Testimonials & Hospice Stories

Hospice Stories

Our Promise to Lou
Our Promise to Jennifer

Jennifer hadn't spoken to her father, Lou, in more than five years when she received the phone call from Nathan Shiovitz of the Jewish Hospice & Chaplaincy Network. Nathan was calling on her father's behalf, because it was a call Lou couldn't bring himself to make. The cancer he'd battled without his daughter's knowledge was taking control. Lou was dying. There were hard feelings over a divorce, Lou's new family and a million other little things. But Lou didn't want to die without giving Jennifer - and himself - the chance to say goodbye.

"My biggest fear is what everyone would think of me calling or coming over now that he was sick," Jennifer says. "I'd had the luxury of not dealing with my dad's illness. And I was afraid of this vision of him on his deathbed with nurses and tubes, and this whole ordeal of everyone being angry with me. So I asked Nathan to call my dad for me, to tell him my fears." Nathan did and a family meeting followed shortly. "Everything was said in front of each other - we cleared the air and it was very cleansing," Jennifer says. "I see my step-mom and siblings in a whole new light, and we've all been given a second chance to spend time together. Now we're sharing the stories with him and each other, not telling them about him after he's gone."

Of his hospice experience, Lou says "Doctors are wonderful and will do everything to keep you alive, but there were tradeoffs to the treatments I wasn't always willing to make." Lou described periods of devastating weakness, insomnia and humiliating incontinence from the medications. "Now that I'm in hospice I get to call the shots," Lou says. "Jewish Hospice has helped me live the end of my life on my terms."

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