Children's hospice service: when children have to die

main content

Death is a taboo, probably many times more when it comes to the death of a child. Unlike older people who have lived their lives, a piece of the future always dies with a child. It is particularly difficult for the family. But also those who support the mothers and fathers during this time take a big part. Uta Freund is one of them. She works on a voluntary basis for an outpatient children’s hospice service. She told Grit Krause about her experiences.

by Grit Krause, MDR KULTUR

Dying and death have been part of Uta Freund’s life for several years now, since 2011 she has accompanied people on their last path. The 55-year-old from Malschwitz near Bautzen is a volunteer at the Christian Hospice Service Görlitz and as such she visits the seriously ill, the dying and their relatives at home.

I always see myself as a relief when I go to the Familys get.

Uta Freund, hospice worker

Ute Freund continues: "The husband or wife, depending on who is seriously ill, can simply do things that are important – or not important: go to the hairdresser, go to cosmetics, meet a friend … But the sick person has someone there, he is not alone. And there are many different ones: some want to speak, some just want to have read aloud, some want to have a prayer. But it’s never sad."

Listen and approach the other

A quality She is a listener, says Uta Freund, and it is easy for her to approach strangers. An important prerequisite for the outpatient hospice service, since the employees are often called at short notice when the families are in need of a man or woman. In the meantime, however, an eight-year-old boy has also been among her protégés and Uta Freund has been visiting him for over three quarters of a year.

This child had a brain tumor and was only successfully operated on. But there are now metastases in the spinal cord and he is now in a wheelchair. We never know how long such an escort is.

Uta Freund, hospice worker

You can clearly see how close you are to his fate. However, Uta Freund also tells of a happy little boy who likes to do handicrafts, just like her, and then her eyes shine. "The first time made me very sad, two or three times during the visits: I got in the car and cried because Ben-Titus told a lot about the past when he was in kindergarten and Had friends. All of that has disappeared. And now I don’t feel that anymore."

We talk a lot about the now, not about dying.

Uta Freund, hospice worker

Spend time with others

Uta Freund herself has three grown-up children, she says, and a granddaughter. That is why she feels it is great freedom to give her time gratefully and with humility to others. She says: "The ideal case is: I did this escort, I get in the car and get out of here and say: Uta, did your job, now it’s family again. It’s not that it always resonates like that."

However, she can’t always strip everything like that, so in her case you need an understanding husband and brothers and sisters with whom she can pray if it is too hopeless. One carries the other’s burden, that is how Uta Freund understands her job. But she also leads the DEFA feature film of the same name, which had impressed her at the end of the 1980s. He suspects that he laid the foundation stone for her engagement today.

She hardly sees her own life affected, except that Uta Freund and her husband have a proxy. In addition, the topic now determines the selection of her reading when she presents books at the local school on the reading day in November: "Lately I’ve been looking for literature about death, like ‘Oscar and the Lady in Rosa’ by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Or ‘Fate is a lousy traitor’, that’s an American book for young people … So that you simply pass it on to children and young people, this way of dealing with death, that it can really affect my friend from one day to the next. And then how do I deal with it: do not change the side of the street, but accompany and visit him. It is close to my heart."

Farewells are always difficult, Uta Freund knows from experience. Maybe the boy with cancer will hit her particularly hard. But that doesn’t matter as long as she can experience him here and now week after week: