My most meaningful Hospice patient relationship was with my first one, who I will call Mary. Mary has been my patient throughout the entire time that I have been in the Athena Program. She has been my biggest lesson during my time as a hospice volunteer. When I first started in September, I was ready to talk my head off for an hour or so on Friday and make a new friend. However, Mary all but refused to sit with me. It never occurred to me that someone would look at a person who was volunteering her time to offer companionship with so much distrust. Mary continuously asked what I was doing there and what I wanted. It broke my heart that she had such little trust in people to be so suspicious of why I was coming to visit her. I decided to try to implement what I had learned in orientation. I remembered that she had been a seamstress who loved gardening, flowers, and baking. She had a son that she talked to and a daughter who I was to avoid talking about. I used this knowledge to ask a few subtle questions about her. She answered with fairly vague answers, such as liking all flowers when I asked if she had a favorite one. I realized that I was going to have to employ other methods of bonding with my patient. This situation reminded me of the video that we were assigned called “Being Mortal”. The video highlighted a doctor’s need to cure all and their inability to accept that there is nothing else that they can do. Doctors tend to see death as a failure. If they had done something else earlier or took another avenue of treatment, their patient might have survived. One of the most important things that doctors need to learn is how to cease treatment when quality of life is taken away. The quality of one’s life is something that no one can get back. When dealing with the end of life, patients need to focus on spending time with their loved ones, with as little pain as possible. As such, doctors need to adapt their instinctual need to cure their patients and let nature take its course in the least painful way possible. Similarly, but of course to a way lesser extent, I had to adapt the way that I approached my visits with Mary. I decided to tell her about myself in order to show her who I am as a person. I was hoping to build as much trust as possible with that tactic. However, she still didn’t take to opening up. I decided to try not to force things with her and to let her do her thing, which for this visit was eating her food. I still spoke a little bit, but I mostly just spent time with her, personally. The next visit, however, Mary opened up a bit more. I think that she needed to be sure that I would be a consistent visitor. As my weekly visits began to pile up, Mary would converse with me of her own volition. I felt immensely grateful for this change because it felt like I was truly making a difference for a patient in end of life care. The experience showed me that there were many ways to connect with a patient and that there is always a way to overcome a challenge if one is flexible and patient.