Over a decade of hospice care provided
The most important conversation I have with a family almost never happens at the bedside.
It happens in the driveway. On the porch. In the kitchen at eleven at night, after everyone else has gone to bed. That's where a daughter finally stops me, lowers her voice, and asks the thing she's been carrying around all week.
How long?
And then — almost every single time — she apologizes for asking.
She shouldn't. She's not being morbid. She's trying to decide whether to buy the plane ticket. Whether to take the leave now or later. Whether to call her brother tonight or wait until morning. Asking is the most responsible thing she'll do that week. But nobody has told her that, so she carries the guilt along with everything else.
I'm Mik, I've been a nurse for over ten years, most of it in hospice.
In that time I've walked into hundreds of homes during the hardest week those families will ever have. I've sat on the edge of couches while people asked me questions they couldn't ask anyone else. Is this normal. What do I do now. How will I know. I've explained the same things in a hundred different kitchens, to a hundred different people who each thought they were the only one who didn't know.
Here's what I kept noticing: families are sent home with a folder and a phone number. That's it. Then the front door closes and they're alone with a person they love and a hundred decisions nobody prepared them for. They're not failing. They were never taught. There's a difference, and almost nobody says it out loud.
I started @prepforhospice because the questions families asked me at eleven at night were the same questions, over and over, and there was no reason they should have had to wait for a nurse to show up to get an answer.
And I wrote this guide because there's only one of me, and I can't be in every kitchen.
There is a map for how this usually goes, and having it in your hands ahead of time is the difference between a week spent panicking and a week spent present.
No map covers the whole territory — there will be turns and other elements nobody can see coming, and I'll tell you that plainly rather than pretend otherwise. But you should not be walking it blind. What I believe is simple. Dying at home should not be something a family survives by accident.
You're not going to remember whether you organized the medications perfectly. You're going to remember how you felt in that room.
I wrote this guide so that what you carry afterward is lighter. So there are fewer moments you'd give anything to take back, and more of the ones you'd keep. So that when you look back on this week — and you will, for a long time — you can say that you did the best anyone could have done with what you knew, and actually believe it.
That's what all of this is for.
I've been in this room before over a hundred times. Let me walk you through it.
