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Although Dame Cicely is a symbol of caring medicine to doctors and nurses around the world, today she is more administrator than practicing physician. Three years ago, she handed over the job of medical director to Dr. Tom West, 58, her close friend of many years, and became chairman of the hospice's management council. She continues, though, to keep a firm hand on her 62-bed hospice, doing weekend medical duty once a month, regularly dropping by to chat with patients and dispensing advice to doctors.
Much of her energy is given to fund raising. The hospice charges no fees, and only one-third of the (pounds)3 million (roughly $5 million) annual budget comes from the government-run National Health Service. Once a world traveler, she now stays close to home so that she can minister to her ailing 87-year-old husband, Polish Artist Marian Bohusz-Szyszko. She has always studiously avoided the spotlight cast on her more famous contemporary, Elisabeth Kubler- Ross, the author of On Death and Dying. "I am not a cult figure," she once angrily told an adoring American.
Why would such a woman, an Oxford graduate and the daughter of a wealthy London real estate agent, choose to devote her life to death? One answer is her religion. Converted from atheism as a gawky, somewhat gauche, young woman, she went through a period of evangelistic fervor, during which she was a Billy Graham counselor, before she finally settled into the Anglican church. Her faith created much apprehension among doctors when St. Christopher's first opened. "We suspected she wanted to produce deathbed conversions," says Consulting Psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes. "How wrong we were." Insists Dame Cicely: "There's an absolutely built-in rule that there are no religious pressures here."
Another explanation for her dedication is that she has trained as a nurse, a social worker and a doctor (she was nearly 39 when she qualified) and has learned the ways in which love and death are often inevitably linked. She has always had an extraordinary gift for establishing intimate contact with patients, drawing strength from them even as she gives it. She talks lovingly, almost as a mother, of long-gone patients -- Mrs. G., Louie, Ted -- who would listen to her problems and anxieties.
Above all, there were her intense relationships with two Polish men, both dying of cancer. One was with a 40-year-old waiter, whom she met while working as a medical social worker at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. She recalls how he left her (pounds)500 (then worth more than $2,000) in his will, saying "I will be a window in your home." The words are now engraved below a window in St. Christopher's lobby. The other relationship, which her biographer, Shirley du Boulay, calls "unconsummated, unfulfilled, unresolved," was with a refugee in a home for the dying in east London, where she had gone to work as a newly trained doctor. Saunders is not one to reflect deeply on these obviously profound friendships, other than to say, with an almost dismissive formality, that they "helped me learn the possibility to stay and really look where I saw something of a welcome."