One sunny afternoon last week, I saw someone getting into my car outside the bottle and can redemption center on Waldo Street.

“Thought I was taking off with your car, didn’t you?” said Karen Porter, laughing.

Well, the two cars are the same size and color.

We began a conversation that helped me decide the subject for this column.

Karen had been away from Rumford more than not over many months. She’d been in southern Maine working with one of her sisters to care for the third who was terminally ill. She told me she had taken Beacon Hospice volunteer training last summer.

“I don’t think I could have handled the situation, understood what was happening and talked with Nancy and the family without the hospice volunteer training,” she said.

Karen and I continued our talk later that day by phone, out of the wind. She’d first learned about hospice care from her sister-in-law who works at the Mayo Clinic. She then saw the training opportunity in Vocational Region 9’s adult education list. The course and the screening for volunteers includes a four-hour orientation followed by six, three-hour, once-a-week classes.

Like Karen, many hospice volunteers have had experience at home with an end-of-life situation. Hospice volunteering is something they could give back.

Chery Gallant said her hospice volunteer work at Victorian Villa in Canton is done “honor my mother, who was in care at Rumford Community Home for four years.”

There are roughly 60 Beacon hospice volunteers serving 200 to 300 patients in the Lewiston-Auburn region, volunteer coordinator Elizabeth Herrick said. Six of them are recent graduates of the program: Cynthia Theriault, Mexico; Leonard Roy, Rumford; Marie Martel, Peru; Orella Puiia, Mexico; George Moron Jr., Mexico; and Karen Porter, Rumford.

Hospice volunteers perform their labors of love in end-of-life settings that some people would prefer not to think about. They are, as Herrick says, “amazing.”

Beacon’s next hospice training series will be in Farmington. For information call 800-981-4635.

Linda Farr Macgregor is a freelance writer; contact: [email protected]