Hospice Movement Founder Dies

Sometimes the important news is not too important. Sometimes it ought to
take a back seat to the really important stuff, the stuff of life and death
that we ignore in favor of the ephemeral and the titillating.

On July 14,
Dame Cicely Saunders
died aged 87. She was the “Visionary founder of the modern hospice movement who set the highest standards in care for the dying.”

She found her metier when caring for

a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom
she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter
with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered
to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern
drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that
ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.

Dame Cicely was a Briton of the old school, “a charismatic grande dame
with strong values and a great talent for leadership” who became an Evangelical Christian in
her young adulthood
in the years immediately after World War II.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. It is the story of a remarkable life.