CHICOPEE — Volunteers of the state’s first hospice home want people to know this is not going to be a somber place.
They envision music, laughter, card-playing, group dinners and plenty of family and friends visiting the terminally ill residents, said Gina Mazza, president of the board of directors for Harmony House.
Harmony House is scheduled to reopen this fall in a renovated six-bedroom home on View Street. It comes after years of struggles including a legal battle over the purchase of the property, the death of the founder and the complete gutting and renovation of the home they purchased.
“What a journey this has been,” said Mazza, while showing off the nearly-finished house earlier this week.
That journey started in 2007 as the dream of Ruth Willemain, a native Holyoke who served as a hospice volunteer after returning from teaching. After visiting a hospice home in the Midwest, Willemain, who died in 2022, made it his mission to open one in Western Massachusetts.
She felt too many people in hospice died in institutional settings because they did not have family or friends capable of caring for them. Harmony House allows people to live their last days in a family-like setting where they can do what they please such as have visitors when they want, eat meals they enjoy and have a glass of wine.
“Our mission is we are serving the people who don’t have the resources to hire someone and they don’t have the family,” said Mazza, of Chicopee who runs a home healthcare consulting firm and teaches at Elms College.
Willemain spent years building a group of like-minded volunteers —many of them who work in health care — setting up a non-profit agency and tirelessly fundraising. The Board of Trustees purchased the about 3,000-square-foot house on View Street in 2015 but legal battles with family members of the former owners stagnated in court for years.
But that didn’t stop the mission. In 2017, three siblings offered their late parents’ three-bedroom ranch on Pendleton Avenue to the organization for rent-free use. The home was opened in June and volunteers cared for two residents at a time, helping nearly 50 people and their families, Mazza said.
“We closed the house on Pendleton at the end of 2019 and six months later we planned that this house would be open. Then COVID hit,” she said.
The pandemic essentially halted work at the house since workers couldn’t gather, couldn’t get building materials due to supply chain problems and healthcare workers were unavailable as volunteers, Mazza said.
Once restrictions started to ease, work was able to start at the house. Before the pandemic Adam Quenneville Roofing volunteered to replace the leaky roof and volunteers had gutted the inside down to the wall studs.
Rich Rivet, owner of Cedar Falls Construction, stepped in to serve as project manager. He made sure the home had the proper permits and offered his own crews at no charge. Other companies, such as Yankee Home Improvement, also volunteered their time and individual tradesmen worked on the project unpaid, Mazza said.
“It has been a year of hard work,” she said.
The house now has new windows, new wiring and an energy-efficient heating system that will allow each resident to control the temperature in their own room. It is waiting for a final sign-off on the new fire suppression system, she said.
Larry and Louise Labrie are part of what they call the Wednesday work crew, a group of between 12 and 14 people who come over for the morning or longer to finish work listed by Rivest on a whiteboard in the living room. The list, which used to be long pages, is now much shorter.
The two typically visit the home multiple times a week and organize jobs for the Wednesday work party. Louise Labrie has also managed to secure couches, chairs, tables and desks at no charge to furnish the home through a local business.
They talk about the incredible acts of generosity they have encountered since getting involved. For example, when they hired a tradesman to make an emergency repair, the man realized a friend had been cared for at the Pendleton Avenue home and has returned multiple times without charge.
Businesses have done volunteer days at Harmony House. Labrie connected up with a designer and art consultant who helped decorate the home, she said.
Last weekend the Moose Family Center ran a spaghetti supper fundraiser for Harmony House, providing the food, the space and the volunteers for the event. Harmony House sold out of the 300 available tickets and couldn’t have been happier with the turnout and financial help, Larry Labrie said.
“When I get you in the door, when you understand what this is all about, I’ve got you,” Louise Labrie. “This is going to be a home with laughter and music. It is not a death house.”
To be accepted into the house, a person must be diagnosed with a terminal condition and is not expected to live for more than three months. They will be connected with a hospice program that will provide the health care services they need to make them comfortable. Mazza said.
The home itself is designed to meet multiple needs. The large, open kitchen has two stovetops so two or more people can cook at the same time. It opens to a large dining area with a long table where multiple people can sit down together. Also connected is a living room with a television and couches and chairs.
The great room is connected to a large outdoor deck by glass doors. It will have a picnic table, lounge chairs and a grill.
Off the main room is a private spot called Ruth’s Reflection Room. It was initially designed to be used by visiting pastors but is available to anyone who needs some alone time. The focus point of it is a stained glass picture designed by Willemain, Mazza said.
The five resident bedrooms are all roomy and airy with multiple windows that residents can make their own. Each will have a hospital bed to make home care easy and attached handicapped accessible bathrooms designed for privacy as well as to make it easy for residents to receive help from a caregiver, Mazza said.
The house is on multiple levels and upstairs is a guest bedroom that can be used by family members or friends or a volunteer who might need to stay in an emergency or because of bad weather, he said.
At the same level are work areas for the Board of Trustees and an industrial-sized washer and dryer.
“This house goes on and on,” Mazza said, showing off a basement and a sub-basement that can have multiple uses.
When the house reopens the board of trustees plans to accept two residents at a time to start and will slowly grow depending on its capability, she said.
For now, she is envisioning residents mainly being referred by hospice agencies. The previous experience shows that most people remain in the house for three to six weeks before they die, she said.
Now that the home is getting ready to open, the Board of Trustees is developing a new budget and operations plan for the long term. Since residents stay for free, Harmony House depends on grants, fundraising and volunteers. More information about helping is available on the organization’s website www.harmonyhousema.org.
“We know it will be a hybrid. We will need some paid staff and we will have a crew of volunteers,” she said.
The current thought is paid staff will mostly be nurses or other trained healthcare workers who will cover overnight and weekend shifts. When Harmony House was first opened it mainly relied on volunteer healthcare workers, but Mazza said she knew that was not sustainable.
They also want enough staff, paid and volunteers, so no one is stretched thin and someone is available if a resident just wants some companionship, he said.
“We know it costs an average of $250 a day to take care of someone and we are using that as our benchmark,” Mazza said.
With every successful fundraiser, every grant awarded, every volunteer who walks in the door and every good thing that happens to the organization, Mazza and other organizers say the same thing.
“Ruth was looking down on us.”
