My Personal Experiences of Sitting With the Dying as HOSPICE Volunteer

For several years, I worked as a volunteer for Hospice, also known as Palliative Care in some regions. I want to tell you some of my personal experiences of sitting with the dying.

Initially I did respite care but eventually I did what was called “Vigil”, which in this case meant that I would be called in to sit with someone who was dying and didn’t want to die alone, or I was there because a family member didn’t want to experience their loved one’s dying by themselves.  There were only 7 of us, out of 200 volunteers, who were willing to do Vigil, so we were called in on a fairly regular basis.

It certainly was a learning experience.  Many people have asked me why I would want to go and sit Vigil with a dying person, and I have asked myself that very question many times, trying to analyze myself.  It was many things for me – curiosity, compassion, experience, and to overcome my own fear of dying.

The experience was many things too. To say I “enjoyed” being there for someone’s last breath, might sound like an odd word to use.  It’s not that I enjoyed it, but I didn’t dread it either.  There was a certain satisfaction knowing that my being there was a comfort to them.  My goal was to comfort them and keep them relaxed and peaceful – unafraid – to the end.

Of course, it didn’t always go that way.  It was not always peaceful.  On a number of occasions, a client would die with much fear or anger and that is a difficult thing to witness.  It always shook me up.  Or to have a family member that is pleading the loved one not to go, not to leave them was extremely sad.

One client of mine, an elderly woman in a nursing home, had no one – no one at all – and she was afraid.  I sat with her for the last 12 hours of her life.  During that time she was in and out of consciousness, but when she was awake she would claw at the wall, as if she was trying to tear herself out.  It was really bad.  During one coherent moment, she told me that this was payback (her terrible pain of cancer) because she had been a bad mother to her children. That was magnified one hundred fold by the fact that her children hadn’t come to see her as she lay dying and she hadn’t spoken to them for years.

 Perhaps one of the saddest and most touching experiences was a young man who was only in his early 30s and he was dying of AIDS.  I was there primarily for the family who wanted to know how things were expected to happen at the end.  I’ll tell you, you couldn’t find much prouder parents as this couple was of their son.  Someone had written nasty things in the local newspaper about gays, citing Biblical scripture.  The son had written a letter back to the Editor and the father read that letter to me.  It was very well written and so heart-felt.  His father cried as he read it to me, his heart broken for the anguish his son had gone through. A person should never have to feel such anguish.

This young man’s sister was his primary care-giver.  She must have been around the same age as him, and it must have been very difficult for her, but I could tell that she didn’t mind caring for her brother.  She did everything for him. So sweet. Such a loving and accepting family.

It helped the family a lot, it seems to learn about the dying process, what to look for, what was going to happen next, things like that.  Often times, they were calmed just by knowing these things, and it was almost always bittersweet.

One of my favorite clients was an elderly man who had been a minister and missionary in South America for 30 years.  He was blind now and he wanted someone to come in and read to him.  His wife was still alive but not well herself and was often in bed in another room when I visited.  It turned out that this couple had written a book about their years as missionaries, and I ended up reading the whole book to my client, with his wife sitting in to listen too, on occasion.  He died exactly one week after I finished reading the book.  His wife died exactly one week after he passed.  She’d been waiting all along.

I considered it pure privilege to be given the opportunity to be there within all these people’s lives and to experience their unique and private moments with them.  I was often privy to their inner thoughts, their fears about dying, their regrets about their lives.

My Personal Experiences of Sitting With the Dying as Hospice Volunteer

You know, when I first started writing this article, my goal was to compile a list of regrets that I most often heard from the dying.  Some were surprising, most were not, but all were thought-provoking.  However, as I started to tell my story, my fingers took on a life of their own and went in a slightly different direction. It’s interesting how that happens sometimes, and makes me think that perhaps there is a reason for that, and there are more things to this topic that I can relate to you the future postings.

I hope you will stay tuned for that.  Next post, I will compile that list of regrets that I most commonly heard.

My Personal Experiences of Sitting With the Dying as Hospice Volunteer

Meanwhile, live well and peaceful.