When Hospice Failed My Family

<blockquote> “While you think about your decision, I’m going in to meet your mother and work my voodoo.” </blockquote> Yes, these were words spoken by the hospice case worker assigned to help my mother find peace and comfort as she neared the end of her life. Those horrible moments occurred five years ago and while they have never left my conscious mind, they were jolted back to the forefront last week as I watched my current favorite TV series, Somebody Somewhere (HBO Max). Summarizing that show would take too long, but what I will say is that it’s Bridget Everett’s character Sam’s vehicle to confront her past and current life with her family, after coming home to their farm in Manhattan, Kansas, to care for her dying sister. Grief abounds, and if you know grief intimately, you’ll also understand that while it’s in back of everything, other emotions and events sometimes surface loudly so as to cause you, and of course the characters in this series, to act like there’s really nothing so wrong, nothing that can’t be laughed off. You could call this denial, or you could say, with me, that life has a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, and usually unpredictable way of cluttering everything up on the inside, as evidenced by the scene in the show when Sam must clean out her father’s barn, an action that apparently hadn’t been taken in a decade or two (I felt that pain for sure). One deep experience with grief, we’d like to think, prepares us for the next one. Sure. That’s like saying that having a second child will be a snap, a piece of cake, a joy ride. <a href="https://medium.com/counterarts/when-hospice-failed-my-family-d97f86314ddc">Read More</a>