“We all must die, may we do so with grace and dignity”
“I am Peter Stolp and am a Hospice Volunteer.
My association with Hospice Volunteers South Inc started as a client about fourteen years ago. I joined the Walking Through Grief programme after my wife Leonie died. It had been recommended to me by several friends and I am glad I took part. Being able to tell my story of grief and listening to other people’s similar stories did a lot towards healing.
I was asked to join hospice’s management committee and partly in gratitude I took on the role of Secretary and then a few other roles over a period of six years. Eventually I outgrew the administrative aspect of Hospice and decided I should try my hand at volunteering, so I did the volunteer training course which I enjoyed very much.
I volunteer in the community. That means I visit people who are dying and spend time with them mostly in their homes but sometimes in aged care, palliative care or hospital.
I would like to share with you some of my experiences:
I was quite nervous when I knocked on my first client’s door some seven years ago, but that nervousness soon left as I was welcomed in. The people I have visited have always been most welcoming. I thought that my purpose was mainly to spend time with the dying person to allow their carer, mostly their wife, to take some time out. There certainly was some truth in that. However, I also quickly understood that the dying person appreciated the visit too, perhaps even more so.
Visits would generally be fortnightly and range in time from two to four hours. What happens at these visits is wonderfully variable.
When I first meet a client and their carer, I work out with them how I can best serve them. One man wanted me to help him write letters to each of his children and his wife. His illness meant he was unable to write. Over a number of weeks, I would sit with him and ask him questions about his wife and children and take notes. I would take these notes home and gradually construct letters of thanks. I then read my drafts to him for correction. My writing style for letters of thanks tend to hold lots of superlatives while he spoke of himself as a plain man. Where I wrote “Gwen and I are very proud of you” in a letter to his son, he asked me to remove the ‘very’ and instead of his wife’s name write “your mother’. Words like beautiful, gracious and love, especially love were not allowed. Consequently, I rewrote the letters five times and learnt how to be gracious in thanks without using any adjectives. I learnt after he died that the letters were well received.
The shortest time I spent with a client was just a few weeks. The longest was two and half years. This man had had been told that his illness would lead to his death within three months. His further two and a half years of life just shows that most forecasts are wrong. Our project was to write his life story. In this case I recorded our conversations and gradually developed his words into a booklet of some 100,000 words. As you can imagine I got to know him pretty well. He told me things he had never told his wife. Needless to say, these things didn’t get into the book. The more I came to know him the more I came to see him as a kind and honourable man. He spent his last months in aged care and the last time I spoke with him he said he hoped he had been a good person. The last time I visited him he was asleep. I left him a note to say that “yes he was a good and kind person”. He died shortly after this. I hope he got to read my note.
Another client was confined to home in an easy chair. He loved books but was unable to read so we decided I would read to him. I chose a Ken Follet book, a story long enough to require him to live for at least another year or two. I would be with him for four hours, so reading was a good way to spend the time. Besides I enjoyed reading out loud and it was a good story. He enjoyed it too. The story would occasionally become rather risqué so I would warn him that he would need to stay calm and settle down. He would just laugh. Sometimes we would both fall asleep and wake up with a start and some more laughter. We did find time to talk about things; serious things like his dying and about being prepared for that. One of the things that he was concerned about was that he hadn’t shown his wife how to operate the garage door. I don’t believe he ever did but I am sure his wife would have worked it out. We never finished the book and since I had left it at his home, I bought another copy so I could find out how the story ended.
The man I visited for the shortest time was also the youngest. He was in his mid-forties. I saw him a couple of times at his home and helped him in his move to the Whittle Ward. We talked about life and death. I last saw him sleeping in his Whittle Ward room. That is where I said goodbye to him with the thought that he was dying without really ever having properly lived. In the short time I had grown quite close to him and left him with sadness.
For one client our meetings took the form of coffee and talk at a local café. We spoke about our lives, our interest in art, philosophy and religion and they were most enjoyable outings for both of us. He was dying from prostate cancer at the same time I was being treated for the same disease. That was rather confronting but also reassuring in that I could be a witness to his journey and see how well he travelled it. I said goodbye to him in the Whittle Ward as well.
My most recent client had built his family home some 50 years ago. He knew that it was vacant and, on the market, and he had hoped to see it just once more, so I took him. It was a large home on a large area of land. As we drove down the drive, I could sense him bringing the past to mind and as we wandered around the outside of the locked house, I could feel his pride in having built it and raised a family in it. I enjoyed that outing very much. I am pretty sure he did as well. This man was pretty hard of hearing and didn’t wear his hearing aids, so he rarely heard what I said. It didn’t actually matter much because most of the time he did all the talking. He told good stories that I enjoyed very much. I saw him last close to death at an aged care home. He woke as I came into his room. I sat at the end of his bed and held his hand while we talked. As he tired and started to drift off to sleep, I said I would leave. He pointed up and said, “I see you there”. I said, “Look out for me”.
These are just a few examples. In a more general sense, we talk about important stuff like dying. I have found that when these men are faced with death, and they have some idea of the path for their end-of-life journey they allow death to come with grace and dignity.
For me, being with these men is a privilege. I come to know them at a time of their lives when much of what held them in the past has been stripped away. They are vulnerable and yet beautifully open. They bare their hearts and souls and their beauty and goodness shines.
I mentioned my wife at the beginning of this talk. I will finish with her too.
Leonie died at age 63 in the evening of 7 January 2009. The night before she died, we were in bed, she in a hospital bed near our bedroom window, me in our bed pushed against the wall on the other side of the room. At about two in the morning, I woke to Leonie’s coughing and suggested I get her a hot lemon drink knowing that this would ease the cough. She said not to bother, and I was so tired I was tempted to just turn over and get back to sleep. But I didn’t. I made the drink and sat on the end of her bed while she drank it. I don’t remember what we talked about during that half hour, but I do remember that it was one of the most intimate moments in our lives together. Her beauty and goodness shone as though her whole life was packaged in that moment.
We all must die, may we do so with grace and dignity.”