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From there, I was invited to work for a hospice in Georgia, a new branch, near Statesboro. I was living again month-to-month, this time at an RV camp. The hospice was filled with emotional drama, which I had gotten unaccustomed to, and the hospice struggled to survive financially. The leadership hovered over us with threats that "We're watching you." It was a sad place and demoralizing way to treat professionals - anyone. Everyone felt the pressure of the lack of patients and funds, like riding a horse, wondering when it might collapse and you under it. So, within ten months, I moved from full-time to part-time, to when needed. I had only fourteen patients and was working about ten hours a week. Although I was the only chaplain, I never had more than about that number, and the entire hospice census was little more in number. I could see another border crossing in the near future.
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Again, I began looking for work, and was offered by far the best-paying job I had ever had, back in Florida. I wanted this to be my last job, a place where I could work until retirement. Yet, after two years of working long hours from before light to into the dark, up to six days weekly, and increasing pressures, partly due to the hospice being sued for misappropriation of funds, increasing longer hours, reduction of staff, and a continued problem with repeated harassment from a staff member, I left. And over three-quarters of my work time was spent in meetings, travel, and documentation. I was jobless, again.
As to the harassment, or the abuse, after repeated complaints over many months, and in which I avoided contact with this person, even bypassing going to the site on the way and from visiting patients, I was called into the office of the manager. This manager is the one who had assisted me before to move my work station to get away from working next to the staff member and had herself spoken of how she did not like the "other side" of the person. Now, she informed me the harassment would get better and asked me just to be patient: so, after all these months, I was being told, essentially, "We condone abuse in the workplace, though we make it clear we don't." And, oddly, the abuser was another chaplain.
I agreed to the patience but would have better said, "No, your own policy says this hospice does not condone this kind of treatment from staff. And I will not condone it." Suing the hospice entered my mind later, but I chose no interest in pursuing such a course. I prefer to trust that I will be taken care of and move on in obedience to the Divine, knowing I acted in integrity. I am okay, as long as I can rest at night and am at peace with the life I am living. Hanging on to how another mistreated me is simply a distraction from the beauty of my life, of life.
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