I have written before about my experience with hospice care when my mom was in her last days. It was a tremendously moving time for me, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I basically moved into her room for 6 days, and we got to spend every one of those days together. I will never forget how precious to me that time was, but apparently, not everyone has a family member with the time and the bandwidth to be with them to the last. Today, I’m writing about an incredible group of people who have dedicated themselves to making sure no one in hospice dies alone.

In 1986, Oregon nurse Sandra Clarke had a patient ask her to stay with him. She was busy, so she had to put him off a bit. But when she went back to check on him, the man had died. Her inability to satisfy such a simple, human request eventually led her to help found the No One Dies Alone Foundation (NODA) in 2001. She and others in the healthcare industry noticed that many of their patients in hospice care were passing without family and friends around them, so the organization uses volunteers (called compassionate companions) to stay with these lonely souls so they don’t have to feel alone.

The NODA program now operates in hospitals from all across the country and in a few other countries as well. Sandra Clarke wrote a No One Dies Alone manual and has distributed it to hundreds of hospitals, hospices, and AIDS end-of-life facilities across the globe.

NODA partners with local hospice and palliative care organizations. The hospice workers assess each patient’s needs, and let NODA know when there is a gap to be filled.

There is no centralized website for the volunteer organizations the espouse the NODA mission, but a Google search of (in quotation marks) “No one dies alone” and your city or state should turn up your local chapter. And you can read the Johns Hopkins University version of the manual here.