On October 9, we celebrated World Hospice and Palliative Care Day. This day is a unified day of action to celebrate and support hospice and palliative care around the world. The 2021 theme is “Leave No One Behind — equity in access to palliative care.”
I first heard about hospice in the early ‘70s when I invited a hospice speaker to speak to my death and dying classes at Beloit Catholic High. I learned that in many ways, Cicely Saunders helped to establish modern hospice; however, according to Hospice and Palliative care of Virginia, Mother Teresa and Elizabeth Kubler Ross helped to prepare the way for the modern hospice movement.
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa claimed that the greatest disease is not leprosy or cancer, rather, it is the feeling of being unloved and unwanted. She and her Sisters would go into the streets of India and pick up the dying and minister to them. Though they often died in a short time, she wanted them to die having known the love of Christ.
Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stated, “We live in a very particular death-denying society. We isolate and institutionalize both the dying and the old because they are reminders of our own mortality. We should not institutionalize people.
We can give families more help with home care and visiting nurses, giving the families and the patients the spiritual, emotional, and financial help in order to facilitate the final care at home.”
Her goals helped to prepare the way for modern hospice.
Dr. Cicely Saunders
Dr. Cicely Saunders is credited with founding the modern hospice movement. She shows again that God can use the most unlikely persons to accomplish good.
As a high school student at an exclusive boarding school, Cicely embraced atheism. But after years of unhappiness and searching, she had a profound experience of God and became a Christian. Changed by God’s love, she prayed this brave prayer, “Lord, what do I have to do today to give you thanks and to serve you?”
God’s answer came when Cicely, as a nurse, counseled David Tasma, a refugee from Poland’s Warsaw ghetto.
Abandoned by family and friends, he was dying alone in a large London hospital. At age 40, he felt that his life made no difference. They had long and deep visits. Their professional relationship turned into a deep friendship.
The two discussed an idea that it might be possible to create more homelike places where people could die with dignity.
One day David told Cicely, “I want only what is in your mind and in your heart.” When David died, on February 25, 1948, he left Saunders with a gift of £500 and the following encouragement: “Let me be a window in your home, (hospice).”
After David’s death, Cicely was determined to learn more about the care of the terminally ill. First, she worked as a volunteer in St. Luke’s, a home for the dying in London. Then she made the momentous decision to study medicine. She became a doctor at age 38. She began to see her work with dying people as a form of religious calling or vocation.
The hospice movement can be traced back to Catholic medieval times when it referred to a place of shelter and rest for weary or ill travelers on a long journey.
The modern hospice movement
The modern hospice movement started because Dr. Saunders wanted to respond to patients who were dying alone in an impersonal setting. She laid down the basic principles of modern hospice care. She developed a systematic approach to pain control in terminally ill patients, gave attention to their social, emotional, and spiritual needs; and began teaching what she knew to other people.
Her concept of “total pain” provided a revolutionary way of conceptualizing the complexity of patients’ suffering. She offered a positive, imaginative alternative that sought to ensure pain relief, maintain dignity, and enhance the remaining period of available life, however short.
Hospice is a type of care and a philosophy of care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient’s symptoms. These symptoms can be physical, emotional, spiritual, or social in nature. Hospice care focuses on bringing comfort, self-respect, and tranquility to the dying patient. Patients’ symptoms and pain are controlled to help reach these goals; however, the focus is providing care, not curing.
Although the hospice movement has met with some resistance, it has rapidly expanded throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere.
The hospice movement is an attempt to help patients with terminal illness to die with dignity. Cicely has written that faith in God and in his care has helped many persons to receive special help from Christ. Christ loved us so much that he would have died for even one of us. Christ died on the cross to give comfort, courage, and care to others. Cicely believed that when her time comes, the same God would be there for her too. I believe that God was there for her when she died.
Fr. Donald Lange is a pastor emeritus in the Diocese of Madison.