The New West Hospice Society is on a mission to normalize conversations around death and dying.
Less than a year after being incorporated, the society is hard at work on a number of fronts.
“We have three major goals or mandates from the community – to normalize the talk around death and dying, reach in to people who want to stay at home for end-of-life and support them, and build a hospice residence,” said Kay Johnson, one of the society’s founders. “We are gearing all our activities around those goals.”
The society is inviting community members to attend its annual general meeting on Saturday, Sept. 16 at 2 p.m. at Century House.
“We are really inviting the community to come and make their views known to give us support and guidance on how they want us to do this work. It isn’t about the board and what they want – it is about what the community needs,” Johnson said. “This happens to everybody, so we want to make sure that we are doing it the way the community sees that it should be done.”
Following the annual general meeting, the society’s board of directors will have a strategic planning session to consider community input, determine its priorities and discuss the possibility of partnering with a community organization on a building project that may include a hospice.
The society is also hard at work on plans for its first-ever fundraiser on World Hospice Palliative Care Day on Saturday, Oct. 14 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Westminster Quay. River Walk for Hospice includes a walk from the tin soldier to the Wow Westminster public art at Westminster Pier Park, an opportunity to acknowledge loved ones, information about end-of-life, advance care planning and more, as well as entertainment and mascots.
“It is going to be a fun event,” Johnson said. “That is one of the things that we are trying to do, in normalizing all this difficult stuff that people don’t talk about. We want to make this a real family-friendly event so families do feel comfortable coming, enjoying themselves and supporting it.”
The New West Hospice Society is also working with the New Westminster School District on a proposal to offer a pilot project in a local elementary school that would help normalize the conversation about death.
“Death becomes less of a mystery. There is more comfort in talking about it openly,” said Wendy Johnson, who previously worked on a similar project with Johnson in Langley. “What we found when we ran that project was that kids felt, talking about these issues in their classroom was a safe place with the support of their teachers. They could ask questions that they had been longing to ask, express their feelings, come to identify and name emotions in that safe environment with other kids their age. It’s a very calm, comfortable setting in which to have those conversations.”
Future endeavours include an art exhibition by the Arts Council of New Westminster at Anvil Centre in April around the theme of death, dying and loss, a musical event honouring some of the artists who have died and an event next May (Palliative Care Month in B.C.) to acknowledge different types of losses.
