#palliative care
The Nurse Who Admits Patients to Hospice Care
“Hospice is not about dying. It is about living the remainder of your life how you want to. Not how I want you to, not how your husband, wife, daughters, or sons want you to, and not how the doctor wants you to, but how you want to.”
Sometimes, the way we frame something makes all the difference.
Post link
my father said to me once that one of the things he deeply regretted was not putting music on for his father while he was fading away. he told me that grandpa would just sit in his old armchair in the quiet, and not until after he’d passed did my dad think of how he could have played of his favorite classical music tapes for him so grandpa could listen to something while he still could. i was very young when this happened and not much older when my dad told me this, but it always stuck with me as something important.
my mother died at home in a hospice cot, slowly shutting down over the course of about a week. when she had stopped responding, i remembered what dad told me about wishing he’d played music for grandpa, and i put the radio on her favorite country music station and kept it on for her until she died.
daddy died in hospital. no cassette players, no decent radios. the day after he was brought in, i thought again of what he told me, and i bought a little portable bluetooth speaker. even though he never woke up, was never aware, i played music for him too.
there’s no real significance to sharing this, not really. my motivation is selfish, again: i just want to hope that someone might think of this when their loved one is stuck in silence somehow, and maybe they’ll play music for them, and they won’t have to regret not doing so. i want to hope it helps someone. and i want to hope that someone will remember my dad with me, even in just a “story i read on the internet” way.
Hey, OP, you actually might have done a very significant thing for your parents indeed. Hearing is the last sense to go when someone is passing away. It’s why palliative care doctors tell patients’ relatives to continue speaking even if the patient stops responding. So even if your mother and father could not wake or respond to you or those around you, they perhaps could have heard the music they so loved, and perhaps were comforted. So what you did wasn’t selfish at all, and I’m sorry for jumping on to your post, but it’s likely that playing music for your parents as they passed away did much more for them than you might have known at the time.
