It’s hard to watch the Ashes. I loved playing cricket with my dad when I was younger, something he could never do with his father, who had contracted polio in the 1940s. Years later it hadn’t occurred to me why Dad could play so well until, when I asked him for a game, he told me we were to visit a family friend first. “It’s kind of like a care home,” he said when I asked where the man lived. “And it might not make for comfortable viewing.”
Everything smelt sterile. The interior decor, straight out of my gran’s playbook, was utterly garish: think floral maximalism at its worst. And when I saw the man we’d come to visit lying motionless in bed, it was difficult not to ask the obvious question. Unperturbed, Dad began to express his gratitude: it turned out he was a dear friend of my grandpa and the man who’d taught Dad to play the sport he couldn’t. Not that I cared: when it was time to leave I was glad to be out of there, too young to reflect on the significance of this goodbye and desperate to get away from the place to which this man had come to die.
According to the Care Quality Commission, more than 90 per cent of the roughly 200 hospices operating across the UK are rated “good” or “outstanding”. Our local hospice was named the UK’s large charity of the year at the 2025 Third Sector Awards but when my dad was diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in April 2024 it was the last place I wanted him to be; my focus was on developments in treatment and ignoring the odds stacked against us. An institution designed to facilitate his untimely death wasn’t for dad, even if they would administer his morphine in outstanding fashion.
The cancer had other ideas. Our problem — that the drugs weren’t touching the sides — exposed my naivety about pain medication. As we live in a Devon village, the hospice nurse who first visited Dad at home happened to be a close friend he’d surfed with for years. I remember his face when he saw the man who not long ago he’d been with in the ocean now oscillating between erratic pain and opioid-induced sleep. Outpatient visits such as these are a large part of a hospice’s role: while only a small proportion (approximately 5 per cent) of deaths happen inside them, many of their services are community-based. And before I could understand what was happening, we’d become one of the roughly 100,000 families a year in receipt of them.
It didn’t take long to require an A&E visit. We’d anticipated an hours-long wait so, when we were hurried through, it was cause for celebration. That was until it dawned on us why: Dad was labelled as in his “last days or hours of life” and it became clear even the hospital couldn’t handle his needs. My dad’s pleading expression, as if questioning how it was possible to feel this way in a place he’d trusted could resolve it, will for ever be imprinted on my mind. I’d made a promise years earlier to refuse another request to accompany him to a hospice. But now, just six weeks after my dad’s diagnosis, when a palliative care nurse told us a space had opened up I accepted it with relief, watching as Dad was wheeled inside from the back of an ambulance.
Although only about 5 per cent of deaths in England occur in a hospice, those under 65 are more likely to die there than those aged over 85. My suspicion is that, as was the case with Dad, hospices come into their own when a younger person, unused to the medication, fatigue and pain routine with a disease like cancer, is unable to handle the rapid upending of their daily life. Hospices are experts in pain management, equipped to administer significantly higher levels of medication than hospitals.
Dad spent 11 days there in June 2024, in a room with a remote-controlled bed fixed with handles to stop him falling out and enough space for me to lie beside him and hold his hand as he had so often done with me as a child. And his room was surrounded by manicured gardens. These were beautiful but struck me as surplus to requirements until one day I saw the awe on Dad’s face as he walked through them. The design of the hospice was not just with dignity and care in mind, it was a place built in appreciation of living too. We settled into an environment of calm and trust, enabling us to step away from our state of hyper-alertness and relinquish control.
My prejudices fading, we met the palliative care consultant. He had a disarming smile and shocked me with his opening gambit: “We need to get you fit for your next oncology appointment,” he said to my dad. A week earlier this had seemed impossible as we had resigned ourselves to the inevitability of it all. The hospice consultant was determined to give us our chance. We made it to the meeting but, adding to the long list of moments I’ll never forget, the doctor told us plainly that chemotherapy was no longer an option. When we returned to the hospice, another doctor — the most compassionate I have ever encountered — was there to greet us, already briefed on the news we’d received. That was dad’s final oncology meeting but the work of the hospice made sure we weren’t left wondering what could have been.
It wasn’t until they helped my dad marry his life partner that my preconceived notions of the hospice were totally dismantled. The staff arranged food, a cake and even decorated the newlyweds’ bed with a congratulatory message and a plate of chocolate strawberries. It exemplified their approach: more than just being medical professionals, they paid attention to joy, awe and love, features that add to the quality of life. And when the very end did come the hospice helped reassure us, with kindness, that some of the more brutal experiences — thrush in the mouth, the breakdown of bodily functions and a sinister, rasping breath caused by pooled saliva known as the death rattle — were common.
Now I know the truth about hospices I’m a total convert. I have nothing but gratitude that my dad’s life ended there and, should I ever need it, I hope I’ll have the opportunity to receive care from one too. And I miss it, so much so that whenever I return to Devon I drop in to have a meal or a chat with the nurses and counsellors to whom I’ll be forever grateful. Their emphasis on creating a place to live, rather than simply die, has redefined my understanding of what it means to enjoy each individual moment. And when I reflect on the first visit I paid to one with dad, I no longer feel sorry for the man who taught him to play cricket and took his last breath there.
Callum Macauley-Murdoch for The Times.
