Curved like a nautilus shell and furnished with a box of tissues, a central room described as the “sacred space” anchors the new Hospice of Santa Barbara headquarters.

Gail Rink, Hospice executive director, enjoys a quiet moment in a room designed as sacred space. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

Part office, part spa and part chapel. This is how Executive Director Gail Rink has come to characterize the new 6,500-square-feet of counseling, art therapy, massage, Reiki, yoga, meditation, kitchen, dining and community meeting space on the first floor of the newly reconstructed Brooks Hall at 2050 Alameda Padre Serra, located behind the Riviera Theatre.

“In the face of death you can’t heal the physical, but you sure can heal the spiritual,” Rink said. “This is the kind of environment we need people to come to."

Mary Ann Jenquin expressed high hopes for the organization's recent cross-town relocation.

“You kind of bare your soul there, where you might not be able to do it any place else,” she said. Aggressive anaplastic thyroid cancer has wracked her throat and spread to her lungs in the last two years.

Afflicting only hundreds of Americans annually, it’s a disease rare enough that patients like Jenquin, 70, become “throw away people” to a medical research industry bent on curing more ordinary ailments, she said. “I was not prepared for being told it was something even beyond the imagination of my doctor.”

The Hospice facility fills the first floor of Brooks Hall. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

But there are no "throw away" people at Hospice. Its new Compassionate Care Center reinforces that notion with enough comfortable space for all free programs and treatments offered by the nonprofit and volunteer-supported agency. It was a slate of services too broad to fit all at once into the prior smaller headquarters, which starting in 2001 was located in a converted Junipero Street house now for sale near Cottage Hospital.

 “Our goal is to help the community realize that there’s a lot of healing work that can be done,” Rink said. “The culture is so scared of death and there isn’t anything we can do to stop it. Part of what we do is we face it. We wanted a home-like atmosphere, but functional.”

Unlike some similar organizations, Hospice of Santa Barbara offers no medical services. It is separate from Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care of Santa Barbara, which also serves the region.

Directors planned the Feb. 17 move prior to a $33 million philanthropic gift received last May by the Hospice of Santa Barbara Foundation. The foundation invests endowment funds used to sustain and enrich Hospice.

Earth tones and bamboo adorn the Hospice interior. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

The entire relocation cost less than $1 million, with interior build-out plans conceived by architect Barry Berkus pro bono and interior decorating services donated by Dana Berkus, his daughter-in-law. Property owner Michael Towbes negotiated a 10-year lease, and Frank Schipper Construction helped to finish the job.

Decorated with natural tones and bamboo, the place was still so new that the artwork was not up yet late last week when Rink gave an early morning tour.

More than a dozen separate rooms fill the new space, including a place for children with dying family members to work through their emotions. A large conference room can be booked for meetings or community classes. At least one open house will be held before summertime.

Yet another section makes space for alternative therapies performed by volunteers like Peggy McInerny, a holistic health practitioner who specializes in Reiki, a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation, Shiatsu massage and craniosacral touch of the skull and spine. All three soothing modalities involve the laying of hands on the body. Not just Hospice patients, but their families and staff members of the organization can avail themselves.

“The fact that they have a healing room is like, well, for us it’s a really a wonderful recognition of the contribution of this kind of work for the dying,” McInerny said.

The Hospice headquarters covers 6,500 square feet. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

“They step in and kind of fill out the picture that Western medicine can’t do alone. All of us who do this kind of work are really thrilled.”

Of grieving recipients, she said, “it gives them a sense of peace and well being that makes a big difference in how they handle everything else.”

“I think what people don’t understand is the difference between healing and being cured,” she said. “You’ve got people in their 80s caring for one another. When one is caring for the other, that’s a huge stress. I firmly believe that hospitals would be totally different if you had a healing room where people did that with doctors and nurses. They wouldn’t be so stressed out."

Sandy Cox offered a similar assessment. Her husband, retired pastor Bill Cox, drowned alone in a hot tub one year ago at age 72 following a 2004 stroke

“Instead of the caretaker, I was the grieving spouse,” Cox said. “I feel like I am still recovering from trauma. Those kinds of therapies can be beneficial.”

Jenquin, whose cancer is incurable and untreatable, said Hospice services are valuable and needed.

“I am definitely spiraling downward,” she said. “I’m getting much weaker and more tired, and just can’t do much of anything anymore.

Gail Rink shows off the new Hospice meeting room. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

“If more people took advantage, I think dying might be a little bit easier. Psychological pain is as bad as any physical pain. I think they’ve helped keep me sane.”

Only 300 new cases of anaplastic thyroid cancer are detected on average in the United States annually, according to the Thyroid Cancer Survivors Association. The cause is unknown.

By the time the disease spread to both of Jenquin’s lungs in April 2006, a discovery that followed two surgeries and a concurrent six-week regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, she decided to cease having doctors scan her body for any more new tumors. This means that, by now, malignancies may have spread even farther throughout her body.

She gave up the scans. But Jenquin hasn’t given up meditation.

Hospice serves adults and children. Photos by Jeff Clark / SBN

“Sometimes, it’s like official prayers, and other times it’s just sitting here and ranting and raving with God: why me?" she said. “I’m really delving deep into myself about life and death."

“They had basically said three months,” Jenquin said, noting she has held on to life much longer.

“I think its all the good people out there who are giving me good thoughts, good wishes, and good prayers.”

Green space flanks the new Hospice headquarters. Photo by Jeff Clark / SBN

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