When Carolyn Peacock-Biggs hopped on Zoom for an interview, she radiated joy, so it was hard to imagine given the news she had received. Twenty minutes before the interview, she had been told that her great-aunt had just passed away.
“It’s beautiful,” Peacock-Biggs says of her great-aunt’s death. “It’s beautiful,” she repeated. For many, the news would be disheartening, but Peacock-Biggs is well-acquainted with death; she’s made a career out of dying.
Before his passing, former president Jimmy Carter used hospice for his end-of-life care, bringing attention to the service, which for many is still something of an enigma. Eugene Weekly reached out to several hospice organizations for this story. Signature Hospice responded for interviews.
As a social worker for Signature Hospice, an at-home health care company,Peacock-Biggs’s workday could look like helping a patient write goodbye letters for their loved ones or assessing the needs of a family dealing with a dying loved one.
Peacock-Biggs describes her job as being like a Bi-Mart. She helps provide whatever someone who is nearing the end of life may need, or whatever their family may need. “Social workers are like catchalls. We can do a lot of things because we have a lot of tools,” says Peacock-Biggs.
Her career as a hospice social worker has created memories unique to her lines of work. Like the time she felt an urge to break from her schedule to visit a patient, arriving just in time to be there when he passed — which was one of his final wishes, along with having his bed face the ocean when he died. “It was beautiful because he got his final wish,” Peacock-Biggs says.
Most people seem to be unaware of the nature of hospice and assume it’s deathbed care and being pumped full of morphine, and they don’t know it’s by Medicare.
In actuality, hospice can work with patients whose health has been declining for years. It often gives patients the choice between spending their last weeks, months or years in a hospital or long-term care facility or at home.
Some even improve and are taken off hospice. However, there is a golden rule of hospice: The sooner a patient is put on it, the easier the process of end-of-life care will be.
“People do have a better end-of-life passing because they have that extra layer of support and eyes on them,” says Amanda Burrell-Chapman, a hospice nurse and director of patient services for Signature’s Eugene and Albany branches.
Burrell-Chapman had started her medical career as a CNA who often worked with end-of-life patients in hospitals. However, she felt rushed in a hospital setting. Wanting to educate patients further, she often felt pressure to get them out the door. “I was like, ‘You know, that’s not good care. That’s not responsible care.’ To be like, ‘Okay, well, here’s your slew of new medications. Hope you do well. Get out the door,’” says Burrell-Chapman of the pressure she felt working in hospitals.
“In hospice, you get to really work with the patient. If you need to take that extra half hour or hour, you can adjust that so you can, you really give them the care that they deserve,” Burrell-Chapman says.
While many are aware of the medical aspect of hospice, they can be unaware of the social care, like Peacock-Biggs’s social work. There can be spiritual care wrapped into hospice as well.
Sandra Waldron understands the power of silence. “Most people don’t realize the importance of that silence,” she says. “A hand to hold, a quiet hand to hold, can be more powerful than anything else — silence.”
Her role in hospice is that of a chaplain. There is no typical workday for Waldron. “Meeting patients, meeting families, there is no one-size-fits-all. Every time you go up to a door, it will always, always, always be different,” she says.
“We offer prayer; we offer humor; we offer that listening ear, some counseling, if needed. It’s never the same,” Waldron says.
Being a chaplain, it’d be easy to conflate Waldron’s role with that of a pastor, but while there are some similarities between the careers, their practices can diverge. Pastors are often educated from a religious perspective. Chaplains are clinically trained.
A hospice chaplain won’t proselytize to a patient or his or her family. They won’t represent a religion. Their aim is to elevate what is important, what is sacred to the patient, according to Waldron.
She once had a patient who was an avid fisher, and what she gleaned from him was that nature was his higher divine. Fishing was his practice of worship and the friends he went fishing with were his congregation, which she honored by realizing fishing was his spiritual practice.
One memory close to Waldron’s heart is that of a woman who loved adventure and KFC. With the permission of the patient’s family, facility and nurses, Waldron met this patient at a park, bringing along the woman’s KFC meal. The patient, who had an adventurous streak, thought she was sneaking away, though her family and care team were aware of her “escape.”
“It just gave her a time of laughter, that sense of freedom, sitting outside in a park on a blue sky day, eating her beloved KFC,” says Waldron of being an “accomplice” to this woman’s breakout from her care facility.
Another aspect of Waldron’s job is being a surrogate family member to those who have no one.
As Peacock-Biggs says, “Hospice gives people who don’t have people people.”
Candace Rodgers is a bereavement coordinator for Signature Hospice — a role that many might be surprised to learn exists. “I have this saying on my wall,” Rodgers says. “It says ‘There is no fixing grief because people aren’t broken.’ They’re in a place they’re meant to be in.”
Grief is natural and Rodgers has made a career in helping people manage their grief by helping them realize it’s a natural thing. “It’s an honor to support people through that time and to sit with people in their grief,” she says.
Tasks of her job include checking in with families of deceased patients, sending out newsletters to aid bereavement and organizing annual memorials for passed loved ones, allowing them the chance to reconnect with the people who made their loved one passing easier.
Hospice made everything easier for Doug Alexander’s late father. His father’s health had been declining First, he needed a cane; a cane became a walker; and a walker became a wheelchair. Eventually, Alexander was told by his father’s doctor that hospice would be best.
For the four months his father was in hospice, Alexander says, “We were just amazed…You can tell they took a real interest in him as a person. It wasn’t just a job,” says Alexander.
That care even extended to his father’s passing. When Alexander’s father died, he informed hospice, which sent over the nurse who had watched over his father the night before. Realizing that in his final condition, his father was most likely not clean and undressed, the nurse cleaned his father and dressed his body so that he would be decent when the funeral home came to collect him.
While hospice is seen by some as angels of death, Alexander views them in another light. He says “In the card that I wrote to them, I basically said ‘You people that are here, and what you’re doing, you are God’s angels on Earth.’”