Article by Diana Kleinloog

Article for the Newspaper - Sundre Palliative Care Association


The Sundre Palliative Care Association wishes to extend a big thank you to the community of Sundre for the successful fund raising events we held at the end of 2017. This community is made up of people who help each other and share the journey with those going through grief. We had conversations with many people at the farmers markets in and around Sundre in November. Our Tree of Hope campaign was an overwhelming success and we had the memory of hearing our loved ones names called out at the Tree Lighting ceremony on Dec. 1. Jo-Anne McDonald heads our Tree of Hope campaign and she made a beautiful presentation of the names along with some lovely choir singing from our Sundre Community Choir. 

Our 2017 Candlelight Remembrance Service was held at the new Sundre Seniors Supportive Living Building. We held our service in the Bistro area of the Lodge. It was wonderful to see the people ‘walk’ to our service from their homes in the building. The service was open to the public and we were happy to welcome those from the community who could attend! It is always a meaningful service, with thoughtful words spoken and memories shared. 

We are looking forward to carrying out more outreach into the community in 2018. After a quiet interlude at the beginning of the new year, we held our second Palliative Partnership Meeting on January 29, 2018. We could only get a small number of partners attending on a busy Monday afternoon, but we had some great discussion. We want to share with the community our new website for the Sundre Palliative Care Association which is www.sundrepalliativecare.ca. We will  update it often with new information. Thanks to Deana McNeish, we have also created a Facebook page which can be found by searching for Sundre Palliative Care Association. We will be posting information for upcoming events on both of these sites. We will also be advertising upcoming events in Sundre-On-The-Go, Sundre RoundUp and the radio for example, for greater distribution. 

Projects we are planning include partnering with the Town of Sundre to plan a Memorial Garden.  We will also be starting to hold evening education/information sessions for the general public. We would like to present information that would be helpful to the community. Stay tuned for sessions beginning in March 2018. We hope to see you at some of these evenings. There will be a range of topics designed to inform and support. We are open to suggestions and want you to know we are listening. Let us know what you would like to hear about. No topic is too small! 

“The most frightening journey can be made more bearable when surrounded by the arms of compassion”.