A Witness to the Journey: Michelle McCarthy, Volunteer Coordinator
Michelle McCarthy has spent a career arriving at one conclusion: for a hospice
Not fixing things, not talking, not filling silence with helpfulness. Just being there — in the right way, at the right moment, for whatever the person in front of you actually needs.
Michelle McCarthy will be the first to admit that her résumé does not follow a straight line. She owned a dance studio for thirty years. She went back to school while raising her children and earned a degree in communications. She pursued an MFA in creative writing at Bay Path University. Her husband challenged her to apply; she chose the only school she wanted to attend, and she got in after three rounds of interviews. The program forced her to write a memoir she had been putting off for years. A book, rooted in her long background in domestic violence advocacy, will be published this July. She is currently working toward a doctorate in leadership administration.
Between the studio and the schooling, she has coordinated volunteers for senior living facilities, a crisis center, and hospice organizations, managing programs as large as 250 people and budgets stretching from $50,000 to a quarter million dollars. She has, as she puts it, built programs from the ground up more than once.
At Park Place, she has been on the job for about four weeks. She is just getting started.
The first thing Michelle does with every volunteer she interviews is listen.
"Their story tells you a lot about why they're doing what they do," she says. "And especially for this type of role — they automatically tell you the why."
The conversations run long. She doesn't mind. What someone shares in the first twenty minutes tells her where to place them, how to support them, what they are ready for, and what they still need to learn.
What brings most people to hospice volunteering, in her experience, is something they have already lived through. They have sat at a bedside. They have watched someone slip away, and they came out the other side knowing that the presence of another person, attentive and calm, mattered more than almost anything else. She knows this herself. She cared for both of her parents at the end of life, both of her grandparents, and her in-laws.
"The most difficult thing," Michelle tells her volunteers, "is accepting that you are a witness to their journey. You don't have to fix anything. You just have to be present."
Companion care, she explains, is one thing. Vigil is another. The distinction matters.
Companion care is lighter — an hour of conversation, looking through old photos, watching a game show together. It is the art of queuing: finding the thread that pulls someone back into their longest, most intact memories, and stepping aside while they follow it. Long-term memory, she notes, tends to stay solid long after short-term has faded. Ask someone how they met their spouse, and the story goes on forever.
Vigil is different in kind. When a patient moves into active transition, volunteers who choose to be present require more preparation, more emotional support, and a clear understanding of what they cannot do.
Debriefing, she adds, is non-negotiable for anyone working at either level. "How do you see a patient you've become very close to pass, and then go home like nothing happened?" Michelle says. "There needs to be space to share what you experienced safely. That's not optional."
She inherited something to work with and is already reshaping it. The onboarding materials, which she found dense enough to discourage any prospective volunteer, have been overhauled, and she has begun recruiting through Idealist, Catholic parishes, and employers who offer staff volunteer days. Building out the vigil roster and establishing companion care coverage in Indiana are immediate priorities. Beyond that, she has longer-term ideas still taking shape, some not yet raised with her supervisor. "I'm asking the nurses things all the time," she says. "I'll learn something and go, I didn't know that's how that works. That's the point."
Michelle grew up in a house full of music; siblings playing trombone, drums, bass, and piano, sometimes all at once. She still gigs with her brothers around the area. She can hear a song and place the year.
She spent thirty years teaching children to dance and still carries that orientation toward creativity, toward reading what someone needs, toward understanding that the point is not the performance but what it does to the person performing it.
She is four weeks into a job she has already thought about deeply for longer than that. The volunteer coordinator position at Park Place, she says, feels like something she can build into something that genuinely serves people at the most unguarded moment of their lives.
