Elizabeth Edwards and Hospice

I was honored to have been interviewed by Eleanor Clift about the Schiavo case and hospice for her book, Two Weeks of Life.  We met at my hotel in Washington DC and spent more than an hour discussing hospice and its many benefits to dying patients and their families.  I talked about my dad, and she her husband.

Now, Clift has an article out about the death of Elizabeth Edwards and the part hospice played.  It is worth reading.  Hospice often gets too short a shrift in the national conversation because it isn’t provocative and doesn’t generate the kind of emotions that sell newspapers.  From Clift’s column:

I’m on the board of the National Hospice Foundation, which I joined after my husband died at home with hospice in 2005. The experience made me a believer. Tom had endured all kinds of draconian treatments. When those treatments were exhausted, and the cancer was advancing, his oncologist suggested hospice. I remember being upset at first because I knew it was the end of the road, but it was time, and for someone whose death is inevitable and imminent, spending those last days at home is the gift that hospice offers. Its holistic approach to health care provides counseling along with pain medication.

Not only in watching the kind of care my dad received, but as a hospice volunteer, I have seen it in action.  And often, that end time allows old wounds to be healed and animosities to be jettisoned:

The fact that John Edwards was there with his estranged wife in her home in North Carolina is a very good thing. Despite all the sordid stories we’ve read about him, these two people had a long life together, and many hardships. The death of their 16-year-old son Wade in a car accident is the kind of loss that can destroy a marriage. I was reminded of that over the weekend when I saw “Rabbit Hole,” a searing drama starring Nicole Kidman about a couple coping with the senseless death of their 4-year-old hit by a car while chasing the family dog.

Their time in hospice, brief as it was, allowed the Edwards family – Elizabeth and John, and their grown daughter Cate – to re-visit old wounds along with the new ones that ended their marriage. Seeing a loved one on his or her death bed tends to focus the mind, and for Elizabeth, who was courageous and clear-eyed all along about the progress of her disease, hospice gave her and her estranged husband a chance to heal those wounds, forgive each other, and sort out what they want for their children, Emma Claire and Jack, who are very young.

Hospice is true health care—and more.  Like all good medicine, it is all about living.  And in the end, that is what makes it so important.