Mary Porter is an angel.  I first met her a few days before my childhood friend, David, passed away from cancer.  I was visiting David to spend his final days with him.  When Mary walked through the door of David’s apartment, she was greeted by David and his wife like a longtime and deep family friend.  In fact, Mary had only met David and Beth a week before, when she was assigned to be the hospice/RN nurse for David.  But already, Mary had made a close connection with this couple.  That connection proved invaluable over the last few days of David’s life both at home and in the hospital, a period to which I was a witness and through which Mary was David’s guide and great source of comfort and security.  I had never been involved in the end-stage of someone’s life, but Mary was instrumental in creating a loving, accepting and caring space in which David could do the final work of his life and provide a space in which his friends and family could give him the support he needed. 

Mary has a very effective skill set of working with the dying as well s being an RN.  I saw her work very effectively with hospital staff to advocate for David’s needs both from the perspective of additional recourses, but also to ensure that David was allowed to move through his dying process without unnecessary medical intervention. But the most important contribution that Mary made was to help David understand the process his was going through and to alleviate his fear and anxiety, giving his wife Beth, the support she needed to be fully present with David.

I have heard said that supporting someone through their final dying process is a powerful experience.  I can now attest to this.  But what made this experience truly extraordinary was the involvement of Mary Porter.  Wherever David’s soul may now be resting, I know that his final journey was greatly aided by the caring, expertise, love and support from Mary Porter.  Go in beauty, David.

2018

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“I met Mary Porter when my father was critically ill. He got sick pretty suddenly and like most of us, my family was pretty unprepared, not to mention devastated. All we could see was the tragedy and none of us could make any sense of it at all.

 

The person who changed that for us was Mary Porter. For one thing, she has been there, and I can not overestimate the comfort of someone who is calm and familiar around something so frightening. For another, she is warm, and direct, and embodies gracious bedside manner. But what makes Mary truly special is her wisdom around death. Basically, she accomplishes the impossible: She manages to reframe death as something that's part of the order of things.

 

Not positive exactly but a necessary part of life, and something that has to be embraced. Until we met Mary such an idea had never occurred to us. But afterwards it became the only thing that gave us comfort, a glimmer of an idea that maybe, maybe, this experience was part of life. In our family, we think of her as an angel of mercy."

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Hanna

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No one should have to die without Mary Porter by their side. 

That is the best way to sum up my experience with Mary during my father's final week of life and his passing. It was by the grace of serendipity that Mary came into my family's life at a time of most urgent need. My father had just been released from the hospital into our care for home hospice. We didn't know how much time left we had with him nor how much he might suffer as the cancer would take over his body. We were frightened, worried, overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted. With minimal help from the Medicare hospice plan, we knew we needed additional support...particularly for some of the physical care my father needed that we didn't feel equipped to handle alone. What we didn't realize at that moment was how much emotional support we needed as well as we were all facing the inevitable process of goodbye. 

When Mary stepped into our home and our lives, she immediately brought a sense of calm and confidence to us all, even my father. He was a man of high standards and critical eye who was difficult to please. But with Mary, he softened and accepted her. I saw that he trusted her and seemed to feel more at peace as she would sit with him and reminisce about his life, talk about dying, or as she offered him medical care. It was a lovely scene to watch my father spend time with Mary. She also helped the rest of us talk about what was happening, eased our fears, and helped us medically care for him. For me personally, Mary helped me to be fully present in my father's dying process, to feel deeply, to access a certain grace about life and death, and as a result I have been able to feel more at peace too. 

I want to add that in the final hours of my father's life, he was rushed to the hospice unit of a hospital. There Mary met my family and assisted us by advocating for important details of his final care so he would suffer as little as possible. We were able to lean on her and it was a priceless gift. I don't know how we would have managed without her as his final hours were quite difficult. The fact that Mary is both a trained RN, so experienced in the dying process, and has the gift of a intuitive counselor, makes her quite a unique caregiver to the entire family as a loved one dies. 

I will live forever in gratitude for what Mary was able to offer my father and my family. I would urge anyone facing similar circumstances to enlist the services of Mary Porter. No one should have to go through the dying process without her. 

Pamela Serota Cote
July 2017
 

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