BOB FAW, correspondent: If you’d like to know what a hospice chaplain does, watch Kerry Egan in New Bedford, Massachusetts as she visits seventy-one-year-old Jim Burgo, who didn’t want his face shown and who is dying from liver disease.

JIM BURGO: I don’t want to suffer. I know I am going to die, but I don’t want to suffer.

FAW: At life’s end, when Burgo is anguished and needs to talk about dying, the hospice chaplain listens and comforts.

BURGO: There are a lot of things about Vietnam that I am not proud of either.

KERRY EGAN: And I think God forgives those things.

BURGO: I hope so. I really hope so.

FAW: If one aspect of her healing ministry can be somber, her visit to the Fall River home of ninety-seven-year-old Mary Labrie shows another.

Singing: “When we all see Jesus, we’ll sing and shout the victory.”

FAW: Here the mood is upbeat, because Mary, unlike Jim Burgo, faces death with absolutely no fear—indeed, looks forward to being in heaven and being reunited with her late husband of 75 years.

MARY LABRIE: Oh yeah, I’ll see them again. We will all be together one day.

EFAN: What will be like, being together again?

LABRIE: Oh, that will be wonderful.

FAW: Kerry Egan counsels people of all different faiths, and not all of her patients are religious. But the common thread in her work, she says, is helping people give meaning to their lives.

EGAN: How do you make sense of all of this that is going on in your life? For every person that I go in to see, my goal is the same, which is to find out what their goal is, to help them meet it.

FAW: A chaplain for thirteen years, Kerry Egan says that what is crucial is learning how to listen.

EGAN: I hear terrible stories sometimes—terrible stories, and the most compassionate thing you can do is not turn away. Oftentimes for you to go in and say, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” when they full well know it is not okay, it shuts them up. So now they can’t say, “I’m frightened. I’m angry. I’m confused,” because now they need to act like everything is okay.

FAW: Listening is the most important thing?

EGAN: Yes. Deeply listening to what it is they’re saying.

FAW: Kerry says something was brewing with Jim Burgo. Finally, she understood. His father had taken him away from his mother when he was very young, and Burgo was afraid it was going to happen again.

EGAN: So are are you afraid that you will die and you’ll go to heaven?

BURGO: I am not afraid of going to heaven.

EGAN: I know, but that your mother and father will be there, and your father will take your mother away again?

BURGO: That is very, very possible in my mind, yeah.

EGAN: Well, there’s no point in sugarcoating it, right? That’s not helpful. If someone is dying, and they’re sick, they know it.

(reading from Bible): “…teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always…”

LABRIE: Oh, that is my favorite verse.

EGAN: I know it is.

Some people really come to the end, and they feel good. You know, they’ve done a lifetime of work and of thinking about this and they just want someone to be there with them, to sort of enforce those strengths they already have.

FAW: But others struggle, and Kerry Egan tries to see them come to terms with what ultimately matters.

EGAN: For some people there’s an incredible relief to have someone come in and say, “What did this all mean? What did my life mean? What does my death mean? Why am I sick? Is there a God? Is there a God who knows I’m sick? Is there a God who cares that I am sick?”

FAW: For a while, what Kerry couldn’t understand was why her patients talk to a chaplain so much about their families.

EGAN: It took me a long time to realize that is how people are talking about God. Again, they might not use the term “God,” but that’s how they talk about ultimate meaning. They’re trying to get at love. They’re trying to get at what God is. Jim is a great example of that. He was talking about his mother, and he was talking about love. What does the love of God look like? Am I going to get to see my mother again? Is the love my father showed me or didn’t show me, is that what God is like?

FAW: Raised Catholic, now an Episcopalian, Kerry Egan isn’t always successful. One patient actually threw a bedpan at her. But Jim Burgo’s wife, Elaine, says that every time hospice chaplain Egan visits, Jim isn’t the only one who benefits.

ELAINE BURGO: She helps me by helping him. If I want to talk, I know she is there, and she’s just an excellent, excellent listener. We don’t only discuss the Holy Spirit and God. I know she is there just knowing he is going to die. If I want to discuss anything, she is available.

FAW: Just a few months ago, Mary was near death. Kerry and the hospice team brought her back to good health, and it was only with Kerry, says Mary’s daughter, Judy, that Mary was able to reveal how she worried about the grief her death would bring her children.

JUDY BIDDLE: It gave me that peace, knowing that Mom is not in denial, that she was just worried about us. She was worried about us children. That was really precious. You know, it’s so good to have someone from outside the family that she can share with, so that she might say things to Kerry that she might not feel comfortable sharing with me as a daughter.

FAW: Family members, of course, are not the only ones who appreciate Kerry.

JIM BURGO (to Kerry Egan): You make people better. You explain God to me. You’ve given me a whole bunch.

FAW: You read the Bible sometimes.

MARY LABRIE: I read it every day.

FAW: Every day.

LABRIE: And there is some good information there to keep you going if you are concerned about things.

FAW: And seeing Kerry, does that help you keep going too?

LABRIE: Oh, yes.

FAW: Kerry meets every day with members of the hospice team. This day she talks with nurse Patty Martin about Mary’s progress.

PATTY MARTIN (to Chaplain Egan): She’s walking around. She is eating better. She is gaining weight.

FAW: Mary is doing so well soon she will have to be taken off hospice care. That worries Kerry because for patients it’s hard to lose the care they’ve come to depend upon. It’s just another issue a hospice chaplain confronts. What helps her cope and decompress, says Egan, is a happy home life: two children, a supportive husband, two dogs. She prays, meditates, hikes, and dances. It helps, too, she concedes, to maintain a certain distance from her patients.

EGAN: I have to remember that it’s not about me, right? It’s not personal. I’m a passing person in their life. You know, I’m not his wife, I’m not his daughter, I’m not his mother. Not even his best friend. You know, I’m his chaplain, and that’s a very different role.

FAW: And when that distancing isn’t enough, Kerry says, she relies on her faith.

EGAN: That gives me a lot of strength to do this. To be able to say that this is not the end and that life is hard, and really hard things happen but that we can be with each other. We can help each other through it, and that is how God functions in this world.

FAW: With Jim Burgo or with Mary, Kerry Egan says she’s learned that while there are miracles, her role is not to be a miracle worker.

EGAN: It really is between the patient and God, right? And that the patient and God are going to do the work. It’s not like I have some magical presence in there. Not at all.

FAW: And what does Kerry get out of it?

EGAN: I get enormous joy. People know so much more than they think they know when they’re allowed to explore it themselves, and God is so much more present than anybody usually gives God credit for. And I get to see that. I get to know that.

FAW: Caring for them when their bodies are failing and their spiritual needs are crying out, too.

EGAN (to Jim Burgo): You’re such a good man.

BURGO: I am not, but someday…

FAW: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

ABERNETHY: We are sorry to add that shortly after that interview Jim Burgo died.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: For years, Natalie Albin endured aggressive treatment for leukemia. She wound up in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. Death was near.

FRAN CRONIN: She’d had years of chemo. She was done with it. There was nothing left for her body to tolerate.

ROLLIN: Her daughter, Fran Cronin, says that what the family wanted at this point was a quiet time to be together and say goodbye.

CRONIN: But the doctors kept on coming back to us and asking us if we’d like to do tests, what else we could do, and we’d have to say, well, what kind of difference will this make? Is this going to change the prognosis? No. This might extend her life for a couple of months. What quality of life is she going to have? Nothing really better, can’t guarantee. In our effort to say goodbye to my mother we were always being interrupted by the hospital’s own need to be service-driven. They weren’t about hospice care. It wasn’t about saying goodbye. Their role and their interaction with us was to provide treatment.

DR. LACHLAN FORROW (Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital): We are wired as human beings, thankfully, to when in doubt you fight for life no matter what. Doctors and nurses are trained, first we want to try to save a life.

ROLLIN: While the person whose life is being saved wants to be kept as comfortable as possible, he or she doesn’t necessarily want to be saved, and often this hasn’t been made clear to either the doctor or the patient’s family. Dr. Lachlan Forrow is director of ethics and palliative care at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

DR. FORROW: The tragedy is our health care system does not provide any context to help doctors and nurses have the time to talk with people about these hard things, and the whole system is greased to pay hospitals and others for expensive things people might not even want. One of the fundamental problems is what gets called our fee-for-service system. Doctors and hospitals get paid for the things that they do that tend to be expensive. The more expensive it is, the more you get paid.

ROLLIN: Our medical system can’t keep everyone healthy, but it excels at keeping people alive, which is expensive. Twenty-five percent of all Medicare spending is for the 10 percent of patients who are in their final year of life. For the year 2012 alone, that’s expected to be $137 billion. Most of the money is spent in the last 6 months of life, which is often of little benefit, if any, to the patient. And the conversations between patients and doctors and family members which might make a difference, Dr. Forrow says, aren’t happening, partly because people are afraid to talk about death and because the part of the Obama health care reform plan, which would have reimbursed doctors for these conversations, was shot down.

DR. FORROW: Cheap, political, inflammatory comments like “death panels” and “pulling the plug on grandma” for cheap political points have terrified the American people in a way that I think—I think that’s immoral.

ROLLIN: Dr. Susan Mitchell, who has studied advance dementia in nursing home patients, has found that even though these patients can be treated and kept more comfortable in a nursing home, they are often hospitalized where they receive aggressive and sometimes painful treatment that is covered by Medicare.

DR. SUSAN MITCHELL (Senior Scientist, Hebrew SeniorLife): The nursing home does not get reimbursed for taking care of a patient who’s acutely ill with advanced dementia, which can take a lot of staff time and resources. So it’s at no cost to them to send them to the hospital where they will get that care.

ROLLIN: The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that the cost for dementia care in 2011 will be approximately $183 billion, mostly paid by the government, and that cost will go up to $1.1 trillion in 2050.

DR. MITCHELL: I think there’s a lot of unnecessary and costly medical care being provided for patients with advanced dementia that is not what the families and patients want.

ROLLIN: But even if patients and their families have expressed their wishes, that doesn’t solve the entire cost problem.

PROFESSOR DAN BROCK (Harvard Medical School): At the end of life, people often have greater difficulty in giving up, in no longer using resources, and so you hear this notion, particularly from families, “I want everything done,” and implicitly there, or sometimes explicitly, “Don’t worry about the cost,” right?

ROLLIN: Professor Dan Brock, who teaches ethics at Harvard Medical School, is one of the few who believes America must ration covered health care based on efficacy and cost.

PROFESSOR BROCK: I was once at a meeting in Britain many years ago with British physicians, and we were talking about end-of-life care decisions, and the Americans asked, “Well, what do you do when patients demand or when families demand?” And the British docs sort of looked bemused and said, “Well, they don’t do that here. They don’t demand here.” We have insurance, so we say we’re entitled to it, and we have this view that rationing is a bad thing to do, and so we think we ought to get it.

ROLLIN: The problem is more acute when the patient is dying.

PROFESSOR BROCK: Should we cover this new cancer drug which extends life on average for three months and costs $200,000 or $300,000 to do so? And when you look at it that way, then people can begin understand that, well, it doesn’t seem to make sense.

ROLLIN: And the other difficulty, Professor Brock adds, is that once a drug is considered safe, Medicare does not consider cost in their approval of coverage. They ask only whether the treatment is “reasonable and necessary.”

PROFESSOR BROCK: Medicare is not able to deny coverage on grounds that—what’s usually called cost effectiveness. That is, the cost isn’t merited by the benefits.

ROLLIN: Many experts say if the question of cost is not dealt with it will surely get worse because of new treatments, which will be more expensive. Also, a growing population of the aged and their physicians will want these treatments, no matter the cost to Medicare.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Betty Rollin in Boston.

DR. JAMES OLESKE (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey): I don’t have a big lap like Santa. Do you like that rabbit? That’s yours. It’s a purple rabbit. That’s purple. Alright, I was told that three times he was in the ICU?

In the US we’ve been mostly concentrating on curing every child. We’re not going to let a child die. Now that’s a great challenge to motivate by, but the ones we can’t cure we just wash our hands and move on, and they’re left to their, by themselves.

Balloons! I guess this is part of our play therapy.

I went into pediatrics because I loved children, and I thought I would help children, and I wasn’t prepared to go to funerals, so many at least, in the beginning of my career. My teeth were cut on all the AIDS kids I took care of, and kids would come in, you know, with all their baby teeth were blackened down to the gum line. They’d have abscesses, and their thrush was so bad it would make it impossible for them to swallow or eat. So then you have an infant….In the beginning of the epidemic, when people were initially afraid, people who had AIDS and who were dying—they were left alone. Everyone shuns you, even your doctor. In that era I would reach my hand through the bars, because kids are always in these cages, and just hold their hand or leg and just, I guess, in my own way pray and hope and wish and lay hands on.

One of the reasons I’ve gotten into the Circle of Life and palliative and pain management is that I saw what a bad job I did in AIDS—very painful disease, and I wasn’t aggressive in the beginning. I am now, but I learned. One of the patients I learned from was Quinetta. She had a tumor throughout her GI tract, and the only way she could relieve her pain, because I wasn’t giving her enough morphine, was to sit in bed scooched over and rocking, and somehow that helped her pain, I guess. When she died, I went in to talk to her grandmother, who I was very close with. I went into the room to tell her, and the next thing I know I’m in her arms crying, and she’s comforting me.

I just wanted to point out to the medical students that pain management and what I like to call palliative care in chronic diseases is not just taking care of children who are dying and end of life care like hospice. This is a much more long-term approach to how we improve the lives of children, and pain management has not been a great success by pediatricians in the past. I mean, we’ve been afraid to use drugs that really control pain and have undertreated pain for such a long period of time.

Less than 1 percent of patients with chronic illnesses ever get addicted and use drugs for drugs’ sake use. Ninety-nine percent of them never happen. So what we do is we don’t treat the 99 percent because we’re worried about this 1 percent, and it’s crazy. So for children it’s even more of an argument you have to make because people, “you’re going to make them addicts.” We’re not going to make them addicts.

Medical Student: She’s a 12-month-old female who has a history of MRSA positive abscess, who was readmitted on Sunday and started on a five-day course of antibiotics. She’s been doing well. She’s been afebrile the entire time.

Dr. Oleske: And we can take that nasty old IV out.

Medical Student: Yes, since she’s done with her antibiotics it can come out.

Dr. Oleske: Great. I’m going to give you this rabbit so you have two of them.

What the Circle of Life is all about is any child with a chronic illness that’s causing pain to be as aggressive with the pain management as you are with treating whatever the disease the child has so that when they do live longer it’s quality of life, and when the children are ready to go on Circle of Life is also committed to helping families deal with that dying process.

And we’re struggling. We have two non-paid physicians, we have two paid nurses, a half-time bereavement counselor, and yet we’ve been able to service so many families in New Jersey and make a difference.

Mr. Schorbel: Dr. Oleske, how are you? It’s good to see you. We’re glad you’re here.

Dr. Oleske: You know she is my favorite patient.

Mrs. Schorbel: I know.

Dr. Oleske: I’m not supposed to say that.

I already had a group of patients that I think needed and would benefit from palliative care. One of them was my favorite patient of all times, Leann Schorbel.

Dr. Oleske: Is that light too much?

Leann was a special person. She sort of arrested, if you will, her mental and physical growth because of an endocrine problem she had, added to the GI problem she had…

Dr. Oleske: Two times in one week, huh?

…added to the immunology problem she had, added to the anatomical, ventricular, brain and blood supply system that she had. I almost wonder how she survived.

Dr. Oleske: If you were closer I’d come and draw your blood like I used to.

And I sort of grew up with Leann over the 25 years I’ve known her, trying to treat her immune deficiency.

Dr. Oleske: Well, you know that the specialist at the hospital should be able to draw blood. I’m not the only person that can do that.

Leann Schorbel: Yes, you are!

Mrs. Schorbel: Circle of Life will keep her at home. That’s what we need, and that’s the people that we want to be here. It keeps her surrounded by the things that she loves and still not feeling well it keeps us as a family together. We’re not separated because when you’re in the hospital you’re totally separated.

Mrs. Schorbel to Leann: There was one person that you like that was on it, and who was that?

Leann Schorbel: Justin Bieber.

Mrs. Schorbel: She knows that mommy and daddy are with her and that the people that will come in to help her are loving people that are very gentle and kind and they are going to respect what makes her feel good and they are not going to scare her.

Dr. Oleske to mother on ward: This baby looks really beautiful…

If you look at the history of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, he made statements like doing good, kind act to others is important, but relieving the suffering of others the reward is God. And if you look at the Christian ethics, you have Christ saying, “Suffer the little children unto me.” It reminded me of the AIDS kids, you know. Christ, if he was here, he would have embraced the AIDS kids. He wouldn’t have said, ugh, I don’t want to get this disease. He wouldn’t have put on a gown and mask and gloves. He would have embraced them.

Dr. Oleske to nurse: So you want to tell me a little bit about the baby…

Nurse: This baby is 20 days old.

Our role as physicians, as healers, is to relieve pain and suffering and to also meet the spiritual needs of the families and children. That doesn’t mean that you take on the role of their religious advisors but that, first of all, you respect what their religious and spiritual beliefs are, and I think it’s important for physicians to have some type of spiritual bedrock if they’re going to do this.

Nurse: We can dim the lights according to the time of the day.

When I was first in AIDS people would interview me and say you’re a pioneer, and I never knew what that meant. Did I carry a fork and I had overalls on? But maybe, in a way, Circle of Life is a little pioneering, but I’m hoping that instead of just being a pioneer we end up being the standard of care…

Dr. Oleske to patient: You have my bunny! I have the same one. We match!

…that what Circle of Life does is done for every child in New Jersey…

Dr. Oleske: This is a very beautiful young girl, mommy…

…every child in the United States, and internationally.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: If you’re homeless in Washington, D.C. and sick, perhaps close to dying, and you end up in a city shelter, the people who work there might telephone a place called Joseph’s House and ask if they can take you in. It was founded by a Christian doctor who speaks about trying to see God in everybody. It’s staffed by a few people on salary and volunteers, and it’s funded by government, foundations and private donors. Lucky Severson paid a visit.

JOSH (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, greeting Melvin White): Hello, how are you doing Mr. White? I’m Josh. Welcome.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Melvin White could not be greeted more warmly or graciously if he were checking into a five-star hotel.

PATTY WUDEL (Director, Joseph’s House, to Volunteer): Would you just hang this up for Mr. White?

SEVERSON: This is Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C., the equivalent of a five-star hospice — an extraordinary place that comforts the dying with a mixture of Christianity and Zen Buddhism. More than likely it will be Melvin White’s last home. He is suffering from the final stages of colon cancer. Melvin says for years he was a cook at a local hotel and a pool hustler on the side. After he got sick, he got evicted.

MELVIN WHITE (Resident, Joseph’s House): I came home from work from the hospital from chemo one day, start the key in the door, and it turned back in my hand.

SEVERSON (to Mr. White): They changed the lock?

Mr. WHITE: Changed the lock on me.

SEVERSON: Melvin is the kind of person who Dr. David Hilfiker was thinking of when he founded Joseph’s House 16 years ago as a place for terminally ill, homeless, African-American men with nowhere to die but the streets.

Dr. DAVID HILFIKER (Founder, Joseph’s House): This was a very special place for many men. It became the first, the only place that they ever loved, ever had, that said, “You can stay here as long as you live.”

SEVERSON: For probably many of these men, this was the most loving home they ever had in their lives?

Dr. HILFIKER: Absolutely, absolutely. And certainly, I mean, they had been on the street for 20 years, and this is a chance to have a home.

SEVERSON: Although most of the 300 or so patients who have called Joseph’s House home have been black men, more and more are women, like Theresa Batch. She has colon cancer.

THERESA BATCH (Resident, Joseph’s House, talking about Tiffani Boerio): Well, she meets me every morning and greets me, so I call her “sunshine.” This morning, the first word that came out of my mouth: “Hi, sunshine. Praise the Lord for you.”

SEVERSON: Theresa has been here three months, has some good days and some bad. She is surrounded by the proud faces of Joseph’s House alumni.

Ms. BATCH: I look at the families that passed on, and some of them that didn’t, that made it through the cancer that they had in their bodies, you know. And I see the beauty of their souls and their minds and their hearts, you know.

Ms. WUDEL (Commencing the house meeting): It’s a special meeting, because today was the day that Melvin White came to join us.

SEVERSON: Patty Wudel runs the place, to use a phrase of hers, with “exquisite attention.” Patients are treated as honored guests, something they are not accustomed to.

Ms. WUDEL: Folks have suffered with addictions for a long time, suffered with not belonging, not being wanted or missed for a long time, carry a lot of regrets that their life turned out the way it did whether they were really responsible or not.

SEVERSON: She was attracted to Joseph’s House partly because of the emphasis on the social Gospel.

Ms. WUDEL: The Beatitudes sure play a big part for the foundation of Joseph’s House as a place of justice and compassion, with Jesus as an important teacher.

SEVERSON: Patty was also attracted because the therapy here includes the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Ms. WUDEL: It’s developing a self-awareness, paradoxically to be able to forget myself and serve the needs of the person in front of me.

Dr. HILFIKER: Our hope is not to present God to anybody, but to see God in everybody, and to allow that person to have the relationship with God that is deepest for them.

Ms. WUDEL (to Mr. White, at meeting): My wish for you is that you will find deep healing here in all the ways that you really need it.

MARY (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, to Mr. White, at meeting): I’m so happy that you are here, and I hope that you can sort of find physical warmth and joy and peace.

JOHN (Resident, Joseph’s House): You just lay back, man, and let them do all they need to do, and you will be well. I know you’ll be satisfied.

Mr. WHITE: You know, I feel a whole lot better in just in this one day than I have been in the last couple of years, you know.

PRISCILLA NORRIS (Nurse, Joseph’s House): What is amazing to see happen over and over again is those who are sicker are cared for and paid attention to by those who are at that moment are stronger, and I don’t mean us.

SEVERSON: Priscilla Norris is the Joseph’s House nurse.

Ms. NORRIS: It fills my heart to meet another person and serve them, because I’m a well person right now, and they are not a well person. It isn’t a helping as much as it is a serving.

Ms. WUDEL: So many people wake up in the morning and are grateful that God woke them up to live another day. And kind of looking at their day from my point of view — feeling well and healthy — their day looks pretty rough. But it makes me think and wonder about my own gratitude for being alive in my own life.

Ms. BATCH (Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”): “…and the home of the brave.”

SEVERSON: The first day we were at Joseph’s House, Theresa filled the house with blast of sunshine. A few days later, she couldn’t get out of bed. But she was never alone. Her buddy, Tiffani Boerio, was at her bedside.

TIFFANI BOERIO (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): I just want to be with her. I mean, I came to work this afternoon at one o’clock because I knew that she hadn’t been doing well when I left on Sunday. And it was just compelling just to sit with her. And I think for me that is just one way to love her.

Ms. NORRIS: Those of us who have known Theresa all know that she has other times gone into these deep sleeps for two or three days and then popped up like the Energizer bunny. It’s not my sense that she’s going to pop up from this one, but I’m hoping that she will.

SEVERSON: Patty and Priscilla grew especially close to one patient, William. Both were with him when he died.

Ms. WUDEL: I felt the blood stop flowing in my friend. Time stopped still then. It was a profound, sacred moment for me.

Ms. NORRIS: There is so much more to a human being than the body, and the sensation of mystery and of soul is tangible. It’s mystical and it’s mysterious. It is the closest I can possible get to what I see as God.

Ms. BOERIO: In some way the world has changed for me because of that experience, and I think that, yeah, in a lot of ways I will never be the same.

BREY CRIBBS (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): It definitely made me less afraid of death. In our society I feel we don’t experience much first-hand of death, and I really saw how it was a reversal of the birth process.

SEVERSON: Brey Cribbs is a social worker, a seminary student, and a volunteer at Joseph’s House.

Mr. CRIBBS: More and more you become less capable, and you need the support of people to just take care of you. But at the same time there’s a childlike quality of the person that tends to become much more joyful and more peaceful.

SEVERSON: Staffers and volunteers agree they are the ones who learn life’s lessons about things like love and selflessness from people who have never caught a break, like Joshua Murray.

Ms. NORRIS (to Mr. Murray): They can solve it; you’ll still need to let infectious disease know that you don’t need the urgent care.

SEVERSON: Joshua is taking radiation treatments for lymphoma, which he says doctors told him is a result of the HIV virus he was born with 23 years ago. His twin brother escaped the disease.

JOSHUA MURRAY (Resident, Joseph’s House): I don’t blame anybody. You know, I was born with it and, you know, I just have to take care of it. I don’t blame my mother for, you know, giving it to me. I was mad, but I didn’t blame her, you know. So, I’m still living.

Dr. HILFIKER: For me the perfect image of the house is a party going on down here, with music and people that we’ve invited and decorations and people dancing, and somebody upstairs dying at the same time.

SEVERSON: A few years after Dr. Hilfiker started Joseph’s House, he was suffering from bouts of deep depression, and he told the patients he could no longer be their doctor. He says one of them, a former drug kingpin and a tough guy named Peewee, taught him a lesson he won’t forget.

Dr. HILFIKER: Right away Peewee spoke up. “Yeah, doc, we’ve been noticing something wrong. You just take care of yourself, and we will still be here for you.” And it was just very simple. But what it was ultimately was an acknowledgment of my brokenness, from a person who was very broken. It was really the turning point in my accepting my depression.

(Group reciting the Lord’s Prayer): Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…

SEVERSON: Every Thursday the group comes together in prayer. On this day, their thoughts were with Theresa Batch. Theresa died after spending three months with the family at Joseph’s House, and she knew she was loved.

(Group reciting prayer): …and deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.