"It's quite a thrill for me to receive this award, from a place that means so much to me and in the name of someone I so deeply admire. Art and I knew each other... over a long period of time... and finally at the Upton Street Hospice, where he had such a good time and made sure everyone else did too.

...you already know and value what hospice care has to offer. A Washington Post reporter, writing with great eloquence a few years ago, described hospice as a "movement, not a place," explaining that in helping people live while they are dying it "bathes their wasting bodies, combs their thinning hair, loves them unreservedly, diminishes their pain, sees to their job and improves their ending lives as if to do so were an honor rather than a chore."

An honor rather than a chore.

I believe that most of us involved with hospice would agree. It does indeed feel like an honor to sit with patients as they recollect the past or go through old photograph albums.

An honor to listen to them as they wrestle with unfinished business and sometimes voice their thoughts about death.

I have had the yes honor of helping a woman write farewell letters to each of her four adult children, gently pointing out to her that she needed to put the same number of 'I love you's' into each of those letters, because otherwise, grown up as her children were, they'd notice.

I've had the honor of helping another woman plan her funeral service, which mostly involved our leafing through a ton of catalogs together until we'd found the perfect burial dress.

I've had the honor of feeding hospice patients ice cream, raising or lowering their bed to make them more comfortable, reading them their favorite psalms, watching game shows together, or simply holding hands in comfortable silence. And I've had the honor of stroking a man's furrowed forehead, over and over again, till he took his last breath.

And probably the greatest story I heard about our hospice occurred before I started volunteering there. A man was dying, and he really needed to die, but his wife wouldn't let him go. As you probably know, these things can happen. She couldn't let him go, wouldn't let him go, because, though Catholic, they had been married outside the church and she feared that they would somehow be punished. A sensitive night nurse, having tactfully persuaded this woman to voice her concerns, swung into action and solved the problem. She arranged for a priest to come to the dying man's bed side and perform a proper, traditional Catholic marriage ceremony, complete with a musical tape of Ave Maria which she'd somehow managed to track down. After that, the wife could let him go.

An amazing nurse, you might say, except that we have so many amazing hospice workers nurses, doctors, aides, social workers, volunteers people who care so much, who try so hard to maintain the comfort and the dignity of the dying and who also attend, with a hug, a cup of coffee, a listening ear, a sharing of memories and tears, with the needs of their patients' sorrowing families.

I do need to say that hospice volunteering doesn't always involve life and death matters and intimate patient-volunteer encounters. We volunteers stamp records, address envelopes, the more talented among us not I make coffee, and we answer the telephone a lot-taking messages, getting and giving information, and transferring calls to other lines while ardently hoping we don't disconnect them... again.

But whatever we're doing, we understand that we're all a part of a magnificent movement which has humanized the dying process, a movement that holds the belief that each day is a life time and that the moments of each of these days ought to be and, to the best of our ability, can be, moments of sweetness, and comfort, and connection..

Being part of this is indeed let me say it once again an honor.

Thank you."