^{Left to right: Representative Sonya Jaquez Lewis, TRU PACE Executive Director Sam Black, Governor Polis, and Colorado State House candidate Tracey Bernett.}

TRU was honored to receive a visit from Governor Jared Polis, Representative Sonya Jaquez Lewis, and Tracey Bernett this morning. In May, TRU received funds from the Colorado COVID Relief Fund grant initiated by Governor Polis to support communities impacted by COVID-19. TRU’s grant funding was used to help provide adequate PPE for our front line staff.

^{Governor Polis, speaks with TRU COO Jim Woodard and Director of Access and Palliative Care Chad Hartmann.}

While visiting, the Governor and his team toured the TRU Tele-Care Center and TRU PACE and thanked us for the important work we are doing. His team was intrigued by the future of telehealth, and we anticipate further conversations with them about the path forward.

Thank you all for participating in TRU’s second annual “Take Flight” Butterfly Release and Memorial. Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic and the shift to safe, independent butterfly releases, we had 140 participants (not including family and friends), and 367 butterflies were released! Whether you made a donation, joined the virtual program, picked up and released a butterfly for a loved one, or all three, we hope you had a meaningful experience. Please enjoy this compilation of your photos and videos:

A silver lining to the challenges presented this year was the opportunity for each family to choose where, how, and with whom to release their butterflies. Some did so at the cemetery; others in their own back yards. One participant shared, “Such a well organized event, and for our family with no funeral options at this time, it was extremely meaningful and helpful.” Another told us, “I looked so forward to this humbling day; my butterfly was so beautiful and so ready to fly away to live its life just like (my loved one) was ready to live his new life. Thank you so much for giving me this moment.”

Again, thank you. Our hearts are with you all.

TRU Community Care President and CEO Michael McHale joins KGNU News Director Maeve Conran and co-host and end-of-life educator Kim Mooney to discuss the evolution of end-of-life care, advance care planning, and the landscape of hospice and palliative care in the age of COVID-19. Topics include the use of telehealth in the care of hospice patients, the business and ethics of end-of-life care, and the tools available to navigate the relief of suffering, the dying process, and grief support for the family afterwards.

Listen to the discussion here.

It may not feel that way today, but spring is here and so is TRU’s 2020 Spring Newsletter. To learn more about how TRU is caring for the community during the pandemic, our upcoming events, expanded grief services and other news, view the pdf here.

With the health of our entire community threatened, thoughtful consideration and discussion of end-of-life values and very particular treatment preferences is prudent. If you were to contract coronavirus infection in your current condition, would you want to be hospitalized? Would you want to be on a ventilator?

Read “The coronavirus highlights the need for advance directives,” an op-ed piece in Saturday’s Daily Camera by Dr. Jean Abbott and The Conversation Project’s Amanda Meier to learn more about starting these important conversations.

Updates from TRU staff caring for our patients and participants during these difficult times:

One of TRUs patients in an assisted living has been unable to see her son due to lock down so he has been visiting and holding a sign up to their window from the outside which has been “good interaction” for the patient, according to family.

Another resident of an assisted living has her daughter visiting each week. The daughter sets up a lawn chair in the parking lot and the resident opens the window. They talk and visit for an hour each week, from the parking lot to the window, and haven’t missed any regular visits.

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TRU received an email from a TRU Palliative Care patient’s daughter expressing gratitude for our ability to serve their family with TRU Tele-Care: 

We are so glad you were and are there for Mom. Thank you for all of your work to get her set up with the Tele-Care meetings. She can call us on her own now, thank goodness. It was so important for us to be able to see her and communicate all together about her care. Thank you.

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TRU received a nice note from a hospice patient’s wife in response to a recent email to patients and families:

Thank you so much for the update. My husband and I appreciate the kindness, care, and support we have received from the staff members at TRU. You have truly been a ‘God Send’ for us. Just to know we have people we can call on any time we need assistance is comforting as we wade through the murky waters of his illness. God Bless each and every one of you!

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A TRU PACE social worker received these messages from a participant:

Take care and thanx for your human and caring approach to what’s going on with us at PACE. You ROCK!!!!

PACE is amazing and so are you. I’m fine and this is getting old for all of us.

Truthfully these more frequent contacts with our more vulnerable folks are truly a blessing in disguise and show how much our folks care about us too!

TRU PACE is grateful to Community Food Share for donating food for us to make care packages to deliver to some of our most vulnerable participants. And we’re thankful for our partners at Via for helping us to deliver! We love our participants, staff, and community partners!

Over the past couple of weeks, TRU has been diligently monitoring CDC guidelines to ensure we are doing all that we can to support the health and safety of our customers, staff, volunteers, and local community. To stay true to that, we’ve made the difficult decision to close the Thrift Shop to walk-in customers starting today, March 19^th.  This closure includes discontinuing donations until we are on the other side of this pandemic (hopefully sooner than later).

The good news is that online shopping via Amazon, eBay, and Etsy stores continues! Please look for great bargains and One of a Find items on these pages.  We will be cataloging items daily and posting new sales that can be sent directly to your home. If you aren’t already, please follow TRU Thrift Shop on Facebook and Instagram, where we’ll be posting regular updates and those tremendous online sales and items mentioned.

As always, your patronage greatly benefits TRU’s mission and ability to provide critical services – hospice, palliative care, and grief support to our community.

We look forward to resuming operations when it is safe to do so. Until then, thank you again for your patronage and stay safe.

Arthur Secunda (born November 12, 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker who’s career has spanned six decades. He first studied at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a teenager and continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York and at New York University. After spending time in the United States Air Force as an artist, Secunda used his GI bill to study in Mexico, Paris and Italy with many great artists and teachers. As a result, Secunda developed a lifelong propensity for travel– living and working in other countries. For decades, he maintained studios in Paris and LA.

Secunda considers himself a landscape artist, and has developed his own iconography in representing nature, the land and its forms, as well as corresponding inner landscapes. He is known for a specific kind of color gradation and blending of forms in many media. He is also known for his brilliant collages and graphics. His work tends to oscillate between the serene —striated colors in landscapes — to the expressive, as in many of his oil paintings.

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Secunda’s art is worldwide

Secunda has held over 140 solo exhibitions around the world, including in the United States, Israel, France, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Spain, and Japan. His artwork is part of private collections around the world and over 100 museums worldwide have acquired Secunda’s artwork. He is represented in most major museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Norton Simon Museum—Pasadena, CA, the National Gallery of Australia; Bibliotheque Nationale—Paris, France; and the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

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After years in Paris, Secunda maintained a studio in Scottsdale, Arizona for ten years, and currently maintains one in Boulder, Colorado, doing what he has done in all of the other places he has lived and worked in the last 65 years — creating imagery.

Secunda has worked as a jazz musician–in Paris in the early days to support himself, and as a milkman; as an art critic, lecturer, curator, writer and publisher. Periodically, he consults at NASA where he is an image visualizer, helping translate scientific data into visual images. Highly respected as a teacher, he has spent time in Lacoste, France teaching a master class in collage and the creation of handmade artists books.

The Arthur Secunda Museum

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The Arthur Secunda Museum at Cleary University in Michigan pays tribute to the life and artwork of Secunda, who began his career as an artist in Michigan. Secunda currently enjoys participating in the Purple Art program at PACE and has been the Artist of the Month, where his art has been displayed throughout the facility.