FRANKIE Hester returned to the North Shore to begin her new life.
Retired from a career in health care, she was free to focus on family, art and her vocation as a palliative care and hospice volunteer.
She was born Frances Mulcahy in 1943. For the first two years of her life, the family lived in wartime housing in North Vancouver where her father, whose heart condition kept him from active service, worked at Burrard Dry Dock.
In 1945, for $500, her parents bought a house on 29th Avenue in East Vancouver. "It was bush," she recalls, "and dairy farms where Burnaby General Hospital is now.
Our neighbour had an apple orchard. I remember his horse would step up onto the porch for his daily apple."
Hester remembers losses, too. "We weren't allowed to cry when my grandfather died and we didn't go to his funeral," she says. When she was 21, her father died in her arms at the breakfast table. "I always thought if I had some understanding of what death meant, I wouldn't have been so frightened," she says.
Hester trained as a licensed practical nurse, working at Saint Paul's and later, as a pharmacy technician at Chilliwack Hospital. Back then, Hester's volunteer focus was on fundraising. She was the top fundraiser for the Chilliwack Hospice five years running.
As a frontline health care worker, Hester knew that time is scarce in a hospital, meted out task by task and that treatment must take priority over compassion. She began to volunteer her time and her training to therapeutic and healing touch in the chemotherapy ward, helping to ease the harsh effects of the drugs she dispensed. For the terminally ill, she gave the gifts of comfort and attention.
"For a volunteer, time doesn't count. If it takes an entire shift to help someone eat a meal, that's OK. When a person needs that human contact, we have all the time in the world. When people come to the end of life, we can help them into a deep, relaxed place where they can slip away. Something profound happens and it is a privilege to share in it," she says.
When she settled in West Vancouver after her retirement, Hester joined the volunteers at North Shore Palliative and Supportive Care. Training for palliative care and hospice volunteers on the North Shore is comprehensive and thorough.
After initial training, new members are matched with mentors and introduced into the program. Education is continuous for all volunteers, through regular meetings, training and learning sessions. Above all, they are guided to learn what all of us would do well to understand: that the end of life belongs to the cycle of life. It is a passage to be embraced, not feared or avoided.
Hester concurs. "It's a privilege to be able to do this work," she says. "Until you've been there, you can have no idea how rewarding it can be."
She is as enthusiastic about her fellow volunteers as she is about their contribution.
"The gift of volunteering is the association with like-minded people. Being in a room full of people who share the same passion is an amazing, energizing experience. It's very special," she says.
Hester found another group of like-minded friends and colleagues and a second vocation as a stained glass artist. In the sacred room at the hospice, a butterfly made of stained glass floats in a window, a gift from Hester. That butterfly, a symbol of transformation and the unofficial emblem of the hospice community, led others, with the proceeds from Hester's commissions supporting volunteer education at the hospice.
At the North Shore Palliative and Supportive Volunteer Appreciation ceremony on April 16, the award of appreciation went to Frankie Hester and to Ruth Gilewich for their dedication and commitment during the previous year.
Earlier that day, Hester had been in the stained glass studio at the West Vancouver Recreation Centre, putting the finishing touches on her newest butterfly. In Frankie Hester's gifted hands, heat, glass and metal are transformed into art.
Under her care, and that of her fellow volunteers, weary spirits find peace.
For more information about the North Shore Palliative and Supportive Care volunteer program, call volunteer program manager Janet Quenneville at 604-984-5951. Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or email her at [email protected].
