addEventListener("load", function() { setTimeout(hideURLbar, 0); }, false); function hideURLbar(){ window.scrollTo(0,1); }

In Praise Of Hospice Movement

IN PRAISE OF THE HOSPICE MOVEMENT

 

The writer of Ecclesiastes said: there is…a time to be born, and a time to die.

 

Or as Woody Allen once re-interpreted this: it’s not that I’m afraid of dying, it’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.

 

This neatly sums up the prevailing attitude that death is a subject to be avoided at all costs and anyone who wants to talk about it will quickly find others changing the subject. Some people even cut ties to relatives and friends who are grieving because they don’t know how to handle it. Many of us do not want to listen to death; many, but not all.

 

For decades, the hospice movement has been enabling people to die well, and helping their relatives and friends to embrace what is happening. It’s hard to imagine how many people have had their dying days enriched by hospice care. We can prepare for life’s end, but only those who know their life is coming to a close can truly inhabit that space and describe how it feels. And to make sense of it, they need people to be at their side, offering practical and medical care, and listening attentively.

 

In the world’s best known Psalm, it says:

 

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

 

These are striking words. The writer knows he cannot speed up this journey by running through the long valley; it has to be walked. Valleys may look beautiful, but in many parts of the world they expose you to danger. Adversaries can look down on you and track your movements; there is nowhere to hide. And when they attack it comes at speed down a gradient. This is a telling metaphor for the exposure of death. What you need to sustain you is a crowd of people who will surround you and walk at your pace.

 

This is what the staff and volunteers of our hospices accomplish. The practical skills and the close listening come at a cost and this should be noted by the rest of us. The emotional impact, of walking with someone through the valley overshadowed by death, is huge; no matter how often you become accustomed to it. The book, The Body Keeps The Score, by the Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk shows the impact of persistent emotional strain on the body. To offer end of life care asks not just for skill, but for empathy and self-awareness; a deep attuning both to the needs of the dying and the grieving and to the reality that every death, and every family, is unique and can throw up unwelcome surprises.

 

Amid this thankfulness there is also disquiet. Like many institutions in the UK, the hospice movement faces mounting challenges. The wider public may be only dimly aware that hospices receive from the government only a proportion of what they need to keep going and that a much larger funding base is drawn from donations. It produces a kind of hypervigilance in those tasked with fundraising, like being tailgated by a white van on a single carriage road.

 

It is also estimated that 130,000 more people in the UK will die a year by 2040, and many will have complex, long-term conditions in the final stages, of which dementia is likely to be the biggest. If the resources are not available for this mortality surge, more people will die poorer deaths and hospice staff may find the score mounting up in their bodies like a basketball game.

 

And then there is the Bill before Parliament in 2025 to legalise assisted dying. People take different views on this issue in good conscience, but the hospice movement was built on the ethic of enabling a good death as nature takes its course. Assisted dying would bring choice into the picture, and at an earlier stage, allowing individual people, with medical approval, to decide when their death would be good. Many are concerned about the kinds of pressures that may come to bear on confused older people who often feel like they are a burden to others. There is also evidence from places like Canada and Holland that liberalisation in the law has led to cases of malpractice.

 

The political commentator Matthew Parris has said that life should not be prolonged beyond what he calls ‘human usefulness’ and that assisted dying should be a natural Darwinian outcome for us. For those who believe all life is useful because its essence is relational, not productive, there is a need to counter that argument, but to do so in ways that do not polarise and upset people in a highly emotive field.

 

It is possible to have a good death, and the hospice movement has enabled people in this journey for decades. In scripture it says that God holds us by our right hand. And he does that in a very tactile way, too, as hands are held in prayer and foreheads anointed in hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

 

Our world can be a careless place, where greater value is placed on economic productivity and lives are celebrated either for being a long way from death, as shown in our obsession with youthfulness; or for defying death – by praising people who look and act younger than they are. The wisdom of the hospice movement is the priceless value it continues to place on those who, like Woody Allen’s fear, are actually there when death occurs.


 

POPULAR ARTICLES

Why Violence Is Declining In The West But There Is No Guarantee It Will ContinueTo
Why Violence Is Declining In The West But There Is No Guarantee It Will ContinueTo
Obama's Covert Wars
Obama's Covert Wars

The use of drones is going to change warfare out of all recognition in the next decades.

Through A Glass Starkly

Images of traumatic incidents caught on mobile phone can be put to remarkable effect.

What Are British Values?

Is there a British identity and if so, what has shaped the values and institutions that form it?



© 2025 Simon Burton-Jones All Rights Reserved