Liz Pickford says her older brother, Patrick Tveraa, was “tough, fearless, and generous.” He loved his daughters, she says. And, he was stubborn. “A giant pain in the butt,” Pickford says.
“But that was his armor,” she adds. “And underneath all of that, there was this really sensitive, caring, generous person.”
Tveraa worked as a correctional officer in Missoula for nearly two decades. Last year, Pickford says her brother got sick. It was cancer, and as the disease progressed, the conversation quickly shifted to end-of-life care.
For Pickford and so many others like her, caring for a loved one at the end of life can be scary — even traumatizing. One western Montana organization has been working to support families through that process through inpatient hospice care.
In her brother’s last days, Pickford says his stubbornness gave way to a request: he wanted to stay at Hope Hospice Center in Missoula. She recalls what he told her.
“You wouldn’t have to ask me about my pain medication and fuss, you’d just get to be my sister,” Pickford says her brother told her. “And I said, ‘I’m still going to do that.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, but it won’t be high stakes for you anymore.’”
Hope Hospice Center specializes in just that — offering families the chance to spend time with their loved ones in whatever way they see fit at the end of life. It opened a year ago as the only inpatient hospice center in western Montana and has since served more than 125 families.
Patrick Tveraa died on April 15 at the center, surrounded by his family. Pickford says she still attended to her brother’s needs until the end. Moving him there changed something small, but important.
“It was so much that I got to ‘turn it off,’ it was that I had people come alongside me,” she says.
Hope Hospice Center’s executive director, Amanda Yeoman Melro, says after an opening year of challenges and opportunities, she hopes many more families like Pickford’s will find comfort at the center. She encourages families considering end-of-life care to reach out and explore the options that may work best for them.
