Blue Ridge Hospice chaplains are available to provide our patients and their families with spiritual care during their end-of-life journey. Our Interfaith Chaplains provide support through presence, counsel, prayer, or religious rituals, but they are also available to provide comfort in other ways. “We do a lot of legacy work,” says Larissa Blechman, who has worked as a hospice chaplain for 14 years, with more than three years at BRH.

“Patients often want to look back on their lives and sometimes find there are things they want to process or resolve before they die, and we can help with that.”

But at the same time patients are often determined to live their lives to the fullest in the time they have left. We help patients celebrate joyous life events such as birthdays, holidays, and weddings. “I’ve done a number of wedding vowel renewals,” says Larissa, “but until this year I had never facilitated a full-blown legal wedding.”

“My patient was only in his sixties, but he had terminal cancer and was close to becoming bedbound. He and his partner had been together for a long time, yet they had never married – and he wanted to change that.” Together with other staff at Blue Ridge Hospice, Larissa arranged for the paperwork and everything else that needed to be taken care of to conduct a small intimate ceremony. The patient wanted to get married at noon, at home, near the neighborhood church so that the familiar church bells would play while they were wed. “We weathered the rain on their back porch and I had to time the ceremony just right, to make sure they could say ‘I do’ as the church bells rang and the clock struck 12:00.”

“I thought it was such a beautiful commitment to life, even when this patient was dying. It’s a reminder that life is so fragile and so tenacious at the same time,” says Larissa.

“There was nothing that was going to stop our patient from marrying his partner that day.”

“It’s something I see a lot in my work at Blue Ridge Hospice – the juxtaposition between life and death, endings, and new beginnings.”

“A quote that has been my mantra all these years is one by spiritual teacher Ram Dass. He says, ‘We are all just walking each other home.’ It’s special to me because that’s what I do every day – walk beside our patients and guide them as we figure it out together.”