THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411040271
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
His name was Jack Hagan, and he was a friend of mine. But we didn't really become friends until it was time to say goodbye.
Jack died of cancer a few days ago at the hospice unit of the Veterans Administration hospital in Hampton. Because he was at the hospice, his death became a celebration of his life. Because he was at the hospice, this man, estranged from his family for many years, had a second family to walk with him on his final journey.
The VA hospice is for veterans who have only a few weeks or months to live. ``We have room for six families,'' says Mabel Floyd, hospice unit director. She said ``families,'' not ``patients,'' and that tells you a lot of what the hospice is about.
Its formal name is the Palliative Care Unit. To palliate means to lessen or relieve without curing. The patients at the unit are on an unwavering path toward death, but there is medicine for the pain of their bodies and there are caring people to be with them as the shadows close in.
One of the requirements for admission of a patient to the unit is that his or her family offer support. This doesn't mean being assistant doctors and nurses. Family support is primarily emotional, but no less critical than the professional attention of the medical staff.
Floyd has been director of the unit since it opened in 1981. She designed its facilities and its program. Designed them with the folkways of an older, simpler America as a model. ``Years ago,'' she says, ``death was a family event, not a medical event. People died at home with the family very much a part of the team that cared for them.''
That's why the unit is more like a home than a hospital. There is a small, comfortable kitchen, where patients and family members can eat and talk. There are rooms where family members can stay overnight. The atmosphere is warm and loving, so much so that family members frequently come back to visit even after patients die.
Jack Hagan, a Navy veteran, had no family in the usual sense of the word. He had broken off relations with them long ago. But he was a member of my church, the Unitarian Church of Norfolk. He needed a family to enter the unit, and church members became that family. No problem, according to hospice rules. A patient's family can be whomever he or she says it is.
So church members set up a regular schedule of visits. They might be long. They might be short. It depended on Jack's condition. Long or short, they seemed mutually rewarding. Jack had always been an intensely private man, but gradually the warmth beneath the surface came clear. He talked about his life, about how he had been a first mate on private yachts or how he and a friend had converted an abandoned church into a home or how he, as a young man, had appeared in TV commercials and soap operas.
Still, the reality of approaching death was always there. Each passing day, he faded a little. It was, Floyd observes, a reality that most of us don't like to talk about or think about.
``In this country,'' she says, ``you're not allowed to get old, you're not allowed to die, and it's not a good idea to be ugly.'' But everyone who comes in here dies, I said, and I asked her how the staff coped with that.
``Everything in nature has a balance,'' she told me. ``We may not have a long time together, but it's a time in which the patients confirm their lives as they talk with us and share their lives with us. When Jack told us about his past, it confirmed his life for him and celebrated his life for us.''
Nor is death an end to the connection between the staff and the family. There is even a big reunion each year, where patients' families join together to cry a little, laugh a little and talk of remembered love.
All of that, Floyd says, makes working at the hospice a joy.
As the time of Jack's death approached, as he became weaker and weaker, members of his church family began staying all night with him. He was restless. He would wake up often, and whoever was there would sit with him, either to talk or just to be be there. Just being there - that was the important thing.
Late one night, we got word that he had died with a church member at his bedside. Not being alone was what he had wanted.
And so part of Jack Hagan's story was over. But there is another part that will go on. A few days after his death, church members and the hospice staff looked at pictures of Jack when he was a young man and when he was a first mate. They joined us in sweet sadness and indelible memories.
Something Mabel Floyd said struck me hard. ``Medicine was once an art that needed more science. Now it is a science that needs more art.'' I have seen that there is an art to helping someone close out life in grace and dignity. It is an art the hospice knows well. MEMO: Anyone interested in volunteering for the Palliative Care Unit at the
Veterans Administration Hospital can call 1-722-9961.
by CNB