Farewell in the coffee house at the Bönekerskapelle
Rheine. cpr. Honor the office! This can truly be said of the ten voluntary end-of-life caregivers who were bid farewell by the ecumenical outpatient hospice. You have done honor to your office, because together more than 187 years of hospice work have now come to an end.
Four volunteers have already worked for more than 20 years, two of them are even founding members from 1994. They have helped to build up the hospice service and have developed an attitude for the accompaniment at the bedside: Allowing oneself to be touched by the mood of the situation, enduring painful conversations and bringing them to an end, in order to then move from a Christian self-image to action. To help and support – and to do so with a high degree of tolerance toward the human ways of life that one may encounter.
The original plan was to bid farewell to the deserving volunteers at the Advent celebration in December 2021. This had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, so the ten volunteers were now invited to a farewell in intimate company. The head of the Health and Aging department, Klaus Jäger, the former hospice coordinator Anna Zeitler-Schlöder and Marita Brundiers and Elisabeth Niemeier as representatives of the active end-of-life caregivers said goodbye to the volunteers who had left. For this purpose, they were invited to a cozy coffee drink in the coffee house at the Bönekerskapelle. All were honored in a speech for their participation and appreciated in individual personality. The veteran escorts also had a lot to tell, for example how the service was organized in the beginning, how later projects like the mourning café and “Hospice makes school” were initiated. As a gift, the volunteers were presented with a group photo as a memento as well as a book about the “Rooms of Silence” at the Hanover-Ricklingen cemetery. This is an art exhibition depicting the five phases of loss and farewell according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. The book served as an “appetizer” because the volunteers were invited with it to the day trip to Hanover that the hospice group is planning for June.