Patient Stories 
The day before Thanksgiving 2023, Kirk L. Brandstrom found out where he would die. And he was thrilled.
On November 22, Kirk was informed that he had been assigned a room in Home+ Hospice House in Rapid City. It was an important moment; memorialized in a photo. Despite being afflicted with stage 4 esophageal cancer, Kirk smiles broadly at the camera, the first two fingers of each hand raised in a “v for victory” sign.
When he was first diagnosed, Kirk’s prognosis was grim, terminal. His mom, Pat Wolf, remembers him saying, “Mom, I cannot go to a nursing home. I’m only 47.”
“Well, baby, you won’t have to,” she told him at the time. “We’ll figure it out, even if I have to hire a nurse to come to my apartment, I promise you won’t go to a nursing home.”
As his closest relative, Pat, 76, had been the only realistic choice to take care of Kirk, something that she was willing to do, though she knew her own limitations. “My eyes aren’t good. My memory isn’t good. I had to write everything down. When he was with me in my apartment, I started just sleeping in the recliner outside his door, trying to hear him when he needed something. That was so hard to manage,” Pat said.
According to Pat, there weren’t many times in Hospice House when Kirk wasn’t smiling. One of the things that became important to him in his last days was making amends. Many of his friends visited and Kirk got the chance to say what he had to say to them. “If he’d been in a nursing home, or if he’d been in my apartment, that wouldn’t have happened,” Pat said.
Kirk’s admittance to Hospice House gave his friends and family something even more precious than peace of mind: additional time; meaningful time spent comforting and being together with Kirk, instead of tending to his complicated medical needs. That extra time was precious. And it was time for which Pat is eternally grateful.
“I got to hold Kirk’s hand as he passed. He held my hand so tight that he turned my fingers blue. And he was fighting till the last minute. He was taking his last breath and saying, ‘No. No,’” Pat said. “The only thing that made his passing bearable were the nurses and the help, the way they treated him, the way they treated us.”
A retiree, Pat is not a woman of means. Yet she intends to leave the balance of her hard-earned 401k to Monument Health Foundation in tribute to Kirk’s experience under the care of Hospice House.
“I could go to the Caribbean. I could buy a new sports car,” she said, only half-serious. “But these people here, they’re so dedicated. They treat everybody the same. I think they cried more than I did the night that Kirk died. It’s a special crew. I want to help out, for the betterment of the nurses and aides. I want to make sure to make their lives better.”
It’s been just over two years since Kirk’s passing. Pat is still grieving, though she has a close group of girlfriends to turn to. And money isn’t the only way that she would like to give back to Hospice House. “My goal is to get to a point where I can volunteer. I’m not there yet. I’ve always wanted to be a feather in the cap, not a thorn in the butt,” she said. “I just put my head down, one foot in front of the other, and I just keep moving. That’s about all you can do. We don’t know why, we don’t know how, but we just have to believe that everything will be okay.”