As e-mails go the one that arrived Sunday night was a Hail Mary.
Without a chance in hell.
Jeanne with volunteer Karen Oko.
Or so it seemed.
It was written by an 87-year-old woman whose last wish in life was to save a home-cooking style kitchen that she described as "the heart" of a hospice where she lives.
And where she will die.
A kitchen that a month ago had been declared terminal itself by budget conscious senior bureaucrats at the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority who decided prepared hospital food would do.
Bureaucrats, the Free Press reported Monday, who collectively had been given tens of thousands of dollars in raises last year.
As I drove over to the Grace Hospice late Monday morning, I was thinking about the timely connection.
And I gotta be honest with you.
I was lickin' my chops.
As it happened it actually was lunch time when I arrived to the enticing smell of home-cooking.
The Grace Hospice is a single-storey 12-bed facility that was opened just four years ago by the Salvation Army as a home-like setting for palliative care.
The park-like setting near Grant's Old Mill and close-by Grace Hospital makes it all the more homey.
But on April 1 the WRHA assumed control of both the hospice and the hospital and, within weeks, the staff heard the hospice kitchen was on the chopping block.
It was a couple of the staff, Jeanne would tell me, who encouraged her to write the Hail Mary letter for the hospice she thinks as her heaven on earth.
Jeanne's room is one with a view of nature, where she can watch birds and squirrels feed on the nibblies she leaves on her window sill.
Like all the others, it's twice or maybe even three times the size of a typical hospital room for two.
"I did the decorating," the wee-wisp of a woman said as we sat at her round-oak table surrounded by framed photos of loons and books on philosophy, science, religion and even trees.
"I love this room," she says. "It has purpose. I will die in this room."
She says it in a raspy voice and without a hint of self-pity about thyroid cancer that was first discovered nearly a year ago in her throat.
"I haven't had a bad life, believe me... But I'm happier here than I have been in my entire life."
She knows that sounds odd.
But the Grace Hospice seems a perfect place to leave this world.
"I'm totally at peace," Jeanne volunteered. "I'm totally at peace inside."
She felt that way as soon as she walked through the front doors five months ago.
Just then one of the volunteers who make daily visits popped by the room.
Karen Oko just wanted to give Jeanne a hug.
That made me wonder why one of the volunteers couldn't have written the Hail Mary.
But obviously, a letter from someone who's actually in palliative care speaks louder and carries further.
Especially the way Jeanne ended the e-mail.
Speaking directly to the WRHA.
"Are you truly planning to invade this paradise with inferior institutional meals? To destroy our heart and soul, our home-cooked meals prepared by our beloved cook and those who help her?
"When one enters Grace Hospice, one enters a home," Jeanne concluded.
"Please do not destroy this."
It was near the end of our two hours together -- and before she introduced the cook -- that Jeanne mentioned the psychic.
Jeanne had been to see her in Boston, when she lived there with her symphony-violinist husband Bill Waterhouse.
During the 40 years that have elapsed the psychic's predictions had been eerily correct.
Except, perhaps, for one.
"At the end of your life," Jeanne recalled the psychic saying, "you will speak and many, many people will hear you."
A volunteer was sitting at the front desk as I signed out.
She told me that the hospice is running a $200,000 deficit by the WRHA's calculations and the $120,000 a year kitchen was a casualty of that.
"If we had only known about this six months ago," she said the kitchen closing. "Maybe..."
Monday morning, I had called the WRHA asking about the situation.
In the meantime, I started calculating last year's salary hikes for the senior management at the WRHA.
Not that I begrudged any of them their six-figure salaries, and in one case, nearly $20,000-a-year raise.
Fat cats, I decided, need to eat, too.
So it was that I was sharpening my knife when WRHA spokesperson Heidi Graham was finally able to reach me about 6 p.m.
There had been some discussions about the kitchen closure after I called about Jeanne Waterhouse's letter.
And?
"I'll start with the good news," Graham said. "The government has decided to fund it," she said.
Of course, I quickly called Jeanne to tell her the kitchen had been saved.
She was shocked.
"How could that happen?" she said.
At the end of your life, I reminded her, you spoke and people listened to you.
Just like the psychic predicted.
Hail Mary, or whatever her name was.
Gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
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