COMPANIONS IN DEATH: No One Dies Alone_111003

Posted: 11/07/03

COMPANIONS IN DEATH:
No One Dies Alone

By Inara Verzemnieks

Religion News Service

EUGENE, Ore. (RNS)–And so it has come to this: Alone in a hospital bed, no family or friends to hear the last ragged breaths, the sounds of a lifetime ending.

The nurse with the purple highlights running through her hair and a penchant for quoting Mother Teresa–although she points to the purple as proof she is more Madonna than Teresa–picks up the phone and punches in numbers.

More than 200 people are on her list–a roster of hospital staff–housekeepers, engineers, food service workers, administrators–who have volunteered day and night to come and sit with the dying who have no one else.

Sandra Clarke, a nursing supervisor at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Ore., started the No One Dies Alone program. Volunteers from the hospital take turns sitting at the bedside of dying individuals who otherwise would have no one. (Motoya Nakamura/RNS Photo)

It has been nearly two years since Sandra Clarke, a nurse at Sacred Heart Medical Center, launched the program she calls No One Dies Alone, but already her grass-roots effort has earned national attention, and hospitals around the country are asking how they can replicate her idea.

As baby boomers age, as families shrink and settle far apart and as more people choose to live by themselves, the number of those who have no one to be with them at the end of their lives likely will grow.

Even now, Clarke picks up the phone two or three times a month to arrange for a volunteer to sit with someone who might otherwise die alone.

According to the American Geriatrics Society, the size of the older population will double in the next 30 years. By 2030, one in five people will be 65 or older. At the same time, people are living longer and having fewer children, narrowing the circle of family and friends they can depend on as they age.

More people also are living alone. About one in four households consists of a single person, the U.S. Census Bureau says. Among those 65 and older, it's one in three.

“This is only going to get worse,” said Charles Cefalu, chief of geriatric medicine at Louisiana State University medical school. “It's going to become a significant problem.”

In a hospital, demographic shifts–the signs of families fragmented and far flung–play out in the simplest human terms: An elderly man, slipping away, called weakly to the nurse, “Please sit with me.”

But Clarke was busy, just starting her rounds, with six or seven others who needed her first. It was 1986.

“I'll be right back,” she remembers telling him. She'd meant it, too; she hurried to his room as soon as she could. But he already had died.

“That plagued me,” explained Clarke, 61, a nursing supervisor.

As she walked the hospital hallways, staff streaming by, she wondered: With all these people working here, wouldn't there be someone who had time to sit with the dying who otherwise would have no one?

For several years, Clarke played with her idea. Then one day three years ago, she mentioned it to another nurse. The director of pastoral care overheard Clarke and urged her to write a proposal.

By November 2001, No One Dies Alone was running. And since then, Clarke, an energetic woman who laughs easily and often, the daughter of a professional wrestler turned Hollywood stuntman, has devoted hours to seeing her vision take form.

Most of the patients the program serves are elderly. Many have outlived friends and relatives. A few have been abandoned by family. Some have alienated themselves.

Clarke tells of one man who died with a hospital engineer at his bedside. When the nursing staff called the family to tell them they might want to come soon, they said: “Good riddance. We hate him.”

“Who's to say they weren't right?” Clarke admitted. “But I feel at that point, it's not our time to judge.”

Others among the dying are far from home–new residents or strangers traveling in the area when tragedy strikes, and family can't get to the hospital soon enough.

When the nursing staff learns of someone who has less than 72 hours to live, a “do not resuscitate” order and no one else around, they page Clarke, who gets out her list of volunteers and starts to call.

Anyone who volunteers with No One Dies Alone must be employed at the hospital or have at least six months' experience volunteering there. Everyone attends an hour-long orientation, which covers topics such as how to determine whether someone is in pain and how to tell when someone has died. Volunteers get few instructions, although they are told not to talk about religion unless the patient asks.

Clarke urges volunteers to treat the dying person as they would family or friends. “It has to come from the heart,” she said.

For Penny Jones, who works in hospital admitting, that has meant stroking patients' arms, moistening their lips, covering them when they shiver.

For Jim McFerran, a leadership and employee development specialist, it has meant leaning forward and whispering to an elderly woman, as she drew her last breaths, that she was loved, that she would be missed.

For Jim Graham, 67, retired after years of building homes, it has meant playing soft music and offering stories about his own life. “I tell them I wish we could have talked under different circumstances,” he said, “but we all come to this place.”

Volunteers sign up through a hospital website to spend as little or as much time as they like at a patient's side. Some offer to sit until Clarke can summon someone else. Others volunteer to sit all night.

At every orientation, Clarke–who recently completed a how-to guide for hospitals that want to start their own programs –asks each volunteer why they want to do this.

Some say they had a parent or a grandparent or a sibling who died alone and they want, in their small way, to make up for that. Quite a few say they themselves are afraid of dying alone.

“It's not something for everybody, in the sense that being with somebody who is dying causes you to have to think about what that means to you personally,” said Barry West, who works in information technology at the hospital and helps Clarke run the program. “It's the sort of thing that raises unresolved issues, feelings and questions in the person who volunteers.”

In many ways, it is as much a program for the living.

Before going to sit with a patient, a volunteer picks up a duffel bag from a battered metal filing cabinet near the hospital's main entrance. Inside is a compact disc player, a few discs, including harp music and Mozart symphonies, a Bible, a journal in which volunteers can write their thoughts, and a stack of notecards.

The notecards were a volunteer's idea–a way to relay what happens in the person's final hours.

When a patient dies, a card accompanies the body, so that if anyone should claim it, they might take comfort in knowing that someone was there to mark the end.