Hospice Quotes

“I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me”
― Lisa Goich-Andreadis, 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, A Two Week Goodbye

“I knew then why I had to suffer. The older we get, the more reasons God gives us to seek His comfort. In the end, He sends us just enough pain and suffering so that we will want to leave. If everything were perfect, we would never choose to go. He wants us to seek an end to our suffering because He wants us to want to come Home.”
― Kate McGahan, JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with my Master

“Endings matter, not just for the person but, perhaps even more, for the ones left behind.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“People struggle to see it's not about whether she's going to die - palliative care isn't just a place you go to slowly slip away. More people live and leave than die on our wards. It is about being comfortable for the duration of something necessary and painful. Making bad times easier.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Flatshare

“If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.”
― Kimberly D. Acquaviva, LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice

“Never take life for granted. Savor every sunrise, because no one is promised tomorrow…or even the rest of today.”
― Eleanor Brownn

“At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“A paradigm shift of viewing palliative care or hospice as a gift instead of seeing it as giving up has the potential to change the way we experience advanced age.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent

“When I reflect on the stories of death supported by hospice care and contrast it with our story depicting an absence of support, I find myself dealing with envy and anger. I have channeled those emotions into this book with the hope that hearing our story might give someone else a chance to create a better ending to the life of a loved one.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent

“If we listen and observe carefully the dying can teach us important things that we need to learn in preparing for the end of our own life's journey.”
― Robert L. Wise, Crossing the Threshold of Eternity: What the Dying Can Teach the Living

“.....listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.”
― Robert L. Wise, Crossing the Threshold of Eternity: What the Dying Can Teach the Living

“Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.”
― Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss

“Hospice care? No, you must mean Frisbee game. Because there's no way my brother and I aren't outside right now playing Frisbee in the middlle of the street in the middle of summer and there are weird bugs everywhere no matter how much bug spray we put on ourselves and our mom is coming out to tell us for the third and final time, C'mon inside kids, it's getting dark.”
― Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

“Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.”
― Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss

“I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.”
― Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss

“My encounter with desperation while witnessing the death of a precious child changed me, teaching me that although we will have sad times, we can move on, chastened and changed but resilient and hopeful. Laurel showed me one way to live with hope as well as cancer as she thrived even when tumors grew within her small body. She exhibited how a child can push aside despair and appreciate as many moments as possible, to believe in the power of resurrection, both the human spirit and in a Biblical sense.”
― Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss

“We know Job's faith survived because his reaction to his devastating loss was to worship God: "Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head, and he fell to the ground and worshiped. He said, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord'" (Job 1:20-21). Let me encourage you and your messed up man, should he be willing, to begin to worship God from your place of brokenness.

Tina shares a dramatic story from her work as a music therapist for hospice. One day, as she prepared to leave the hospice floor at the hospital, a nurse called her back to work with a patient in respiratory arrest. Music therapists use music to match the beat of a patient's heart rate, and as the therapist slows down the beat of music, most of the time the heart rate follows, as well as the breathing. At the start of the process, the patient's wife shouted, "Sing 'Amazing Grace'?" Deciding to minister rather than work, Tina sang "Amazing Grace." The patient's distress was overwhelming. He could hardly take in air, and his chest heaved while his wife wept. Right in the middle of "Amazing Grace," The wife once more blurted out, "Sing 'Jesus Loves Me'!" Tina, switched gears and sang, "Yes, Jesus loves me." Tears streamed down the man's cheeks as he sang with her, "Yes, Jesus loves me." His words were broken and he could hardly say them, but in that moment, he worshiped the God who was about to take him home. Whatever you're facing . . . worship.”
― Tina Samples, Messed Up Men of the Bible

“The last message he’d had from him was on the back of a postcard with a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh on the front, and the farewell message, handwritten in blue biro in Paul’s looping, confident hand, had said, ‘Suck a black man’s cock for me, darling.’ He had been spared blindness, then. The next he had heard was a hoarse-voiced man announcing himself as Paul’s father, and Paul had died in the hospice.”
― Philip Hensher, The Emperor Waltz

“There were no books to help me so I wrote the book”
― Linda Dipman, Angels Watching Over Me

“I stared at the hospice nurse's clipboard of notes, her purple scrubs, her file filled with Momma's health history, and I listened to the clicking of her pen and never looked her in the eye. She didn't belong in our home. She was just full of false information, cynical with age, and her pessimism about Momma's lifespan was making the house feel claustrophobic, like a coffin. She was closing the lid.”
― Caitlin Garvey

“Life—what was it? So deep and important and full of feeling, so crucial, then suddenly just a blink, a mayfly moment and gone. Nothing really, in the grander scheme; and no grander scheme either. No. A vertiginous perch, the bedside chair in a hospice.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“People dying of COVID can be 'dying' for a long time. People dying of cancer often are dying for a long time. But with cancer, and other terminal illnesses, it's acceptable to move from treatment into hospice...We give them morphine...we meet death half-way.”
― Susan Kraus, When We Lost Touch

“She thought about their time at Bridge Builders Hospice: how people passed through those bedrooms like ghosts on wrecked rowboats, incapable of redirecting course from the approaching cliff. She had witnessed it many times: the moment dying became a letting, and the currents plunged their patients, headfirst, into waterfalls so misty it was like sailing through cloud. Resist it nor not, it made no difference.”
― Jarred Thompson, The Institute for Creative Dying

“We were always waiting for the drop. That tense feeling in the house was an intangible change in the cadence of our life, like the pause in the middle of a serious conversation as you wait for the waiter to clear each plate off the table.”
― Caitlin Connors, Irishman Dies from Stubbornness: Unbelievable Truths Behind the Life That Launched the Viral Obituary of Christopher Clifford Connors

“He reminded everyone in the room that he was still at the helm and death could take a number.”
― Caitlin Connors, Irishman Dies from Stubbornness: Unbelievable Truths Behind the Life That Launched the Viral Obituary of Christopher Clifford Connors

“She gazed over her oxygen mask at the small, smiling Christmas tree that sat on the table behind her.  Tonight, the whirling sound of the disk in the drive was a song that was sweeter than any lullaby.”
― Circa24, Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.

“You are a beautiful death goddess, do you hear me?

Death goddess. I need that on a T-shirt, I mumbled.”
― Abby Jimenez, Worst Wingman Ever

“We live in a fix-it society with the technology to repair many broken things at our fingertips. We forget that we’ve all been deliberately designed to “end” one day. When that ending happens, there’s nothing to fix. . . This is not giving up, or giving in. It’s acceptance.”
― David Kessler, The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's Final Chapter – A Gentle and Honest Approach to Caregiving and Supporting Families with Peace

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Play-ers. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Players. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition