“I want to spend Christmas at home with my family,” said a determined David Barton, in between the surges of pain that were going through his cancer beaten body. It would become his one wish, his ultimate goal before his time ran out.

When I first met David Barton, it wasn’t under the best of terms. A week before Christmas 2005 his health took a drastic turn for the worst and placed him back in the hospital. A lifetime of smoking cigarettes had finally caught up with him. In October, the news came that he not only had stage four cancer of the lungs, but that the cancer had metastasized to the bones in his legs. The doctors said he would have four months to live.

Now sitting in the hospital bed, surrounded by his wife and two daughters, he made the decision to enroll in what thousands of people have already found as an option to ‘end of life’ care. He signed up in a local Hospice program, specifically Heartland Hospice.

Hospice provides an alternative approach to caring for patients. They are experts on pain control and their emphasis is on the quality of life for a patient, not necessarily quantity of life.

According to the Caring Connections website, a program of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO), the focus of hospice relies on the belief that each individual has the right to die pain-free and with dignity, and that our loved ones will receive the necessary support to help them do so. This approach carried out by Heartland Hospice allowed Barton to return to his own home to spend the remainder of his time in the company of his family.

David Barton and his family were gracious enough to allow me to document his journey from his entrance into hospice up until his exit from this life. These pictures, although uncomfortable at times, show David’s evolution from pain into peace, fear into comfort, and most importantly the unfaltering companionship of his family’s love. It is my belief that shedding our fears of death and understanding the dying process begins with accepting that death is a normal part of life.

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