Committed to Compassion
Lars Egede-Nissen ’58 helped establish hospice care in the United States.
BY IAN ALDRICH
At the age of 10, Lars Egede-Nissen ’58 had the opportunity to shadow his father, a general practice physician, on house calls to patients in their hometown of White Plains, New York. For Egede-Nissen, these visits were not just a window into the work of his father but a lesson in staying committed to the practice of being a compassionate person in the wake of extreme hardship.
Less than a decade before, in the family’s native Norway, Dag Egede-Nissen had used his medical practice as a clandestine outpost to ferry residents out of German-occupied Oslo to Sweden. The work eventually led to Dag’s arrest and confinement in a concentration camp, where he endured the final months of the war. After, Egede-Nissen’s father spoke only occasionally of that time, instead converting whatever pain he carried with him into caring for his family and patients.
“He was such a wonderful man and his patients really felt that,” says Egede-Nissen. “While he and I took walks, we would run into some of them, and they would look me straight in the eye and say, your father is a saint.”
Over his own long, often pioneering career in building and running hospice care programs and facilities around the United States, Egede-Nissen has diligently instilled what he learned from his father into his own work practices. “I’ve never claimed to be a clinician, but I think there’s something in me that has me emulating my father in a way,” he says. “The empathy he showed people and his willingness to listen to people to know where they are and what they need were things I tried to do.”
A Columbia University graduate and Navy veteran, Egede-Nissen was employed as an editor in the mid-1970s for a publisher that specialized in medical books when he was assigned the job of publishing a new edition on nursing care for sick children by an author who was a renowned expert on death and dying. The work, says Egede-Nissen, opened his eyes to the burgeoning world of hospice care (the country’s first facility opened its doors in 1974) and its need for smart, empathetic leaders.
In 1979, Egede-Nissen took a career leap and started work at a new hospice program in California’s Humboldt County. “We had one desk, one phone, one chair and three people,” he recalls. “But we did the work we needed to do and today, that hospice is still there.”
My goals have always been to assure that every American should have access to compassionate and high-quality health services. I have also passionately advocated for a heightened awareness of health care choices and their consequences.
Despite its startup flair, the job proved to be the beginning of something unexpected for Egede-Nissen. As a development officer and later CEO, Egede-Nissen became one of the country’s first thousand hospice professionals, and over the next several decades headed, and sometimes steered the creation of, hospice programs and facilities in California, Connecticut, Maryland (where his own mother became a hospice patient), Texas and Michigan. He was the first consumer member of the National Board for Certification of Hospice and Palliative Nurses and later co-authored a new certification examination for hospice and palliative care administrators; in 2013, the Hospice and Palliative Care Association of Michigan recognized him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
“My goals have always been to assure that every American should have access to compassionate and high-quality health services,” says Egede-Nissen, who also headed Planned Parenthood offices in Miami, Florida, and Dayton, Ohio. “I have also passionately advocated for a heightened awareness of health care choices and their consequences.”
Much like those early memories of seeing his father care for patients, Egede-Nissen’s work, and the people who have passed through his life, have impacted him. “I value my relationships in a different way than I once did,” he says. “And I’ve been terribly lucky to have so many wonderful people in my life.”
That includes his late wife, Nancy, a hospice social worker, whom he married in 1993. Theirs was a tight partnership, says Egede-Nissen, no more so than in the final months of Nancy’s life, when her husband was on the frontlines of her end-of-life care.
Even though Nancy didn’t attend SPS, the friendships she formed with several of Egede-Nissen’s formmates made it seem as if she had. Through reunions and other campus visits, Egede-Nissen says his wife grew attached to the School and was honored by the opportunity to be buried at the SPS cemetery. Egede-Nissen plans to be laid to rest there, too.
“When you’re in high school you’ve got your stuff — your sports and clubs and social activities,” he says. “But as I’ve gone back, it’s the friendships that are still there for me that are truly the most valuable. At our last reunion, the class poet, who always speaks at our dinner gathering, got up and opened his remarks by talking about Nancy. But that’s how our class operates. We really looked out for one another.”
Which makes the Alumni Award hold special meaning for Egede-Nissen. “My father always said to me, don’t take yourself too seriously,” he says. “So, this isn’t anything I was looking out for or expecting. I’m certainly not in this world to be famous. But to be chosen for something like this, well, that just feels terribly special.”