In July, Cindy Reed celebrated her 30th anniversary of being a hospice nurse.

"My kids really grew up at Hospice," she said, seated in the colorful and welcoming space of her office in the Hospice of North Idaho Hospice House. "You can't do that now but (my youngest daughter) Zoe, for the first few months, lived in my office."

Reed "landed" in North Idaho in January 1982 after graduating from nursing school and spending a year in the Tri-Cities. She even graduated from the same nursing school that her grandmother did in 1933.

Reed has made a career of providing expert care and compassion for the sick and dying as well as providing tireless support for grieving families. For three decades, the upbeat, positive and fun-loving Reed has helped people cross over from this life. It might seem like a dismal or morbid job, but for Reed, it's where she is meant to be.

"I love taking care of folks who are dying. I fell in love with the job," she said. "What I loved about it was I like being somewhat autonomous, because when you’re out in the field you don’t have five other staff members or MDs at your fingertips, and you have to get creative with things. I’ve always liked taking care of folks and their families that were dying because I felt like if anyone needed TLC, that’s the time."

Reed's dedication to making people comfortable and helping nurses do their jobs led her to become the director of Hospice House, which she has done for five years. She also teaches a class about end-of-life care at North Idaho College to share her insight and experience with aspiring nurses.

"I never wanted to be an administrative nurse in my early years," she admitted. "My job evolved from being a hands-on, in-the-field nurse to more administrative. Before this building was built, I was feeling kind of sad, actually, that I wasn’t getting to do much of that any more. I like my job and there’s a lot of administrative parts that I like, especially when I can see staff get what they need to do their jobs well … I actually am really good still at putting in IVs. I have a lot of years of nursing experience and so a big portion of my job is actually educating."

Reed loves to water ski. She appreciates a good sense of humor and she loves taking care of people and animals. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have spent their last moments with Reed, and that is a privilege she cherishes.

"Grief is a direct measure of how much we love," she said. "If you think about it that way, we’re in sacred space, and we only get one chance to do that right."

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Why did you choose this career path to begin with?

It wasn't anything real altruistic. I was working at Kootenai Medical Center at the time. I started on the medical floor, then I had a child and I migrated to the coronary care unit and when they built the big blue hospital, we moved coronary care and it was changed to progressive care, which was more of a telemetry unit and that was fine, but they were migrating to 12-hour shifts, and because I had two small children and a husband who worked all the time, I was looking and I knew I couldn't do every other weekend. I was working part time and raised two kids with no child care, so that was the impetus for looking for a different type of job. Then the hospice job came up and so I went and checked it out and they hired me. I was hired as a part-time nurse and part-time volunteer coordinator, but I had to volunteer to (coordinate volunteers). I didn’t get paid to do that, but the volunteer coordinator at Hospice, when you have 100-plus volunteers, that’s a full-time job. The day I started we had eight patients on a daily basis and we had just become Medicare certified so our census jumped from eight patients on a daily basis to like 28 patients in the space of a couple of months. We didn’t have cellphones, we had belt pagers… Right after I came on board, three nurses quit … so all of a sudden there was just two of us, so for three months, we didn’t sleep.

How would you describe an average work day?

I spend a lot of time essentially 'putting out fires,' in other words, making sure that nurses and CNAs and staff that work here have the tools that they need to do the job; making sure that families are well supported — the nurses do really well with patients and families but sometimes it’s a lot of emotions involved in what’s going on here. Folks are dying or folks are really sick and finding out where everybody’s at in this process in what their goals and expectations are, sometimes you’re navigating tricky waters. I spend some time on the floor … I don’t always love all the paperwork and things that come in with being joint-commission accredited and Medicare certified because that’s a layer of computer work that, if someone told me I’d have to do that, I’d be like, ‘Noooo…’ But, when I came over here, what I find is when I’m really tired of this, I can go out and do hands-on care and I do a majority of the orientation for any of the nursing or other staff that are hired at Hospice of North Idaho.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

I never have felt special, but I have really felt blessed when I get to be a part of this process because, yes, there are some very sad days and days that will rip your heart out, but I get to come to work every day and witness love on every level. Granted, not everybody is nice, but for the majority of people, you’re witnessing incredible love amongst family members, amongst staff to patients, from patients to us … We treat it as a privilege, not even just here but when we’re in someone’s home, it’s a privilege to be allowed in someone’s home or their space. We want to be as respectful as we can be. You know, sometimes hospice gets the connotation that we help people die or that we push them along, but that’s not true. Maybe depending on your perspective, we help people live for as long as possible with as much quality and as much comfort as we can possibly provide for them … our goal is never to hasten death or to prolong anything. It is to teach patients and families to do this so they can be as independent for as long as possible so we’re not there taking the place of what they are. In other words, we’re not the 24-7 caregiver, usually it’s families but we need to teach that family how they can do this and maybe they won’t be able to manage it in this living space, maybe it will end up happening here.

Do you have a way of coping when a patient passes, or a mechanism that you turn on?

I think it is about centering yourself. It’s about providing a lot of love and respect and not treating that person as if they don’t exist already. Somebody always says, ‘I don’t think I could go to see somebody who’s dying.’ Well, it is true that we’re all dying and really, the visits that we make to someone who has already died are a lot less. People live up until the moment that they die, so when you’re providing care for patients and families, they’re very much here with us. They’ve had whole, rich lives that we invite families to share with us so we know who that person is. I totally love that. I love that we get to be a part of who they were. And the staff does too, we’re always just amazed at what people have accomplished in their lives. Dying is not always pretty. We like to have peaceful deaths, and that is our goal, but I always think that everything happens for a reason and that timing is perfect. That’s my philosophy, it’s not anybody else’s, and I really think if timing is perfect and everything happens for a reason, that my being there or one of the staff being there, it fits. We’re all part of this tapestry that makes a beautiful picture.

What does it mean to you that you’ve been there for so many people in their final moments?

There are a lot of lessons learned and one of the biggest ones is I know nothing. There’s always something more to be taught from someone else. My spiritual framework has seriously changed from when I was 26. I am not very rigid when it comes to religious views, but I have a strong spiritual center. There are times when I feel like God is very present in what is going on, and it’s the person who had no religious or spiritual framework, either... It’s just interesting to watch folks. People die the way they’ve lived. If they’re the ones that were really introverted and didn’t have a lot of people around them, chances are they’re probably not going to do that when they die. Sometimes they’ll never resolve any unfinished business, you know, you hope for that. And sometimes, forgiveness and reconciliation and all those things happen and it’s a beautiful thing. I just try to come at it with not a lot of expectations, hoping that we teach people that it’s good to be as honest as you can with each other, because we still get the, ‘Oh, don’t tell them it’s hospice because they don’t know they’re dying.’ Well, I honestly don’t know any patient I’ve taken care of that didn’t know they were dying. They may not want to say it, and they may want to put it in a room and shut the door and only peek at it now and then, but families and patients do a lot of protecting each other because they love one another and they’re grieving. But when they drop that wall of being able to talk about it, this is intimate time that never comes again, and it is pretty darn incredible.

What keeps you happy and above the sorrow you encounter here?

I would be kidding you to say I never cry because there are days that are really heart wrenching. But I would be more sad, more upset if I saw somebody not getting good end-of-life care, and that means being tortured because they don’t have enough pain medicine, being left alone or not having that support, because it is so important. Part of me, it’s just my personality, I’m always the optimist and I also like to look at things, like, ‘What is the worst that can happen here?’ I used to be on call, you go out to a house and you’re shining headlights on driveways and you wake everybody up because you’re trying to see the house number, so by the time you find this lost house you’re kind of freaked out, and you know that this is an intense situation and you don’t know what you’re going to do … I always try to center myself for a minute, take a deep breath, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Well, they might die, and the worst might not be that, they might die really uncomfortable, so anything I do, even if I just show up, will make things better. That used to take the stress out of my balloon. I’m a talker and it’s hard for me to listen because I’m fast and one of the things I’ve had to learn is to stop talking and listen and assess and see where people are at. Act if you need to act, but just being part of what’s going on, it’s kind of like, you did nothing but the very fact you showed up makes it better … You go into a room and it’s total chaos, and if you come in with an attitude of peace and calmness and try to answer everything as honestly as you can with some sensitivity, and educate folks, they do way better. It doesn’t mean we have perfect situations, because we do have things go to hell in a hand basket in a moment, but still, it works. I have always loved that.

Do you have any words to remind people why they should make the most of the time they have here?

The hardest thing ever is to watch somebody die who has no one. I will tell you that when you come to that point that we all get to, you know, we all are born naked and we all die. We might do all kinds of things in between, but we’re equals when it comes to this. Those folks that die alone, they aren’t going to say, ‘Gee, I wish I worked more, I wish I had more money.’ No, they’re wishing they had worked less and spent more time with family, or they wish they had family. They don’t have anybody to care for them. Sometimes that’s why they land here, because there’s no one. That’s the hardest.