May 3, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Author, 90, volunteers love at hospice
by MARILYN STEEG

Sitting on Keystone House’s comfortable porch, Mary Rose Nuse takes a break from the comfort she offers residents of Keystone Hospice. Caring for the beautiful gardens and grounds at Keystone House are among the many services volunteers contribute. (Photo by Paula M. Riley)

One of the 95 volunteers at Keystone House (at Keystone Hospice in Wyndmoor) is a dynamic woman with Paul Newman-blue eyes, silver hair, a flawless complexion and engaging smile. Mary Rose Nuse just celebrated her 90th birthday but is not a typical nonagenarian.

Co-volunteers and Keystone staff helped her celebrate in a room that she knew very well – in 1939. At that time Keystone House was an apartment building where she and her husband, Jack Eagleson, lived as newly-weds. What was once their bedroom is now the hospice’s living room.

“Our fireplace burned cannel coal but it still was very cold in the house. I developed pleurisy, and so we moved to Oreland, where we raised our children.” (Cannel coal is a bituminous coal containing much volatile matter that burns very brightly.)

Now the house consists of offices, a beautifully decorated living room and adjacent dining room for the residents, and 19 patient beds.

Volunteering one day a week for the past five years has given Mary Rose a better understanding of the “mysteries of death.” “I hope to be able to continue to live in my Flourtown home, but if I ever need hospice care, I will come here to Keystone. This is a loving home — about as far from a hospital as you can get.

“Most patients are positive and peaceful. I’ve never heard moaning or crying; perhaps a response to the cheerful atmosphere that the staff creates. There are AIDS patients, many of them young, but also people of all ages with cancer, and then the older people. No one is turned away from loving care at Keystone.”

Mary Rose likes to massage patients’ feet because it’s a way to introduce herself. Conversation follows, usually about their families. To provide families with a lasting memory of their loved ones, Mary Rose records on tape patients’ reminiscences. She has heard some fascinating stories, both happy and tragic, and she cherishes this aspect of her patient support work.

While rearing their seven children, Mary Rose worked as junior school secretary at Ravenhill Academy in return for tuition for three of her daughters. Her husband was an engineer with Acme Markets. Their children now live in California, New York and the Philadelphia area; she also has 18 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Mary Rose spent many years counseling battered and abused women in Maine, where she married her second husband who had retired from teaching at the Penn Charter School. She was widowed twice.

Mary Rose has just finished a 300-page book about her life, called Chapters, just for the family. The five chapters are entitled “Childhood,” “Adolescence,” “Marriage One,” “Marriage Two,” and “Old Age.” In it she discusses her life, recalling the flu epidemic, the Depression, World Wars I and II, and travels in Alaska, Europe and the British Isles, Japan, and Russia — “a small piece of history,” she said.

Reprinted with permission from the Spring, 2007, issue of Keystone Notes, the newsletter of Keystone Hospice in Wyndmoor.