CEO Message: February 2026

Erin White, President & CEO

Dear Friends,

I recently rewatched Jonathan Demme’s iconic concert film Stop Making Sense, featuring the Talking Heads, and—perhaps an unusual place to land on the eve of Valentine’s Day—it has stayed with me.

Afterward, I found myself returning to the short MTV promo film made at the time. In it, the interviewer asks Talking Heads frontman David Byrne why he chose the title Stop Making Sense. Byrne replies, without hesitation, “Because it’s good advice.” He goes on to explain that music—and the performing arts more broadly—don’t really make sense. They aren’t meant to.

So many of the most meaningful experiences we have as humans resist sense-making: art, grief, illness, aging, love. Especially love. “Stop making sense” really is good advice.

It is advice I almost never follow.

I love a good framework. I love patterns that reveal why something is happening or how a problem can be solved. Spreadsheets with clean formulas. Calendars with carefully protected time blocks. Tactics that funnel up to strategies.

I love making sense.

And yet, when you work in end-of-life care, your nose is pressed right up against places where sense falters. Pain doesn’t follow a tidy logic. Timing is rarely fair. Bodies fail in ways we can’t predict or control. Families love each other deeply and still struggle to show it. Grief doesn’t march through five orderly stages, but instead cycles around and through—retreating and reemerging over time.

Again and again, this work asks us to loosen our grip on explanation.

At Hospice Giving Foundation, our funding often supports kinds of care that live in the in-between spaces—services that don’t fit neatly into insurance codes or clinical categories. Music at the bedside. Art as expression. Acupuncture, gentle touch, presence. These offerings may not “make sense” in a traditional medical framework, but they help people feel held, seen, and less alone.

In that same interview, Byrne reflects that with music, the body understands before the mind does. The same is often true at the end of life. Before words or answers, there is touch. There is breath. There is showing up. Love moves in, even when nothing seems to make sense.

We are privileged to support the people and organizations who stand in those spaces every day—when sense slips away and what remains is care, dignity, and connection. This work is not about having the right explanations. It is about being present. About trusting what the heart and body already know.

On Valentine’s Day, when love is so often reduced to cards, gestures, and certainty, I find myself grateful for a deeper, messier version—one that doesn’t always make sense, but is no less real for it.

With warmth and gratitude,

Erin White
President & CEO

P.S. With deep gratitude for the hospice and palliative care clinicians and caregivers who continue to show up for patients and families every day. For any fellow fans out there, a love song (of sorts): David Byrne covering David Bowie’s “Heroes.”