[00:00.01] Unit 17 A Harder, Better Goodbye Mother complained of a pain in her ribs.
[00:10.14] She was a yoga lover, an ocean swimmer, a woman who at 72 looked ten years younger.
[00:16.50] She thought she had pulled a muscle.
[00:18.47] But the pain refused to go away.
[00:20.38] Tests revealed that cancer had moved to her ribs and spine.
[00:26.24] She and my father had been planning summer vacation.
[00:29.52] Now they were planning the remaining months of her life.
[00:33.34] She made it clear she did not want to remain in the hospital.
[00:37.37] She wanted to go home.
[00:40.07] Hospice, we were told, could help us care for Mom at home.
[00:44.38] Suddenly hospice became the center of our lives.
[00:48.06] A few times a week the hospice staff -- doctor, nurses, social worker -- would visit our home,
[00:55.00] making sure Dad and I could handle the bedpans, the pain killers and the reality of Mom's dying.
[01:01.06] March, April, May.
[01:06.28] Each month, each week, each day was a diminishment.
[01:10.48] Mom was confined to downstairs, then to her bedroom, then to her bed.
[01:16.35] Dad brushed her hair.
[01:18.40] I read to her.
[01:20.17] We examined family photo albums.
[01:23.16] As we flipped through these Kodak moments of life now drawing to a close, I would comfort myself: At least we are home.
[01:32.33] Our biggest fear was that Mom would experience unbearable pain.
[01:36.49] But she did not.
[01:37.44] Painkiller helps.
[01:40.17] It was in those last days that hospice was of particular help.
[01:43.56] I had not seen anyone die before; I did not know what to do.
[01:50.07] Use swabs to wet her mouth, the nurse told me.
[01:53.25] Hold her hand.
[01:54.40] Her senses are dimming, but hearing will linger.
[01:58.24] Tell her you love her.
[02:00.49] She died on's Father Day.
[02:02.12] I had bought Dad a bottle of cognac, which we were drinking when we heard her breathing stop.
[02:09.35] Serious illness is a journey to a foreign country.
[02:12.55] You do not speak the language, the people are strangers, and you can not know how you will behave until you arrive.
[02:21.03] But inner strength, too, is unpredictable.
[02:24.57] For after the night of Mom's death when I thought I could not go on,
[02:29.10] we went on.
[02:31.07] That could not have happened without hospice.
[02:34.09] The hospice nurse had made her comfortable; the aide had set her hair.
[02:40.21] Deaths like my mothers prove that hospice can make death not just an ending but a kind of culmination.
[02:47.37] If you control symptoms, if you provide support to patients and families, you can see great growth at the end of life.
[02:57.09] There are many alternatives to suicide even at the end of life.
[03:02.02] Hospice offers the hope that death, while inevitable, need not be impersonal, need not be unbearable.
[03:09.56] The argument over assisted suicide may have helped Americans recognize the ways in which medicine, so good at so many things,
[03:19.07] fails the dying.
[03:21.02] But it also prevents us from meeting the real challenge of providing decent end of-life care.