1. Natural Pain Relief

Massage can significantly reduce chronic and acute pain. It can support comfort care and reduce the amount of medications needed for someone to remain comfortable. This can help support increased awareness and alertness while keeping pain low.

2. Boost the Quality of Life

Massage can help someone relax and feel more at ease. There is a labor to dying and the more ease we can inspire, the easier this transition can be. Massage offers compassionate touch and attentive care. It can help someone feel seen, understood, and connected.

3. Minimize Anxiety

Massage helps relieve anxiety and instill feelings of peace and tranquility. It can help regulate the nervous system and promote the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest system) while allowing the sympathetic nervous system to take a break. It can reduce levels of cortisol in the system.

4. Enhance Mood

Massage offers support to those who are experiencing depression or sadness in this stage of life. Massage helps release endorphins and decrease the release of cortisol in the body.

5. Support Immune function

Massage can significantly help with lymph flow. This helps strengthen the function of the immune system and fight infection.

6. Improve digestion & ease nausea

Massage offers digestive support and can help promote regular bowl movements and reduce nausea. Many seniors may experience digestive imbalances especially if they are on a number of medications or in Cancer treatment. Massage supports the nervous system in charge of “resting and digesting”, it can help to balance this system and keep things moving through the body.

7. Increase quality and quantity of sleep

Massage can help support sleep. Treatments can help someone sleep more deeply as well as sleep longer. Often clients will fall asleep during the massage and/or notice significant depth in sleep the following nights.

8. Compassionate Touch

Often when someone is at the end of life, the care he or she is receiving is very medical. It may be rare to receive loving touch. Compassionate touch coupled with a healing presence can be incredibly relaxing and can inspire ease.

9. Respiration function

Massage can support respiration and inspire deep breathing. This can be incredibly relaxing and help massage the organs. If breathing is labored, massage can help relax the muscles that are overworking and hypertonic.

10. Improve circulation

Massage therapy can benefit circulation significantly. Helping return blood back to the heart and promote the removal of toxins and nutrient exchange. It can improve blood circulation but also circulation of lymph helping to boost immune function.

Death Doula Overview:

A death doula or end of life doula is a non-medical professional who cares for the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of someone approaching death. She often works alongside a doctor or a funeral director  but never in place of. Death doulas are sometimes called soul midwives, end of life guides, death coaches, doulas to the dying. 

What does a Death Doula Do?

• Helps with end of life planning and logistics

• Creates a comfortable space for the dying and the family

• Focuses on the rites and desires of the dying person

• Helps plan the vigil

• Help create a legacy project with the family if desired

• Educates family and friends

• Helps maintain dignity

• Helps family and loved ones through grieving

Can you imagine meeting someone in their last six months of life? They’ve lived an entire life that you know nothing of. You walk in to be with this human, to see him or her, to be curious about this life that has been lived and is now closing. You have such a different experience of this person than everyone else in his or her life. You’re being welcomed into this significant transition time. This is what we get to do as Companion Volunteers with Hospice.

I have been volunteering with Signature Hospice in Portland, OR for about two years now. They offer amazing support for their patients, volunteers, and staff. From a volunteering perspective, Signature Hospice offers deep support and expressive appreciation to their team of companion volunteers. We start with a high quality three day training where we cover the details of HIPPA, ethics, spirituality, our own beliefs, and how to care for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. We meet and connect with our Spiritual Care Coordinators and other volunteers who have been with Signatures for many years. We ask many questions and talk a lot about boundaries. With a great training under our belts and continued support throughout our volunteering, we go off into the world.

What Is A Companion Volunteer?

As a companion volunteer we can’t help someone eat, stand or bath. We cannot touch medication nor help someone get up if they fall. We are extremely limited in the things we can physically do for someone which is exactly the point. The point of this role is to be present - completely - with someone. We don’t have the option to busy yourself with tasks if you’re uncomfortable. We witness, we love, we spend time, we see this person. That is the doing, and it’s a lot to do.

You Are The Medicine

One thing we learned from the beginning and that has stuck with me since is this idea that “you are the medicine”. My job as a companion volunteer is to be present. To be with someone. I am not fixing or changing anything. It has similarities to the Vipassana meditation experience in that we are asked to be with the present moment, to observe and be in it without reacting, without changing or fixing anything, “as it is”.

As a great manager of many tasks, this is of course the most difficult aspect of the role for me. If someone is screaming out in pain, I can not change their pain, I can be with them in it. Of course we can say this is beautiful and maybe that really helps someone. Maybe it does but not in the fast acting way that pain meds can. Not in a way that may bring the screaming to a stop and subdue the sufferer.

The Actual Work Of It

The actual work of it is not glamorous. There are gems, the shiniest most memorable gems, but we spend a lot of time at the bedside while someone sleeps. In my personal experience, I’ve enjoyed watching many Westerns together, providing Reiki and Massage, holding hands, hearing stories of spouses, families, and travels.

It’s incredibly special that someone allows a stranger to come in at this stage of life. If you’re curious about life, go sit with someone who is dying. You are the student here in the most relaxed of class rooms. This is the human condition. This is my nature and your nature and though our lives look different, birth and death will become each of us. It is our journey to take, it is our passing on to prepare for.

The Actual Love of it

Worth Considering

How do you handle endings? Do you skip to the next song before this one has ended? Do you watch the finishing credits of the movie? Do you leave a relationship at the first sign of trouble? Do you look the other way when you see someone suffering and asking for help?

How do you suffer? Are you able to ask for help? Do you turn inwards? Do you use external distractions? Do you confront the pain, dwell in, feel sorry for yourself? Do you feel sorry for those you know are hurting? Do you fix it - immediately? Do you see it? Are you curious about it

We all know we’re going to die but that sure doesn’t make it easier. As a massage therapist and hospice volunteer, I believe that we can offer care to dying people that inspires grace and peace throughout the process of dying. Here’s how:

Physical Comfort

Aches and pains come with old age and as the body grows older, pain can become more prevalent. Massage and energy work can help relieve pain and help someone feel relaxed. It can benefit circulation and swelling (edema).

Loving Touch

Often someone approaching the end of their life may experience touch mostly from medical professionals . There can be a lot of transferring, taking vitals, needles, bathing, and other procedural care. This care often lacks compassion due to overworked staff. Simple compassionate touch can benefit physical and mental well-being significantly. Simple hand holding, applying lotion to hands and feet, a gentle foot or head rub are examples of this kind of touch. Touch without trying to fix or change something. Touch that is loving and intentional. Touch that expresses love, and tells the receiver’s body that it is safe, that he/she is loved, and that you are there with them.

Healing Presence

“You are the medicine” is something I tell myself every time I walk into a client or patient’s room. I am not going in to change or fix something. I am going to hold space, to be with someone where they are, to love and see them completely. I am not there to do. I am there to be with. Be with whatever he/she is experiencing. I leave my plans, my drama, my stresses and excitements in the car.

Therapeutic Tough

Massage for Palliative and Hospice patients can help relieve pain and anxiety. It can offer support that medical staff and even family can’t always offer. This undivided attention can help calm the patient and reduce fear. Loving and present touch is an essential part of one’s care plan. Of course there are considerations that must be made for clients experiencing severe conditions and specific illnesses where touch may not be permitted. It’s important to be knowledgable about the precautions and contraindications.