During this past year, my experience as a hospice volunteer has allowed me to meet many patients and to reflect on my feelings about the process of death. While I was aware that I would be faced with death more than usual as a hospice volunteer, I did not expect it to affect me as much as it did when my first hospice patient passed away.
I met my first patient back in October. We instantly became good friends, since she always wanted someone to talk to, and I love talking too. The two of us would sit for an hour each Saturday and share stories about our lives: we talked about previous romances, vacations, and even times when both of us had fallen and broken our ankles. I know that I was keeping her company and helping her feel better emotionally, but I also realized that she was doing the same for me.
Since I am a pre-med student and hope to become a physician in the future, I was also saddened by the fact that I couldn’t provide more than a conversation. I wished that I could have helped ease her physical pain, but I knew that it was not possible. Whenever I felt hopeless about not being able to help my patient feel better, I remembered the video, “Being Mortal,” based on the novel by a surgeon named Atul Gawande that we watched at the beginning of the semester. Gawande, even as a surgeon, had experienced similar feelings when he couldn’t help prolong his patients’ lives and would sometimes resort to providing false hope. One of the things I learned from this experience is that even with improved medical technology, we cannot avoid death. I am more aware that this is something I will have to deal with in my future career, so it helps to get a head start on having conversations about death that discuss it as something that’s natural rather than taboo.
After winter break, I was looking forward to coming back and talking with my patient again. However, before I got the chance to do this, I was informed by the volunteer coordinator at Ascend Hospice that she had passed away. Even though I had expected death at some point, I was surprised and upset that it had happened so quickly after my first meeting with her. It took me a while to try to view the death of my patient in a more positive light rather than as the end of our relationship. One of the things that helped is a quotation from a prompt from the hospice program that says, “Understanding death as inevitable is necessary to appreciate the meaning and beauty of life.” This statement made me realize that even though we treat death as the opposite of science, it is completely natural and a way for us to celebrate the lives and stories of our loved ones.