Hospice. A place where people who deserve more than they are given go to temporarily live and permanently perish. This is what I thought hospice was before I came to the VA. A place with dejected patients, pessimistic nurses, families on the verge of collapse. And on top of that, this was a VA, a hospital with old, cynical men who were put through horrific trials that no one should have to experience. This is going to be bleak.<\/p>\n
One of the first patients I met when I arrived was someone whom we\u2019ll call John<\/em>. John<\/em> perfectly fit my vision of a veteran in hospice care: he was cynical, he only cared about sports after he got out, he liked the dark and always left his room\u2019s lights off, and he always said that he just wanted to die. A week later, I was back at the VA, and John<\/em> was dying. I put on some classical music and sat beside him, holding his arm.<\/p>\n Most of the time, culture shocks happen when you go to foreign countries, but they also happen to me when I volunteer at the VA. The staff of the VA are generally a good deal older than the people I see every day, and it was quite shocking to me when people I wouldn\u2019t know would start greeting me. Around campus, I may not even greet the people who lived with me during my freshman year, but the culture of the VA was different. As I was holding John\u2019s<\/em> arm, I was amazed by how easily I could see eye to eye with someone from a different generation just by thinking about our common characteristics, such as our common mortality. One thing the VA has taught me is that all of us are much more similar than I previously thought. We often put a label on \u201cveterans\u201d because they experienced many traumatizing things, but the label dehumanizes them. I would ask the patients about their childhood memories or their family to rehumanize them. And I\u2019ve heard about pranks they\u2019ve pulled, crazy family members, and heartfelt stories.<\/p>\n Against all odds, hospice was often a lively place. Therapy dogs, instrumentalists, and singing groups would visit. You\u2019d see patients strolling around, reading the news, watching movies. One patient I knew especially well, loved to poke fun at me. Paul<\/em> would always be sitting in the living room, and he\u2019d call me over whenever I was there. I didn\u2019t ask Paul<\/em> much about his time in the military because he\u2019d always tell me stories about historical events. He\u2019d always make fun of me especially when I didn\u2019t know about popular historic things such as the \u201cflying tigers.\u201d Paul<\/em> never ceased to make me laugh, and while I talked to him, I\u2019d forget that he was a hospice patient.<\/p>\n But every week I would be reminded that I was in the hospice unit. Every week, I was briefed on who had died since I was last there. The enduring patients would get thinner, weaker, more tired. And Paul<\/em> was no exception. After a couple weeks of visiting him, he would get too tired to talk to me for long periods of time. His death was going to come. It was unavoidable. And that was okay. On my last day, Paul<\/em> was sleeping, but I just stood in his room for a while. I came to terms with his mortality and with it, my own. It is likely that many of the people on the hospice unit will pass away before I come back next year. They will have lived a long, hard, and joyful life, and they will have to move on. And eventually, so will I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hospice. A place where people who deserve more than they are given go to temporarily live and permanently perish. This is what I thought hospice was before I came to the VA. A place with dejected patients, pessimistic nurses, families on the verge of collapse. And on top of that, this was a VA, a … Continue reading “The Place Between Life and Death”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"school":[9],"program_year":[24],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hospice","school-u_pitt","program_year-24"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"school","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/school?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"program_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athenainstitute.com\/ahp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_year?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}