April 23, 2019
On March 23rd, Yan St-Pierre and I had the pleasure to attend St Clare Hospice’s Spring Ball 2019 and also to visit the hospice itself the following week. Some of you might remember our call to donate to St Clare’s for Christmas, as the charity is closely connected to MOSECON’s own Director of Operations, Nik Wright, his parents Stan and Heather and his family. So when we received the invitation, we were delighted to accompany Nik and Rebbeca to the ball, as a means to support St Clare and to learn more about their services to the community.
The ball itself was a lot of fun, rides in a Rolls Royce and a private helicopter were live auctioned off as well as a weekend golf trip to Portugal or tickets to the Royal Opera House in London, with all of the ball’s profits as well as the auction prizes going directly into caring for the hospice patients. Nik Wright held a moving speech about his father’s and his family’s involvement with the hospice and what St Clare means to him. If you are unfamiliar with the services a hospice offers, you can learn more on St Clare’s website.
However, what astounded me most on our visit to the hospice was how much joy the place itself (with its beautiful gardens), but also the people working or living there radiated. For me this is one of the greatest achievements of St Clare: To overcome the sadness connected with dying without denying it – for both the patients as well as their loved ones and to empower and enable everyone involved to be as independent as well as comfortable as possible.
Finally, as we couldn’t attend the St Clare 10k run in England because of our previous registration for the Berlin Half Marathon on April 7th, we decided to run the Half in honour of Stan Wright, who extensively travelled around Germany in his youth, and ask our followers to donate a 1 Euro or a Pound respectively for every minute it took us to finish (113 min 22 secs for Yan, 113 and 30 secs for me). Knowing that we didn’t just run for the fun of it was definitely a big motivator in getting to that finish line!
As St Clare needs to raise approximately 4.6 million GBP each year to provide their in-patients, day therapy groups as well as family members with health care and emotional support, and the NHS only funds about 40% of this, we would like to ask you all to spread the word, consider a donation or even pay St Clare’s a personal visit, it is truly the most friendly and welcoming place!