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Caregivers of Older Adults Blog | Spirituality & Aging (3)

Why Hospice – Why Now?

By Nina Rios on Fri, Jul 20, 2012 @ 11:00 AM

“It’s time for hospice” – difficult words for families to hear.  As a family caregiver, you may have given some thought to the day when you would have to make that decision for an aging parent or other loved one – but you’re never quite prepared – not yet, why now?  The thought of hospice often brings about the impression that it’s a way of just “letting them die.”  Accepting the inevitable death of a loved one is an emotional hardship that no one is ever really prepared to face.  Although this is sometimes hard to face, the goal of  hospice care is to provide palliative care for terminally ill individuals while allowing them as well as their families to focus on their personal and spiritual needs as they prepare for the end of life.

Making a decision about placing a loved one under hospice care is difficult enough, finding the appropriate one and one that accommodates the family’s needs is yet another consideration. 

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A Ministry of Presence: Visiting a Nursing Home

By Nina Rios on Fri, Jun 29, 2012 @ 10:30 AM

Visiting a nursing home in an attempt to deliver Christmas cheer along with some fruit and warm socks to those who did not often get visitors was an annual tradition for me and my four young daughters.  But, one that my daughters did not always find rewarding.  Instead, they complained that it “smelled funny” or that the elders’ attempts to touch their young, fresh faces made them uncomfortable. But for the most part, many of the residents sat silently, looking vacantly, perhaps into a past that only they could enter. Undeterred and with a promise of ice cream cones after the visit, we continued this tradition for many years.

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