Descriptive Essay: Hospice And Palliative Care

Death. I’m surrounded by it, surrounded by life fleeing people’s lungs at the Hospice and Palliative Care in Columbia MO. For the patients in this center, their days have become numbered. I can hear the machines churning away, a machine that has become most of these patients single life source. A realization then quickly hits me, I’m breathing in the same air that others in this very building are using to take their last. Families rush in and out of the rooms, franticly getting in their last goodbyes while they still have the chance. Children don’t understand, looking distraught as they hang onto the coattails of their parents. One child, visibly crying as he pressed his face into his fathers business suit, didn’t understand what was happening as he exited into the warm spring afternoon. “Why wasn’t Grandpa
The opening and closing of doors has almost become soothing to me, echoing off the walls in the hallway. It provides a little bit of sound, a little bit of life, to any otherwise lifeless building. The walls in the waiting area are about as pale as the faces of those surrounded by them. Some are waiting for family members, others are keeping themselves busy, and some just have to step out because they can’t bare the pain anymore. As I find myself blending in amongst the visitors, the smell of chlorine and cleaning supplies spreads through my nostrils. It has me thinking, how amazing is it that in a place filled with death, they can make it smell like the opposite, clean and pure. One man in a red collard shirt and khaki shorts is on the phone with what sounds like a relative, urging them to get here as quickly as possible in order to say their goodbyes. A female worker at the desk frantically direct visitor into the respective rooms of the ones they are visiting, trying her best to calmly dealing with the stressed and