Roby Newman, LCSW

August 2012

Social worker’s day revolves around being there for patients, families

For the past year, former longtime Peninsula merchant Robert Cohn has been telling Mission Hospice & Home Care social worker Roby Newman his life story. Every couple of weeks, Newman hands over a page or two of typed monologue for Cohn to review and listens as Cohn goes on to describe the next chapter in his life.

“This is for my family,” Cohn explains. “When I was growing up, you never questioned your parents and they didn’t really tell you the family’s background.”

Cohn’s children and grandchildren won’t have to wonder about the forces that shaped him because he’s covered what he wants them to know in the autobiography. The document also is a way for him to reflect on his life and to feel productive.

“I feel the greatest thing Roby has been able to accomplish with me is giving me the satisfaction of knowing who I am and that there are still things a person can accomplish even toward the end of life,” said Cohn, a former Advanced Care patient who is currently in the Transitions program, a non-medical program providing social work and volunteer support.

Newman has done about a dozen of these “life legacies” for patients and their families, but it’s a small part of his overall responsibilities. He and the five other social workers perform a range of functions including linking families and patients with community resources, helping with end-of-life documentation such as advanced directives for health care, and a variety of counseling challenges.

On the day Newman met with Cohn, his first visit of the morning was with Janet Allgire, the primary caregiver for her mother, Evelyn Console, who is spending more and more of her time asleep in the end stage of advanced Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

“The care Janet has provided her mother has been extraordinary,” Newman remarked. “But her mother is declining. My concern now is how Janet is experiencing that decline.”

During his meeting with Allgire, whose husband and daughter help with Mrs. Console’s care, it’s clear that she has concerns about whether her mother is in pain, and if there’s anything more she can do. Newman reassures her that the pain medication prescribed by the  Mission Hospice doctor is adequate, and that in spite of her approaching death, Allgire and her mother share an unbreakable bond.

“What you have between the two of you, nothing can ever take away,” he tells her.

The conversation, which lasts about half an hour, also includes more prosaic issues. Does Janet need more respite care (she always says she doesn’t), how well an antibiotic cream is working, and what the Giants are up to.

Allgire adds that she knows that someday, she’ll go into her mother’s room and she’ll have died.

“She’ll go quietly and comfortably,” Newman reassures. “At that point, Mission Hospice isn’t going to disappear. We’ll still be here for you.”

Being there for the patients and their families is what drives Newman and his colleagues. In Newman’s case, that goal has special meaning. His mother died when he was a teenager and he recalls that it wasn’t possible, at that time, to discuss his feelings with anyone.

Part of the way he coped was by starting to write poetry when he was 15. He later earned a Masters in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University after finishing a history degree at the University of Massachusetts. He believes his early experience with loss led him to volunteer for five years at VNA & Hospice in San Francisco, including time at Coming Home Hospice working with AIDS/HIV patients. He says that witnessing people dying “opened me to the heartbreak of dying, as well as people dying with grace.”

He attended graduate school at UC Berkeley in social work with hospice in mind and was hired at Mission Hospice before he graduated in 2001. He still uses poetry to cope with death and expects to publish a volume of his work inspired by Mission Hospice patients this fall.

“Poetry helps me make a different kind of sense of things,” Roby said. “In this work, we witness death. I always feel like we get to show our best selves.”