.

The end of my massage career was abrupt. Suddenly, I had endless hours to fill. Mom and I began walking together every day, usually two miles. We planned various routes. Our favorite, the usual, took us through Volunteer Park, then up 15th to Louisa Boren Park, where 15th begins to curve toward E Boston. We often stopped to enjoy the view. While we walked, we dubbed ourselves the paint police and enjoyed critiquing houses we passed.

Mom turned eighty in December of that year. In her honor, Gigi, Dolores, Uncle Henry, and Uncle Jim came out from DC and Virginia. Many of us who lived in Seattle joined them and Mom. We took a train to Vancouver. This was Mom’s wish for her birthday. A few, including Rebecca, drove up to Vancouver. When we got off the train in Vancouver, I tripped over someone’s bag and landed, hard, on my shoulder. This was extremely painful (and embarrassing). Emergency medical people took me to a hospital. Things were better once I had a sling, and when I had Vicodin on board. Gigi and Dolores stayed with me until I got treated (hours) and then brought me to the hotel. I stayed in the hotel, reading and resting, while the rest of the family went to the botanical garden. Later, we all went out for dinner, in honor of Mom’s birthday. Rebecca helped me with undressing, bathing, and dressing. She also shopped for clothes that were easy to take off and to put on. I rode home with Rebecca at the end of the weekend, rather than the longer train ride. I was glad that I no longer had a massage practice to worry about.

The broken bone healed well, and the physical therapist encouraged me to begin using the arm very soon. Maintaining long hair was impossible. My son-in-law Pedro took me to his hairdresser, and I got a short haircut. Soon after I got home, the Vicodin caused disabling constipation (worse than the pain from the shoulder). When I got over to Urgent Care, I asked for the drink used to clear out the colon in preparation for a colonoscopy. That worked and I switched to other methods of pain control.

I heard somewhere that massage for lymphedema (swelling caused by accumulation of lymph when lymph nodes were defective, or removed, because of cancer) wouldn’t require deep pressure. I missed doing massage, and this seemed like an alternative. I thought that I could get a job someplace doing lymph massage. I signed up for a training program in Springfield, Missouri—ten consecutive days in March of 2001.

By the time of the class, my shoulder was almost fully healed. The training was held at a hospital in Springfield, and I found a motel room close by. Another woman in the class was staying at the same motel, and she gave me a ride most days. She was a lot younger, as were all the other students, and we didn’t bond. I felt awkward with the others and spent most of the time outside of class alone. The complete works of Jane Austen got me through the evenings. Most days, the shoulder was painful by the end of the day.

The classwork wasn’t difficult, and I got the certification. Then I came back to Seattle and discovered that only physical therapists are hired to do lymph massage at places in Seattle. I could have started a private practice, but didn’t want to. So it was back to the drawing board.

A friend and former massage client suggested that I look into becoming a counselor. I missed listening to massage clients, and becoming a counselor attracted me. I looked for a program. Antioch University sounded interesting, especially their philosophy of giving no letter grades but only extensive comments. Grades had been a huge thing in my life (and important to my dad). Letting go of them seemed good. Before application, the school required many hours of relevant volunteer service so that students wouldn’t complete classwork and discover that they didn’t like working with people. The school also required three prerequisite classes, such as general psychology.

I got permission to use hospice volunteer hours for the necessary volunteer hours. Becoming a hospice volunteer sounded comfortable after all the hours I had spent with people who had AIDS. I wasn’t afraid to be around people who were dying. I signed up for training at one local hospice (Providence). When it looked like they might not offer a class in the fall, I also signed up for training through a second hospice (Group Health). In the end, I got both trainings and volunteered with both agencies (the first for about six years and the other for fourteen years).

Both hospices were very clear that volunteers are part of a team. Both asked for a year commitment as a volunteer. Providence had stricter guidelines on many issues, including the commitment of at least four hours/week to volunteering. On the other hand, my supervisor for Group Health Hospice left it up to me how much time I spent with each patient. All of this was important, and part of learning to be part of a team. I was able to do some massage on Providence Hospice patients. I loved doing that small amount of massage again.

I began volunteering for hospice in the fall of 2001, and signed up for prerequisite classes for Antioch. I took two classes one quarter and one the other. Then I applied for the masters in counseling program. Not everyone who applied got in, and I was originally on the wait list but then got in when someone dropped out. My group began in spring 2002. We had required classes together, such as Family of Origin Systems, and Communications and Counseling Skills. Later in the program, we had more choices of classes and often were mixed with students at different stages toward the degree. I generally took two classes per quarter. Others took more classes and moved through the program more quickly. The quarter I had three classes was too much for me. School was a lot different from what I remembered from undergraduate years. Now I could research online, and write papers on my computer. A lot of the drudgery was gone.

Even though I already had the required hours, I continued to be a hospice volunteer. I purposely kept my class load low and had plenty of time to spend with hospice patients. I sometimes studied if the hospice patient was sleeping while I was there. This happened quite often when I was simply offering respite. Talking to and (especially) listening to patients and family members often felt like practice for my counseling degree. The combination felt good.

After two years of classes, I was almost done with required classes and had to find a yearlong internship. I talked to Catholic Community Services, Jewish Family Service, and Seattle Mental Health. I thought that Older Adult Services (SMH) would be a good fit with my hospice work (more than working with other clinics), since older adults might be likely to have health crises. The head of Older Adult Services offered me an internship, in the Bellevue office. I’d been hoping for Seattle, since that office was walking distance from my house, but accepted Bellevue.

I drove to Bellevue the first time I went over there and found the bridge entirely too stressful. Getting there by bus involved taking a bus from over by Safeway to the Montlake Bridge and then walking down the stairs to get a bridge over 520. The bus that ended close to the agency (four blocks) only ran during commuting times. I had to catch the bus at that time (coming and going), or I had a big problem. I didn’t know how to get home without the bus, and I was scared about it. Nowadays, I would just get a Lyft home.

Having interns creates extra work for clinicians (training them), and eventually lessens the workload (since interns see clients who need lots of attention). Over time, I was assigned a number of clients to work with individually. I saw many of them weekly, giving me lots of practice as a counselor. One of the other clinicians had me lead a group with her. After a couple of weeks, she turned the group over to me, so I got practice with that as well. We talked, played games, watched movies, and ate snacks in the group. The hard part for clients is that interns come and go, but then so do clinicians at a mental health agency. Most of our clients are chronically mentally ill and have been in treatment for many years.

I will always remember when I finished my internship and the master’s program, because my oldest granddaughter Elena was born (March 2005) as I was completing the year. She was thoughtful enough to be born at night so I could be there but not miss any of my internship. My daughter Rebecca brought her into the office to show off to my coworkers there soon after she was born.

When the internship was completed, I applied for, and got, a short-term (five months) and part-time (twenty hours/week) job as a case manager at the SMH office near my house. This is when reality hit. Interns get lots of practice sitting with clients, in individual therapy and in groups. We did very little case management: housing, money management, transportation, and setting up appointments. Now I had to face those demands. Several of the clients assigned to me had severe personality disorders. I saw them in their homes and hoped that our support would keep them from crises.

We were just beginning to put information onto the computer when I was an intern. At that point, we mostly wrote things like treatment plans by hand, and someone else put them into the computer. That changed when I had the five-month job. Then I had to learn how to use the software, called Psychconsult. We still had paper records as well. I generally went over to the place where they were kept and checked out the file on each client. I wanted to get to know them on paper before seeing them in person. Some had multiple files, all inches thick.

After five months, the job ended. The head of Older Adult Services didn’t want people working part-time. Another case manager and I asked if we could share a job. No. I could have applied for and gotten a full-time position, but I didn’t have energy (at sixty-one) for a full-time job. So that was done. I made a few stabs at getting a part-time position in another agency, including an interview that went well, at an agency in West Seattle. They ended up going with an internal choice. I was sort of relieved, because I didn’t want to drive that far.

My next idea was a private practice, much as I didn’t want to try to find clients and didn’t know how to find them. My friend had the perfect office for me, on 18th and Madison. I looked at it and agreed to rent it. I bought some furniture, pictures, and other supplies. Another friend gave me a beautiful planter. The person I rented from also suggested that I join her and others in offering counseling groups within the gender-questioning community. A transsexual woman and I were the moderators for a group supporting people who had relatives going through the process. My co-leader’s wife joined us sometimes. I thought I might get some private clients through that community. The results were less than spectacular. We had one regular attendee at the support group, and a couple who came just a few times. I ended up with one regular client, and no one else. I wasn’t interested in advertising my services. After a year, I stopped moderating the group and working with the individual client.

I continued as a hospice volunteer. I eventually decided to stop volunteering for Providence Hospice of Seattle (about 2006) but continued with Group Health Hospice until about 2016, when I was seventy-one. At that point, driving to see patients or to deliver medications began to seem like a burden.

In October 2006, I went back to Seattle Mental Health and asked about becoming a volunteer in Older Adult Services. I met up with the lead clinician. She set me up with a couple of clients, doing individual therapy once a week with each. Sometime after that, I agreed to work with a two-hour group. The group met once a week, and I agreed to facilitate twice each month, while the lead clinician (later others) did the other weeks. I trained again on the computer. At this point, much more was on the computer, and that’s where I looked for information about clients. I learned to write notes from sessions at home, and then email to myself, so that it was easy to copy and paste into Psychconsult.

Both of the clients I worked with were women about my age. Both talked easily. Both liked having weekly therapy, which couldn’t be offered by regular clinicians who sometimes had more than seventy clients. Both had been diagnosed with mental illness when they were teenagers, fifty years before I met them. They had occasional crises over the years since then.

I also worked briefly with several other clients. One was struggling with cancer, so we met at her house weekly for several months. Another was in the hospital with a severe lung problem. I visited her there and a couple of times at her residence. I knew both of them through the group.

Although the groups weren’t defined this way, they were always all women, to the point that one member simply referred to it as her women’s group.

The group I began working with during my internship was quite informal. We all sat around a big table. Snacks were provided at the midpoint. Other than that, the group and I were able to figure out what to do on our own. Sometimes, I had ideas that took us through a number of weeks. Other times, group members came up with things, including the time we watched Gone with the Wind and then the follow-up movie. I attempted to get discussion going about the movie without much success.

The group in Seattle had more structure, including check-in time, snacks, chair exercises, and some sort of educational element. The chair exercises faded away as more and more people felt unable to do them in the later years I worked with the group. I freely interpreted much of it to make the group the way I wanted it.

The size of the group varied over the years. At one point (c. 2012), we had as many as nine attending most weeks. When the lead clinician became too busy, several other clinicians led the alternate weeks, not always successfully. Attendance began to shrink over time. Clinicians referred some of their clients to the group. Some stayed; others attended a few times and then dropped out. Getting back and forth from their homes was often an issue. Some didn’t want to listen to the problems of others. One person dropped out because she preferred day treatment, including the chair exercises. Some enthusiastic and longtime group members had health issues, which kept them away from the group. Group members and facilitators were less committed when numbers diminished to the point that we might only have two or three attending.

For the agency, it was necessary to have at least four people attending to make the group financially viable, but we hung on until the day that only one person showed up. We were also preparing to move from one building to another, so it seemed simpler to put the group on hold. Previously (about 2010), we moved buildings without a hitch. That move was only three blocks. The latest one was more like a mile, which complicated the process of getting people to the group. The conference room available for the group in the new building was quite small. A table that could hold eight people almost filled the room.

We moved, and the group didn’t begin again. We met once after a woman with cancer died—three facilitators with the four remaining group members—and had a sort of memorial service and reunion. Group members care about and support each other, and this was important to them. I doubted that the group would ever again become a regular event, but was resurrected sometime after I left the agency, with rotating facilitators. Also, one of my two individual clients had chosen not to have any more services from SMH. I had less and less to do there.

I asked the head of Older Adult Services and the lead clinician about ways to get me a little more to do. It was a good time to ask, because we were short of staff (one retired and another quit), and they agreed to have me begin to do intakes. This meant sitting with a prospective client for an hour or more, asking all sorts of questions about why they were there, history of mental health problems (and addictions), and family history. After that, I reviewed the information and figured out a diagnosis, which usually took an hour or so. Then all that had to be entered into the computer. This took me at least another hour.

When I did an intake, I made sure to tell the person that someone else would be his/her case manager. I didn’t do that the first few times, and some were disappointed to learn that they wouldn’t see me again. I think it was good for them to understand that they were working with a team at SMH, not just one person. Doing intakes could be emotional. It was hard to see how many people are pretty much alone in the world—little or no connection with family, a few or no friends, and no sense of community.

Then we switched to different software. I signed up for three training sessions. The lead clinician had already partially trained on it, which meant she could help the rest of us. Monthly supervision was part of my volunteer experience. I told myself that learning new tasks and systems was a good way to maintain brain synapses. It was frustrating. I ran into roadblocks, as did many other clinicians. The support staff kept upgrading the software. We had weekly (or more often) new information to master.

I always knew that I could walk away from Sound Mental Health, formerly known as Seattle Mental Health (I think it’s simply Sound Health now), if the situation got too difficult. In the end (2017), that was what I did when I couldn’t master the new software and had almost nothing to do. It was time to move on again.

I had discontinued being a hospice volunteer shortly before leaving SMH, partly because my supervisor retired and partly because I didn’t want to drive so much to see patients or to make medication deliveries.

During those years (2001–2017), I wrote about my experiences with hospice patients and as a mental health counselor. I’ve gathered pieces together here and organized them. I want to remember the people. I want to remember all I learned. Those years and those people are part of me.

2

ALMOST HOSPICE PATIENTS

There isn’t a hard line between my massage years and my years as a hospice volunteer. One part of life bleeds into another.

I met many of my massage clients because of my connection with the AIDS community. Death always hovered, and most were close to death when we met. A few of my other massage clients eventually died after simply being regular massage clients. They seemed healthy when we met and changed over time. This seemed very different from spending time with people who had AIDS.

I met one client when she and I were sitting in the waiting room of the dentist (in early 1993). I barely noticed the two older people sitting across from me until I heard them having a discussion about chronic pain that she endured. She was frustrated at not finding anything that would help her. I surprised myself when I looked across and said, Maybe you need a massage. I didn’t really expect anything to come out from my comment, but she was immediately interested and arranged for me to come to their residence (a large apartment) to give her a massage.

This client was nearly eighty when we met. She lived with her husband and an adult daughter, plus two little dogs. I did massage on her for four years as her health gradually declined. She also referred her daughter, her granddaughter, and a friend to me for massage. The granddaughter referred several people including her best friend. She tried to convince her husband to get massages, but he refused. She commented that men of his generation thought massage was only for women. My spontaneous comment in the dentist’s waiting room paid off well.

I brought my massage table and other supplies to their apartment. When I got off the elevator, I always heard the dogs barking—and the people yelling at the dogs to shut up. I thought to myself that the dogs believed they and the people were all barking together. I didn’t share that observation. The dogs were perfectly fine once they saw me. Then they stopped barking. The whippet sometimes tried to get up on the massage table with my client. Someone would shut the dog in a back bedroom.

When the client filled out the intake form, she indicated that she had diabetes. I never knew if it was type 1 or type 2. She worked hard on controlling her diabetes, including taking insulin. She made it clear that she expected me to call her Mrs. _ and not by her first name. (This was rare. All the rest of my clients went by first names, except her friend.) She was generally silent during massage. She began to worry about her health after a couple of years.

The client was a powerful woman. Her husband, children, and grandchildren looked up to her. By the time she was eighty-three, diabetes had left her blind. She was hardly able to walk on painful feet. She had congestive heart failure, and perhaps not long to live. She could have qualified as a hospice patient. As I gave her a massage, she recalled being at the University of Washington in the 1930s. She wanted to paint and was good at it. But then she married and had four daughters. Her life had gone by in a flash. The young woman with life ahead was still inside, wondering what happened to all the choices.

The client wasn’t able to get up on the massage table at the end. She spent her time in bed, and I came in there to do massage on her. At last, her kidneys failed and she died within the week. I remember seeing her obituary, but I didn’t go to the funeral.

Another client was forty-one when we met in 1997. She was a client for two-plus years (until I stopped doing massage). She was part of a chain of referrals that began with a former neighbor of mine. My friend referred many of her friends to me, and some of them gave my name to others. Some of those people became longtime clients. One man who was a client for a long time gave my name to many of his friends, including one who gave my name to his friends, including a woman friend.

This client was beautiful and vivacious. She worked in sales and looked every inch of it. She traveled a lot on business. She flew from one coast to the other, though her body was depleted. She slogged through chemotherapy. She was looking for a better wig, one that would look like her hair, from back in the good old days, before her body betrayed her life. She was hoping to have the energy to continue her life. She didn’t want to have to tell everyone that she was disabled by cancer (six years of treatment when we met).

When she flew, she planned ahead to make sure of an aisle seat. Once she settled next to a woman who asked her to trade with the woman’s husband and sit in the middle of the next row. Despite guilt, she stayed in the middle seat. The woman glared at her the whole trip.

This client wanted so much to forget about cancer. She had hopes for each new treatment. Yet there was always a whisper of fear. An evil genie lurked in blood and bone. She hoped genetic information could help. She dared to ask for everything and anything. Then she had to wait for weeks to hear as she trembled and prayed. She did all she could to become strong and well. Sometimes she believed she had won and needed no more help. She always showed her belief and worked to stay strong by herself. She still looked young and healthy.

She was struggling and canceled an appointment not long before I stopped doing massage. I saw her obituary a few years later, a tribute to how hard she fought and to how she inspired others to look for a cure for cancer. She took part in a number of clinical trials and always believed that she could make a difference for others even if she wasn’t cured.

Another client was fifty when we met at the beginning of 1999. She was a friend of another massage client. This woman had been treated for cancer but was back at work when we met. She was struggling to keep working even though she didn’t feel well most of the time. She still hoped that she would have a long-term remission.

My cat Charlotte greeted this client the first time we met. The client remarked that she had a cat once. Her daughter was allergic, so she put the cat outside. It disappeared. She thought it was all right. I couldn’t agree but said that I hoped so.

As the cancer ate bones, brain, organs, her burdens fell away. She divorced the husband who beat her even though she had converted to his religion and had his children. She had worked all her life but now took time off for illness more and more often. She finally left the job for good. Her children had chained her soul. Now, she said, they were old enough to go on without her, with help from their dad. He had moved back in and now was a gentle helper. Now she was ready to go where none could follow. Now she had herself as never before. Cancer was taking her life and had set her free.

This client spoke of the terror of a diagnosis, the pain of surgery, the misery of chemotherapy, fatigue, and sadness of hair loss. She talked of loneliness despite friends, despite family, and despite doctors and nurses. Broken words could never explain. Tears could only suggest. Weight loss told a story and the slow steps of a weary soul. She was angry with one who told her it would be OK.

So she was my client for a while. She wanted massage to ease her aches and friendly conversation all the while, until she came to the edge of death. She couldn’t climb the stairs or lie on the table. Then, when she was close to the end of her life, she chose to move to Bailey-Boushay. I offered to visit her in the hospice and assured her that it was as a friend. I had no expectation of payment.

I brought her some poetry, honoring her journey. And I brought a tape of her favorite guitar music. I hoped it would help her to relax. I also brought a framed picture for the wall of her temporary home. It showed a horse galloping free. It was a painting done by my brother-in-law. We sat in the dark room, hands gently linked as the quiet wrapped round our breath.

A friend came in to sit sadly by the side of the dying woman. She had tears in her eyes and didn’t know what to say, until the dying woman briskly spoke. She insisted that now was to time to plan her memorial service, and she did. She chose every prayer and song.

Toward the end, a whisper was all cancer left her. She struggled to assert her needs. She had no trepidation but no volume either, not enough for the nurse to understand. The nurse questioned in a loud voice, perhaps hoping that her volume would inspire the whisper to grow louder.

Others helped on her way at the end. She had family and no need for me.

She died on a Monday, or so I heard. She died just five days after my dear Charlotte (massage cat supreme) was assisted on her path to death. They both were ready to go. Life wasn’t fun anymore. I wondered as Charlotte and my former client went on their way. I wondered what was gained by the five days that the woman lived on in a coma, dying more slowly than Charlotte. Still, now they were together on the other side.

In Memoriam

            The words are familiar

            but different somehow

            not like the woman I knew

            It hardly matters

                        the work, the summer home

                        the details of her life

                        spelled out in the obituary

                                    She was truth and pain

                                    She was love and anger

                                    She was life

                                    and now she is no more

A vignette

            Ufros Aleinu Sukat Shlomecha

            G-d shelters us in the shadow of his wings

            In the quiet dark

            Hands joined

            Moslem and Jew

            Even through restless motion

            Spasms of coughing again

            Breathing gently

            In silence

            Warm touch

            In this moment we are whole together

            One in spirit with the One

3

BECOMING A HOSPICE VOLUNTEER

Sometimes important decisions are made almost as a casual addition to something else I am doing. I don’t always remember why they happened.

When I had to find a volunteer situation to build up hours before applying to Antioch, I considered a number of options. The rationale behind the requirement was that people might take classes and then discover they didn’t like working with people. It is better to find out before the investment of time and money. This made sense to me. I wasn’t thrilled about the requirement for myself. I thought I had plenty of experience. I had been a teacher. I had volunteered to spend time with people who were living with AIDS and caregivers. However, the requirement was not negotiable. I think some people volunteered at mental health agencies, but I didn’t want to do that. I decided that volunteering for hospice would suit me, but I didn’t know which hospice to approach.

A couple of my massage clients had talked about volunteering for Providence Hospice of Seattle. Both of them were huge fans of Providence Hospice of Seattle and especially about the supervisor of volunteers. Their love for her and respect for the organization drew me toward it. I wanted to volunteer there and I wanted to get to know the woman they loved so much.

After the years spent with people who had AIDS, I missed the intensity and intimacy of relationships with people who were facing death. This was another reason I decided to volunteer for hospice. This would be another opportunity to share the journey toward death with individuals. Antioch told me that I could use hours as a hospice volunteer, as long as someone with a degree in social work would supervise my hours and validate them.

I contacted Providence Hospice of Seattle (PHOS) and learned that they had a training scheduled for September (2001), several months away. I signed up for it. One of the people involved with training and supervising volunteers was a social worker. I assumed that he could sign off on my hours.

Soon after I signed up, the person in charge of the training for PHOS contacted me. She was afraid they wouldn’t have enough people for the fall training, so it might be canceled. I could go to a different session later. I was anxious to apply to Antioch and planned to begin taking prerequisite classes in the fall, so I worried about the delay. I contacted the hospice program at Group Health Cooperative and learned that they had a training program in October 2001. I signed up for that one as well, just to make sure I could get started.

As it turned out, I attended both training programs and was a volunteer for both hospices. Volunteering was so rewarding that I continued during the years I was working on the master’s degree (2003–2005) and even beyond. I volunteered for PHOS from 2002 to 2006 and GHC from 2002 to 2015.

The volunteer coordinator and the social worker ran the PHOS training. I can’t remember for sure how long the PHOS training was. I think it may have been forty hours over four weeks. To pass the class, students had to be present for every hour of it. Anyone who missed any time had to start the whole class over at a later date (could be as much as a year later). This became a problem for me when I realized that one of the training days was on Yom Kippur, when I meant to be at services. That particular class was to take place at a funeral home and included a tour of the oven for cremations. I struggled with this for a day or so and then decided the class was an appropriate way to spend Yom Kippur.

And in fact, I think it was. The funeral home we went to was on Broadway. I walked down the hill to it. I had never been there before. However, it brought back memories of times I’d been in other funeral homes and of the people who had died. It got me to thinking about how it would be when Mom died. She was eighty years old, in good health but possibly not far from dying. I thought also of myself. Someday I would be the body in the funeral home. The man at the funeral home took us through the place. We looked at the selection of caskets, ranging from simple boxes (used for cremations) to elaborate concoctions lined with lead and intended to last forever. He showed us the space where funerals were conducted. At the end of the tour, we rode in an elevator down to the crematory. (In my memory, at least one person was unwilling to go down to observe that oven.)

Hospice training classes’ sessions generally included some joking and teasing. Casual conversation was part of each class as well, as we moved from one part to another. (This was truer of others than of me. As usual, I had a hard time loosening up and speaking up in a group. I guess that’s the introvert in me. Unfortunately, this can look like aloofness to others.) The field trip to the funeral home was very quiet and very serious. No one smiled and no one chatted.

In the past (when Mike’s mother died in 1980, for instance), I went to funerals at the Jewish Funeral Chapel. Like many funerals, the service