Kayla Bonkowski | What Dying Teaches the Living
People who work in hospice describe a changed relationship with what matters. That knowledge does not come from training. It comes from the rooms. Ask someone who has worked in hospice for ten years what the work has taught them and the answer is almost never clinical. They do not talk about assessment tools or intervention models. They talk about what they have observed when people are dying. The observations are consistent across practitioners. Dying people regret specific things. The patterns in those regrets are not what most people expect before they encounter them. Kayla Bonkowski is training to work in hospice and palliative care in Sterling Heights, Michigan. She holds a Cum Laude psychology degree from Rochester College and is completing her MSW. She is candid that she does not yet have the accumulated bedside knowledge that comes from years in the field. What she has is the academic preparation to receive it. People who work consistently near death describe a changed relatio...
