Honest Endings by Katherine Cullen M.S.W

Author:Katherine Cullen, M.S.W. [Katherine Cullen, M.S.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9781646544370
Google: jkr8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
Published: 2020-09-10T05:16:46+00:00

Chapter 3

All the Lonely People

Death by the numbers can be staggering.

I would be working with roughly fifteen to twenty-five hospice patients at any given time. About half of my caseload would die each month, invariably making room for more. That amounts to ten to fifteen deaths a month, maybe 125 a year. I did not go to all the funerals, perhaps a third of them. In three years, I met about three hundred people who would die well within the span of the same time period.

The official line at the hospice was that we did not “help people prepare for death,” that we instead “helped them live life until the end of it.” So untrue. It would have been cruel to not prepare someone for what was coming, as best we could.

After about eight months on the job, things became easier for me. I am not sure why. I suppose I got into the rhythm of working in the hospice environment and became somewhat hardened. I had been through a lot of death and dying by then, and so perhaps I had more confidence in my effectiveness. There is also this weird gallows humor that happens in hospices as a sort of coping mechanism—we would joke about a family that needed “slap therapy,” for example.

Whatever the reason, I stopped crying all the time.

By then, I had also built up a couple of relationships with other staff members and had some degree of comfort there, but we still did not talk much about our cases. We just sort of ignored it, though we did talk about the agency and how dysfunctional it was. That was good for a laugh.

None of this is to imply that the work ever really got easier. Sometimes it would be a case of “hurry up and wait,” and I got pretty good at that. If I was on call during the weekend, it was almost certain that I would get at least one call, so I might as well wait for it.

One morning at around 2:00 a.m., the phone rang—a rude awakening, even when you know it may be coming. The sister of one of my patients was very, very upset. Joan was going to die soon. The sister had thought she still had a couple of months to go, but things had taken a sudden downturn. She had finally grasped the true reality of her sister’s impending death.

The woman on the phone was on the verge of hysterics. I remember asking her some specific questions, partly as a way to calm her down in the dark as I pulled on some semiprofessional clothes, trying not to disturb Ed or the sleeping pets. Putting the dogs out at 2:15 a.m. was the last thing I needed at this point. Time was of the essence.

The agency’s rule was, I could not talk on the phone while I was driving. The problem was, Joan’s death was very likely imminent, and she was a good twenty to twenty-five minutes away.

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