Compassionate partnership
By Sean Feagan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Confronting death is daunting, but a new project is providing resources to help in a centralized and comfortable space.
Strathmore Municipal Library and the Wheatland and Area Hospice Society (WAHS) are partnering to create the “compassionate corner,” a dedicated space within the library for access to resources on death, dying, supportive care and coping with end of life. These resources are suitable for any age group and focus on aspects of grief, stress of caregiving, and loss during illness and death.
The space will provide the community with an array of resources helpful at times of grief, terminal illness or other challenging situations, in one place, explained Rachel Dick Hughes, director of library services with the Strathmore library.
“The library has had those kinds of items for a long time, but they don’t really circulate well, and a lot of people don’t go to the library for those types of things – they just kind of get lost in the books we have there.”
These resources can be helpful when confronting death and dying, said Joni McNeely, WAHS president.
“Educational resources can increase literacy about palliative care and can support people at the end of life, as well as their families,” she said.
The compassionate corner will help bring the topic of death out of the shadows, said Teri McKinnon, WAHS director of community relations.
“We wanted to bring to the forefront that public forum for offering compassion and resources in grief and dying,” she said. “Often people do it very privately and often it is very lonely.”
The compassionate corner will help bring them together in one place, so people can access them and not feel as alone,
“A compassionate corner means that they have a single, directed place to go,” added McKinnon. “This is a nice place for them to go within the library to just gather some resources so that they might be able to help themselves through a path they didn’t really know they were on.”
The project was helped by the library’s existing resources on the topic, spanning 65 titles. But a wish list has also been created of new resources to be added, for which WAHS will donate to the library to add these tiles to their collection. Each month, the space will focus on a different topic.
The space will provide a place for people to find resources they might not have known existed, inside the library and beyond, said Dick Hughes.
“We want to give people a chance to feel less alone, knowing that other people in the community are looking for the same kind of things,” she said. “There will also be (WAHS) resources, so hopefully we can connect them to local organizations that can support them too.”