"I didn't realize I could stay in touch with my hospice volunteer for a year after my husband died. It was so reassuring just knowing she could be there for me from time to time. I would like to do the same for someone else in the future."

Hospice/Palliative Care Community Education

& Volunteer Training

*Please note, the training program in Nelson is now full. Applications are no longer being accepted for the Nelson area.

East Shore and Kaslo Hospice will be offering training in the Spring of 2012.

HOSPICE VOLUNTEER TRAINING is offered on an "as needed basis" and future training dates for all areas are posted on this website as they become available.

SAMPLE OUTLINE of past sessions:

Introduction to Hospice/Palliative care
Letting Go & The Practice of Mindfulness

Caring for the Cancer Patient

Palliative Care and Alzheimer's/Dementia

Grief & Loss

Being With Dying

Our Volunteers Speak

Hospice Volunteer Training
My father, as a United Church minister, held together the process of grieving and funerals for thousands of people over his 40 active years. During the 15 years I lived at home, funerals (as well as weddings) were part of the Saturday routine.   Combined with baptisms they filled out the 'hatched, matched, and dispatched' part of his work. The funerals were difficult for me, especially the two suicides and a murder I attended as a young teenager. I avoided funerals until I was asked to give the eulogy at my grandmother's funeral. I was moved by the heartfelt grief of my father and aunts for the loss of their mother.

It wasn't until Lyn Hazelton was living with cancer for four years that issues of my own mortality began to surface. She, more than anyone I have known, was open about her hopes, her fears, and the daily struggle to embrace life.  

When I spent time with her over that last Christmas, she was still working as a consultant to the last of over 250 businesses she had helped start. Almost completely immobilized in her bed in the St. James Cottage Hospice, she managed a steady stream of friends and acquaintances who volunteered to support her and help her complete her work. She held a wonderful party to thank them. That hospice in a park overlooking the Fraser River was a beautifully designed homelike facility.   She received a quality of care that exceeded anything I could have provided if she had come home to Crawford Bay as she had planned before her health suddenly deteriorated. When I attended the celebration of her life two months later, the common theme was gratitude for her gift of sharing her experience of living with a terminal illness and the struggles of facing her death. Through her art, her music, and the challenging intensity of her conversations she brought us into her experience and helped us each face the reality of our own inevitable fate.  

At that time I resolved to learn more so that I, too, could easy the passing of others and be able to embrace my own final journey. Initially, I signed up to attend the hospice volunteer training a find out what services are available locally. I was surprised to discover that, even without a hospice facility in our community, there appears to be excellent, if not abundant, home support services. The people I met, both participants and trainers, were wonderful. We listened, we shared, we learned and came away with a deeper understanding of the events and issues accompanying the process of dying, death, and, for surviving family and friends, loss, grief, and recovery.

It has inspired me to become a hospice volunteer and, while not called on for that, to work with others in the community to expand the services for care of our community's elders.  

Living here, we enjoy a remarkably high quality of life and I, with the help of my hospice friends, want to make the most of it right up until my last sigh.

Written by Robert Agnew

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