Restoring hope in life’s final chapter
Hospice addresses pain, fear, and deeper spiritual suffering, so patients and families can find peace
With more than 43 years of experience as a hospice chaplain, Father Tom Welk, C.PP.S., has witnessed a lot of death. But more importantly, in a place that others may find devoid of hope, he has seen a holy abundance of life’s most beautiful moments, reconciliation and restoration, and joyful reckonings as God’s children are called home.
In a recent episode of Restoring Hope, the podcast of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, Fr. Tom Welk offers profound insights into hospice care, spirituality, and the meaning of life’s final chapter.
A calling rooted in compassion and ethics
Fr. Tom’s path to hospice ministry began at a crossroads. As an undergraduate, he wrestled with whether to pursue medicine or the priesthood. Ultimately, his vocation as a Missionary of the Precious Blood led him to a unique intersection of both callings. “End-of-life care has a lot of overlap with medical work,” he says. When asked to help start the Harry Hynes Memorial Hospice in Wichita in the early 1980s, he embraced the opportunity to serve those facing life-limiting illnesses.
His work reflects the Precious Blood charism of reconciliation and life-giving presence. “There’s lots of things that people need to take care of. One of the more important things,” he says, “is reconciliation.” He shared a poignant story of a patient who, as soon as he entered her room, told him, “Thank God for cancer.” The illness gave her time to mend broken family relationships, a grace that sudden death often denies.
“With cancer and other life-limiting illnesses, you get a forewarning. That slope was the time she needed.” Fr. Tom worked with the family to bring them together. “The last one made that reconciliation, and she died, within 24 hours,” Fr. Welk says. “It allows a lot of peace, not just for the person who’s dying, but also for those loved ones who still have to continue their life journey.”
Beyond pain: addressing suffering in all its dimensions
Hospice care, Fr. Tom emphasizes, shifts the focus from aggressive curative treatment to aggressive comfort care. “Controlling pain is only one dimension,” he says. “Suffering runs deeper. You can do all you can to make sure they’re kept physically comfortable, but you might still have a miserable human being on your hands if you don’t take care of that psychosocial/spiritual. And that very much ties in with the ministry that I provide patients.”
He illustrated this with a powerful example. A patient, bedridden and irritable, resisted every attempt to ease his pain. “He looked at me and said, ‘Here I am hurting, and they send you out. How the hell are you going to help me?’” Fr. Tom gently engaged him in conversation, eventually uncovering the root of his anguish: fear of death. The man could not bring himself to say the word “cancer” because, for him, it symbolized dying. When he finally screamed, “I have cancer!” relief washed over him. “His biggest source of suffering was fear of the unknown, which is death,” Fr. Tom says. “Talking about it made it more known. He slept through the night for the first time in weeks.”
Hope, meaning, and the dash between two dates
For Fr. Tom, hope is inseparable from meaning. “Hope is finding purpose in life,” he says. Quoting Mark Twain, he reflected on the three elements of a tombstone: birth date, death date, and the dash in between. “The most important part is the dash — the journey,” he says. “And the second most important day is the day we figure out why we’re here.”
All faith communities, Fr. Tom says, share a common human need for hope. “I like to look at hope as finding purpose and meaning in life. It really begins to address the why question of our existence. The most senseless thing we face is death. It takes a lot of hope, figuring out what is the meaning and the purpose of death. Is it going into nothingness, or is it not a healing — the entrance into something much deeper and fuller? That’s the ministry.”