Catholic hospice cares for family in time of need

    Harvey Crowley Couch III had just retired in 2012 after serving more than 40 years as a professor of law at Tulane University Law School. Harvey and his wife Duane, faithful members of the St. Thomas More campus ministry center at Tulane, had looked forward to his retirement, which surely would provide more time for him to enjoy his grandchildren and pursue his passion for reading.
    Harvey loved to read. At his Tulane retirement party, he beamed when professor Bob Force handed over a huge wrapped box as his retirement gift. Inside were four successively smaller wrapped boxes, the last containing a rare first edition of a book he cherished.
    “Although he was a great law professor, he was really a historian at heart,” Force said. “He really studied history.”
    Harvey turned 77 in February. About six weeks ago, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw that he was dropping a few pounds. He was a little more fatigued than usual. He went to the doctor. It was stomach cancer, with a tumor too advanced to be removed surgically or to be helped by radiation.
    Then, on Nov. 7, six weeks after he was first diagnosed with cancer, Harvey died.
    The incredible swiftness of Harvey’s death – which can be both a blessing and a burden – was eased in a tangible way by Notre Dame Hospice, which assumed Harvey’s care in those final days when the world stopped for Duane.
    For more than a month, she had managed to ferry Harvey to oncology appointments hoping for a miracle, but he got progressively weaker. In the business of life and death, small kindnesses and bedside manner mean a lot, particularly when it is your husband who is suffering. You are looking for human compassion, not the regurgitation of statistical probabilities, which can’t be taught in medical school. You either have bedside manner or you don’t.
    When Lee Eagan, Duane’s brother, made the call to Notre Dame Hospice, the idea was to find a way for Harvey to make a peaceful journey home.
    “I told Duane, ‘You need somebody to care both for you and your husband,’” Eagan said. “I said, ‘Let’s call Notre Dame.’”
    Twenty minutes after Eagan left a message, the phone rang. The next day, Gina DiLeo, a registered nurse and case manager for Notre Dame Hospice, came to the Couches’ home. She met privately with both.
    “Duane came out saying, ‘This lady is an angel. She handled Harvey’s questions and held his hand,’” Eagan said. “Gina came back into the living room, and she and Duane are holding hands and telling stories. She told us, ‘We’re going to need this medicine, but you don’t need that medicine.’ On a scale of 1 to 10, she was a 15. The whole team was singing from the same sheet of music.”
      DiLeo loves her job, which she treats as a vocation. She was in her final year at LSU Nursing School in 1978 when her father, Dr. Vincent DiLeo, a pediatrician, was dying of leukemia at the age of 54.
    “I would come home from a date, and the poor man was having such trouble breathing,” DiLeo said. “Listening to him breathe, I knew we would probably have to bring him back into the hospital. I was just wishing he would stop breathing. I didn’t know what I was wishing for. I was wishing for hospice so he could pass away in his own bedroom. They didn’t have anything like hospice then.”
    DiLeo worked “happily” as a pediatric nurse for 15 years until she felt the call to become a hospice nurse. As a Catholic, she wanted to work for a Catholic hospice that would take a team approach to the patients’ physical and spiritual needs.
    While there are many misconceptions about hospice, this is the biggest one: “The biggest complaint I receive from families is, ‘We wish we had known about this sooner.’”
    Eagan said Jesuit Father Stephen Rowntree came to the house the Saturday before Harvey died and celebrated Mass for the entire family, pausing at the sign of peace to place his hands on Harvey’s head and make the sign of the cross. He invited everyone in the room to do the same thing.
    When another family member was seriously injured in a car accident in the 1990s, the entire family had gathered like that at Children’s Hospital. Jesuit Father Harry Tompson came in the middle of the night to pray. Later, the family finished with a rosary. Try as they might, no one knew the exact words to the “Memorare.” There was no Internet back then.
    Harvey retreated to the sofa and pulled out his yellow legal pad. In perfect script, he wrote down the “Memorare,” word for word.
    “I’ll never forget that to this day,” Eagan said. “There wasn’t a scratch-out or a correction. I can’t even address an envelope without making a correction.”
    And now, whenever there is a family crisis, the tradition that Harvey started with his yellow legal pad is sacred. Using the Internet, one family member will write the first sentence of the “Memorare” – “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession was left unaided.”
    And then another family member picks up the prayer and adds the next sentence, and so on, until it is complete. Like Harvey’s life, there is a sacred nature to finishing the race and keeping the faith.
    “He has had a beautiful death,” Eagan said.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.