Mellette Brought Life to Hospice House

By Amber Lester Monday, June 07, 2010

Margot Mellette didn’t know what to expect when she went to visit Hospice House as research for an eighth-grade term paper.

Where some might expect sorrow, she found a bright place full of love. She was inspired to return, so much so that she organized a group of friends to form the Hospice Teen Outreach. Now, as the Hampton Roads Academy graduate prepares to leave for Yale in August, she will be leaving behind an outreach organization that boasts around 20 teenage volunteers.

“I was drawn in by the warmth of the caretakers,” she says. “They wanted teens there … at a hospital it feels like you’re being a nuisance.”

The volunteers sit with residents, bake, clean and tend the garden. Mellette also organized efforts to assemble care baskets for the patients. She most enjoys talking to the residents about their lives, hearing stories about when they were her age. They tell her about dances and proms, long car rides with boys and life in small towns. “I don’t think history books do it justice,” she says.

Hospice House Director of Development Teresa Christin says having teenagers in the house changes the atmosphere and makes it feel more like a home to the residents. “Just by being here, they bring something to the program,” she says. “It goes both ways; the kids are a little nervous and scared at first and within a short time, they’re just bounding through the door. They understand this is about how we live as much as how people are dying.”

She remembers one Christmas when the teenagers decorated a tree, baked cookies and giggled all night. Christin walked past a patient’s room and peeked in to see her grinning. “All of these things that the kids do, a lot of them were Margot’s ideas,” she says.

Mellette wanted to capture the memories of patients in hospice care, but she says time was unfortunately not on her side. For her senior project, however, she worked with classmate Priya Vyas to document some of their volunteering experiences on tape. They led an initiative to visit area nursing homes and film residents talking about their lives; when completed, the interview DVDs were given to the subjects and their families. In one instance, a family received the DVD interview the day their relative died.

Her favorite interview was with a man in his 90s who fought in World War II. He said the hardest day of his life was the day he lost his mother, and became choked up; Margot was touched. They compiled the interviews and footage into a presentation to present at a meeting of the Hospice House Board of Directors.

“It is really extraordinary, what they’ve done,” Christin says. “I overheard one of the members say the interviews looked like you could have seen them on '60 Minutes.’ When the presentation was over, the word I heard the most was ‘wow.’”

But Christin says that’s the impression Mellette leaves. “She’s very mature…she’s a natural leader,” she says. “Her ability to articulate her experience and what she learned from these people is just amazingly impressive.”

Mellette isn’t sure what she’ll study when she gets to Yale, but is interested in medicine and linguistics. She’s excited to go to the Ivy League school, and just a little scared. At HRA, she performed in musicals, was active in choir and served as head of the honor council. “I’ll be a very small fish in a big pond,” she says. “But it will be a good and humbling experience.”

She plans to stop in at the Hospice House during visits home, but is currently training a high school sophomore to take the reins after she leaves. “I know I’ll keep volunteering until I leave and I’ll keep checking up on my successor to check into things,” she says. “I know it will go on…so many people want to see it succeed.”

Christin, who wrote recommendations for Mellette, says the staff will miss her, but expects to see her come back over the years. “I think this is a place that has become very near and dear to Margot,” she says.