A hospice is a place where people who have a terminal illness go to live under volunteer care so they can die in comfort. Most of the people who stay at the Hospice House are victims of cancer; it is the number one illness of people living at the Hospice House. Others are people with AIDS, heart disease, or other terminal illnesses.

 Mr. Phelps is a volunteer at the Hospice House in Concord. He told us the two ways people can be cared for through a hospice. The first way is going to a hospice until you die or become well enough to leave the Hospice House. The second way is to have a doctor or nurse come to your home two or three times a week. The volunteer would read and write letters or talk to the person. Mr. Phelps told us that the most important part of being a volunteer is to LISTEN.

To be a volunteer at the hospice you must be an adult. You would have to go through a certain number of hours of training. At the hospice, every patient has his or her own volunteer assigned to him or her. Even though Mr. Phelps has only been to one Hospice House (in Concord, New Hampshire), he says that they are very home-like.

I knew that a Hospice was a place for fatally ill people. I didn't really get the whole thing. I thought it was a really weird place, I mean just a place for people to die. I thought it would be really depressing., but then I learned by talking to the people that worked there that it's not a depressing place. -Melissa Rosenthall

When I was told that I would be visiting a hospice for a day I was fairly happy. I thought that this was the project I would be most interested in. I immediately started to think about all the things I knew about Hospices. I knew that a hospice was a place that terminally ill people went to die. I knew that a hospice was supposed to be a place like home where patients could be properly taken care of in their last days on earth. I knew that a lot of people there had cancer or AIDS. This is all the knowledge I had going into this project; I ended up coming out of this expierience with a lot more information.

When I got to school that morning my project mates and I met up with our former Geography teacher, Mr. Richard Phelps. Mr. Phelps is a volunteer at the hospice. His job is to go around to the at-home patients and stay with them for a couple hours while their spouses or family members go out. I wasn't aware that people could stay at home and still be patients of the hospice. Mr. Phelps sat us down and told us all about the hospice and answered all the questions we had about it. After which we all piled into Mr. Phelps' car and rode the five minutes down to the house.

When we entered the hospice my first impression was that it was very pretty, but it didn't remind me of home very much. It seemed very formal and kind of like a hospital, which the hospice is trying to veer away from. There were flowers everywhere, and when asked about them we were told that many local buisnesses donated fresh flowers weekly. We were informed that the house didn't have any residents at this time, but when patients were here it seemed much more like home. We were given a tour and the bedrooms were rather nice. They were roomy with their own bathroom. They had nice furniture, and we were told that patients were allowed to bring their own furniture. (Well, everything but the bed because the beds were mobile and needed to stay that way.) The patients were, however, allowed to use their own bedding.

When we met the volunteers I noticed that they were very warm and they seemed like they would be good at taking care of the patients. They informed us that some patients were elderly people dying of conditions such as heart disease, etc. I was not aware of this. I thought that people who were here had to be younger people. I assumed that old people would go to a nursing home if they were ill.

All in all I think this was a very good expierience for me. -Barbara Wilkinson

I didn't know much about a Hospice before we started on this project. I knew that a Hospice was where ill people went to die. I thought that I would have trouble visting a Hospice , beacuse I know that I don't like death or the thought of death, but the Hospice is just a home, like any normal home, but bigger. I think that the Hospice is here to comfort us , people, that can't handle death. It's a way of telling us that death happens and that its better to die in comfort than to have a long slow and painful death. I'm glad that I faced my fear beacuse the Hospice House is of great comfort for the dying and their family members. -- Sarah Emerson

Before I went to the Hospice House I knew almost nothing about what a hospice does or what a hospice was. When I visited the Hospice House I learned that a hospice can be a sad place. When people go to the hospice that usually means they have about six months to live. At the Hospice House, the sick people have around-the-clock care. I learned that Mr. Phelps helps out a lot. He goes to people's houses abd reads to them. He also writes letters and cleans for them. Mr. Phelps is a true community hero. -Steve Murphy

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