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Sacred Heart of Hunting Park
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By Whitney Clemens and Dawn Walsh
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“We believe in the dignity of life. Everything about the facility should reflect that,” says Sister Marie Edwards, director of nursing at Sacred Heart, a home dedicated to nurturing terminally ill cancer patients.
Take a look inside the iron gates on Old York Road and Hunting Park Avenue in Philadelphia. You will see a refuge from daily city life. Sister Marie Edwards walks Jerry, a friendly yellow lab, through the well-kept pathways and green grass in the back courtyard of Sacred Heart Free Home. The hand-made benches, gazebos and meticulously shaped bushes give the garden a magical atmosphere. Every aspect of this place resonates a mission to show love and respect to its patients and surrounding community.
The facility is run solely by donations and serves the needs of those who fall between the cracks of Medicare and Medicaid, typically low-income adults under 65.
Patients admitted to Sacred Heart are connected through social workers, word of mouth and doctors. The patients must have gone through all possible treatments and determined chemotherapy is no longer effective. “Each patient must sign our DNR [Do Not Resuscitate] policy,” Edwards says, “an agreement that there were be no resuscitation on our facilities. Nothing is done here to speed up death or extend life. We try to keep things as natural as possible and keep the patients comfortable during their stay.”
The home is divided into three floors; the sisters on the top floor, women on the second and men on the first. The influx of new patients varies according to the severity of their illness. “Some patients come here very sick and live only two hours, while others have been here for years, “ says Edwards. “Right now at the home we have seven women and 10 men staying here. My main job here is to prepare the patients spiritually for death.”
In addition to Edwards and the sisters, the home is staffed with a secretary, dieticians, nurses and a maintenance crew. The sisters themselves coexist with the patients and are available all hours of the day, every day of the week.
Every morning, the maintenance crew cleans up trash strewn across the property that has been either displaced by the wind or carelessly thrown. Directly adjacent to Sacred Heart is a very different scene. Hunting Park’s grounds are plagued with litter and loitering. Edwards has taken personal action to make positive changes within the park but is limited by her lack of free time. She contacted the Fairmount Park Commission to encourage the planting and upkeep of the park’s trees. She fears that, in the near future, it will be left barren. “I have an impulse to clean up the park,” Edwards says. “I would take a garbage bag out myself and pick up the trash if I had the time.”
The home’s therapy dog, Jerry, was donated to Sacred Heart. Edwards takes Jerry out for what she calls her daily “mental health walk”, a morning ritual to give Edwards a break from her emotionally demanding role. Jerry wears boots on his paws after returning home too many times with cuts from broken glass. “I’m a woman in habit and I don’t think people will mess with me, but it definitely helps to have Jerry with me,” says Edwards. “It also gives me a chance to talk to people I wouldn’t be able to before.”
Edwards points outside her window and talks about a shooting in broad daylight a few months ago. Although she didn’t grow up in the Hunting Park section of Philadelphia, she doesn’t let its rough exterior intimidate her. “I could go to a nice, safe place, but that isn’t where I’m meant to be. In my mind, as religious sisters, this is where we should be. We are meant to live among those in need and serve the poor.”
The home’s founder, Rose Hawthorne, held a similar mindset when she established St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer in the late 1800s, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Rose was the daughter of the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter". She believed that to work among the poor effectively, she had to live among them and founded a community of Dominican nuns, now known as the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, which still exist today.
Today, they live and work in homes similar to Sacred Heart in the Hunting Park section of Philadelphia. Other homes are located throughout the country in New York, Minnesota, Georgia and Kenya.
“In my mind this is a very special place,” Edwards says. “This is where the sisters need to be. I believe very strongly in this location.”