Maureen I. Mason, a longtime volunteer in the hospice program at the old Church Home and Hospital who lectured widely on the subject, died Feb. 13 at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson of complications of a fall.
She was 96.
"Because life doesn't last forever, it becomes incumbent upon us not to waste the life we are given," wrote Mrs. Mason in her autobiography, "The Journey," which was published in 2008.
"Dying is a natural stage of our lives, like birth, adolescence, middle and old age. Since it is the last condition of everyone's life, it may well be the most important," she wrote. "Dying is the time in our life when we gather ourselves in, take our inventory and can come to an understanding of all our life has been."
The daughter of Robert Neely, a shirt maker, and Mary Garmany Neely, a teacher, the former Maureen Isabel Neely was born and raised in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where she graduated from high school.
One of her favorite stories from her childhood was seeing aviator Amelia Earhart land her plane in a field, having just completed a solo transatlantic flight in 1932.
"She and her best friend were in a field when Amelia Earhart asked where she was and the girls shouted 'Ireland,'" said her longtime friend Sarah Rebecca Galloway of Towson.
In 1939, she earned a degree in home economics from the Belfast College of Domestic Science in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
In 1940, she met George W. Mason, who was serving in the U.S. Navy, building airstrips in Northern Ireland. They married in 1942, several days before Mr. Mason was sent to the Pacific Theater, where he served for five years.
They lived in Amesbury, N.H., while Mr. Mason completed nursing school at Boston University, and moved to Ruxton in 1950, when her husband took a job as director of nursing for the Maryland Department of Mental Hygiene.
Mrs. Mason went to work in 1950 at the old Hutzler's department store in downtown Baltimore, and when Hutzler's opened its Towson store in 1952, she was named supervisor of the women's separates department. She retired in 1979.
In the 1970s, she began volunteering at the Church Home and Hospital on Broadway in East Baltimore.
Several years later, she joined an interdisciplinary team of professionals from the hospital — including her husband, who was director of nursing there — who traveled to London to meet with Dame Cecily Saunders, who had established St. Christopher's Hospice in 1967.
Dame Cecily was the founder and pioneering force behind the modern hospice movement, which provides palliative care for terminally ill patients and helps ease the pain of their death for their loved ones.
The hospice program at Church Home and Hospital, which was established by her husband and was the first at a Baltimore hospital, was modeled after the one at St. Christopher's Hospice.
It was established on the seventh floor of Church Home and Hospital's Barton building and began receiving patients in 1977.
"The hospice team comprises doctors, nurses, social workers, clergymen, physical therapists, psychologists and non-professional volunteers. Nowhere, probably, is the volunteer more appreciated than here," reported The Baltimore Sun in a 1979 article on the Church Home and Hospital hospice.
The second hospice program at a hospital opened a year later at what his now the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.
"You can't help being touched by these people," Mrs. Mason told The Sun in the 1979 article. "For dying is such an ordinary experience, it comes so close to you — you can't help realizing soon that we're all in this together, what's happening to them will eventually happen to me."
She explained that one of the primary functions of hospice was helping the patient deal with pain and the fear of pain.
"And you forget yourself. When you come to feel what they are going through, the only thought you can keep is, 'What can I do for this person to make his day more comfortable,'" she said.
"She was gifted at this work because people were so afraid. She could lead patients and their families through this," said Ms. Galloway. "It was always, 'What can I do for them?' She found meaning working in hospice."
She said that Mrs. Mason was "good with words and a natural storyteller," which she delivered in her native Irish brogue.
"Maureen was someone who spoke her mind and most often with great wisdom and insight," said Ms. Galloway.
"As people get close to dying, she said it was 'like they were carrying a suitcase where they folded and repacked its contents, that's what you did to help someone die,'" she said.
For years, Mrs. Mason traveled throughout the state and the Mid-Atlantic lecturing at churches, hospitals, colleges, universities and other groups about her hospice work. "Let's DO Talk about Difficult Goodbyes — Death and Dying," was one of her popular talks.
"It was my privilege to be with dying patients and their families. It became my life; and, in so many ways, it was the best part of my life," Mrs. Mason wrote in her book.
"I was able to ease my way into the life of the dying and then assist in easing the dying into acceptance and a full experience of their lives, if they chose to do so," she wrote. "When I talked to our patients about dying, what I was actually speaking about was how they were living."
For her years of hospice work, Mrs. Mason, who later moved to the Glen Meadows retirement community in Glen Arm, received a WJZ-TV Channel 13 Volunteer Award.
Mrs. Mason's husband died in 2002.
She was an active member of Towson Presbyterian Church, 400 W. Chesapeake Ave., where a memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday.
She is survived by three nephews.