Valley hospice volunteers support chronically ill

WASILLA — For Mat-Su Regional volunteers Sandra Falkner and Paul Supina, hospice care is about more than just going through the motions.

Sitting in the home of Arthur Jennings, a retired military man with emphysema and an obvious aptitude for oil painting, Falkner and Supina spoke of the friendships they have formed with him after just seven months of care.

“I look forward to coming to see Art,” Falkner said. “We’ve talked about so many interesting subjects.”

But their first conversation revolved around their “mutual love of art” — and Art.

“He’s multi-talented, and his ego is as large,” Falkner teased.

“I tell people I’m a habitual talk-aholic and a chronic interrupter,” Jennings interjected.

Kidding aside, Falkner called Jennings a “wonderful artist,” something she can easily see as the founder of the therapeutic art program within Mat-Su Regional Home Care and Hospice.

Prior to her return to Alaska, Falkner’s degree in fine arts was sitting rather dormant while she kept busy doing clerical work and starting hospice programs in Florida hospitals. She practically “had the run of the hospital,” she said, but wanted to do more for her patients than just assign them a volunteer.

Falkner’s father, a bomber pilot during World War II, encouraged her to add art to the mix.

“During the war, he used to go to the orphanages … and do artwork with the children,” Falkner said. “I never forgot that.”

When she came back to Alaska for a high school class reunion, she came across some Mat-Su Regional Medical Center personnel and asked about their hospice program. Finding one didn’t exist, she decided to move north in 2006 to help create the hospice and therapeutic art programs that exist today at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.

Jennings said he understands the success of art therapy from a patient’s perspective, but also through the eyes of a volunteer.

In the 1990s, Jennings offered painting lessons to mental health patients in Anchorage.

“(Art) gave them an outlet,” he said. “I just wanted to help.”

And the distraction from depression, from which so many of his “students” suffered, he said, has been invaluable for him as well.

“I can be depressed and they can give (me) a pill or they can send somebody over,” Jennings said, of hospice.

Supina’s introduction to hospice care is a little bit different, and more recent. After being a trumpet player in a military band, he spent many years volunteering as a flight instructor for the Civil Air Patrol. But he “didn’t really consider that volunteering,” he said, because he was getting just as much out of the relationship as he was giving, flying around for free.

Then one day, deep in conversation, a friend told him that he had come to the conclusion that he felt happiest when doing something for others.

“That hit me right between the eyes,” Supina said. “I never thought of that, because I always did stuff for my family and for myself.”

Soon, Supina started visiting senior homes — himself a senior by then — while his wife worked in hospice care in North Carolina. They spent a year in Nome, two years in Galena, and finally, almost five years ago, they moved to the Mat-Su.

“I really enjoy hospice because you get to hear great life stories, and you get perspectives on life that you don’t get normally,” Supina said.

Jennings certainly offers that. While he talks art with Falkner and swaps war stories with Supina, he has also been working on a full-length memoir about life, sex and death since he was “given the gift to write” two and a half years ago.

At that time, Jennings had a “dying and coming back” experience during a three-week stay in the ICU after his right lung collapsed.

“They told me I was gonna die,” Jennings said.

Although he doesn’t have much lung tissue left now, he said, he’s still around — thanks, in large part, to hospice volunteers.

“When your time’s coming, there’s a lot that goes on and you need help really bad,” Jennings said. “The first thing (hospice) did is step in with the paperwork, and that was a huge help.”

For example, Jennings has requested a “do not resuscitate” order in the event his illness leaves him unresponsive. The hospice workers “know how to make it legal.”

“They guided us through that process, and it makes my wife feel good about (the future),” he said.

Having a doctor practically on call for him through a hospice nurse who visits weekly, he said, is another bonus of home care (compared to extended hospital stays or relocation to a nursing home).

“If anything’s wrong, the doctor’s right there, on the phone,” Jennings said. “You can’t get that service from a regular hospital.”

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.