Dying words recorded for posterity

Geelong palliative care volunteers have won state recognition for their work preserving dying patients’ treasured memories.
The State Government this week awarded a Barwon Health program where 14 volunteers recorded the patients’ life stories and messages for loved ones.
Dignity Therapy Volunteer Team’s Tonya Court said it was humbling and gratifying to become connected to strangers through such a unique and bittersweet experience.
“What the volunteers do enables treasures and pockets of wisdom to be recorded down,” she said.
“The family and generations to come will be able to remember and piece together the person now gone in physical aspect, but remembered in the soulful realm.
“It’s an amazing process by which the human spirit, all broken and perhaps ready to give in to the inevitable, arises one last time to translate all those precious memories.”
Barwon Health Palliative Care program manager Jacqui White said volunteers went above and beyond to offer the therapeutic service.
The volunteers run the Dignity Therapy program at the McKellar Centre using skills from backgrounds including journalism, social work, politics and school administration.
“They’ll come after hours and on weekends, and they provide a really high level of support.” Ms White said.
“It’s not an enormous group of volunteers, but they have showed a great commitment to dignity therapy, which is a really time-intensive therapeutic intervention.”