Malachi House offers a home and family for terminally ill
by Frank Barnett

(Plain Press, March 2010) Malachi House allows the terminally ill to live out their days as happy as possible. From the outside it just looks like another handsome 100-plus-year-old row house in Ohio City. But 22 years ago, the internal walls were knocked down, fusing the 4 individual units into one big beautiful home. After expanding in 2002 it can now house 15 residents.

“The thing that needs to be remembered about Malachi House is that it’s just a private home (not hospice),” said Mary Kay Stahley, executive director, “We don’t do any skilled nursing here. All we do is comfort the terminally ill. We become their family. Hospice comes in and takes care of them.”

Hospice usually refers a person to Malachi House. They have to be terminally ill with 6 months or less to live, no money to be able to afford to be anywhere else, eligible for Medicaid, and have no willing or available caregiver. They cannot have any kind of contagious disease like tuberculosis.

A full kitchen provides all the meals. Residents can come down to the big dining room table on the first floor, though many remain in their rooms. Lunch in particular is a popular time of day for staff, volunteers and special visitors to socialize and enjoy what the full and part-time cooks come up with everyday.

Some 150 volunteers donate about 800 hours a month, allowing for a small paid staff of 15. Stahley marvels at the time, as well as all the food and supplies, donated. “We’re totally supported by donations. We do not get money from Medicare, Medicaid, the Diocese, St. Malachi’s; we’re a totally separate entity from the church. So, we do fundraising. But with our mission it’s difficult to market it in a way to make it appealing. So we rely on word of mouth.”

A small chapel on the east side of the house offers Catholic mass and daily communion, though all denominations are welcome. A closed circuit camera in the ceiling allows the services or any entertainment in the chapel to be seen on TVs throughout the house for the residents who cannot come down. Most noticeable in the chapel is the back wall where the names of the hundreds who have lived in the house since 1988 are engraved along with their birth and death dates, allowing them to forever be a part of the facility that took care of them.

Another silent recognition of residents is preparing the bed they occupied once they pass away. “They get a white bedspread and heart shaped pillow and a rose,” Stahley points out. “We leave it like this for at least 24 hours, because you’ve got to remember them in death as well as in life. They were a member of our family so we’ve got to keep them in our memory.”

She also points out that once a resident is eligible to move in, the medical people aren’t likely to subject them to rules. One of the bay windows was partitioned off as a smoking porch, because “they’re not going to stop smoking, they’re just not.”

A Malachi House brochure calls the facility “a home for the living as well as the dying.” Care giving provides opportunities for divinity students as well as nurses and medical students to apply their skills. An art therapist is also utilized, and a music therapist will soon be hired. There is already a wide assortment of CDs on hand for all tastes, classical, jazz, country and rock. And if music doesn’t sooth them, a therapy dog is brought through all the rooms occasionally to take the residents’ minds off their condition.

 

News & Articles | Archives