When I was still working in Hospice I loved using stories as a way to help keep our board of directors connected to those of us they were helping to steer.

I always hoped that what I said spoke accurately on behalf of those of us on the other side of the board room doors, the ones in the field and in the trenches. The ones who were able to do what they did because the Board had our backs….

I knew one of the reasons they were on the board to begin with was because somewhere in their life they had been touched by a hospice story. We used to say, we come to this work, because first, it comes to us.

So I would bring stories to help them feel connected to the miracles, the joys, the sorrows and the moments of unspeakable tenderness that occur as a result of the work that happens. 

For one particular meeting the story was a bit different. We had just had one of those “runs” of death that our nurse, Barbara Bush, always described as the Mother Ship hovering over the valley plucking people up. Because in the two week period prior to this meeting we lost 14 patients. 

When a small rural hospice loses 14 patients in 14 days the effects on the agency can be extreme to the point of being dangerous. We had all been rocked to the core and we were all exhausted. It was during the Holidays, as it sometimes happens and more staff than usual were out and away with their own families. We were kind of a skeletal crew. 

As part of how I chose to honor the impact on my co-workers I prepared something for a staff meeting that I then chose to bring to the board. 

Many of these podcasts are based on stories I once shared with the board of directors at hospice. 

We always started our team meetings with a reading of the names of the patients that had died since our last meeting. We'd give anyone who was present a moment to talk about that experience if they wanted to, and if they didn't that was ok too.

At this particular meeting, we came into a somewhat darkened room and when everyone was there I lit a candle and said the following:

Today, I light this candle for all the care givers who are sometimes the forgotten angels. The ones who show up day after day, night after night, having to just trust that where they are and what we are doing, matters.

We are all members of that tribe. And our little tribe has just experienced a stream of loss…..so many people have died since we last met. Each one of them slips into our hearts then silently, unknowingly, innocently; change us. Every patient makes, and then leaves, an imprint in some way. 

And it isn’t just the patients we care for that make an impression. 

It's also the people they leave behind when they die that tug most fiercely at the strings of our hearts; the children who bid farewell to their parents, or the parents who watched helplessly as their child died. A sister, a brother, a friend or a lover; the ones who are left living often create more urgency in our lives than those we have watched leave.

So today, in remembering our most recent deaths, I light this candle for those who companioned them at their end of life. The grand daughter and great grand daughters of a woman who one day was playing with her great-grand-children on the floor and was then found on the same floor the next afternoon having suffered a major stroke. The stroke took her life 5 days later. We had them on service for less than 72 hours but the experience touched all of us. And the husband and son who had to say goodbye to a woman who just didn’t have any fight left, who died before her other two sons could get here. And it is for those two sons.

This candle is for the beautiful, vibrant mother of three young children as she tries to understand why it hurts so much just to wake up in the morning; and it's for her children who wake up right now in a world that feels cruel and harsh and scary. 

I light today’s candle for all of those individuals now left with the burden of learning the language of a world they never even wanted to go to. And included in that are each one of us. Because, we also, suffer in these losses. This candle burns for us as well. We all deserve the tenderness and respect extended to the families of the patients who die on service with our agency. And not just those of the agency that sit around the table in our staff meetings but also those from the agency who don’t attend these meetings; our aides, our volunteers, our office staff and the valued members of our board.

We are well served when we take time for one another around the lose of patients, when we take time to acknowledge the loss in our own lives, in our co-workers lives and in the lives of those in our communities.

Acknowledging for the aides that they have lost someone they care for and cared about in the most intimate of ways, acknowledging the people who deliver and retrieve the hospital beds and the oxygen concentrators when a patient we have shared care for, dies. Acknowledging for the physicians who entrusted us with caring for their patients, many of whom they have had relationships with that spans years. And also acknowledging the coroners and funeral directors who take up where we leave off to tenderly and with gentle kindness tend to the fginal care of our patients.

I can say all of this because I trust that the ones who are released are good and it’s the ones left behind that need love and care.

I then read the names of the patients who had died, pausing at each name so that anyone who was there could say something if they wanted to. At this meeting, as the 14 names were read, the tears came and the words came and the laughter and hopefully some small sense of completion. All necessary to being able to move forward.

We are almost all care givers in some capacity, at some point, in this life. When it is your turn, find your ballast, find your life line, and hold on. Find the person you feel safest with and ask them to be ready to bear witness to your grief, or to share it. Please don't try to do it alone. There is nothing as hard as feeling alone in grief and there is nothing weak about admitting that the grief is there.

This is Sean Jeung. Thank you for sharing this time with me and I hope you'll join me again WTVGT. Until then, may peace be a constant thread in your life.