From a Calling to a Legacy: Christy Whitney on Hospice, Leadership & Letting Go

The holiday season is often filled with joy — but it can also be a time of reflection, loss, and quiet grief.

In this powerful and deeply human conversation, we sit down with Christy Whitney Borchard, a pioneering hospice and palliative care leader whose life’s work has shaped end-of-life care in western Colorado and far beyond.

Christy didn’t set out to build a legacy — the work found her. What followed was a thirty-year journey of service, compassion, leadership, and courage, founding what would become one of the most respected hospice organizations in the country. Now, she shares what it means to step away from the work that defined her — and trust what comes next.

This episode is not just about hospice. It’s about calling, identity, leadership, grief, service, and the courage to let go when a chapter is complete.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How Christy found her life’s work — and how it found her
• What hospice really means for patients, families, and communities
• Leading with compassion in emotionally complex environments
• Navigating retirement after building something from the ground up
• Redefining legacy beyond titles, roles, and accomplishments
• Why learning to let go can be a powerful act of love

Whether you’re grieving, reflecting, transitioning, or simply listening quietly during the holidays, this episode offers wisdom, warmth, and perspective that lingers long after the final word.

🎧 Listen, reflect, and share with someone who may need this conversation today.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Vision And Legacy
• 1:04 Introducing Christy And The Why
• 2:44 A Family’s First Hospice Experience
• 6:14 Early Influences And Hospice Origins
• 15:50 From Volunteer Roots To Leadership
• 24:50 Building A Movement In Grand Junction
• 32:20 Fundraising As A Fork In The Road
• 38:12 Community Webs And Programs That Stick
• 45:08 Expanding Across The Western Slope
• 52:20 Kids, Grief, And Healing By Doing
• 1:01:10 International Insights On Bereavement
• 1:09:24 Family Grief Styles And Patience
• 1:16:42 Retirement, Culture Shifts, And Letting Go
• 1:24:40 Reinventing Purpose: The Meeker Store
• 1:31:20 Hospice vs Palliative Care: What’s Different
• 1:41:48 Holidays, The “Holiday Effect,” And Rituals

Transcript

Kellie: 0:02

Some lives aren't shaped by a single plan, but by the courage to follow each calling as it reveals itself. Today's conversation is about vision, service, and the legacy we create when we're willing to step forward even without knowing what comes next. Christy Whitney is a pioneering leader who spent her career walking alongside people at the most sacred and fragile moments of living. It was a career that found her, and over time, she helped transform end-of-life care, not just locally, but around the world.

Erin: 0:32

But this story isn't just about what Christy built. It's about why. From personal loss to professional calling. From founding Hope West, one of the most respected hospice and palliative care organizations in the country, to navigating retirement after more than 30 years of leadership, Christy shares what it means to live with passion and purpose, and then let go with courage, clarity, and deep humanity.

Kellie: 0:57

At a time when many of us are reflecting, reading, and remembering, this conversation invites us to rethink hospice, service, and legacy, to ask what it truly means to honor life when one chapter closes and another begins.

Erin: 1:11

Welcome to the P-I-G. We're Kellie and Erin, sisters, best friends, sometimes polar opposites, but always deeply connected by the life and love of the woman who was brave enough to let hospice in. Our mother, Marsha.

Christy Whitney: 1:37

Thank you.

Kellie: 1:38

We purposefully asked you to join us for a Christmas Eve special for a number of reasons. One, it's been a few years now since you've retired, and your life was truly a living legacy in how you built your career, in how you absolutely transformed hospice and palliative care in Western Colorado, our connection to hospice and Hope West through our mother, who was one of your very first patients in 1994. We'll talk a little bit about that. And this is a time of year where so many people are reflecting on life, love, loss, and legacy through the lens of how their life has transformed or how their life has unfolded. For us, we're looking at it through the lens of our very mission for this podcast, which is purpose, intention, and gratitude. And our history, you and me, goes back a long, long way. And so I have a couple things to share with you. And hopefully I won't start crying right off the bat because I wear my emotions on my sleeve. But having grown up in this community, the day that our mom entered hospice care and your program was very brand new, she'd fought it for a long time because she was scared of what hospice meant, even though she knew she was terminal. And hospice came in on a Friday afternoon. We had, I think our nurse's name was Sue, if I remember correctly. She was with us all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and our mom passed at 8 a.m. on Monday morning. Erin happened to be home that weekend from high school. She was going to a boarding school in Colorado Springs, and I spent the whole weekend with our mom at home and Erin. And over the weekend, our mother said, if I had only known sooner how wonderful this would be, not for me, but for all of you, I actually would have done it a long time ago. Wow. And that has always stayed with me. And so as you developed your career and hospice and palliative care of Western Colorado, which became Hope West when I went to work for you in the about 20, I want to say it was about 2009. Yeah. 2010 has always been near and dear to my heart. And then in 2008, you and I were selected along with Judy Burford for the Women's Foundation of Colorado, Colorado Woman of the Year Award. They typically only gave it to one person, and they selected three people that year from different generations. That was neat. And it was Judy, it was you. And I was very honored and privileged to have been selected for that honor. And I remember what a thrill it was for me to receive that word alongside you because I had such admiration and respect for the work that you were doing. I was always surprised that you and our mother weren't the best of friends because we would have been, I'm sure. The two of you are so much alike. Beautiful, always decked out in gorgeous colors, running nonprofits, expanding them locally, regionally, nationally, receiving recognition and awards. And to come to work for Hope West for that period of time was one of the great joys and privileges of my career. And along with our mom, we lost our grandma who lived to be 101. She actually died on December 23rd, 2018. And that's part of the reason why, as a patient of hospice, we wanted to both honor our mother, honor her, honor your dad, who died in your own care on Christmas Eve, your mom who you served, and all of the people who not only work in that industry and are caretakers and leading that mission that you have now retired and left, not left behind, but left behind. But all the people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people whose lives have been touched through your work. So we're very excited for this conversation. And I would just like to turn it over to you to really talk about your journey into hospice and into leadership and what that really meant for you.

Christy Whitney: 6:14

Well, it's sometimes hard to figure out where to begin. But I got married in college and I married the kid across the street. And his mom and I were a lot closer than probably me and him. And we were really great friends. And while I was in college studying to be a nurse, she got sick with pancreatic cancer, and she ended up dying on the floor that I ended up working on as my first job as a nurse. Wow. Prior to that, when I was a nursing student, is when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross really was in Chicago and she had just written her book, and I heard her speak, and she was a colleague of a doctor that I was working with as a student at the Heinz VA. And I got really fascinated by her work and this whole notion that there were no dying patients in the University of Chicago Hospital. You know, she was like the lone person who even noticed these things. And then this doctor that I happened to be assigned to, kind of in a weird way, who ironically died of a like a brain hemorrhage or something, like on the floor. I mean, like just you know, young and gone. And so I had all these kind of weird kind of death-related things that had happened to me. And it got me interested in the subject of death and dying. Then I became a nurse, then I became aware of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and bereavement, and they're called the IWG. And they wrote a statement on what the rights should be for a dying patient. I remember being a nurse, and this is before my mother-in-law was a patient there, and tacking that up on the bullet board in the nurses' station in the med surgeon in the hospital that I worked in Chicago, just thinking it was important, you know, for people to know. And I think that St. Christopher's made a movie about that time that came out on TV, actually. And so I got kind of interested in all of that. But, you know, there was no hospice um in the United States at that time. So I experienced the whole death of my mother-in-law, which was really like beyond belief bad. And um, not only writhing in pain and in a hospital for a month and a half, and the family splitting apart over grief and who was going to care for what, and on and on, you know, and I thought nobody should ever have to experience this again. And so that kind of left a lasting impression on me. But then time kind of rolled on. You know, I moved from Chicago to Durango, became a med surge nurse again, and there was no hospice or anything like that around. And my best friend Anna Glenny got snowed in and uh typical. If you're involved in anything in Denver, it could be like eight feet of snow in Durango, and we'd get to Denver and everything would be closed. And so the meetings would be canceled, and we would be there stuck, you know. And we're like, what the heck? These people don't know how to deal with snow. So this happened to Anna. She got to Denver for the meeting, some kind of nursing meeting or something, and the meeting was canceled, and she didn't have anything to do. So she heard about this hospice, which was a nursing home in Denver, and she went and visited it. And she came back and she was just all stars in her eyes, crazy, you know, enthusiastic. Her husband is an ER doctor. So they both got all hepped up about wow how cool this all was, and decided to go to Hospice of Marine, California. At that point in time, it was so early in the hospice movement, they would take interdisciplinary teams and take them to California, or you'd pay your way to California, and then they would spend a week with you and teach you all the principles of hospice, pain management, but you know, everything, you know, how to do it, volunteers, the whole business. And they came back to Durango and decided to start a hospice. Now, when I think about that, I think that's really pretty wild because you know there were no hospices way across the United States, and there were like 12,000 people in Durango in 19, you know, 80. I think 1979, this was that they started the hospice. So Anna, being my best friend, she wanted to know if I wanted to be a volunteer hospice nurse. I said, Oh, probably not. And she said, Well, would you at least teach uh a nutrition? I didn't, I can't remember if I had had my son or I think my son had just been born or something. She wanted to know if I would teach end-of-life nutrition, which I knew nothing about, but of course I read up on it and taught it at the volunteer training. And the volunteer trainings in those days were really pretty wild. And I have to kind of describe them because it probably is the stuff that has stayed with me through my whole career. That I'm sad that the people doing this work now didn't have these experiences. So here we were in all volunteer hospice. And who was in the room? You know, ER doctors, ER nurses, head nurses of psych units, head nurses of ortho units, all these medical professionals, you know, social workers, chaplains, all these people who had like full-time jobs, but they all came together to learn how to do hospice. And in those days, there was um a woman whose name I'm not gonna recall, Deanna Edwards. I didn't recall it, who wrote a song, Teach Me to Die. And we would sing that song at volunteer training. And basically it goes, you know, Teach Me to Die, hold on to my head. I have so many questions, things I don't understand. That's just the first line of it, but it goes on and on and many, many verses. So these workshops, if you will, were pretty life-changing. I mean, we did things like wrote our own obituaries, we did we did all, you know, all the things, anything you could kind of do on the topic. And so time marched on, and I didn't become a hospice nurse until I think they were short a nurse one day. So my best friend Anna called me and said, Would you just come really take this one patient? Because we're kind of short of nurse. And I said, Oh, okay, you know, so I took the patient. About that time I was getting super disillusioned with the hospital, and I wasn't sure I could even work there anymore because I was just, it was just a really in bad shape, bad care, bad staffing, bad everything. And I told my friend Anna I was going to leave nursing and go to law school. That really I'd always wanted to be a lawyer, and that's what I was gonna do. I just hated nursing, I couldn't stand it, and uh that was what I was gonna do. So she said, Well, I think you should volunteer as a hospice nurse because maybe it would get you reinvigorated about being a nurse. So that was her line, and I bought it, and so one thing led to another, and my friend Anna had four children. So as time rolled on, I mean, it wasn't but it seemed like a blink of an eye that she had like four teenagers and they were like all consuming. So she stepped down as the director and hired somebody else who really didn't know healthcare and she really didn't want to do it, and asked me if I would do it part-time, like 10 hours a week. So I'll never forget our first budget was three thousand dollars, and we got a grant from course for that three thousand dollars, and it paid my salary. I was always kind of a rule follower, so I had an accountant do a review. I couldn't, we couldn't afford an audit, but I did a review of our financials, you know. And he said, How come you're exactly balanced to the penny? I said, Oh, well, since I'm the only one who gets paid when we ran out of money, I just didn't get paid anymore. So that was my first hospice job. And you know, all volunteer hospice was very exciting, very demanding, kind of all-consuming to tell you the truth. And then I got pregnant with the twins and I decided, oh, I can't do this anymore. I took a job in a doctor's office. I, you know, law school was out, but I really liked hospice and thought I kind of left hospice for good, but one thing led to another. I and the person who came to replace me ended up quitting, and then I went back. So, anyhow, I sort of ran this hospice as a hobby in my other jobs. So ran the hospice and worked in a doctor's office. Then I ran the hospice and worked as the quality director for the hospital part-time. Then when I was at the hospital, they asked me if I would run the hospice, do the quality job, and maybe do home health too. And so I did that. And about that time, Medicare decided it was going to pay for hospice. Well, that was very controversial across the United States. And so I wanted to go to the national meeting. And one of our volunteers, who was a nurse, and her husband had been the city manager in uh Los Alamos, and she got a copy of the Los Alamos city budget because I'd never done a budget before. She said, Well, I got a copy of the Los Alamos, you can use that. So that was my first budgeting experience. And she also was kind of a you know, in the know kind of person. And she said, Well, I think you should go to this conference. And I said, Well, I don't have any money to get there. I mean, I have little kids and we don't have a lot of money. And she said, Well, I thought the funeral home director would pay for it. And I'm like, really? So I went and asked him, and he said, sure, he paid for it. So I went off to the conference, and then I kind of got involved because there look we're like maybe, I don't know, a hundred hospices in the United States, something like that. So it was easy to be involved because you just met everybody and kind of knew everybody, and then I was sad because I didn't have money to keep going. I got the funeral home director paid for twice, and then I thought I really didn't know if I could keep going. And this other volunteer said, Well, board members get paid, I mean, they get their way paid to the meeting, right? I'm like, Yeah. And she said, Well, why don't you run for the board? And I said, Me run for the board and national board. She's like, Well, I don't know why not. She said, All I can say, you know, might not win, who cares? But you at least tried. So I'm like, Oh, okay. So I apply. It's funny when I look back, I so that must have been about 1983, maybe. And a friend of mine who's a doctor at Fox Chase, he's retired now, but he said, I he said, I love to tell the story about you running for the board because in those days everybody had to give up, get up and give a speech. And you got up very proudly and said you were from Durango, Colorado, and that you ran the hospice and you were very proud that you had served 12 patients last year. And everyone turned to each other and said, Did she say 12? Did she say 12? Did she say 12? But somehow I won. And so I got elected to the board. So then I started going for free. And then one thing led to another, and I, you know, you just meet people. So I ended up with a lot of friends nationally through the National Hospice Organization. And, you know, one thing led to another Medicare started hospice, and the hospital wanted me to become Medicare certified so we could get revenue, and but no one in billing could figure it out. So I ended up doing the billing for the hospice. I mean, this is how I learned math, I guess. Just all kinds of goofy things like that. Then they required because I was a manager at the hospital that I have to be the re weekend supervisor, which was really a joke because, like I said, I'm kind of a budget nurse, not so much a put an NG tube down nurse. Oh my god, I was a nervous wreck doing that, and finally I got out of it. But I had done kind of every job in the hospital because then they gave me the quality over the physician. So I was over the medical staff quality. So that was a big job. And pretty soon I kind of knew my way around the hospital. So when my boss decided to retire, she told them that I should be hired as the vice president of patient care for the hospital. So I took that job. And that was really my first. I mean, not that I didn't manage departments and manage people, but I always said I thought managing paid people was kind of a breeze compared to managing people who weren't paid. I mean, I was telling a friend of mine one time, she was running a volunteer hospice in Salt Lake and they had just become Medicare certified, and she was really nervous that everyone was going to be paid. I said, You you have like a hundred people you supervise as volunteers to do that. You could have a thousand. So anyhow, so those are the early days of hospice, and then I, you know, got promoted, and then the goofy thing is this is fun more than you want to know, but uh at the hospital, I really loved that job. I and I was good at it. But the funny thing happened, funny but not funny. My boss, who was 43, died of a brain tumor. Oh, goodness. In a day. I mean, literally, I was supposed to fly to Washington, DC the next day with my boss to lobby for a status for regional referral center for the hospital so we can get more money and blah, blah, blah. And by that time, I had been in graduate school, finished graduate school, and I'd done an internship in Washington, D.C. So I knew a lot of people there and da-da-da. So I was gonna do all this. And lo and behold, my boss dies, and the person he sends with me is this kind of third vice president he had the system, this the Catholic healthcare system had put on our team, who had been one of the Iran hostages. Wow, he had been the hospital administrator in Beirut, wow, and resurfaced in the United States. But before he left, there were no DRGs. I mean, he ran and he ran a for-profit hospital. I mean, he really didn't know anything about what we did, and only in a system wisdom could they have promoted someone like that over us. So they gave him the job. And that day I picked up the phone because I had been recruited to Washington, DC, pretty relentlessly for this one job. And I called my friend Ann who was on the board, and I said, Is that job still open by any chance? And she said, Well, we're in the final interviews, but if you're interested, um, we'll keep it open and you can apply. So I pretty much flew to Washington, DC, got the job, and moved. It was and it was running a hospice, you know, a big hospice. Yeah, and they owned a hospital. So that was interesting. They had an inpatient unit, but it had the licenses. Hospital, so they were looking for someone who knew how to run a hospital. So that's kind of how my life kind of accidentally pieced together. So that probably gave me the confidence, you know, when people I knew in Grand Junction, and I knew people in Grand Junction from nursing associations, stuff like that. You know, Kieran Hildebrand who owned UK. Yes, of course. Okay, so Karen was a vice president in the same system I was in Kansas, and her husband took a job in Grand Junction. And I came up to a meeting in Grand Junction one day, and there she stood in the hallway. And the reason I knew her is we were supposed to give a speech, like within the next couple of weeks, at this big conference for hospital boards in California. And she and I were the keynote speakers, and here she was not going to be in her job. So I'm like, oh my God. What a small world. Yeah. Yeah. So Karen and I've been friends since then, and she was on the hospice formation board. And so she always says she's the one who got me to Grand Junction. I don't know. It's a long story how I got there. So, but I knew I didn't want to stay in DC for a long time. And by that time, I had gotten divorced. And my husband hated Washington, DC. I could have lived there my whole life. I kind of was adapted to it, I think. I didn't mind traffic. And my kids had a lot of great things to do, and it was nice. But it was a very hard place to be a single mom.

Kellie: 21:16

Yeah, I bet.

Christy Whitney: 21:18

You know, you had to have a summer girl, and I didn't have the money to do everybody in my neighborhood and had nannies except for me because I couldn't afford it. So uh I decided to take the job in Grand Junction and start this hospice from scratch. I had run a hospice, so I, you know, I knew what I was doing, but in that point in time, it really was interesting because nobody really knew what hospice was. There had been two hospices in Grand Junction, and they were kind of associated with the hospital-based home health agencies, and they kind of had wars with each other and never really kind of developed, and people really didn't know what they were doing. And you know, it was not good. And so when I came to town, I told the board, I said I really don't want to inherit any employees. I want to pick all the employees because I've already done that once. I mean, I had to the hospice I went to run in Washington, DC was maybe 15 years old, however old it was, 15 years old about, they were pretty much bankrupt. I had to pull them from the brink, and I can remember saying to the board, you want to do this fast or slow, because if you want to do it fast, I gotta fire half the people because they're not they're not gonna make it. Or I can do it slower and try to teach them and sort through who can do their job and who you know can't, and stuff like that. And so I'd already done that once. I didn't want to keep doing this. So um, so then I just started, you know, and when I looked at the budget, the budget wasn't gonna work, and it was short money, and they had forgotten to put in money for an office or any office equipment, oh no, or any anything, any secretary, any, you know, anything because they were so used to hospice being a sub-department, you know, of another department in a hospital, they really never thought about what it would take, like you know, utility bills and stuff like that. So I told them it wasn't gonna work, the budget wasn't gonna work. And these hospitals had all given $25,000 a year for three years and the HMO. So that's five institutions. And I told them I good news is I could do it on that amount of money, but I needed all the money now. So they gave me all the money now, which is kind of amazing. Wow, and then I still didn't have enough money, you know, for everything. So I went to the VA because I had volunteered for the VA. When I was in Washington, DC, a friend of mine asked me if I would volunteer for the VA to teach hospice across the United States and help write a book, like a guide to hospice for the VA, which I did. And they always felt bad, I think, that they didn't pay me. Even I thought it was a blast. I mean, I didn't mind doing it as a volunteer, but they didn't have the money to pay me, so I just did it for free. So I knew I went around the central VA office, so I guess that gave me the guts to go ask the hospital administrator, the VA, whether we could have free office space. And by the way, a free doctor and a dietitian and a couple other things. And I got all of them. Wow. He gave me they gave me an award. So I thought that was pretty funny. When I think back about my job and what I did or didn't do, these are how all the pieces are interconnected, and somehow I feel like I didn't orchestrate it so much as I paid attention. Yeah. Paid attention and did what came naturally to me, which was to help people. I was interested in stuff. I like people, I'm an extrovert, you know. I just always kind of bounced around doing what seemed like the right thing to do, and ended up in this great job. Someone asked me how I had the vision, you know, to create hope was. I said I didn't really have one. I really had a one foot in front of the other vision of do whatever the you know burning platform was in front of me and get that done and then do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But the nice thing that also happened in my job in Washington, DC, Hospice Northern Virginia, which is now capital carrying, a huge hospice now, they relied a lot on fundraising. And they raised about $2 million a year, $1.2 million, a lot of money. I didn't know anything about raising money at the time. And they had a really dynamite development director. And she taught me everything. I mean, anything I know really about fundraising, I learned from her. Um, ironically, she ended up knowing Kathy O'Shea. I mean, they got to be friends from the development world. I mean, it's just really such a small world. But I I guess I drank the Kool-Aid in terms of if you want to do anything that truly makes a difference, a profound difference, I'll say. It's gonna take fundraising because the government is never going to pay for profound things. I mean, this should not be a big ha-ha, right? I mean, the government pays for the very essentials and barely even that. That's why hospitals are crappy to work in. And I mean, you're not gonna do anything remarkable based on Medicare or Medicaid or private insurance. Right. You're just not going to. And so I had just sort of accepted from the beginning that it was going to take a lot of fundraising. And I guess I educated the board that it was going to take a lot of fundraising. So my board, my beginning board, that was kind of like, oh my God, they weren't used to that either. But somehow I convinced them because I had to raise a lot of money just to open the, you know, open the doors and get stuff for free and all this stuff. So I guess they thought I could do it. So they didn't put up much of a fight. And so I would say over the years, and I would even see still say this if I was teaching, that in my view, as a healthcare institution, there's a fork in the road, and you can decide which one you take. You take the we don't want a fundraise fork, and you do what you can for the money you can get. You develop product lines based on what's paid for, not what people need, whatever it is, the flavor of the month that Medicare is going to pay a lot of money for, private insurance. You do that, and you do it big, and you, you know, cancer, orthopedics, sleep studies. I mean, I can just rattle them all off. And you do that because that's the only way you can keep a hospital open. That's the only way you'll be able to deliver babies or have an ER or you know, all the things that nobody pays for. So you have to do that. That's that's the business of hospitals. And to run a hospice like that, it's similar. You just ratchet down staffing, you don't pay for things that people need that are expensive. You decide how that this treatment's good enough, you know, just like an insurance company would today. And and you balance your budget based on what Medicare primarily is the primary payer is going to pay you. It's not hard. I mean, it it's irritating, but it's not hard. However, I didn't want to do that. I said I could have been a hospital administrator and made a million dollars a year. I chose not to do that. I wanted to do stuff that really helped people, and that I could, you know, at the end of the day, look myself in the mirror and feel like I had done something good and that I hadn't just made do. And so I always said that it was a fork in the road. But if you take the fundraising fork, no one's gonna give you a dime if you don't do something extraordinary. Right, yeah, just that simple, it's pretty black and white. If you're just gonna do the ho-hum, you'll have a gala, you'll make fifty thousand dollars or whatever the hospitals do. I don't know, but you know, people will support things that are halfway good, but they won't support them very much, or for very long, huh? Or very long, right? And so I think incrementally the great thing about Hope West was it was all really personal to me for whatever reason. I felt like the patients were all people I either knew or were likely to know, or I knew their relative, or they knew their employer, something there was some kind of connection. So I always felt that I was doing really personal work, and that's different than being the anonymous hospital administrator, you know. So I was always highly motivated that we do well because I kind of took it personally that it should go well because there's no point in doing it if it didn't go well. Yeah. I think the other thing that was really lucky for me is I have pretty short attention spanish, you know. But I have a lot of broad interest. Doing hope was allowed me to do all those things. I got to do really unusual things you wouldn't normally get to do. So that was fun too. That's a story right there.

Erin: 29:56

Wow, it's so incredible to hear the whole story. Well, it is shocking. In passing, you kind of referenced all of these pieces accidentally falling together. And I just I just don't believe that there are accidents. And I think that you absolutely walked the road that you did because it was purpose-driven from the beginning. I think the heart of of why you did what you did and having that loss of your mother-in-law that you did in the beginning fueled something inside of you. And I just want to commend you for being open to what could be for you and for something to then cross your path and for you to say, Okay, I can do that. Okay, I can do that. And I just the belief that you had in yourself is so inspiring.

Christy Whitney: 30:59

And yeah, I don't know how I got that, but I guess it was, you know, probably listening to people around me or feeling compelled. Probably once I was a single mom, I and the sole supporter of my children. I uh suddenly knew failure was not an option, maybe. But but I think I was thinking about this. How I love the title uh the whole P-I-G thing because I'm a huge believer in intention, and I think that it all worked because of that. Actually, it the intention part. The purpose part's important because you know, Daniel Pink, who's like a I'm like a groupie of, I don't know if you ever read any of his books. If you have uh you know, he says that there are only three things that motivate people, and money is not one of them. Purpose, right? Right? Purpose number one. So if you think about that, purpose and intention take you two-thirds of the way there. Maybe you have a little bit of an IQ, but you know, mostly purpose and intention, throwing a little gratitude, you're there.

Kellie: 31:55

Well, and that's really what you grabbed a hold of, Christy. You know, you didn't just build a life and build an organization and build a place that people could go to or have as a resource when or if they needed it. You built something that meant something to you. To me, that's the legacy part of what you did. And it started all the way back at Hanover College, which is another commonality. You and I both went to Hanover. That's right. I forgot about that connection. A college of a thousand students.

Christy Whitney: 32:38

500 when I was there. That wasn't by the time you got there. I think it was 900.

Kellie: 32:45

But that legacy for you started all the way back, you know, when you are in college as a young woman with a mother-in-law who's dying, and it was a very painful experience. And you took that pain and turned it into purpose.

Christy Whitney: 33:01

Yeah.

Kellie: 33:01

Which is very impactful.

Christy Whitney: 33:04

Well, you know, and other life things. You know, my brother died of suicide when he was 29. And so, you know, grief became a really important subject for me too. In a lot of hospices, grief is sort of like the stepchild, grief work, grief programming, grief, whatever. It's like, yeah, we got to do it. You know, we'll send out a newsletter, we'll do a couple groups, you know. But to me, that too was personal. You know, I remember what it was like to lose my brother when I was 31. And I remember what it was like for his kids. So that's where I got so interested in things like how do kids grieve and who helps them, you know, who who helps them with that. And I'll never forget one of my schemes for marketing. I don't know how I hit on this, but this is how the community got involved. I decided that I couldn't afford a marketing director. So I asked the heads of marketing of all the founding institutions to be on a committee to advise me in marketing. And then I included the marketing person from School District 51. Uh-huh. And then we did market segments. And so one of the segments we did was actually kids like how will we teach kids about hospice? And she said, Well, the only way kids are going to ever learn anything by hospice is if they experience something. The kids only learn through experience. Right. And then I kind of walked out of that meeting and asked Kathy DePaulo. She wanted to work full-time with kids. I didn't know how you're going to pay for it. I just figured I'd figure that out later. Because I had a person who I knew was passionate about the subject, who had the qualifications and who could do it. And she was standing there, and I thought, okay, we should just do it. So that's how we do it. We just started. And I think that that is where you kind of get the connecting points. That if you have a philosophy, really big believer. My graduate school ended up being in community health. So I'm a big drink of Kool-Aid and how communities are healthy. Yep. And they're healthy through eliminating social isolation and getting people connected. That that's how you improve their health. Yes. Pretty much, period. And so I always sort of felt that was my secondary job. So whether it was getting people reintroduced to society after grieving, being a volunteer for heirloom, yeah, it also raised money for a hospice. But the secondary gain was all these people, they met new friends. They had a support system, they spent Thanksgiving together. I mean, they did they did a lot of things that helped them get through the worst time in their life. So it's funny how everything does become interconnected if you pay attention.

Kellie: 35:34

Yes.

Christy Whitney: 35:35

And it works when they are. If it was just a matter of we got to raise money for hospice, come volunteer at heirlooms, that probably wouldn't have gone that well. You know.

Kellie: 35:45

So a couple of things before I know Erin is itching to jump in here on a couple of really key topics. What year did you start hospice, the original hospice in Grand Junction?

Christy Whitney: 35:57

1993. Okay. January of 1993.

Kellie: 36:00

Yes. So I knew it was in that first year or two. So our mom entered hospice September 9th of 1994. I had just turned 24. She had just turned 47.

Christy Whitney: 36:14

So we've been open about a year and a half.

Kellie: 36:16

And Erin had just turned 17, just a month before our mom passed. Talk to us real quick about all of the programs that evolved and kind of that time frame of what happened because hospice became hospice and palliative care of Western Colorado, which became Hope West, and is recognized nationally as one of the premier hospice providing organizations in the country. And you paved that way.

Christy Whitney: 36:51

Yeah, I um I was thinking, you probably remember this. Do you remember the computer of your mom, your mom's computer? Yes. So how I met you, I think, was when you decided, or I don't know if it's how I met you, or shortly after I met you, you gave me, or hope was, your mom's computer. Yes. And I didn't know what we were gonna do with it because I couldn't really figure out what we're gonna do with it. And of course, in those days, you know, we weren't so computer bound, right? We didn't need that many of them, right? We needed about two, you know.

Kellie: 37:17

Yeah, she was way ahead of our time with the computer.

Christy Whitney: 37:20

Right. So I didn't know what what I was gonna do with this slick computer. We decided we would give it as a gift to a child in grade school, I think it at Immaculate Heart, who named the kids' grief program and he called it Forget Me Knot. And I think that that name might even still be around. It was the kids' grief group, and it was Bobby Alpha's daughter. Oh, okay. She won the computer. Oh, what a small and she did a um a logo for it, and it had it was a heart with forget me not around. Yes, I remember that. So sweet. But you see, you talk about that connection, and then Bobby Alpha became a hospice volunteer, I think, for about 30 years. Yeah, I mean, you know, so it's just you know, that is how life is. In graduate school, there was a book I never could find again. It must be out of print. It was called The Web, and it really used sort of the spider web analogy to say that in order to have community health, you have to have this web. And everything is kind of should be knitted together in some, and it will be knitted together in some way, and it can either be can be knitted together in a positive way or it can be knitted together in a negative way. And I always kind of had that image in my mind when this stuff would happen to say, okay, now now we have a relationship, you know, with Immaculate Heart that we didn't have before. Now we have a relationship here, and then we would look at things like okay, how are we gonna get that community of artists involved in Hope West? Well, we did the Mass Project, you know, had a lot of artists that participated in the Mass Project, then they became involved because people live in community, but they live in their own like communities, you know, community of artists, community of teachers, community of the college, community, you know. So if you think about how are we gonna educate the community about hospice, you can only do it one community at a time, the medical community, the teaching community, the student community, the you know, so it is really all about community, but all these little communities, right? And I really think that was the magic of our success. And I I told somebody um recently that I could help them get their length of stay in hospice, which is of course, when you get your length of stay up, the government tries to accuse you of fraud now, so it's kind of a dicey thing. But in the old days, no one wanted to come to hospice, so I, you know, we were trying to get people to not be scared of hospice. And I said, Billy, anybody could do it, but they have to be willing to do the work of having these relationships with all these communities. And even, you know, in terms of the inpatient unit in the restaurant, I just thought it was funny. I never even thought about it until a friend of mine said that the only way she got her mother. To be willing to have hospice care was to eat at spook. And then she said, you know all those nice people that you meet at spoon, those are all the nice people who work for hospice.

Kellie: 40:11

And those so then she made the connection. Yeah. So that's what I want to get to because your vision was so big. Now it involved connecting all of these communities. But for people who are listening who may not know Grand Junction and know about Hope West, you didn't just provide hospice care in the hospital or at somebody's home. You had the vision to build an inpatient facility that is second to none. I mean, it is absolutely pretty great. Not only was it brave, Erin and I both have spent a lot of time inside those walls as family members of loved ones who are passing. I have spent countless days, hours, months in those halls as a team member for Hope West, working with alongside and for you, which was a great privilege. But there was also the restaurant, Spoons, the Coffee Shop, Artful Cup, Heirlooms, which is the secondhand store where donations can be accepted. And you talked about heirlooms where people who are grieving come together and volunteer. Those people are out of this world. Incredible what they do down there. Then you expanded that not just inside of Grand Junction, but to all of these outlying communities as well.

Christy Whitney: 41:38

Yeah, that was again a saying yes thing. You know, when I lived in Durango, when you live on the Western Slope, it really is a pretty small world. Yes. So I knew people, and I think I was in Grand Junction about a week. I remember I still had I had those director chairs, you know, you fold open. That was my furniture. And the phone rang, and it was Tyler Erickson, who at that time was the hospital administrator in Montrose. Well, he had been the hospital administrator in Cortez when I had opened a hospice there when I was in Durango. And he said, Welcome to Western Slope. I'm I'm glad you're back. And can you do the same thing in Montrose that you did in Durango? And I said, Well, Tyler, I've been here like a week. I said, Why don't you call me in about a year and we'll talk about it? So he called me about a year to the day and said, Okay, he was ready to talk about it. And I got really gutsy and I said, Well, I don't know, Tyler. I said, you know, I'm gonna tell you, in order to open a hospice there, you are going to need to fundraise $100,000 because that's how much money it will cost to start a hospice there. He said, That's no problem.

Kellie: 42:43

Wow.

Christy Whitney: 42:43

So that's what they did. So we started getting a hospice going in Montrose. And it was probably about a month later when my friend Leslie Cryer at Delta, who was the home health director who I'd known when I was a home health person, said, I can't believe you're gonna drive through Delta to start a hospice in Montrose and leave us out to dry. We don't have any hospice here. And I'm like, Well, what I told Montrose is they have to, I thought the fundraising thing, I'll put it to the side. So I said, You have to raise $100,000. She said, No problem. And so they raised $120,000 because they wanted to beat Montrose, you know, and so just stuff like that. I mean, you know, you just can't make it up.

Kellie: 43:22

Erin, this is where I tell you that Christy is just like mom.

Christy Whitney: 43:26

Yeah. Well, you just can't say no, that's really the problem. Yeah.

Erin: 43:33

I mean, the drive, the vision, the creativity.

Kellie: 43:37

She did the same thing in public radio. It was, you know, a different sector, but it's almost the identical story. It's so beautiful.

Erin: 43:47

Yeah, I love it.

Christy Whitney: 43:48

So that is kind of how it happened. And it wasn't easy. I mean, you know, it's not so magical that, you know, I mean, I tried to do things well. I mean, I tried to hire good people, I tried to motivate them, I tried to be fair and paying them and you know, stuff like that. But it wasn't always easy because as organizations grow and change, they go through tough times, and there's things you have to learn. I mean, we had a combined director one time for the first couple of years in Mantos and Delta. It didn't work. So then we made a change. It's hard. Organizational change is hard, and so that's why purpose really has to be there because if you don't have a purpose, there's no reason to go through anything hard. Right. Yeah, that is exactly right.

Kellie: 44:30

So, Erin, I was thinking about the kids program, which is one of the most impactful programs that operates through Hope West. And the conversation that you and I have all the time on this podcast, and the reason it really came to be is that we came to understand only as adult women that we grieved our mother's death so differently, and that created some division and some divide and different roads traveled through the years. That happens to a lot of families. And I'd love to talk about that actually a little bit, Christy, from your perspective, and then also let Erin share with you a little bit about her journey as a still a kiddo, having lost her mom and turning that into volunteering for hospice in the Fort Collins area. Oh, cool. I know that hospice, yeah. Yeah, and being involved with that program over there.

Christy Whitney: 45:35

I think they had a kids' grief program before we did. That program in Fort Collins, yeah. About the same time.

Erin: 45:41

Oh, really? Well, I would love to share with you, you know, some of my experience and then jump in and add your thoughts as I go here for sure. But, you know, like Kellie said, I had just turned 17 when our mom died. And it was September. It was the beginning of my senior year of high school. I had spent my junior year at a private boarding school in Colorado Springs. So I had actually left Grand Junction and I had been home for the summer. She was diagnosed in May and died in September. So I'd been home a lot that summer.

Christy Whitney: 46:19

Yeah.

Erin: 46:20

But my very 16-year-old self, right?

Christy Whitney: 46:23

Yeah.

Erin: 46:24

Driving and off with friends and, you know, kind of living my life. And Kellie got married that summer. Our brother Scott got married that summer. I went to France as an exchange student for a month that summer. I mean, it was just, it was, it was a very chaotic time. And like Kellie already stated, I came home that Friday, the same day that hospice started their care. And when hospice arrived that Friday, so did I. And so I got to experience having the hospice nurses in our home that weekend. And then mom died that Monday morning. And admittedly, that time of my life is a complete blur. Um, I actually have very little memory of my entire senior year of high school, quite honestly. But I I said it then, and I've said it for the last 31 years, and I will continue to say it, which is that anybody involved in hospice, but especially those hospice nurses, you all are angels walking on this earth. And I was so deeply impacted by not only how they cared for her her, but how they cared for all of us. It was really profound. And even though I don't have a lot of really active memories, there's something so deeply embedded into my soul that is impacted by the level of care that I know that my family received from hospice and just how beautifully we were all held. It was extraordinary. I stayed home for a couple of weeks after mom passed, and then I went back to school. And, you know, my dad had given me that option to just come home and finish high school in Grand Junction. But my mom's dream was for me to be at this boarding school. And so I really leaned into that. I knew that that's where she wanted me to be, and I knew that that's where I needed to be and wanted to be there. And so I went back and I was encouraged, probably from hospice in Grand Junction, to look into a grief support group at the hospice in Colorado Springs at Pikes Peak Hospice. So I did. They had a teen grief support group that met weekly, and I had a friend and fellow student at the boarding school who had also lost her mom a couple of years before. And so we went together and we started attending this grief support group for teenagers. It was incredible, it was amazing. Even then, at that early age, I was I was a kid, I had just turned 17. I again was so impacted by the care that I continued to receive through grief counseling. I just had that same thing in me. I just wanted to volunteer, I wanted to give back, I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to do something. It's amazing. I was 17 and in high school, I couldn't write a big check or you know, anything. And so I sat down with somebody at Pi, I think it was the director of Pikes Peak Hospice.

Christy Whitney: 50:00

Martha Barton was a director, really pretty lady with gray hair. What was that name? Martha Barton. Maybe either it was Martha Barton, it could have been Moira Reinhardt, that was the first director, but then Martha Barton was the second director. They're both good friends of mine.

Erin: 50:15

I love that you just know that off the top of your head.

Christy Whitney: 50:17

Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, I know them really well.

Erin: 50:20

Well, I had a conversation with somebody and said, Hi, Martha, I want to give back. What do I do? What are my options? So I ended up going through the volunteer training program at Pikes Peak Hospice. And so it was so fun to hear you talk about even how training today looks very different than it did then, right? So this was in 1994. So I went through the volunteer training program and I started then volunteering in the children's grief support groups. So I was attending the teen class for myself, but I was volunteering with the younger kiddos.

Christy Whitney: 50:59

Oh, yeah. Oh, that's the model.

Erin: 51:02

I have to say that I think that did more for my own healing journey than just attending the grief support group for teenagers. There was something so magical about working with these kids. And so I worked primarily like seven, eight, nine-year-olds, you know, and it was such an extraordinary experience. I loved every minute of it. I still have artwork that some of those kids made for me. And, you know, all just I just hold such incredible space for that experience and that time. And so I graduated from high school and I went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins. And I'm pretty sure the very first thing that I did after moving into the dorms. Let's go to volunteer. I drove myself to what then was hospice of Larimer County. Um, now it's Pathways, and said, I want to volunteer in your children's support groups. And they just, Nancy Jacobson was the director there. If you know her, she is an extraordinary human. She really just welcomed me in. I mean, she just kind of took me under her wing. Um, there were several people in that organization that really just embraced me as a kid. And so I started volunteering for Hospice of Larimer County and got very heavily involved in their children's grief support groups. And they do a family grief camp in the summertime. And so I started um helping with that and helping organize the camp. And then I would attend the camp and help facilitate, you know, sessions then for the kiddos and stuff like that. And it just became such a part of who I was. And it was so fulfilling and it was so powerful for me to walk through that time feeling like I was giving back to this organization that had given so much to me and so much to my family and taken such good care of my mom. And it was just part then of my healing journey. And I, you know, I went to college thinking that I wanted to be a teacher. I'd wanted to be a teacher my whole life. And then I pulled back a little bit from hospice and started volunteering in an elementary school. And then I was like, oh no, I don't want to do that at all. But my but my degree is in human development and family studies. There were a couple of classes that I took in college that then I coordinated for Nancy to come and speak to my to my class and you know, stuff like that. And so I pursued my degree. And then when I graduated, it was this very con very untraditional way that business was run, which was they offered to basically then pay me for the work that I had already been doing, but I had a college degree. And so I started to be compensated for you know some of my help with the children's grief support groups and the camps and stuff like that. And then I took another turn. I took a a job offer to work at a crisis pregnancy center, and so I became their director of client services and I switched gears. But my time at hospice, all those years of volunteering absolutely shaped so much of who I am and how I've continued to operate in this world. And I hold every hospice employee, volunteer, nurse, everybody in the absolute highest regard. It's a magical concept.

Christy Whitney: 55:06

It it truly is. And I I think that, you know, I was telling somebody that to spend my whole working career primarily surrounded by people working with hospice as volunteers or donors or employees. I mean, I was surrounded by the best human beings on the planet. I I wanted to say something that I think is really interesting about your experience because I think it's very important. And this has to do with Meeker. Meeker has an all-volunteer hospice because they can't afford a Medicare hospice. My sister-in-law, I mean, my husband's wife who died, her sister became the director. It's a really talented, cool person. And she came to me one day and she said, you know, she went to Camp Good Grief or whatever. And she said, I really think we should do this, but you know, I think we should do it for kids who have any kind of loss. And I said, Well, I couldn't agree more. But she said, I think we just want to do it really different. And we started by taking kids who had lost their little brother at five on an ATV accident, which they witnessed to Camp Good Grief, which was our kids' camp. And then they came back to Meeker and did group. And over time, they became the founding members of basically a teen counselor program for bereaved children. Just exactly what you did. And I just saw a video at the fashion show this year from a meeker kid who lost his dad from a brain tumor when he was a senior in high school. And his father was the principal here, a meeker. Oh. And he talked about how this program helped him so much that in college he went back to be a volunteer at Camp Goodgrief. So it's kind of that thing about learning by doing. And the thing I witnessed when I was around the kids at camp, they worship these teen volunteers. I mean, they worship them. I mean, I think it must be so encouraging to see, okay, here's a person who's experienced something as bad as I have experienced. And they know how to smile, you know, and they're like fun again. That's the only thing I can kind of equate about it, but it couldn't happen any other way. And so now in Meeker, they have this cowboys program where they're assigned to children who've had loss in the school. So whether it's divorce or whether it's death, they're assigned to these kids. So they have a partner, they have a buddy. So they go through the whole year with this kid. Wow. And they might go to camp with them or what have you, you know. And I think that to me just blows my mind. And I think little meeker, a thousand people in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere, nowhere. Never could afford a hospice, which there are very many places in Colorado like this, which is just a travesty in my mind, that there's no hospice. And if Hope West would quit sponsoring this all-volunteer hospice, it would close. It's a model that really could be replicated in other places if I was a lot younger. Because really, it's kind of a miracle. Mika raises over $100,000 a year for this program. Isn't that incredible? It's amazing. They have they have a counselor, they have a paid counselor, they have nurses, they have a nurse, but then they coordinate with home health, which they can do because they don't have Medicare. And they have about usually 15 patients because they don't have to have a six-month prognosis. It's pretty amazing. I say it's kind of back to the future kind of hospice. I mean, that really it gets back to the purpose. Like, why do we do this thing anyway? Right. But several years ago, my friend who ran the Boulder Hospice called me out of nowhere and said, I wonder if you want to go to Norway with me. I said, Okay. She said, for free. She said, but you don't get paid. But they wanted me to go speak to the Minister of Health about hospice because Colorado is the same size as Norway. Wow. And I told them I thought you should do it. And I'll go with you, but I think you should do it. So I went and we stayed with a hospice director in in uh Oslo and got to be friends. I was there for maybe a week. Then she came to visit here and he and Meeker even. So they invited me to be part of this international work group, which has been going on for all these years. I mean, 40 some years. Wow. Almost, I guess, getting close to 50. I don't know. And this is really the old timey hospice people founded it. Wow. Including Colin Murray Parks, who is a bereavement guru in the early days. Kind of, I'm kind of a groupie for him, too. So Anyhow, this meeting was in Canada, and I told them typical, I'm too busy to go. I can't go. I don't have the money. I don't want to spend the money. Blah blah blah. And uh they said, Well, Colin Murray Parks is going to be there. And I said, You are kidding me. And they said, No, he's coming. So I think you should come. It's only in Toronto. I mean, how hard can it be to get to Toronto or someplace? I can't remember where exactly it was in Canada. I think Toronto. But I said, Okay, I'll come. So I went and it was phenomenal. I got to get my picture taken with Colin Murray Parks. That was a thrill of a lifetime. But I was also on a team at these meetings, it's like a conclave. I mean, maybe it's like the Aspen think tank. I don't know. But you get into assigned to a group and you have a project. And typically, what evolves in that project is a white paper on an expert subject. So I was on the bereavement group, and I was assigned to this group that was a psychiatrist from Taiwan, who was also a palliative care physician, the head of the Singapore Hospice Association, a professor of social work from the University of Singapore, another teacher in that same program, and a guy who was a bereavement coordinator from Florida. So we worked together for a week on this model because there was no international model of grief. So we for a week did all this stuff. I learned a lot about Taiwan, a lot about Singapore. I never knew. And it was amazing how from all these different countries coming together on one topic that we agreed to this model. And they had the saying called goodness of fit. This was the Singapore people. They kept saying, Well, no bereavement program is going to be worth anything, but there's not a goodness of fit. And I thought, what a great saying, goodness of fit. So it has to be goodness of fit for you. It can't just be same for everybody. And then we published a paper in a Taiwan medical journal. So I got to have my name written in Chinese. So I'm glad I got to experience it one time. So it's pretty cool.

Kellie: 1:02:29

That's so incredible, Christy. What came out of that international model on grief? Because we were talking a little bit ago about how Erin and I grieve so differently and how common that actually is among families. And I would venture to say, based on our own experience, that the differences in the way people grieve inside of families create a lot of disconnect, division, and divide.

Christy Whitney: 1:03:02

Absolutely. Absolutely. It almost happens without fail, to be honest. I think there's that has to be that patience of working through. And the model, goodness of faith, only you know, you can tell I worked in an Asian group because they did this origami model with all these axes, you know, of different things that kind of go together that you have to, you know, the wholeness of the experience. But I think that it is very, very common. I'll I'll give you another example. Obviously, it happened in my family, you know, that of my first husband, where everybody blew apart and never really got back together. But even up here in Meeker, so I met my husband at my daughter's wedding because his son Christopher was in my daughter's wedding. He was the best man. His best friend was my son-in-law. And they introduced me to Kent because he wanted to start a hospice in Meeker, which I said, there's no way. I'm busy. I'm gonna do it.

Kellie: 1:03:56

You gotta raise a hundred thousand dollars too. Exactly.

Christy Whitney: 1:04:00

I did say that. But I said, no, I I couldn't do that. But I I anyhow, so I eventually met with Kent, and then I felt so bad. I thought about six months went by that I told him no. And then I called him up and I said, Well, I've been thinking that the only thing that would work would be a volunteer hospice. And I know how to do that because I did that when I was like 21. So I could probably do that again and help you do that. So that's kind of what we did. So we started our relationship really as friends, but after a couple of years, we had a dating relationship and it was all everything was going fine, and our kids would see each other. And I thought this is really kind of amazing that our kids already know each other, they're best friends, you know. Isn't it wonderful? Until we announced our engagement. And none of them were the responses I expected. Christopher, who I thought was going to be my biggest cheerleader, you know, who was in my daughter's wedding, I became a hated person to him. Oh, I mean, a hated person. He did a lot of looking back kind of funny things. I mean, he would ignore me, he would not speak to me. He gave his father all of these things. He gave his father a picture window that had all of these romantic pictures throughout my husband's wife, was they were high school sweethearts. So all these pictures of them together, you know, and it hung in a big frame in our hallway. And I finally said to my husband, I said, I'm patient with this, but I said, I always feel like I'm in someone else's house and then I've done something wrong. I feel like I'm having an affair with somebody whose husband, you know, who is still alive, and I never really knew your wife. It's it's a horrible feeling. And uh said, Well, I'm gonna take down those pictures because there's no sense in feeling like that. So that kind of made matters worse. And Christopher threw me under the bus so badly, my son-in-law got so upset at how Christopher talked about me that they don't speak anymore. And now the funny thing is of the five children, I'm probably the closest to Christopher. Wow, and I think it just comes through patience and grace. Yeah, yes. I mean, yeah, you know, I don't even know how it kind of happened. We've been married now 10 years, but there are years that we didn't even really speak to each other. I mean, we weren't didn't swear at each other, we just didn't speak to each other. And I was cordial and you know, whatever, whatever. But I just kind of hung out and little by little, now he talks to me more than anybody else. He they make sure we get there to decorate the Christmas tree. It's the sweetest thing. And I was saying something to Kent when we were coming home the other night from decorating the Christmas tree. I said, I just it just really blows my mind how great this is. And he said, I think it's because you are patient and you let it happen. You know, you let it work itself through, which I think that's how we're wired as human beings. I mean, we don't just get over stuff, you know. So Christopher felt, I think, the loss of his mom in one of the most visible ways in the family, and other people, you know, differently, more pragmatically. You know, uh, my stepdaughter Kellie, she's a physician, she's very pragmatic, most pragmatic person I've met in my entire life. She's married to a rancher here, meeker, you know, she's went to medical school, we went to the University of Wyoming and then medical school and was a resident in Grand Junction. And I mean, she's just practical. So she was always just practical about it.

Kellie: 1:07:20

Practical about it. Yeah.

Christy Whitney: 1:07:21

Yeah. So every single person in the family it's been different. And I think I've just learned that over and over again. That's that goodness of fit thing, right? I mean, that you know, you can't really have bereavement, support. You have to be in a space that you can get it.

Kellie: 1:07:36

Yeah.

Christy Whitney: 1:07:36

Right. And for some people, they cope through complete denial, they cope through, you know, I think sometimes people have really prolonged grief because they just ignore it for a long time and then it kind of sneaks up on them. And there's all kinds of things that happen to people.

Kellie: 1:07:50

Yeah, that it can be get buried very, very deep. Yeah. And that can come along with loss of any kind. You know, we talk here a lot about loss through death. We've all experienced that on many, many levels, but also loss of anything, dreams, relationships, friendships, talking about your life and beauty, whatever, yeah, limbs. You know, I mean, we talk about money, whatever. Yeah, yeah. A lot of those different kinds of things. But, you know, for us, it was really we never stopped being sisters, but we weren't being sisters. And I think I shared with you on a side conversation that we felt this real interjection from our mother saying, the greatest gift I ever gave the two of you wasn't in a box. It was in each other. And for us, it was really being willing to have the raw, real, honest, vulnerable conversations about some really hard subjects, hard topics, hard experiences, hard decisions, and not attach condemnation or negativity or blame to any of it, right? But just to get it out in the open, in a neutral space where we could just evaluate it.

Christy Whitney: 1:09:18

Well, I think getting it out, that's key, isn't it? Yeah, but it's not easy to do. No, it's not. And a lot of people never do it. Yes. Not people never do it. It's just too hard. Yeah. You know, yeah. And sometimes, you know, it's sort of like Christopher and I never had a conversation, but I think we both get it. I mean, I got it because I knew it was grief. I mean, I knew it wasn't about me personally. Yes. So I didn't take it personally. And I told my son-in-law that I'm brokenhearted that the two of you are not in relationship because I can take it. Right. And I appreciate you know speaking up for me, taking up for me, being on my side. All that's wonderful. But the fact that you are out of relationship now because of me, that makes me sad because I I can handle it, you know. I kind of sometimes wonder if they'll ever move back here and then they'll have to get a deaf friendship because you can't ignore forever.

Kellie: 1:10:05

So because it's too small there not to it's too small not to work through things. I I find too that the older we get, if we're willing to mature as we age, because some people don't mature as they age, but if we are willing to mature as we age, time and experience gives us a different lens of perception.

Christy Whitney: 1:10:28

Oh, yeah.

Kellie: 1:10:29

Not only in how we're experiencing moments right now, but how we're also looking back at what was. And and that's very, very helpful.

Christy Whitney: 1:10:38

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I certainly find that being shockingly 73 now, almost 74. I don't know how this happened. I it's kind of hardly wrapped my head around it. But I know I'm that old because I find myself, you know how they always say that you do life review when you're dying. And I'm like, well, I know I'm not dying, but I'm doing all this life review and I don't get that, you know. And I'm like, so okay, that kind of scary because you think, well, maybe I'm I'm dying. I just don't know yet, you know. But you just start to think back and say, how I handled this, how I handled that. I might wish I'd handled that differently, or I wish I'd maybe done that a little differently, and maybe this would be better if I get to come back around a second time. Maybe I'd do it different. And uh, I was talking to a friend of mine who's about the same age. I said, Do you have this at five o'clock in the morning? I get up at five because I can't stand to lay in bed and just ruminate over stuff I wish I had done differently. And uh she said, Yeah, I get up at five too. She said, It happens to me too. Oh my god. So it's easier to get up, do art, do whatever, you know, do whatever. So you get more perspective on a lot of things, gratefully. You know.

Kellie: 1:11:42

Well, we want to spend some time talking about the holidays in relation to hospice. But first, I would love to celebrate your retirement and talk about your transition from CEO and building this unbelievable organization and that decision to retire. And in your own words, it was hard for a while. And I think for a lot of people, it's hard to make that transition.

Christy Whitney: 1:12:13

You know, it's really the hardest thing in life sometimes when you have change, is they say people don't mind change as long as it's the change they want, right? It's change that we don't want that's hard. And I had sort of conjured up in my mind, and partly from what I had been told, but also partly just my own stupidity or whatever. I really pictured my retirement being more like a year-long mentorship of new leadership, who would someone who had never been a CEO before. The organization I knew was gonna go through very tough financial times because you can't avoid it when you open a PACE program. You had three years, almost three million dollars in losses. And we were always on the edge anyway, you know, and the business plan in five years showed that it was gonna save Hope West because we would double our revenue and make us more stable and we wouldn't be as vulnerable, blah, blah, blah. But we had to go through this tough time. And it just unfortunately, because of COVID and my delayed retirement, it happened when I was retiring as opposed to before I retired. Right. So I thought I was gonna just help this new person who, you know, said that's what she would want. Da-da-da. I thought I was going to go over and join the club, you know, which is now closed, and reopen the coffee shop, which is now closed, and I was gonna volunteer at heirlooms and I was gonna do this and do that, and I was gonna have a ball mentoring. Now, I'll never really know who decided this, but either the new CEO or the board or both decided that I was way too threatening to have around and that I needed to like vanish. I mean, from sight, like not be on the campus, not call people. People were forbidden to talk to me. It was really awful, to be honest. It was really hard, but I tried to rise above it. Again, I think okay, I'm an adult person, I can rise above this. I was not gonna make an enemy out of the new CEO. I just was not. I gave her a lot of grace. It was the antithesis to what I felt like I had built as a culture.

Kellie: 1:14:14

Yes.

Christy Whitney: 1:14:14

And if she brought in somebody who I had known since he was a junior CFO, who I had brought in a couple times to teach, and you know, he's got a lot of good points, and he has a really smart about a lot of things. But he came with kind of a cookie-cutter approach to doing hospice to break even, it was all good intended. And looking back now, there was a lot of pain that was involved. But you know, the great thing is the organization's alive, and there's no guarantee with a new CEO it would be right, and so however and whatever you learned or didn't learn, or however it went down, the right thing happened. We just have to believe that. And so, even though it was hard for me personally, and sometimes I said I felt like it should have been in a psych unit, it's different to retire from a job of something you built from scratch, it just is, and very few people do that anymore, right? Right, as you know, and particularly after 30 years. I mean, it just doesn't happen. So that part's unusual. And so I I guess when I look back, I think it's figures that would have been hard. But the other funny thing is, as it turns out, so I became a consultant, a national consultant, and I wrote white papers and I did teaching a little blah blah blah. But then I realized I really didn't like doing that anymore. I really don't want to do Medicare hospice, blah, blah, blah. And I wish someone would ask me how to keep nurses, but they don't. And I think, you know, it's probably not my personal job to take on the United States to try to change how nursing is supported. But I'm glad I did it as long as I did the way I did, and supported a lot of nurses over time, and that's okay. It helped them, like the starfish thing.

Erin: 1:15:48

Right.

Christy Whitney: 1:15:50

So, anyhow, I have this kind of really a second life. I mean, I really feel like the blessing has been to come to Meeker to be married after being single 26 years, which is really shocking to adjust to that too. And thankfully to be married to a saint who doesn't get too rattled, you know, my crazy ideas. And you know, the store's been a whole experiment.

Kellie: 1:16:11

And tell tell us about the store because I love what you're doing with your shop. You are so creative. Another commonality with our mom, but tell us about the shop.

Christy Whitney: 1:16:25

Well, this is what one of the funny things is so I was at a dinner party, probably had one glass of wine too many, and a friend of mine said, Didn't you always want to open a store? And I said, Well, yeah, kind of. That's why I mean the shop at the tea house and in the restaurant and the thing at heirlooms and three stores and stuff. I said, Yeah, I've always kind of thought about it. And she said, Well, I have a friend who just bought this building downtown, this huge building built in turn of the century, 1913. It's been empty for eight years, and he's trying to figure out what could go in there. I told him you've run a lot of businesses and that maybe you could figure out what could go in there. So I said, Well, all I really know is nonprofits, so I could start a nonprofit and it could be housed there, maybe, and maybe it's a collaboration because I'm kind of into that between like the museum and the town and the Maker Arts Council, and maybe this could be a store that would support the three of them. And so I wrote a business plan. I showed it would lose a lot of money every month. Then I wasn't really sure how I was gonna raise all this money, and then I was talking to my former accounting firm about learning how to do QuickBooks, and he said, I think you should do this as just a private business for three years so you can take the tax write off because it's gonna lose money. And then if you want to turn it into a nonprofit, then you should do it that way. Okay, so I decided to do that. Well, it turns out it loses a lot of money, not just a little money, a lot of money. And of course, I self-funded it. I didn't borrow the money because that would have been even worse. Maybe I don't know. But I love the store and I've met a lot of people through it, and I still love it. I love the creativity of it. And now I think almost maybe break even this year. Maybe break even. By year five, it probably will make would make money. As but I'm old. As I said, you should have done this with a 30-year-old, you know, who could live out the five years of a business starting and losing money, but anyhow, I'll never recover that money. But I told my husband, I said, see, this is a great thing. I said, we could have gone on like maybe 10 cruises for that money, but they would only last a couple weeks apiece. And this way I've had all this entertainment for three years. So I think we got a model now that might go forward. It's kind of off and on. But um, I've learned a lot, a lot about meeker, a lot about how any retail could survive here. There's not an aptitude. I think that's one of the things I missed the most about living in Grand Junction. I always felt like all you had to do is turn around and there was aptitude there to help you. That's just not true here. Unbeknownst to me, they had no way to do it, they had no volunteers, they had no money, they had no time, they had three jobs to do the job they have. Okay, I didn't know any of that. You know, I didn't know that the museum director owned her own business, plus worked for the funeral home, plus she ran the museum. Then the person who is over the arts council works for free. I didn't know that. She's the head of the chamber of commerce and somebody, something else, you know, and so every single thing I was going to collaborate with, there was no nothing there. Yeah. And it it could never work here. I mean, I've learned that kind of thing would not work here. You can do things cooperatively, but people work three jobs. Half of the community lives out of town. So people who support the store primarily live out of town. You know, they own a ranch, they own a house up, you know, they're here part-time, whatever, whatever. Those people have money to shop with. The people who live in town, who you'd think would be your customers, they don't have money to shop with. And if they do, they're very frugal. Right. Because they know ranting's up, ranting's down, they don't buy stuff they don't need. So now we're turning the store mostly into consignment. Consignment. Consignment clothing. I have some consignment art, but also consignment crafts. People quilt and they make cards and they do this and they do that. So I'm kind of piecing together, reconceiving the store into mostly having things that are made in meeker and under consignment or made from something repurposed. And then I'll have a few things like maybe stonewall kitchen food or something. I don't know. But it's been wild.

Erin: 1:20:25

I love the concept. Love that.

Christy Whitney: 1:20:28

It doesn't have much purpose.

Kellie: 1:20:29

Purpose is entertainment. But that's okay. I suppose. Well, that's a very acceptable purpose. I think entertainment is wildly underrated.

Christy Whitney: 1:20:41

Yeah. Well, I used to tell the board that it has this.

Erin: 1:20:48

I did want to make sure that, you know, we talked about in all of your experience. I mean, the literally thousands and thousands and thousands of families that you have walked through end-of-life care. I know that I personally had some misconceptions, and you touched on it earlier about what hospice is, what they do. And I had no real understanding of what palliative care was. That wasn't a word that was in my vocabulary, especially as a teenager. Can you walk us through what the difference is?

Christy Whitney: 1:21:33

This may sound like a cynical answer, but I really do believe it's the truth. So I'm going to start with the concept of hospice. There's some very fundamental principles of hospice. You know, things like interdisciplinary team, right? The focus of care is not just the patient, it's the patient and the family. Hospice isn't a place, it's a concept. Superb pain management rooted in science. Symptom management, rooted in science. These are all central hospice things, right? I think both working in a rural aeroliac meet group, but then having the opportunity to be in Africa and be with people in Singapore and whatever, these people are not hampered by the Medicare regulations as they evolved. Now, I'm I'm smart enough to know that hospice wouldn't have taken hold in the United States without Medicare becoming the payer. I know that it would have gone away. So I think that's sort of the price that was paid to establish something that was different. The unfortunate thing is because it came with a box of rules, you had to have this thing called palliative care over here to do it for the people who couldn't fit in the box. These people are in the ICU. They need family-focused care, they need expert symptom management, they need bereavement care, they need anticipatory grief work, they need all these things that hospice knows how to do, but they can't get it because they're in the ICU. I'm sorry, you know, or they're in the cancer wing, I'm sorry. Or their prognosis is greater than six months, as if we could tell when people are going to die. So all of this is to me, palliative care, palliative care should be an adverb, not a noun. But it's become a noun because we have this Medicare box that I don't think will ever go away. The opportunity in my mind is to be like Meeker and have palliative care and bereavement look just like a hospice. People up here, they call it hospice. They don't know they don't have Medicare hospice, they don't care about it. Not one wit. But because it doesn't have an economic engine, but philanthropy, it really has to have a Hope West that has all this complication stuff, you know, the Medicare, this, that pace, you know, all these things that get paid for in order to help the infrastructure to support something that really is innovative palliative care. And as you know, Kellie, palliative care really isn't paid for, but under conventional medicine. There's not like a palliative care benefit. Right. And so anything you do is philanthropy or private pay, or you know, we even considered some kind of a concierge medical practice. I mean, how could we tuck palliative care into something that would give it life, longevity, but is always at risk. And it still is. And I think one of the biggest gifts of things that we did because my own mother was in and out of hospice care four times. And without palliative care, she would have been SOL. You know, like, I'm sorry, rug pulled out, no hospice, no tea, no support, no nothing, no anything.

Kellie: 1:24:29

Yeah. And that would have been our grandmother too. You know, she lived on her own at home past her 100th birthday with no care whatsoever, than Kellie popping by and for afternoon goldfish crackers and pretzels and wine out of the box. Because that was what she wanted to do, right? And I got her because I knew the benefits. To your point, also, we spent a lot of time discussing what do you call it? What do you name it? Because it is a transitionary period. Yeah. But it's not that you're actively dying. But neither are most hospice patients. Right.

Christy Whitney: 1:25:09

It's just that you need extra hair. I mean, you know, the thing is, I used to tell the Blasphos patients when I would enroll them that the six-month thing was a Medicare thing to save money. And it was. And that we all know that I could die before him. Right. You know, whoever I was talking to, I could leave that room, go out to my car, get side swiped, and die. Done. So who is to know? Yes, we know if you have a certain kind of diagnosis, statistics aren't on your side, blah, blah, blah. But many, many diagnoses really can't be prognosticated at all. Alzheimer's, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, dementia, COPD. Yeah. These are big things. And it's a travesty that they're not well served by hospice, and they aren't because of this whole prognosis conundrum. Right. They call it hospice in Singapore, but what it is is palliative care. They call it hospice in Taiwan, but what it is is palliative care. And in Taiwan, this guy told me there were 60 psychiatrists in the hospital he works. Wow.

Kellie: 1:26:10

Can you imagine? Oh, wow.

Christy Whitney: 1:26:12

If I ever become mentally ill, I'm moving to Taiwan. You should see the problem they have from mentally ill people. They have something called the um, what do they call this? Like the Hope Cafe or something. And they have all these mentally ill people who work it so they can have a job and be paid. Oh, I mean, stuff like that. They have a chapel because Taiwan has people who are Christian and people who are whatever they are. And so they wanted it to meet all needs. So they have a ceiling. Now they have a lot of money in Taiwan that opens up into a cross. Oh wow. And the light comes down on the floor to give an atmosphere of Christianity. But when somebody who's a Muslim or whatever is there, they they don't open the cross. I mean, just stuff like that. It was um mind-blowing to me to listen to all this, and they all called it hospice. In Africa, they call it hospice. They had an AIDS epidemic, they certainly didn't know where people are gonna die from HIV. You know, it just It still took care of them. This whole international work group, you you start to learn that other countries don't have this six-month thing. And the funny thing is, even though they don't have it, people have a hard time coming to hospice because of I think because of the United States. Like for the UK, it started as an inpatient thing. So it makes sense. Nobody wants to go to the inpatient thing because it's scary, right? So they never have successfully made the transition into the home care thing because they can't get their length to stay hot long enough. And they kept saying, How can I help my length to stay? And I said, I don't know how you can because you have no rules. You can have a length to stay of three years if you want it. You might want to call palliative care instead of hospice, you know, because people don't want the word hospice. They want a different word. You can find it, but it doesn't gonna change anything. So I think palliative care is essential. I mean, I don't think you should can have a good hospice without having a good palliative care program. I don't really think it's a challenge because again, it's not paid for, partly paid for. Yeah. Doctors are paid for, nurse practitioners are paid for. It can be partially paid for. But nevertheless, it's worth the hard work to have it. Talent experience is really important, and I think that that way people can kind of come in and out of because then the concept is consistent. Right. The bills can go however the bills go. It's all an insurance thing in the Bob, you know, which it doesn't have much to do with what's happening with the patient and the family. I mean it shouldn't. So I feel like this should be the background, you know, the that should be the back room operation.

Kellie: 1:29:06

That should all run in the background and the care and the compassion and the connection should be at the forefront. Yeah. Right. I agree. Yeah. Christy, you spent well over 30 years helping patients and families navigate the holidays. There is a concept known as the holiday effect, where natural deaths increase around Christmas in the new year. You lost your dad on Christmas Eve. We lost our grandmother on December 23rd. A lot happens this time of year.

Christy Whitney: 1:29:45

Well, and I think this is back to that goodness of fit thing, unfortunately. I wish it wasn't. I wish it could be more quickie-cutter. We came up with things like Lights of Life, which was yes, a fundraiser, but also a bereavement activity. We had an inspirational talk. We, you know, we lit up the campus, or we before that, we lit up a tree in City Hall one year, and we were in the mall one year, we were all over the place. We did it to give people an opportunity to memorialize a person that they lost, but also have maybe a little inspiration about how to get through the holiday. We usually did a grief group on coping with the holidays. So for people they anticipated having a difficult time, they could go get a little extra support. I think it's different for every different person. You know, I think about like my parents, they put my my brother's heart of hospice that I got for him every year on a tree every year. And I never put it up. Makes me feel too bad. And I think he won't care. But it doesn't make me feel good. It makes me feel bad. It made them feel good. So they did it, you know. I mean, everybody has a different thing. I kind of I think repressed actively my father dying on Christmas Eve because his death was so unusual. I think kind of like you were saying how your senior year was kind of a fog. I feel like the time around my father's death was a fog for me, other than one thing that he said that was I think is really funny. So my father was at the care center. We flew him there, you know, we're in a private plane from Kentucky because care is so bad there. And he gets to the care center, he gets comfortable for the first time in honestly a year, and he's awake, but then he went into this coma where he just wasn't, he was just asleep. But the morning he died, I went in and he was awake, which that was shocking. So he opened his eyes and I was the only one sitting there. And he said, Christy, he grabbed my arm and he said, I'm not ready to die. I'm like, okay, Dad. I said, remember how for the last two years you've said, now, Christy, I don't want you to be sad when I die because you know, I never expected I live to be 93. I've had a wonderful life and I'm prepared, and I don't think you should feel bad for one minute. Now you're telling me you don't, you're not ready to die. And I started laughing. I said, Do you really think we get a choice of that? I don't know. I said, Well, tell me about that. He said, I just don't want it to be over. And I said, Dad, think about all the patients I've been with when they're dying. I've never had anybody say that. And yet I said, You said the most profound thing I've ever heard in my whole career. I don't want it to be over. I said, Is that not a compliment to your life? I don't want it to be over. Not like I'm worried about your mom, or I'm worried about the finances, or I'm worried about blah blah blah. I just don't want it to be over. It's beautiful. I think that's really great. So I have this vision of my dad kind of leaving this world wishing it wasn't over. Yeah. And then my mom went and talked to him by herself, and I could hear her say, you know, give him permission to go and that she was going to be okay. Uh because I'm sure he was worried about her. So I don't have the same kind of experience that my sister-in-law, whose dad died suddenly on a Christmas Eve, every Christmas Eve, she kind of relives that, which is sort of sad.

Erin: 1:32:50

Well, I think it just it speaks to exactly what we talked about in the beginning and we talk about constantly here, which is there's just no rule book for grief. Every single grief experience is unique. And so it's just what what's gonna get you through the holidays is not necessarily going to get me through the holidays. And so I think there just really needs to be this extra measure of grace that we give ourselves and each other of just an understanding for each other, acknowledging that my grief is not your grief and your grief is not my grief, and and we're all gonna have a very unique experience. Yeah, I don't know how we get that message out there that it is okay to feel one person at a time, apparently, you know, because we talked about that in that international group.

Christy Whitney: 1:33:57

We had a really long discussion about and debate about when grief occurred. Does grief occur only after a death? Does grief occur when the person gets six? Does grief occur when when does grief occur? And what does grief look like, you know, in an anticipatory thing? And so we talked about all those things, how even the continuum of grief is not what we typically assign to grief, you know, that it only starts when you leave a person, which is not really usually true, unless it's unexpected. You know, unexpected is I think different than expected, but maybe the same too, depending on how a person because don't you think it has a lot to do with how a person copes with difficulty periods?

Kellie: 1:34:33

Yes. We actually spoke about this in a previous episode with Marcus. He lost his father very suddenly to suicide. And while he had battled Crohn's disease for most of Marcus's life from a teenager forward, so all of his dad's adult life, he was sick.

Christy Whitney: 1:34:56

Yeah.

Kellie: 1:34:56

So there was clearly an element of grief for what could have been or would have been had he not lost his health at such a young age. But the end of his life got very, very, very difficult. And so he made the choice and decision that he made. Marcus compartmentalizes and handles grief in a very different way than I do, than Erin does, than you do, than anybody else does. And he, like you, went back to work right away. That was what he needed to do to honor his father's memory and his life and his legacy. And through the years, we've talked a lot about that because a lot of people don't understand that. For them personally, they need to take time away, they need to take time off, they need to sit in those emotions and that empty space and feel all of it before they can do anything. And as you shared, some people wind up stuck there for lack of a better word or a more technical term for most of their lives and then they miss a lot of their lives.

Christy Whitney: 1:36:13

Yeah, they never really become happy again, so to speak. Yeah.

Kellie: 1:36:16

Yeah. Yeah.

Christy Whitney: 1:36:18

Yeah.

Kellie: 1:36:18

That would be hard. So grief is grief is a big topic. It's it's it's big. It's big.

Christy Whitney: 1:36:26

And you know, and I always felt like we only scratched the surface. We offered a lot of different things, and I'm sure, Erin, from your experience, you have the same kind of experience, knowing how many different things are offered for different people, different times. You know, I felt really strongly that we have an open group that was open weekly for five years if it needed to be. Yeah. Because some people need it. And I said, I hate having groups that are closed. You know, it starts on week one and goes through week six, and you lose someone in week two. And I'm sorry, you're gonna have to wait five weeks till you can get in a group. Yeah, and that is how it was done in the early days, some places. And I I just said, We're not doing it that way. I mean, I don't care if you have some specialized groups that work that way, but there should be an underlying support that could be accessed to me 52 weeks a year. It just needs to be. So yeah, and of course, in our country, bereavement care is not paid for either. So, you know, it's it's one of those fundraising things again. But if you have vision for what it could be, the people helped by it will help you sustain it. I do believe that, yeah.

Kellie: 1:37:32

And the other thing that's not paid for is caring for the caregivers. Right, right. And that could be family members who are also grieving, right? But it's also the caregivers who give so much of themselves. And I witnessed that firsthand. Erin and I have both seen that. You saw it your whole career. Yeah. Who service these patients, their families, their loved ones with a level of care and empathy that takes its own toll on them.

Christy Whitney: 1:38:04

Oh, yeah. There was just a big research study that was done this morning. I read it in the in the newswire, a research study done in Australia, I can't not in the United States anyway, but about nurses, hospice nurses and the toll on them. You know, Ashley, you know, is over the care center, my daughter, my nice practitioner daughter, and she really was phenomenal in her job. She worked really hard to find a model and systems, put systems in place so that it worked well and that we could achieve the mission of being able to admit someone almost 24 hours a day, instead of saying, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to wait till tomorrow morning to come to the care center because you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't have anybody working the swing shift or whatever it is, you know. So she had this whole thing she had worked out. The nurses were all happy, but care center wasn't making a lot of money. I think it was breaking even maybe, but wasn't making money. And sometimes it would lose money. So then they said, Okay, we're not gonna do any of these things. We're gonna strip these nurses, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this differently, we're gonna change the staffing model, we're just gonna have a med surge staffing model, we're not gonna have a hospice staffing model of one nurse to three patients, we're gonna go one nurse to six patients, and that should be fine, you know. So they did all these things, which ostensibly was hard and good because it would save money, but it really was a rough period for the care center to go through, and I think it's kind of recovered now. But Ashley couldn't stay, she just said she just couldn't do it anymore because she worked 24-7 almost. I mean, she really did. If she wasn't at work, she was on the phone, kind of a 24-7 worker. So when she left, it was really hard because it's all she had known. She'd only worked in a care center since she was a nurse, and she became an office nurse practitioner specializing in endocrinology, which she's only one person who is specialized in endocrinology in in Grand Junction. So she's you know, she works hard again, and she's the hard worker, but at least she has weekends off. Right. So that part's good. So yeah, but I mean I think that it everything sometimes people have to leave and do another job for a while or just get a break. You know, I used to say we should rotate hospice inpatient nurses through the education department because even if they didn't like it, because they should just need to get away from it for a while but not get lost. Right. You know? But yeah, I think there's always opportunity in doing that better. Supporting caregivers. Both paid ones and unpaid ones. Yeah.

Kellie: 1:40:25

Well Christy, your impact has been so great. Your legacy is so big. Your influence on our lives, my life personally, our family I would venture to say that your ripple effect, because of the roots you built here, spread internationally. And I really just want to recognize and celebrate you for that.

Christy Whitney: 1:40:52

Thank you.

Kellie: 1:40:53

Thank you. I have always looked to you with respect as a mentor, as a friend, and as a colleague. And it means so much that you took time out of your retirement and your life, which is still very busy, to share time with Erin and I today. I'm so grateful and I know that this is going to have a big impact.

Christy Whitney: 1:41:17

Well this has really been a gift to me too because I think that I think as I told you when we were just chatting that you know one of the things that I sort of was lamenting about is I felt like I had learned a lot, you know, what worked, what didn't work what, you know, all the you know hardship whatever overcame that I would have liked I would like to have the opportunity to share but there's not really that kind of opportunity it turns out for people. And I see it in my colleagues too. I have a friend Samira who's I mean she makes me look like a you know she's done more than me. And she's just sort of gone out with a whimper, you know, from this huge job. So kind of like you said that transition time for people I wish we had more opportunity to find ways for the people who leave their jobs to share what they learned. There's no formal way to do that and there's no really socially acceptable way to do that unless you just decide you're going to become a know it all consultant type person, which I have no interest in doing but so it's been really a gift to me. And so I thank you for that. And I really admire both of you and I admire you for doing this podcast. I think it's very innovative. I think it should have big impact. I I would hope it would because the thing about hospices it's just life right it's how life really should be. You know we're on this planet to to help each other right and that's kind of it. So it's not all that difficult if you just focus on the right thing. And that's what you guys are doing. So thank you for that.

Erin: 1:42:40

That's a really beautiful message. Thank you for that. That is profound. It is just how we should be living and caring for each other.

Christy Whitney: 1:42:51

How we should be living.

Erin: 1:42:52

Because we are all in this together.

Christy Whitney: 1:42:55

I have been asked to write a book of wisdom from the hospice pioneers nuggets of what they've learned to share with this generation of leaders. So I thought it was a great idea and I got all hecked up about it. And you know me I always start with the art. So I designed this book cover and the title called Dear Hospice and uh Wisdom from the hospice pioneers for today's leaders. And then I decided I would interview one of my oldest and dearest friends. So I interviewed him and he's been retired from hospice a number of years. And he said I can't believe you really want to do this. He said to be honest he said I haven't thought about hospice for years but as I thought about it you know it wasn't all roses. He said it really drummed up a lot of unpleasant memories about people and incidents. So he said I didn't expect that. And he said I wonder how that will be for you. You should think about this before you start. So over the next couple weeks I realized I was waking up anxious. So I called up Jay and I said I I've decided not to do the book. Not that I couldn't do the book but I don't think it's where I want to spend my time now because I knew it wouldn't be all positive, right? The thing I like about how you guys interviewed me and this whole thing it's all surrounded by the positive the purpose and the intentions the gratitude. And that's different than saying can you tell me the history of hospice and what dawned on me and I was telling my friend Chris who had asked me to write the book I said I think this book should be written but only asking people one question like what's the most important thing you've learned and leave it there. Let people share that without drumming up how it was controversial when this happened or that happened and people didn't agree about this or didn't agree about that and conjuring up all these people wars that are part of the history of something as it forms and storms and norms and all that. So yeah.

Kellie: 1:44:35

So Christy I have a question what's the most important thing that you learned?

Christy Whitney: 1:44:41

I guess I would add one more P to the P-I-G. I think I've learned that if you have passion purpose intention and gratitude you can do almost anything and it'll shock you what you can do.

Erin: 1:44:53

I could not agree more.

Christy Whitney: 1:44:56

That's my most important thing.

Kellie: 1:44:57

And finally when you look back over all of your life and career what are you most proud of?

Christy Whitney: 1:45:06

I all the things I've done I'm probably the most proud of getting hospice to places that didn't have it I have to say I mean whether it's Cortez, Pagosa, Durango, Delta County, Mantos County, Meeker, Pilato Valley, I mean places that could not have done it without some help. And I really believe again because I believe every single human being deserves to have this kind of care whatever you call it they deserve to have it and they don't have it and get it in places that are remote across our state or any state. So I think that's maybe what I most thought it's beautiful.

Kellie: 1:45:42

I love that stories of others helps us create a more meaningful connection to our own.

Erin: 1:46:25

A small share can make a big impact. You can also join us on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn and connect further at thepodcast.com.

Kellie: 1:46:35

And if you're enjoying this podcast one of the most meaningful ways you can support us is by leaving a five-star rating, writing a short review, or simply letting us know your thoughts. Your feedback helps us reach others and reminds us why we do this work.

Erin: 1:46:51

Because the P-I-G isn't just a podcast. It's a place to remember that even in the midst of grief, life goes on, resilience matters and love never leaves. Thanks for being on this journey with us. Until next time, hugs and kisses everyone