It is neither a home for the aged nor a hospital for the ailing but is possibly both and more — a sanctuary for the ailing. They do tend to the patients here, but that is not so much about any serious therapeutics — for, they are attending to the sick inmates beyond cure. Instead, what they do is provide what the inmates require at that stage of their lives — palliative care.
Going by definition, palliative care is a focused service meant to improve the quality of life of patients in an advanced stage of any of the serious or life-threatening diseases. Simply put, it just means “end-of-life” care that focuses on relieving the pain and suffering of the terminally ill till they fade away. And here, that is provided by a committed team of physicians and nurses, specially trained for this purpose, who serve for the sheer joy of serving.
The place is thus a shelter where life coexists with death, where life-support systems are as much part of the infrastructure as the mortuary, and counselling to keep up the spirits of the inmates and their near ones, an integral portion of its functioning as performing the last rites of the destitute patients!
And this “home” goes by the name hospice.
In the hospice, outside the conventional hospital environment, they primarily do pain management, taking care of such patients’ physical and emotional needs, along with some basic medical requirements. Thus, the aged and the bedridden, in need of palliative care, whether for any disease or plain advanced age, are cared for here till the end of their lives, recognising their right to dignity in life and death so that their passage to the world beyond is dotted with care and concern. And all these at no cost to them!
Any visit to a hospice can be humbling, and it indeed was!
“Where the one who yesterday was, is not there today, and in that impermanence lies the greatness of this world,” declares the celebrated Kural, ‘Nerunal Ulanoruvan Indrillai Ennum Perumai Udaiththu Ivvulagu.’
A hospice might well be the solemn platform where one can have a brush with this “greatness” of transience, conferred by the inevitable death on the enigma called life!
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