December 2001 – February 2002
Hospice care is “about having your heart broken,” but it is also ”like slicing open a piece of fruit and seeing its sweetness,” says Frank Ostaseski, who has attended the deaths of more than 1,000 people over a 20-year period.
Frank is the founder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, running a five-person Guest House for the dying, and supplying volunteers to a 28- person hospice inside the Laguna Honda Hospital. He says that his work is “extraordinarily satisfying. I feel so lucky that I get to do this. If we welcome death as part of life, we can learn from people who are dying. It can be an extraordinarily intimate time. Sometimes I get very close, and when a person dies, I am very sad. But I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything.”
The Guest House, located a half block from the San Francisco Zen Center, was once a bed-and-breakfast for Buddhist students of the center, converted in 1987 into a home-like hospice for the dying. There the dying pass their final days, each attended by a trained volunteer, a.k.a. “compassionate companion.”
Patients often arrive at the hospice full of anger and suspicion and two overriding fears, Frank says: that they will die in pain, and that they will die alone and abandoned.
At the hospice, he assures them, neither thing is allowed to happen….
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Tags: death and dying, hospice, socially engaged buddhism