Marion Vise has devoted more than 40 years of service to Hospice Austin, leading bereavement support groups and helping thousands of Central Texans along the way.

Established in 1979, Hospice Austin was the first end-of-life care center in Central Texas and is currently Austin’s only nonprofit hospice. Anyone can receive treatment from them no matter the typical restrictors – such as age or financial status, they just want to gift people comfortable final months. Their organization has over 400 trained volunteers today, but Marion’s been involved since almost the beginning. She started her volunteer journey just two years after their first patient was served.

After several moves around the US because of military transfers for her husband, the couple finally settled down in Austin where Marion went on to attend the second ever volunteer training class at Hospice Austin. She then began her journey working with patients and their families as they went through life’s final moments together. There was a brief period that she had to step away and deal with her own family matters, but Marion made a hasty return to the organization. It was then that she began helping Hospice Austin’s bereavement program founder, Carolyn McDonald, in the office. Shortly after, she started counseling the bereaved and took over the department following McDonald’s retirement. This led to her receiving facilitator training and ultimately leadership of multiple general and loss of parent support groups. When her husband passed in 2004, Marion took on loss of spouse groups as well where she is a “sensitive and highly skilled facilitator” according to Nancy McCranie, the previous Director of Volunteer & Bereavement Services.

“She has been a faithful volunteer the entire time.”, says Nancy. “In the early years, she was one of the small group of people who helped get Hospice Austin started. In the years since, she has given her gifts in the area of facilitating bereavement support groups. It’s hard to calculate the thousands of lives she has touched over the past four decades. Marion truly embodies the Hospice Austin mission to provide care and support to anyone in our community who needs it.”