When Tom walks into a room with his golden retriever, Rocky, people look up.
In hospitals and nursing homes, families gather around. Patients brighten. Even in the hardest moments, a few shoulders drop. Rocky, a 4-year-old therapy dog, is basically a walking bundle of comfort.
“You can’t help but smile when you see him,” Tom says.
So when their neighbor was admitted to the HopeHealth Hulitar Hospice Center, Tom and Rocky went too. Hearing the word hospice, Tom expected sadness. When he walked into the center, he found something else entirely.
“It was just so much love going around. So much kindness,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
For Tom — a neighbor, a friend, a relative outsider to hospice — the experience changed the way he thinks about end-of-life care.
> Learn how to get started with hospice care.
“This is a wonderful place”
The Hulitar Hospice Center, located in Providence, is designed to feel less like a hospital and more like home. Sunlight spills into patient rooms. Visitors, including beloved pets, are welcome 24 hours a day. Family members can stay overnight. There are soft chairs pulled close to bedsides, and quiet common areas decorated with healing art. Here, patients have access to hospital-grade symptom management while spending precious time with loved ones.
Tom had been to the center once before, years earlier, to visit a family member. This time, it was his neighbor of eight years — a private, proud woman who didn’t want her illness widely known. When Tom and Rocky walked into her room, she lit up.
“She cried out, ‘Rocky!’” Tom remembers. “She loves him to pieces — she was so happy. He went right to her.”
They began visiting almost daily, and as the week went on, Tom got to know many different members of the staff: the hospice aide who adjusted a pillow and lingered for conversation. The social worker who made space for hard questions. The volunteer at the welcome desk, whose smile was so sincere.
“I remember thinking, ‘My God, this is a wonderful place,’” he says.
His neighbor, for all she was going through, felt the same way. From day one, she formed deep connections with her care team. Tom was struck by the appreciation and warmth he saw between them.
“They loved her, and she fell in love with them,” he says.
> Read: In the halls of Hulitar: An inpatient hospice nurse opens up
Care that honors choice
Tom’s neighbor had arrived at the Hulitar Center off a difficult hospital stay. She’d been told she was at the end of her options for curative treatment. Hearing that, she’d felt she had no options left at all.
At the Hulitar Hospice Center, her perspective shifted. Hospice care may come during the final chapter of a person’s life — but it is deeply focused on helping them live fully within it. It does that by offering choices that many people don’t realize they have: the choice of comfort. The choice of defining what a “good day” looks like.
Instead of chasing more treatment, the Hulitar team focused on finding out what mattered to her — and how to help her feel her best, so she could make the most of every moment. They took time to explain her options and give her control over each of them.
After several weeks, something unexpected happened: Her symptoms improved enough for her to go home.
Today, her HopeHealth hospice team visits her in her apartment, helping her adjust to the changes in her illness and continue to live as fully as possible. She still has plenty of good days. In fact, Tom recently passed her on the way to the laundromat. As always, she stopped to say hello, chat, and shower Rocky with affection.
“She knows she’s going to eventually pass away, but she wants to be at home. Because of hospice, she is,” Tom says. “Even though it’s sad, it’s so beautiful too.”
> Read: What’s the difference between hospice & palliative care?
“How do you do it?”
When the time is right, Tom and Rocky plan to return to the Hulitar Hospice Center — this time, as pet therapy volunteers for other patients and families.
Their recent experience has reframed how Tom thinks about hospice. He saw how inpatient care can provide stability in moments of crisis. He saw what it looks like when a community supports its neighbors at the most vulnerable time of life. He wants to be part of that.
In the meantime, he tells friends about what he witnessed at the Hulitar Hospice Center: the calm and compassion, the dignity, the remarkable staff.
“What you folks do isn’t easy,” he later wrote to the HopeHealth team. “Helping someone navigate from this world to the next is admirable.”
One day at the Hulitar Hospice Center, he pulled a chaplain aside to say as much. He gestured around the hall, taking in this place that holds so much loss — but also so much love.
“How do you folks do it?” he asked her.
The chaplain smiled. Then she looked pointedly at Rocky, who gazed back up at her. “How do you do it?” she asked him.
It took Tom a second to understand. Then, ruffling Rocky’s ears, he got it. Some gifts can’t be explained. Only witnessed.
“Her answer was so succinct and so perfect,” Tom says. “It was just a beautiful moment.”