Living until the end

6th in a 12-part series

Ellen Ann Hansen is sitting on the hospital bed that has recently been installed in her living room. It's a small living room, so the bed is hard to maneuver around, much less ignore. Not that she would expect you to ignore it.

"Don't be afraid to ask me if I'm dying," she says.

Yes, she answers, she can tell that her body is slipping now. It's getting harder to breathe on her own, as her cancer spreads. But the fact that she is dying, she says, doesn't mean that she isn't also still living.

Hansen has made a list of books she wants to read, and until recently she took classes at Westminster College. "My long-term goal is to be an art therapist," she says, then smiles at the notion of "long-term." With the help of her IHC Hospice social worker, Shelley White, Hansen has also gotten closer to her goal of living in the moment.

"Tons of people are willing to warehouse and feed you," she says. "But I want and need for this to be a process of dying. I want to experience it."

Hansen, 47, has been a hospice patient for a year. That's a long time to be on hospice care; in fact, a third of the hospice patients in the United States come to hospice a week or less before they die. Because it cares for people who are dying — people, in fact, who have actually agreed not to seek life-saving measures — hospice is sometimes avoided by the very people who could benefit from it.

"Gloom and doom," says Jon Addington, a chaplain with Harmony Hospice of Murray, to describe a standard perception of hospice.

But, like Hansen, Addington says that you can look at hospice another way: By managing pain and by helping patients simultaneously plan their life and their death, hospice actually helps people live more fully right up until the end.

Like other hospice patients, Hansen has a "team": a nurse, a chaplain, a home health aide, a social worker, a physician and a hospice volunteer; a collection of people who regularly check up on her and provide care, who in essence are coaching her through her dying, in the same way that Lamaze instructors coach women in the birthing process.