Abstract · I have been working at Tábitha Hospice House for Children and Young Adults as a volunteer since the summer of 2014. I mainly take part in household duties, and in care services and leisure activities for children (and sometimes for their families as well). I usually spend an afternoon or an evening in the hospice house per week. In this study, I would like to introduce the difficulties volunteers have to face with, and the joy and success they can find in children's hospice, based on my experiences of the past one and a half years of volunteering. First, I focus on the difficulties; I make a special reference to the services for patients at the end of their lives and their families, and to the services for children with different health status on relief days. After that, I attempt to explain why people decide on children's hospice volunteering despite its difficulties, and what kind of pleasure and motivation they might find in this activity. My primary goal is to show a wide range of various and exciting activities and sometimes uplifting and some other times heartbreaking experiences of children’s hospice volunteering, which might turn us into more open and emphatic people who can understand the world better, and are more capable of love.

This review is a written version of the lecture given at the 12th Congress of the Hungarian Hospice-Palliative Association.

Abstract · The summary provides a brief account of the beneficial effects of using music in hospice. An active and a receptive music therapy in hospice services, applied by trained professionals, can help dying people improve their state of mind, their physical and psychosocial condition, the quality of their lives, and create their peace of mind as well. In addition, music therapy also has a beneficial effect on the relatives of dying people and the hospice service employees: music therapy can relieve the relatives and help them build a more honest and open relationship to dying people. It also plays an important role in creating mental balance and reducing psychological burdens of the employees taking care of the patients.