Community Service
For five summers straight, my days were spent at the VA Hospital, not because I was forced to, but because I have always liked helping people. When I signed up, Voluntary Services assigned me to the Hospice Unit on the third floor. I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope with death, since the Hospice Unit is for terminally ill veterans, but I was willing to try.
I got up every morning at 6:30am to be at the VA by 8. Once I got there, my routine was hardly ever the same. I had many responsibilities. The one thing that never changed was starting the day off by passing ice water around to all the patients. I had to change the old cups out for the new ones. This was one of the many tasks I was given. It wasn’t until my second week of volunteering that I experienced death. I came in and did the usual but when I went to change the water cup for a patient to whom I had become acquainted, he wasn’t in his room. I asked the head nurse where he was, and she said he had passed in the night. It wasn’t unusual for this sort of thing to happen, but I had never been around it before.
My most memorable death experience was with the man in room 311. He had become a good friend. He told me stories and we talked about everything possible just to keep him company. The day it started, I had gone to check on him and he was having trouble breathing and not talking to anyone. For the next three days, I had spent hours in his room just sitting with him because had no family to comfort him or see him go. The last breath he took was long and raspy. Then it just stopped.
After that it was just a routine. On the third floor, death occurred at least once a week. Five summers of this natural occurrence has made me realize that death is the way life flows. I’m just glad I was a part of the patients’ lives to make death a little easier for them. I would never want to be alone when my time came.
