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Harbour Hospice farewelled its much-loved spiritual carer Vincent Maire, 74, last month.
After 18 years with the charity, Maire has retired to spend more time with wife Liz and family, and pursue his interests in conservation work and spiritual direction.
Vincent, from Manly, first joined Harbour Hospice in 2005, but not as a spiritual carer. In fact, Vincent is not an ordained minister.
“I had a very long career in marketing and communications, and was the fundraising manager at Harbour Hospice for six years before I retrained as a spiritual companion and returned to hospice in 2013,” he says.
When Vincent started at Harbour Hospice he took on the unenviable task of raising the final $2 million to build Harbour Hospice’s building at John Dee Crescent, Red Beach – which he achieved.
But once he moved into the role of spiritual carer his focus changed to being “a steady presence, someone who walked with someone who was nearing the end of their life.
“With comfort and gentleness I would help that person explore what’s going on for them in terms of their spiritual orientation, whatever that might be. What that looked like could be anything from sitting alongside and chatting with them about their life or their fears, or simply sitting in silence with them. It could mean praying with them, anointing them or connecting them with a minister from their own faith tradition.”
Many older people are at peace with dying, Vincent says.
“They are able to look back on their life and see that they’ve had a life, whatever that has been like. A lot have already lost people they’ve known and loved, so they expect this. For many it’s a relief and they can say, ‘I’m at peace’.
“There is an element of hope that perhaps they will continue on in some form. It is not unusual for people to say they can’t wait to be reunited with the person they loved the most in this life.
“But in my experience, even when people have been church goers all their lives, religion does not play a big part in the end. People don’t want their minister by their bed when they die, they want the people who have loved them around them.”
Just as there have been many profound moments, equally, there have many funny ones. Vincent once went to visit a patient who was beside himself with anxiety and shivering in his bed. Vincent knelt down beside him in readiness to pray, but just as he did he got a terrible cramp in his leg.
“I leapt up to my feet and shouted a well-known expletive,” he said. “The patient started laughing and the more he laughed, the more I laughed.”
Vincent also brought light and laughter to many through his Men’s Group, a support group for widowed men whose spouses had been in Harbour Hospice care.
“It was originally set up in 2009 to teach widows how to cook. We’d had an elderly gentleman come into hospice and ask us how to cook cauliflower. All his married life his wife had never let him in the kitchen and now that she’d died, he didn’t know how to cook anything.”
But while the group started out offering cooking lessons, Vincent soon learned that the real reason the men were turning up was because they wanted to be in the company of others in the same situation.
“This is a group of men who are all on the same journey. They’ve lost their wives and now there’s a gap in their lives. This helps them to accept that they are not alone.”
The men meet fortnightly and enjoy a cooked lunch followed by a talk from a guest speaker. They range in age from their 60s to 90s.
If the focus was on grief every week, Vincent doesn’t think the men would come.
“They come to quietly support each other and they find a camaraderie in knowing that the guys sitting either side of them have experienced what they’re going through.”
Vincent will miss his work at hospice, but says he is ready to move on.
“Being part of Harbour Hospice was an amazing part of my life. It was an absolute privilege, and especially because it’s my local hospice. I met so many people and made so many friends, and the great thing about hospice is that no one’s there because it’s the only job they can get. Everyone is there because they want to be there, and that makes a huge difference. I consider myself very fortunate to have had this experience.”
Harbour Hospice is in the process of filling the spiritual carer and Men’s Group facilitator roles, but it is on the lookout for volunteer guest speakers for the Men’s Group. At each session, a talk is given by a guest speaker and the men have enjoyed hearing about a range of topics from what it was like to run a school in Jerusalem to a volunteer’s experience of working with refugees in Iraq. One speaker was an expert on alternative medicines and a park ranger visited to talk about his job. If you have an interesting tale or topic to share, please email volunteer@harbourhospice.org.nz
