I work as a volunteer in Hospice. I chose to do this as I feel a strong sense of love and protection for our elders. I had many years of childhood volunteering with my mom, who was a nurse, and have since, joined some organizations that allow us to “adopt” grammas and grampas with my family.  We’ve spent many happy years befriending sweet lonely elders, most living alone in assisted living, but all of whom are still independent, strong, and living well in their senior years.

Now, my kids are older, our family visits have stopped since college and high school and volleyball are our new routines. Yet, I found myself reaching for something to give to, and quickly committed to a Hospice organization, as a volunteer.

This, is good. I need to do this. But this has been breaking my heart. The people I see, the elderly I visit.

Not because they are dying, but how they are living.

The photo included here is Arline. My current “patient”. A beautiful woman with a zingy zest of humor and a smile that lights up her sweet face every time she sees me. She weighs all of 80 pounds and has 4 teeth in her head. She counts and tells me this each time I visit. It troubles her greatly.

She lives in an assisted living facility, and has a small twin bed on her side of the room which overlooks a brick wall with a barbed wire rim on top. It’s a run of the mill hospital room, and scarcely decorated with a few old random photos of her family, and a roommate named Olga. She has about 10 pieces of clothes to her name, and everything important to her, some old letters and clippings, are in a bundle in a beat up dresser next to her bed.

She doesn’t remember how old she is. This also bothers her. She thinks 80 something, but based on her stories of being an extra on the I Love Lucy Show, I am putting her in her nineties.

She has three children, only one of which occasionally visits (the nurses confirm this) and the other two, whose names she can’t remember.

The Hospice organization I volunteer for does a good job trying to offer her support; she has two volunteers (including me) and a Chaplain that visits her each week (her sign in sheet confirm this). But, that is it.

Other than the nurses who come and go, her meal delivery and her bath twice a week, she is alone.

She doesn’t have strength to wheel herself around, so she is at the mercy of others to ever leave her room. She often, sits in her wheelchair next to her bed, her small tray in front of her with some water and melting ice cream, staring at her too loud TV, her constant source of companionship.

There are many other patients just like her there in that nursing facility. Sitting in their wheelchairs, lining the hallways, most unable to move or communicate in any way other than grunts and wild, erratic movements. Some are frozen by strokes, leaving them with a smooth, peaceful mask of a face, unable to share the horror and pain they are struggling with as their brain tries to sort out what incongruities are happening between their thoughts and their physical abilities. And some are just comatose with drug concoctions; barely acknowledging the world around them as they peer through their drug-glazed eyes.

Some, just cry. They wail from their rooms; “Help me, save me” – a constant chorus rings the halls. The staff tries to constantly sanitize and clean, but the stench of urine is the underlying odor that accompanies any visit.

You can tell Arline was a generous, optimistic woman in life, as her first response is always a smile and even when she doesn’t know the answer to a question I ask her, she finds the positive angle on it… “well darn, I don’t remember what I liked to eat during the Holidays but I bet it was something good!”

Yet when I go deeper, it’s easy to see she is troubled. She makes passing, confused comments about her family not seeing her much, the nurses just doing their job but taking no extra time for her personally. This is her home, yet this is only their job, and it is obvious.

I have seen many like her over the years. Patients, whose life has passed years ago, who are now in some dreadful limbo, hovering between their physical and mental chaos ticking down towards their last breath – just waiting to die. Their families, stretching the bank accounts to pay for their care, who would never admit it, but are hoping that day comes soon.

I don’t blame them. I can’t imagine my own parent living like this, and my version of hell, would be my own, final, remaining days spent in such prolonged misery.

My mother-in-law passed away last November. She had a stroke on a Friday and passed the following Monday. It was dreadful and tragic, but I was so thankful she went so quickly. She was kept comfortable, surrounded by loved ones, until she took her last breath and we all got to say goodbye.

But Arline, she keeps ticking, declining every time I see her. She somehow manages to lose more weight, her remaining teeth coagulated with thick grime from lack of effort to ever brush them courtesy of the nursing staff. She no longer cares for her appearance. When I first visited her, she took great pride in her looks, putting on clip earrings or a cute barrette to hold back her curls. Now, her hair, which she took such pride in, sits frizzy and flat with no mentions of any further beauty visits. Her nails we used to keep polished and filed are now ragged, her cuticles picked and raw. She used to ask me to help her keep them nice; she has stopped asking. Her zest still simmers below an unknown sadness she can’t define; it is dulled and only bubbles to the surface when provoked with the right questions about her past.

She is dying. She doesn’t have enough memory to be aware of this, but her soul knows, her spirit reminds her in an unspoken way.

I think about her a lot. Her story. All she did in life, all she loved. Forgotten, lost in a past lifetime she once so boldly inhibited. I can only pray she made permanent impressions on her family who she left behind. Yet the care they offer her now, leads me to believe they aren’t giving her much thought. I hope I am wrong.

Who will carry on Arline? Who will remember her story? What did she live for? Who did she impact?

I believe she will be at peace when she dies, I believe in a merciful Jesus who carries our souls to be with him for eternity. I pray she dies soon; isn’t that horrible? Just so she can connect with that peace she so deeply needs. Because right now, she is just a breathing organism, taking up a very small part of this world. A very small, very sad, very lonely part of this universe. I do believe things happen the way God intends them to happen, and as my Pastor says “If you’re heart is still beating, God still has a purpose for you”. I struggle to see what her purpose is now. Perhaps her purpose is to stoke me,so I can do more for her/for them. Perhaps her purpose is to remind her family, no matter how negligent they are, that they are failing her and they have a small window to be better, to do better for her.

I don’t know. I will trust God knows. And I will trust God inspires me, to do what I am meant to do from knowing Arline and the many others I meet through hospice with the same stories, the same sad endings.  I pray He instills in me a purpose for how I can make their lives better. And I smile, imagining what when they finally do go back home to Him, they will look Him in the eye, and say “What took you so long?”