Hospice Polishes Its Image

This kind of rapid response is essential to families in distress. “I was confused and upset. I didn’t know what to do,” said Jane Anaradoh, a psychiatric nurse in her 40s who was working overnight shifts in a hospital, raising two kids on her own in Hyattsville, Md., and trying to care for her mother, Grace, a Nigerian immigrant with thyroid cancer. A friend suggested they call Capital Hospice, in Northern Virginia. A nurse was at their door by 8 the next morning; a doctor, social worker, home aide and volunteer followed within days. The hospice helped Jane relieve her mother’s pain and nausea, and offered other assistance. Grace’s slow-growing cancer stabilized, and the hospice discharged her—a rare but not unheard-of occurrence.

In Seminole, Fla., Anna Muir wanted to personally help Ray Lanier, 64, her partner of 17 years, through the last stages of head and neck cancer. With the help of hospice, Muir was able to handle many of Lanier’s needs at home. When Lanier moved in his last few days to a serene inpatient room at the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast in Pinellas Park, Muir was by his side, sharing some humor: Muir promised to take Lanier’s ashes home and put them on the mantel, next to his favorite fishing hat and the TV remote.

For Eleanor Browning, hospice’s physical and emotional support allowed her to achieve a new level of closeness with her daughter, Pam. Previously reserved about showing affection, she changed in her last year—and their relationship changed as well. “Every night, I told her that I loved her,” Pam remembers. “And she told me, ‘I love you too.’ ”

Joanne Kenen, a health policy writer at the New America Foundation, received a Kaiser Family Foundation media fellowship to write about hospice care.