What is a Family’s Role in Hospice?
Whether you’ve been advised to consider transferring your loved one to a hospice facility or have a hospice service come directly to your home, that decision ~ to look toward the path of hospice care ~ is never an easy one for any member of your family. Like an unexpected wave of ocean water suddenly splashed directly in your sun-warmed face, it’s an instant awakening; it’s real life telling you death may be near. While hospice care can certainly be cancelled should your loved one take a turn for the better and have good health renewed, just the thought of “hospice” care always stirs up mixed emotions about life, death, family, fears, values, and loved ones.
Hospice care is having the expertise, experience, and insight from a professional hospice team orchestrated to try to help you, your ailing loved one, and your family address, face, and work through this emotional, often-stressful, and sad time in your family’s life. Although doctors will no longer be called for medical advice and rescue squads won’t rush to the home to transport your loved one to the local Emergency Room once again, the prescribed morphine can still be administered and most everything and anything can be done at home or in the hospice family’s suite to ensure your loved one is pain-free. While this professional, experienced, and compassionate team of nurses, counselors, and caregivers are there both at your family’s side to comfort you and help you through this difficult time and at your loved one’s side to ensure the individual is comfortable as possible, the family’s role never changes when hospice is called.
For the loving, devoted daughter who steadfastly and joyfully stayed at her mom’s side for many years helping her mom perhaps recover from a massive stroke, will still be at her mom’s side ~ gently dabbing her mom’s face with a cool cloth, stroking her mom’s hair, and holding her mom’s hand. That daughter will be just as intimately and physically connected to her mom as she was before hospice met the family. Her role will not change.For the son who traveled back home to be near his mom’s side during her last weeks, days, or breaths, his role will not change. While a member of the hospice team may be directly and physically in the room with his mom, the son may choose not to stay in the room as witness his mother take her first breath in Heaven. Whatever the role each of the loved one’s aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and cousins embraced before hospice came to help, that role will remain the same.
Hospice caregivers don’t take over and nudge the family out. Instead, their presence often makes it just a tiny bit less-painful to be there when the loved one dies.Hospice does not replace the family. Instead, hospice is called upon to help, support, and simply be there with the family. While the loved one’s general practitioner may recommend to the daughter or other primary caregiver to consider hospice, sometimes the 24/7 caregiver does not want strangers in the home during this time. Simply meeting with and listening to all that hospice has to offer doesn’t mean you have to agree to accept their service. In fact, should you choose to embrace the help of hospice, you can decide how much of their services you want to utilize – or how little. If you simply want the comfort of knowing they’re just a phone call away, or if you prefer to have them in your home but not at your loved one’s bedside – that’s all possible.
author’s note: When the situation arose in my my family, I declined hospice care for a loved one in my family. I did not want or need a stranger “doing her job” in my home at such a personal and sacred time.
