‘You Don’t Really Know… Until You Try’
Neil Pappalardo joined the Capital Hospice community in 1999 when he moved his wife here to die. Back in New York, Carol, 55, had been told the breast cancer that had been gone for 18 years had not only returned, but spread. The couple moved south to be close to children living in the Washington area.
Neil says that for the next several weeks, the care Carol received from Capital Hospice helped make their final days together more comfortable. When asked about the value of the bereavement counseling and support he received following her death in October 1999, he doesn’t mince words. “It saved my life,” he says.
Although it took a couple of years for Neil to feel comfortable enough to try, he knew right away that he wanted to find a way to “give back” to the community and his new friends at hospice.
Since then, Neil has been trained as a patient-care volunteer, an experience he describes as very spiritual. “I get a lot of reward,” he says. “By sharing my story, by helping people however I can, I’m there to give a little comfort before the end.”
Neil says being a hospice volunteer isn’t for everyone. For him, a constant challenge is knowing how, and sometimes even when, every new relationship with a patient will end. “The toughest part is when you get close and you lose them,” he says. “You know they’re going to go and it’s hard sometimes. You talk about your life and theirs. They pass away and you go on, but you miss them.”
His current assignment started out as his most difficult: He saw a need for a hospice volunteer at the nursing home where his wife had died.
“I asked for that assignment not knowing whether I would make it through the front doors,” he says. He’s been a hospice volunteer there two days a week for the last 18 months.
Neil says he plans to continue volunteering for Capital Hospice as long as he is physically able. And he urges others to at least consider the idea.
“You really don’t know whether you can do this sort of thing until you try.”
‘It Feels Good to Know I Can Help’
After her husband died of a heart attack in 1981, Marguerite Henthorn didn’t want to sit around feeling sorry for herself. When she looked for a place in Northern Virginia to volunteer, she thought about three family members-her oldest brother, a brother-in-law, and one of her son’s godparents-that had died of cancer.
With no hospice services to draw upon, the caregivers in each case struggled mightily. They forced dying patients who had no appetite to eat. They agonized over what were the right choices to make. They withheld pain medication for fear of causing addiction.
“I remembered the pain and torment that everyone involved in those situations went through,” she says. “They simply didn’t know what they were doing. When you take on something like that alone, you don’t know what to do.”
With those experiences in mind, Marguerite, 73, became a volunteer for one of Capital Hospice’s regional offices. After an initial stint in the Medical Records department, she became a Bereavement volunteer, working directly with patients and loved ones.
But direct service proved too stressful. “It’s very hard to see grief and forget it,” she says. “I took the pain home.”
She decided to return to the Medical Records department, and more recently works as an administrative volunteer for the Point of Hope Grief Counseling Center and volunteer services. With Capital Hospice team members making home visits each day throughout the metro area, she notes that plenty of paperwork is always waiting to be processed and entered into the computer.
“People who work in the hospice field are a little bit special-they are very caring,” she says. “It feels good to know that I can help them in some small way.”
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