Carol Schmitt is hospice team manager for the Douglas Counting Visiting Nurses Association, Rehabilitaion and Hospice Care.

Carol Schmitt is the Douglas County Hospice team manager.

“Birth and death are both part of life’s natural cycle,” Carol Schmitt says with some authority.

She’s been a midwife, a hospice nurse and is now hospice team manager with Douglas County Visiting Nurses Association, Rehabilitation and Hospice Care in Lawrence.

“Americans are generally excited to talk about and celebrate birth but are often reluctant and resistant to talking about death,” Schmitt says.

When she tells people she works for hospice, they often offer her sympathy and ask if her work is depressing.

“It’s a wonderful job and a great privilege to be part of people’s end-of-life journey,” she says.

Schmitt says she didn’t have a big plan for her own life journey; things just seemed to happen one little step at a time, with one thing leading to another.

She and her four siblings grew up in Guilford, Conn., where her father was an insurance salesman and her mother was involved in community politics. Her mother also took part in civil rights marches.

After high school, Schmitt took a year off to work as a waitress and a school bus driver.

“Sometime during that year, the idea of becoming a midwife slowly emerged,” she recalls.

She graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1982, joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Guatemala.

“We worked closely with local teams to promote health care,” she says. “I worked a lot with women’s groups to help them improve children’s nutrition. Some of the local midwives let me accompany them during home births, and I became involved in all aspects of community health with indigenous groups.”

After the Peace Corps she moved to Albuquerque, N.M., to teach nursing skills to trainee midwives at the Midwifery Training Institute. She eventually became more involved in the wider aspects of community health care. In 1985 she traveled Kansas City to visit her future husband, Kansas artist Wayne Propst, whom she’d met during a vacation in Belize in 1984.

They settled in Lawrence in 1990. Schmitt worked part-time for the Visiting Nurses Association (at Cottonwood Inc.) and then as a nurse with De Soto School District.

She returned to full-time hospice nursing in 2002 and became hospice team manager in 2005. She loves the holistic and team aspects of her work.

“There’s a lot of talk in health care about the team approach, but in hospice it really happens,” Schmitt says. “The hospice aide is as much a part of the team as the physician. As a team, we aim to address people’s physical, emotional and spiritual needs.”

Her team continues to develop expertise in end-of-life care and deliver it in confident, sensitive ways.

“But first, all team members need to have their own comfort level with death and dying,” she explains. “The resistance that we, as a culture, have to contemplating our own death can be one of the biggest challenges in hospice work.”

Schmitt thinks about death a lot and isn’t sure if it’s part of her nature or just the nature of her work.

“When I try to imagine how I’d feel if my husband or son were dying, I know I’d be overwhelmed with sadness and grief, but I don’t think that sadness will ultimately determine my memory or feelings for them,” she says. “Death alone doesn’t define the essence of someone.”