Volunteers:

Angels of Holistic Care

Every year more than a million persons and their families utilize the services of hospice. According to updated statistics reported originally in 1996 by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, more than 115,000 persons are involved in hospice care in America. Almost 100,000 of these, or four out of five, are volunteers. They average more than fifty hours of care for the dying every year out of the goodness of their heart.
 
Part of the volunteer contribution to the hospice team is to address the emotional and spiritual pain in facing the inevitable end of life. Often the most difficult and critical role in hospice care is to help both the care recipient and the family care givers and the most care-concerned feel comfortable with the philosophy of hospice.
 
Regardless of the family's religion or spiritual path, toward the end of life prayer provides a way to move from fear to hope. One purpose of such prayer was expressed by Reinhold Niebuhr in the "Serenity Prayer," which he formulated in 1934: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference."
 
The dying process can bring relief to the person approaching the end of life as the bodily processes gradually shut down, suggesting that we were created to go out of this life as gently as possible. The body's signals of hunger and thirst close down, because they no longer have an organic function. Since the beginning of time, we have followed our instincts to stop eating and drinking at the end of life. This has been the natural process of life.
 
In all of human history only in the present generation, mostly in the United States, have families felt guilty if they do not artificially feed someone who stops eating at the end of life. This may be a characteristic response of a controlling personality. Or it may result from insecurity and fear of the unknown. This syndrome of fear may affect the religious person as much as the secular fundamentalist. Fighting to prevent the victory of death at all costs may result from the belief that God is to be feared.
 
As Hank Dunn puts it, "To accept medicine's inability to put off death indefinitely is not a defeat. On the one hand, it is accepting the world as it was created, while at the same time having a profound sense that the Creator has granted life as a gift. For me, to hold on and grasp out of fear is to deny the gift and the Giver."
We have the choice to face death in fear and struggle or to accept it in trust and grace. This is what spiritual leaders mean when they urge us to live all our lives as if each day were our last. The person who can do this will want to protect life, both one's own and others', as a responsibility to our Creator, but one can at the same time look forward to one's own death as the supreme moment of life. An important role of hospice volunteers and of the entire hospice movement is to support everyone's natural instinct to understand such wisdom.