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By Ellen Buckmaster, Hospice Austin Volunteer
When I tell people I’m a hospice volunteer, I almost always get something like, “Oh good for you. I could never do that,” as if my efforts are heroic or out of the ordinary. It’s an interesting and perhaps telling response, because I think we all tend to downplay our ability to show up and meet the sorrows in our world. I’ve taken to responding with something like, “Some people can work with abused children which I would find challenging. I’ve simply found that soul-satisfying work which really suits me.” This is my way of saying; you too can find the social need that matches your capacity to give.
It strikes me as something very rare, finding home ground as a volunteer. And Hospice Austin feels like my place, like home. Over the decades I’ve volunteered in many ways for different nonprofits. I’ve loaded food cans into boxes, driven patients to doctors’ appointments, licked stamps, mentored a 13-year-old foster child, and hammered nails into the framework of a new house, all to find a way to engage my heart in meaningful work. And my heart was engaged. Just not fully. As satisfying as all these occupations might be to others, they didn’t connect with me on the deepest level.
Hospice affords me that connection. Death is a reality that has resonated with me over my whole lifetime. Perhaps because my personal losses were gently dispersed throughout my years and not concentrated into a traumatic hammer blow, I have been able to process and incorporate my felt sense of each passing. My younger brother’s best friend died when I was 14 and the gut punch I experienced was a classic death response. I remember describing it to a friend as a hole, as an emptiness. It was my first time walking the long, gray hallway of sorrow. A hallway with only one door all the way down a long, airless corridor. When I emerged, I had changed as a person.
My older brother’s death when I was 17 was more complicated. He had lived away from home for a while, and we were just beginning to establish an adult relationship. When he died suddenly, my grief was conflated with that of my mother’s. Her bedroom was adjacent to mine and the distress sounds coming from her room in the darkest hours of night came from a feral graveyard of agony. I inhaled her grief like secondhand smoke.
Ellen Buckmaster sitting bedside with her aunt Luanna.
When my beloved great aunt died in a hospice facility in Akron Ohio, I had the privilege to sit at her bedside for five days. She had gone ten days without food and water, slipping in and out of a morphine-induced coma, and the end was imminent. But my aunt’s tiny, bird-like body and her fierce spirit outlived my stay. I flew home on a Thursday morning, bereft that I couldn’t be with her at the end, and discovered she had died while I was in the sky. This experience motivated me. I was awed by the vigil process and by the quiet, loving hospice care she had received. I felt, in my bones, that I had found a calling. Sitting by her bedside was such an honor. Our shared space felt like a sanctuary.
I recently heard an interview with Nick Cave, famous musician, and father of two sons who died within a few tragic years of each other. And as he ruminated on death, he emphasized his belief that death connects us all – it is the ultimate shared experience. And I think this is why I am so gratified to be a bereavement facilitator at Hospice Austin. It allows me to connect with myself and with others at our deepest and most vulnerable level. It invites scary and necessary conversations. It is a reminder that nothing of real significance divides us. In that light, hospice is my portal to profound connection. It allows me to touch that place of love we all share.