How Hospice Supports Your Family Through Grief and Loss

Rev. Donna Marie Tetreault is a hospice chaplain and an active member of Compassion Sabbath, an interfaith working group which provides ongoing education for religious leaders to help with the needs of the dying in their faith communities. Throughout her experience in religious work and counseling, she has seen the effectiveness of hospice. She writes that it can support families through grief and loss. "The team of nurses, social workers, chaplains, home health aides, volunteers, bereavement coordinators, and the medical director, " she explains, "can help you navigate through the waves of grief."

Rev. Tetreault identifies four essential services hospice provides or facilitates:

Hospice listens and lets you express your grief: Hospice team members provide ongoing support and listening as medical, spiritual, and emotional needs and tasks arise. Hospice focuses on the one who is dying as well as on those they will leave behind. The plan for care identifies specific needs for education about the disease process unfolding, what to expect as death nears and occurs, and the bereavement support and guidance that is most helpful and appropriate.

Hospice provides encouragement, guidance, and education: These discussions, led in a compassionate and gentle way, address advance directives such as tube feedings, resuscitation, hospitalization, nursing home placement, and funeral planning. While these are tough topics to discuss, moving through them in ways that respect the dying person's wishes, cultural expectations, and religious practices can help to ease some of the uncertainty and fears of the unknown. Hospice offers a holistic approach, recognizing the unique physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the patient and their loved ones. In this way, the journey towards life's end is lived out with dignity and respect.

Hospice helps you work through relationship issues: One of the most common experiences of anticipatory grief - the grief felt be loved ones in ancious anticipation of the approaching death - is undeserved guilt. Often family members regret past times of anger or seperation from the one who is now dying, or blame themselves for not recognizing symptoms earlier or not pushing for more aggressive treatments or therapies. Hospice works through these natural concerns with you, allowing you to see both the good and the stressful in all reltioanships, and to realize the limitations we all have in wanting and providing the best for those we love.

Hospice assists with planning and care issues: Other supports that hospice team members provide are education and guidance related to the tasks and expectations as death nears. While no one can predict just when and how death will occur, there are physical signs and symptoms that life is ebbing away. The hospice nurse, working with the primary physician and medical director, provides medications for comfort that help relieve a patient's physical adn emotional distress. The social worker can help you determine the availability of appropriate community resources, veterans benefits, adn other other services. The chaplain is available to contact a family's own pastoral minister, to offer blessings and prayers, to counsel and guide, and to officiate at a service if so desired. Hospice team members are available to accompany you through the funeral observances.

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Blue Skies Hopsice provides all of these services to patients and their families. For more information please call or email us.

Blue Skies Hosts Country Fair at Kindred Care

On April 26th, the Blues Skies Hospice staff and volunteers organized and hosted a country fair event for hospice and non-hospice residents at Kindred Care in Dyer, Indiana. Residents had their picture taken with clowns, played games for prizes, and enjoyed ice cream and music. The event was a fun success.

Residents enjoying the fair

Blues Skies staff and volunteers organized and hosted the event





Kindred Care staff also enjoyed the event

Jewish Hospice Network Declares Importance of Hospice Care

Blue Skies Hospice serves and will continue to serve patients and families of all faiths and no faith. Members of the Jewish faith are organizing the Jewish Hospice Network to emphasize the medical and spiritual importance of hospice. Jewish Exponent published a wonderful account of the JHN, and the work they are doing. The article contains a Jewish story and how one Rabbi believes it symbolizes the importance of hospice care:

Rabbi Tsurah August of the Jewish Hospice Network -- of which Wissahickon Hospice is a partner -- said that when she met with Ira at his home, she looked for his connections to Judaism. Ira played music, and August discovered a shofar in one of his instrument cases.

Since it was the month of Elul, which precedes the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, she told Ira about the hallowed tradition of blowing the shofar each day of that month.

She also talked about some of the shofar's symbolism.

One of them is that when a shofar sounds, it blasts through the boundaries between this world and the next; even though Ira had trouble breathing, he blew the shofar each day of Elul until he fell into a coma and died at the end of October.

August, who was ordained at the Academy for Jewish Religion, in New York City, said this activity was meaningful for Ira and gave him something to do when he no longer had the energy for his many interests.

This, she said, reflects the importance of hospice care in enhancing the quality of a patient's life.