Hospice is concerned with life and living and that includes dying

We have little control over the fact that we are going to die, buts we can control how we live, writes Tony O’Brien

HE word hospice is one that possesses a unique capacity to evoke powerful and often conflicting emotions. It is a word full of inherent contradictions and stark contrasts. Historically, hospice represented a place of death — a home for the ‘incurables’. Not surprisingly therefore, hospice continues to generate enormous fear, apprehension and aversion.

In Cork, senior citizens often describe the experience of being urged by their parents to cover their mouths with a handkerchief and to run as quickly as possible past the formidable gates and high walls of the old hospice at St Patrick’s Hospital on Wellington Rd. In later years, these same adults report instinctively blessing themselves as they drive past the hospice as a form of silent prayer invoking the Lord to protect them from ever needing such care. We are never very far from our past. We are never very far from our fears.