Pathways Through Grief to Hospice Volunteering

Abstract

Most individuals volunteer for hospice following a death in their own life. Many scholars assume that being motivated by past experiences with death means that individuals are seeking out hospice volunteering as a means for working through their own “unresolved” grief. The understanding that grief is a kind of disorder that must be resolved is based on a biomedical model that contradicts much recent theoretical and empirical research. While grief can be incapacitating to individuals, bereavement can also have pro-social and life-affirming dimensions including discovering new meaning in life and developing compassion and a desire and capacity to care for others. The desire to return the care a dying family member received from hospice is frequently cited in the literature, although no study to date has systematically analyzed the diverse ways personal encounters with death bring individuals to volunteer for hospice. Drawing on original in-depth interviews with volunteers from a variety of settings in the United States and Germany, the analysis illuminates three central processes linking experiences with death and grief to the draw to volunteer for hospice: developing and discovering caring capacities and emotional capital, transforming suffering and extending compassion through continuing bonds, and exploring and learning from grief. I draw on psychological, sociological, and philosophical literatures on grief and the self to create a framework for interpreting these findings that grief is not something external and threatening to the self that one must surmount or bring closure to, but instead grieving can fundamentally shape who one is and present opportunities to redefine and expand the self.