The Love in Hospice

November is designated as National Hospice Month and here at HFA we regularly hear from family members about what hospice has meant to them and their loved ones. People tell us about the dedication shown by the hospice nurse, volunteer, social worker or other member of their loved one’s caregiving team.

Many of us at HFA were particularly touched by a piece in the New York Times’ Modern Love column, written by a Minnesota judge who performed an ‘emergency wedding’ for a hospice patient at the behest of his hospice social worker.

THE call came around 3:30 p.m. on a sultry Minnesota day. The hospice social worker, Cheryl, explained the situation in a rush. She had tried 15 judges, and all were either in court or otherwise unavailable. By chance, she had reached me directly.

She said she needed a judge to perform an emergency wedding.

Believe it or not, this was not my first such request of the week. In fact, I often receive these requests, usually involving the need to get a waiver to avoid the required five-day waiting period. Sometimes I am sympathetic, as when the request is spurred by a sudden deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

But generally I don’t like to reward those who leave matters like the arrangement of a wedding until the day they want it to happen. My son, Cole, proposed on Valentine’s Day this year for a wedding 18 months later, in August 2012. I was tired of the seemingly endless series of calls from people with ridiculous, impulsive requests.

I leaned back in my desk chair and, as I do when I’m tired, pulled on my right earlobe and scratched my head, the right forefront where my hairline is beginning to retreat. I half-listened as I wondered what to do about the post-trial motions for the case I’d just heard, and the detective waiting outside my chambers for me to sign a search warrant, and the sheaf of emergency orders on my desk in unrelated cases that typically accumulate during a lengthy trial.

But Cheryl begged; she practically yanked my bleeding heart right out of my chest. She explained that she was a hospice social worker for Thomas, 77, who had recently been discharged from the medical center hospice unit so he could die at home. He was conscious and lucid but likely to die at any moment. He could no longer talk and communicated entirely though hand squeezes.

His dying wish was to marry Donna, his life partner of 38 years. She was 57. They had talked about marriage over the years but had never gotten around to a wedding. They had even gone so far as to fill out the application from the downtown wedding license center.

Their wedding was performed, with the judge officiating over the phone, witnessed by the hospice chaplain and arranged by the dedicated hospice social worker, Cheryl. The groom died later that evening.