NOSDA volunteers say program rewarding

Its name, “No One Should Die Alone,” says it all.

NOSDA is a group of Coeur d’Alene-area men and women who sit with the dying, and they’re looking for others to join them.

Sharon Harris, a NOSDA volunteer for two years, calls the program, “rewarding, not just for the dying person, but also for their families and for us (volunteers), too.

“Over a period of time, we develop rapport with the patient and their family members, if they have any locally,” she explains. “We become friends.”

NOSDA was founded in 2002 when the Rev. Roger LaChance of St. Pius X Catholic Church in Coeur d’Alene asked deacon aspirant Chuck Finan and his wife Monica to spend time with “Ben,” dying of pancreatic cancer. Ben was in Kootenai County Medical Center, and his wife was able to be with him only part of each day.

The Finans and four other volunteers from the parish took turns, each spending two hours a day visiting, praying and talking with him.

“As we spent time with Ben,” Finan says, “we found ourselves the recipient of his gift to us. We were the ones surprised, because while we were present for him, he became the path for God to work within us.”

After Ben’s death, the Finans felt a calling to help other people in similar circumstances. That November, Chuck developed a paper outlining the proposed NOSDA ministry and presented it to LaChance as a demonstration of what he could do as a church deacon.

The ministry has since evolved into an ecumenical organization because the dying are members of many different faiths, and some have no church affiliation whatsoever.

The current crop of volunteers, Finan says, includes members of the Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Lake City Community, Real Life, Seventh-day Adventist and Coeur d’Alene Bible churches.

“So far, all our volunteers have strong faith backgrounds,” he says. “But we don’t allow any proselytizing, and we’d sure accept atheists or agnostics.”

The first training session, by Hospice of North Idaho personnel, was conducted in May 2003. By now, Finan says, NOSDA has trained 150 volunteers, and about 80 of those remain with the program.

Many of their clients, he explains, have no local family members and others are shut-ins with no one visiting them. He calls those people part of the “throwaway society.”

Others have relatives who do visit, but those visits are limited by work and other obligations.

Ideally, says Finan, NOSDA would like its volunteers to spend at least two hours a day with each patient, and with enough volunteers, each volunteer would make only one visit each week.

“They talk with them, read to them, pray with them – if that’s what they want – or just hold their hands. It’s up to the patient and the family to decide.”

Lisa Farrar of Post Falls says the NOSDA team assigned to her mother, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, increased their visits the closer she same to death.

“Mom was in an assisted-living home, and I don’t have any siblings nearby, so I was in a bind. Then, through a Hospice social worker, I learned of NOSDA.

“They talked with her, read to her, and they watched movies together. They didn’t push religion, but mom had some unresolved issues, and their praying together helped her work them out.”

Farrar says the volunteers initially visited three days a week. As her mother’s condition worsened, they increased their visits to five days weekly. Near the end, she says, the volunteers were at her mother’s side 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

One volunteer with a real stake in the program is Valerie Vanderpool. Her husband, Tom, was 68 when he died of emphysema in February 2005. During his last 10 months five volunteers visited him two hours daily, five days a week.

After Tom’s death, she took off for visits with friends and relatives in Alaska and Florida. When she returned she took NOSDA training and last October began spending 2 to 2 1/2 hours each Monday with a 97-year-old woman dying of colon cancer who lives in Coeur d’Alene’s Beehive assisted-living facility.

At the request of the patient, all five of that patient’s current NOSDA team are Lutherans, Vanderpool explains.

So far, says Finan, his organization has served 33 patients, about a quarter of whom died in a volunteer’s presence. Currently six terminally ill patients are being served.