Chaplain's Corner

Where do you live, I asked early in my visit with an elderly woman. I often ask the question or one like it. It helps me get connected to the person I’m caring for because “home” is a very spiritual concept. It is a place where we are rooted, where we feel as if we belong, where we are connected and comfortable. You would not believe the number of people I care for who quote Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz when speaking of their desire to get out of the hospital. “There’s no place like home.”

“I have no home” demanded further conversation and I usually ask, “What do you mean when you say you have no home.” Then the story poured out. “Well, three weeks ago I was brought to the hospital and now they say I can’t go home. They say I am going to be paneled to go into a nursing home, whatever ‘paneled’ means.” Often “they” is an ambiguous group of unnamed and unfaced people. “They” become the adversary, the roadblocks, and the co-conspirators that are preventing this dear woman from going home.

I know the unnamed and unfaced “they”. The group is comprised of concerned family members, a home care coordinator, a doctor, a physio and occupational therapist, a nurse and maybe others. “They” have done assessments, reviewed the woman’s health history and “they” have concluded that the safety and well-being of this woman would be in jeopardy if she was discharged to her home.

The next week when I visit the dear woman tells me, “My kids have emptied my apartment, a lot of my things have been given to members of the family and a few are being stored for my room in a nursing home. I’m nothing but an old woman with a couple of boxes.”

Then, follows, 60, 100, 150, 200 days, sometimes as long as a year:  waiting, and waiting, and waiting, without a place to call home. Sometimes during the wait the woman is moved from room to room in the hospital, then maybe there’s a move to and outlying hospital that has an empty room. Finally, a room in a nursing home opens up and the dear woman once again has a “home”. It’s not much, a single room with a bathroom, but it is hers, a place to call her own.

Imagine being taken to a hospital and then being told you will never go home again. Imagine having your earthly belongings liquidated and your family filling a few boxes for your room in a nursing home. Some of you don’t have to imagine this, you have lived it. You know the agony of making the necessary but heart-wrenching decisions that I have described.

With these changes in living arrangements comes grief. The dear woman has experienced a significant loss. For the first time in her life she has been without a home and regardless of the pragmatics that demand the loss, the grief is real and profound and it is often compounded by cognitive deficits which make it all the more difficult to comprehend and accept.

As sad a tale as this one is, those of us who watch it play out can help. The help we can give is compassion. We can listen to the sorrow, sympathize over the loss, identify with the sense of betrayal and keep her company through the waiting. There is no way to avoid this loss, going home is not an option. A new frontier, a nursing home, lays ahead and many of see this mystical frontier as a dreadful and foreboding. The transition is difficult most of the time, but if we live compassionately with those who face this kind of change, we can help them through the loss, adjustment and see them come to accept the change; sometimes even with joy.