Easing Anguish Hospice Volunteers Step In To Soothe Pain, Give Comfort To The Dying And Their Families

John Shaw was a fortunate man.

The 73-year-old former salesman had love, companionship and good humor through his last days.

When he died on May 9, “he just slept away,” said Mary Bouscher, 69, his dear friend and caregiver. “It was a very peaceful death.”

Much of John’s - and Mary’s - support during his final year came from Hospice of Spokane.

“Hospice was in this house every day. I think they missed two days in a little over a year,” said Mary. In the living room of John’s modest brick rancher, Mary told the story of John’s final year and how much they counted on Hospice volunteers.

With nurses, social workers and volunteers, Hospice of Spokane offers help to people diagnosed with terminal illness and to their families. The emphasis is on pain management and helping to confer dignity and grace on the dying person’s final days.

Hospice presently works with 110 clients, 29 of whom live in the Valley. There are about 100 volunteers helping to serve those people and their families; only 12 of those volunteers are from the Valley.

Many families handle day-to-day care for their loved ones. Many other families, however, are too small or too scattered to meet all of the terminal patient’s everyday needs. About 40 percent of Hospice client families request volunteers.

One of those steady volunteers is Neva Keyes, 35.

She helped John and Mary with anything and everything. She would bathe John, listen to his stories about growing up Catholic, keep him company as he worked crossword puzzles. She became his friend and Mary’s.

Neva would take over on a Friday afternoon, while Mary went to have her hair done.

“She would give me a break,” said Mary. “And he got a break from me, too. That was important.”

Neva’s commitment to hospice work stemmed from her own experience. Her mother died of ovarian cancer 3-1/2 years ago. She has done hospice work ever since - usually volunteering between 6 and 10 hours a week.

Why would a young woman, a former airline stewardess, now married to a radiologist, devote many hours to the old, the ailing, the dying?

“It’s very rewarding,” Neva said.

She’ll take on any chore: making beds, doing dishes, vacuuming, even gardening, if she’s asked.

After all, she experienced “the enormous effort and time it takes to care for someone who’s very ill.”

Chores that might ordinarily seem boring, aren’t.

“Because I know first-hand, I don’t see these things as tedious anymore. I see them in a different light,” Neva said.

Agnes Lopeman, whose husband Orin died of lung cancer a week before Christmas, said the Hospice volunteers “made a lot of difference. I don’t know how I would have managed without them…. I think I would have panicked lots of times.

“I could call 24 hours a day, which I did sometimes.”

The bond between Hospice volunteers and family members is a two-way street.

“The one thing I can’t get over is the trust that complete strangers have in us,” said longtime Hospice volunteer Paul Fordyce, a Valley resident.

It’s not lost on him that today’s Hospice workers recreate what extended families routinely did decades ago.

“Thank God we’ve been able to do that. There are so many lonely, lonesome people out there,” he said.

“It’s such an honor - you go into the home for the first time, the parent is lying here, and the family entrusts you to take over for a couple of hours.”

John Shaw had no family in Spokane, but he was far from lonesome. After John developed emphysema, Mary leaned on her 30-year background as a home health care nurse to care for him. Other friends helped. too.

“He was a wonderful man. He was loved by everybody,” Mary said.

“John had a good sense of humor right to the end,” Mary said. He would sometimes, quirkily, admire his own feet: “‘Don’t you think I have the cutest little feet?’ he would say.

“He was laughing on the outside, but I’m sure sometimes he was crying on the inside,” Mary said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)