Veterans Affairs program provides comfort to vets in hospice

NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. (AP) - A Department of Veterans Affairs program offered at several facilities in the Chicago area seeks to provide companionship in a veteran's final days.

The No Veteran Dies Alone program is active in about one-third of Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide, according to officials. Those facilities include Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago and Hines VA Hospital near Oak Park, the Chicago Tribune (http://trib.in/1SPOR2d ) reported.

The program, which began in 2013, links volunteers with veterans in hospice care whose family and friends cannot be there to comfort them.

"It is an act of true selflessness to comfort a patient as they take their final breath," said Dr. Stephen Holt, director of Lovell Federal Health Care Center. "Since we began this program, no veteran has been alone in their final moments."

Nick Konz of Grayslake, 69, who served as an Army cook for part of the 1960s in Germany, is one of the volunteers at the Lovell program.

"We'll hold their hand, reassure them it's OK to die and let them know that they're not alone," Konz said. "Somebody cares and appreciates what they did for us."

Konz listens as veterans recount their service days and life after the military. He gets to know patients while they're still lucid, he said, so he can be a familiar presence at their side as they draw their final breaths.

"Some people are incoherent" near death, Konz said. "They'll just look right through you. But I think to myself that they recognize me."

Konz, who also heads up a local veterans assistance commission, estimates that he has helped see as many as 30 veterans out of this world while volunteering over the past few years.

"Every person's death," he said, "is just as unique as that person's life."

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Information from: Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com