Imagine you are sitting with a beloved family member who has only a few days or a few hours left to live. A member of the hospice you’ve hired gently and reverently enters the room. She sits with you and your loved one and quietly holds the space.
And then she says: “Since he’s about to die, it’s too bad he’s not a member of the right religion.”
How would you feel?
Welcome to Part 2 of “Good lessons from bad hospice,” in which I transform the horrendous experience my family had with Mortem Hospice into good lessons that remind us what’s important when providing hospice care. “Mortem” is a fictitious name that I chose so that staff at the actual hospice that served my family won’t feel attacked as I relate the actual ways in which they conduct business.
Religious freedom for hospice patients
People have a right to their own religious beliefs. And while free expression of religious views is valuable, it’s not always appropriate.
People in emotionally vulnerable situations deserve to have professionals “meet them where they are at” (i.e. validate their experience and connect with them in their reality to a reasonable extent). The main obstacle to meeting patients and family members where they’re at is ego: providers making the experience about themselves. When members of the hospice team serving my grandfather commented on the situation based on their religious terms, such as by speaking about reincarnating, they were being selfishly unrelatable to the people they were supposed to be relating to.
What actually happened
To clarify, the above quote about not being a member of the right religions is a hyperbole I used to set the tone. What was actually said:
Nurse: “Is your father a believer?”
Auntie: “Yes… he’s Catholic…”
Nurse: “That’s good, because non-believers don’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Though my Grandfather and Aunt were both practicing Catholics, they shared with the rest of my family a distaste for expressions of such religious chauvinism. My Grandfather never promoted or approved of such limited arrogant thinking. When I was a teenager enthusiastically studying Buddhism, taking vows and meditating with monks, he applauded the value of what I was doing and likened it to his own spiritual devotion.
It is as inappropriate for hospice providers to push religion as it is for public school teachers. Both professions are publicly funded to provide needs that our society believes everyone is entitled to, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, socioeconomic class or religion. While most hospice agencies are private corporations, the fact that most hospice revenue comes from Medicare makes hospice workers agents of a government funded institution.
The lesson: We need to keep our religious views to ourselves when serving patients and their family members. Most social workers know that self-disclosure is only appropriate under certain circumstances, and even under those circumstances it’s important to carefully gauge how the disclosure is coming across.
Does this not apply to expressing religious beliefs?
Thank you so much for this, as someone who works for a religious NGO I have a lot of trouble putting some of my feelings to words without seeming anti-religion. The key part is (as you stated) when it’s more about the practitioner’s ego than the person themselves. When I grieve, I often find that the people who use religion to comfort are saying it more for themselves to re-affirm THEY will get into heaven rather than discussing the dying/dead person’s strengths, qualities and good deeds or sitting with the grieving person’s emotions and non-judgmentally “sitting with them” wherever they are in their grieving process.