Wholeness Healing Center

In Honor of National Hospice Month

During National Hospice Month, we at Wholeness Healing Center would like to recognize the dedicated professionals and volunteers who provide love and comfort to those who are terminally ill.

Hospice care professionals and volunteers are truly helping others at their deepest core. We recognize these individuals for their strength and compassion. Their efforts help millions of individuals and families each year.

One of our staff members, Dorothy Molczyk, wanted to share her experience working with Hospice in thanks and honor of Nation Hospice Month:

Most significant life events are marked with celebration as well as pain. At the birth of a baby, there is the mother’s physical pain as that new life is ushered into the world. As a father or mother lets go of their little one’s hand for their first day of kindergarten, the parents experience excitement as well sadness. At weddings, graduations, moves and retirements, a combination of feelings exist. There seems to be a life lesson that in order to appreciate the joy, we must embrace the pain as well. Can this be true of the last event in our physical existence as well: the physical act of dying?

The Hospice philosophy supports this belief. As a former Hospice social worker, I came to adopt this truth as well. In our society it is difficult to talk about thoughts and feelings surrounding death. What I found in my experience is that all patients and family members of the patient had feelings about the upcoming death and needed to share their conflicting feelings, no matter the age and the background. The Hospice program allows the dying patient and their loved ones to do this. Hospice focuses on keeping patients physically comfortable to ensure that they can concentrate on the emotional and spiritual work that the patient and family want to complete.

My father was in the Hospice program when he died. He was surrounded by his family; he was pain free and his passing seemed gentle. My 20 year old son who was in the room at the death of his grandfather said quietly to me, “Mom, it was nothing like I thought it would be”. He was right. On that night we experienced the joy of sharing my father’s experience as he was birthed into the next world. We simultaneously very much experienced the pain of letting him go.

Tags: hospice