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Staff Spotlight on Bereavement Coordinator Becky Schultheiss

Her Focus is the Family

As August National Grief Awareness month continues, we are spotlighting another outstanding Crossroads Bereavement Coordinator, Becky Schultheiss of Crossroads in Cleveland.

In September Becky will celebrate her fifth anniversary as a Bereavement Coordinator at Crossroads in Cleveland. Crossroads isn’t the first hospice she’s worked for but, according to Becky, it is definitely the best.

Becky began her career as a Bereavement Coordinator with strong educational credentials including an associate’s degree in art, a bachelor’s degree in education and a Master of Divinity degree in Pastoral Care and Counseling.

Prior to joining Crossroads, Becky worked at two different hospices, each for one year. What Becky appreciates most about Crossroads is the very role of the Bereavement Coordinator.

Bereavement Care is a Specialty

“At Crossroads it’s the Bereavement Coordinator who stays in contact with the family,” after a patient passes, Becky said. At the other hospices where she worked, it was mostly the Chaplains who kept in touch with families. So the Chaplains supported families before and after a death.

What Becky truly appreciates is the “chance to focus on the family” after a death. She prides herself on “walking beside people” and “helping them go through what they’re going through.”

Becky said, “I listen.” Sometimes a family member will ask her, “what to do” or how to feel. “That’s not my job,” she said. “I will listen” and help someone “work out” what they need to do to move forward. And each family is different.

When Becky began at Crossroads there were three Bereavement Coordinators at the Cleveland site. Now she’s the only one, providing bereavement care for approximately 1700 patients a month. It can be a challenge “getting all the work done” and “using her time wisely.”

Becky meets these challenges head on by giving her position as a Bereavement Coordinator her all every day she’s on the job. And when she’s not at work, Becky enjoys reading and spending weekends with her husband visiting Ohio State Parks with their camper.

School is Back in Session.
Be Alert on the Road!

Make Driving Safely a Priority

Delivering end-of-life care requires a lot of time on the road, logging miles driving to patients’ homes. You may have already noticed a change in traffic this month. As students head back to their classrooms, roads become busier with school buses, pedestrians, cyclists and families traveling to and from schools. 

While traffic patterns shift during the fall, research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows overall traffic fatalities decline after September when summer travel ends. 

But the risk to pedestrians increases throughout the fall and winter months, due to shorter daylight hours and more people out walking after dark. Drivers should expect shifts on the road and be on the lookout for traffic pattern changes when students return to school in the fall.

Take Precautions on the Road

• Every driver can help make local roads safer by following a few simple precautions:
• Slow down in school zones and obey all posted speed limits.
• Watch for crossing guards and always yield to pedestrians using crosswalks.
• Stay vigilant, especially around young children who may step into the street without warning.
• Keep crosswalks clear by stopping before the crosswalk at intersections.
• Never pass a stopped school bus. Always stop when a school bus has its flashing lights activated and its stop arm extended.

Road Safety Facts

• Pedestrian safety is a growing concern. In 2023, 77 percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred after dark and 63 percent happened during the workweek.
• Teen drivers remain at high risk. Motor vehicle crashes continue to be the leading cause of death for teenagers in the United States. 
• School-related traffic creates hazards. Although there may be fewer vehicles on the road than during summer, school drop-off and pick-up times can lead to congestion, more pedestrians and increased activity around neighborhoods and school zones.

A little extra patience and attention behind the wheel can go a long way in helping students, families, YOU and everyone on the road arrive safely at their destinations.

Remembering the Future

By Danny Gutknecht

That day, hours before the phone call—the phone call one never forgets—you’re standing in front of a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has laid its hooks in you. It is hauntingly mesmerizing in some unexplainable way. Impossible to move away from. And yet, you have no idea what is only a few hours away.

The mesmerizing painting? A door.

But it is a door titled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, by Ivan Albright, who spent decades on this one painting. A door with a funeral wreath, dead center. Decrepit hands trying to pry it open, but the door will never open. Everything in the painting decaying in obsessive detail. And the title, taken from the Book of Common Prayer: a confession of things left undone.

Just two nights before, we were awake until the wee hours, deep in conversation. We lost track of time talking about the future. Your face glowed with aspirations—about how exciting life was going to be, about how things were finally coming together. How golden the future looked. The conversation decided to stay up much later than it should have, considering the plane for Chicago left early the next morning.

Two days later there’s the phone call. The sound you never thought you would hear. The words: “He’s gone.”

What? What? What?

But what is not a question. It’s the only sound your mouth can make in that moment. The hope that it’s all a sick joke.

You frantically check the flight status. Hours pass, but the clock shows that those hours are really minutes. You have to get back. Every fiber in your body thinks you can do something about it—that somehow, if you can only get there sooner, you might be able to reel the big spindle of time backward.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense. But a part of you has decided that you’ll get there and it might be all right, even though you know it can’t be. Time has stopped being something you can count. It is now a barrier: the distance between where you are and the closed door you are trying to pry open but can’t.

But this isn’t a museum anymore, and the door isn’t a painting.

Disbelief is soon shattered by the real understanding of what agony is. Before, agony was just a word. Now it is the only word conceivable. And the experience—just try putting that into words. It is unspeakable.

To attempt a eulogy. To explain the beauty of a human being, of a relationship. To describe the numinous experience of love. To even attempt putting that into words is to murder something sacred with a pen.

The agony and despair are also, at the same time, the powerful realization that love is something the heart and soul are not large enough to contain.

It manifests when you try to move your hands and feet. There is no life force. It is like having an anvil tied to each limb. And it is the reminder that however much love we gave, there was always—certainly—more. But the immobility is the pain of reaching into the void for the hand of the one who held some of that love.

It is a violent and forced examination, followed by a clear-eyed glimpse into the petty dramas that subvert our precious exchanges in time with those we love. Maybe we are dulled by the frequency of our own redundancies, or maybe we have a sort of collective amnesia about how much love we really have to give.

And holding back in life—for what?

What’s a past? Or, more so, what’s a future?  

It doesn’t take long at all—maybe a month—to realize that the worst pain isn’t remembering the past. It’s remembering the future.

The past happened. Nothing can reach it.

I’ve tried.