Corey Young and the Art of Caring
Life’s a funny thing. A few months ago, when I interviewed the remarkable Corey Young, I had more than enough material to do him some justice in a profile. Corey is a full-time hospice nurse in Meadville and owns and helps run French Creek Framing & Fine Art, facts that, all on their own, suggest a life brimming with color, variation, and commitment. Then, a week later, my 99 year-old father, Alfred Slote, went into hospice care in Michigan. My wife and I, along with my brother and sister, joined a team of hospice nurses and health aides to care for Dad till he passed away two weeks later. The facts of Corey’s hospice work were for me no longer just facts.
In the pecking order of the medical world, nurses in general are underappreciated and underpaid, especially considering what they actually do, which is almost everything. In the context of hospice care, when patients have decided they’ve finally had enough of hospitals, tests, aggressive medications, and the interventions of doctors—what Corey calls “the cog wheel of the medical system”--hospice nurses become the sole providers of medical care, and their guiding principle is very simple: to bring comfort to a person’s last days, weeks, months. In my recent experience, that shift, despite the resignation it signals, brings incredible relief—to everyone involved. Corey could have predicted this.
“I come to people,” he says, “who have often suffered immensely” through rounds of chemo and radiation or other debilitating treatment. “They’re exhausted. Yes, they’re scared about going into hospice, but usually, by the end of the admissions process, you can tell they’re relieved. That’s why I don’t see my job as sad or depressing.” For Corey, the beauty of this care includes the freedom it brings to the person receiving it. “We want you to be comfortable until the time comes. We have no agenda . . . . Enjoy the time you have left. Eat what you want to eat. Go where you want to go. Do what you want to do. If we can help in any way to make that happen, we do.”
Corey Young is ebullient and funny and revs at a high rate. He talks fast, thinks fast, and seems to need less sleep than most healthy human beings. He works 16-hour late shifts for Hospice of Crawford County (HCC)—4 pm to 8 am, one week on, and one week off. This means he’s on call every other week, Monday through Friday, mostly for “late admissions” emergencies for at-home patients who are close to the end. There are usually 40-50 patients in the care of Hospice of Crawford County, and he’s the only late shift nurse. It may seem like a recipe for burn-out. Maybe, if you’re not Corey. In his “off” weeks, he’s at the frame shop on Market Street, either on the first floor, managing the business with his fiancé Christopher, or upstairs studying for the latest stage of his medical education, a Masters in Nursing from Penn West. (At the time of our interview he was enrolled in two courses, Advanced Pharmacology and Evidence-based Practice.)
How did all this happen? How does anyone, in Meadville or anywhere, end up with this intense, double-barreled, wildly varied professional life?
For Corey you might say it starts with endurance. He ran cross-country at Meadville Area Senior High and did the same in college, at Washington and Jefferson, in Washington, PA. He majored in English there, with medical school the intended next step. Then, in his senior year, his mother Tammy, the loving, bright, resourceful single mom and nurse who raised Corey and his younger brother Evan through very straitened circumstances, was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiform grade 4, “the most aggressive, untreatable form of brain cancer.” She lived for nearly two more years, much longer than the doctors predicted, and, until the last three months, the quality of her life was good, thanks, in part, to hospice care. But when she died, the loss was devastating for Corey. “She was the center of our universe. In my wildest dreams I never thought I wouldn’t have her.” Med school was no longer in the cards. Instead of studying for the qualifying exam and applying to schools, he had been spending months focused on making his mother’s time with them as good as possible.
Suddenly without direction or a sense of purpose, Corey endured through his friendships, especially with lifelong pal Janice Gifford, and by keeping himself as busy as possible. He expanded his hours at Tops, the local grocery story, where he had worked since high school— “less for the money than for consistency and having somewhere I knew I could be.” He worked at all three Urgent Care centers in the area (in Meadville, in Vernon Township, and in Titusville). He worked at the Meadville Chamber of Commerce. He held all these jobs at once. It meant 80-100 hours a week of busyness. “I did not want to be at home and didn’t want to be alone.”
Eventually, he found purpose again. While still working all those jobs, he started taking nursing classes through the University of Pitt-Titusville. By the spring of 2021, he had earned an associate degree in nursing and shifted to working full-time as an RN at the Meadville Medical Center, on the cardiac and telemetry floor. At the time, this was also the COVID floor. The experience overwhelmed him often. “I was taking people I went to high school with to the ICU who never came out.” He did, though, learn an enormous amount in a very short time. Within months he was getting trained as the charge nurse of the floor and soon was responsible for both his own 4-5 patients and for the other nurses and their 35 or so patients. On top of that, because the hospital had no telemetry tech at the time, Corey had to monitor all the EKG results at the hospital in real time.
The decision to shift from hospital nursing to hospice care was easy. Hospice had wrapped his mother in comfort.
These were crucible years. Starting with his mother’s illness and death in 2016 and reaching into COVID, Corey grew to know well the nature of human suffering. He had cared for his mom. He had worked through his own trauma and gotten to the other side, where helping others along a similar path felt inevitably right. Shifting to hospice care, which had wrapped his mother in comfort, was an easy decision. And he was still looking after his community. His first hospice patient was his old fourth grade teacher, Ginny Trimble. “It was wonderful. I’d often visit her on off days; Christopher and I would sometimes take our dogs to see her. She never suffered.” Beloved Mrs. Trimble. “I definitely cried a lot when she passed.”
But how in the world did Corey come to own French Creek Framing & Fine Art? When the world is Meadville, this turn in the story doesn’t feel so crazy. In 2019, when Corey was still in nursing school—and still working a register at Tops—he was “chit-chatting” with an old customer friend, Sandy Cherapovich, longtime owner of “Sandy’s Art Works.” She wanted to close the shop and retire but it was the only custom frame shop in town and, as Corey put it to me, she “didn’t want the business to be lost to Meadville.” She had Corey and Christopher look at the shop and the numbers. They didn’t have the money, or the time, or the expertise, and they were trying to buy a house. But they were “intrigued.” At the same time, it turns out, the town’s most generous supporter of downtown development, Rob Smith, a retired tool-and-die CEO, didn’t want the frame shop to vanish either. So he bought the business and looked for someone to run it. When he asked the young director of the county visiting bureau, Victoria Dickson, if she knew of anyone interested, the stars aligned. Victoria and Corey had been apartment mates. She knew all about his interest. Rob had Corey and Christopher draw up a business plan (Christopher’s background includes business expertise); Rob then offered them the business under very generous terms, relocating the shop to a two-story building he had purchased and beautifully restored, right across from the town’s historic Market House.
Running the shop has meant another new steep learning curve for Corey, but he’s loved the challenge, is in awe of the expert craftsmanship of Valerie Hanes, who does most of the archive-quality matting and framing, and relishes the break this work brings to the intensities of his hospice labors. Corey also deeply values being part of the downtown community. He has thought about this a lot. He lists for me the shops and businesses that surround his own and help make Meadville unique. “What we have here is beautiful and needs protecting. We shouldn’t take it for granted.” He says much the same thing about Hospice of Crawford County. It’s the only non-profit hospice in the county. “Dying can be expensive,” he says. The deficit HCC runs every month is absorbed by the Meadville Medical Center, which owns it. HCC wouldn’t exist without the Medical Center. “The community should be pretty thankful.”
I have a similar thought about Corey Young, a person who has taken on deep, unfair hardships and made them the framework for his own growth and commitment and care. A town, like a person, never knows when it will need angels. So thank God they’re on hand.
Corey loves that his shop is part of the downtown community. “What we have here is beautiful and needs protecting."