When Monica “Nikki” Hill joined Blue Ridge Hospice in 1988, the organization was growing but still operating with limited resources. Nikki Hill began working without a salary, with community donations eventually making it possible to fund her nursing position.
It was characteristic of the organization in those early years — people stepped forward because patients and families needed them.
Over the next 15 years, Nikki Hill would become one of the nurses who helped define what hospice care looked like at Blue Ridge.
But perhaps the clearest measure of Nikki Hill’s influence is found in the nurses who followed her.
Nikki Hill, whose example as a nurse, teacher and mentor influenced generations of Blue Ridge Hospice caregivers.
“When I grew up, I wanted to be just like Nikki Hill.”
From left to right: Mary Jane Lee, Nikki Hill, and Caroline Hastreiter in the early 1990s, three of the people who helped shape Blue Ridge Hospice’s early years.
Teaching a Different Kind of Care
Lisa Day Eiland encountered Nikki before Lisa ever expected to work for Blue Ridge Hospice.
Already a nurse, Lisa enrolled in the organization’s volunteer training program in 1995. She remembers an exercise Nikki led that asked participants to list the people and things most important to them, then gradually cross them off.
With each choice, the list became smaller, illustrating the progression of losses that can accompany terminal illness. The exercise encouraged participants to consider what those losses might feel like to the person experiencing them. “It was a great way to, especially as a person, not a nurse, just a person, I could get a glimpse of that,” Lisa remembered.
And when Blue Ridge Hospice needed help covering weekends, it was Nikki Hill who called a few weeks later and offered Lisa a job.
Jennifer Martin remembers learning from Nikki Hill, too. Long before she began the Blue Ridge Care career that would span decades, Jenni was a young nurse working on the oncology floor at Winchester Medical Center. That was where she met Nikki Hill.
“While I was a nurse at Winchester Medical Center on the oncology floor, I met this amazing nurse,” Jenni recalled. Nikki had exacting expectations when it came to managing a patient’s pain and symptoms. “If I was 30 seconds late on that pain medication or there was a symptom that was going on in the room, she would be standing out in the hallway, tapping her watch,” Jenni remembered, and Nikki would say: “Jenni, we need to stay ahead of the symptoms. We prevent them. It is about living well.”
Jennifer Martin learned quickly. “And when I grew up, I wanted to be just like Nikki Hill,” Jenni said.
An Example Others Followed
As Blue Ridge Hospice grew, so did its nursing team. Nurses who worked alongside Nikki Hill remember the importance of having someone who could show others how to do work that was still relatively new.
Looking back decades later, members of Blue Ridge Hospice’s early nursing team described Nikki Hill as instrumental in bringing more nurses into the organization and emphasized how important it was for new hospice nurses to have someone who inspired them. One former colleague remembered that Nikki Hill “was really great and really rolled with the punches.”
That ability to teach was not limited to clinical technique.
Nikki Hill taught nurses to understand loss. She taught them to anticipate pain rather than wait for it. She taught them to focus not simply on dying, but on how someone could live during the time that remained.
And that approach was evident in Nikki Hill’s own care.
In a 1988 Winchester Star story, a patient named Ralph Baile was profiled after severe pain from bone cancer had significantly affected daily life. The article described Nikki Hill working with the patient, family and physician to bring the symptoms under control. Nikki Hill visited regularly, stayed in contact every week and made herself available when needed.
The philosophy behind that care was simple. Hospice could not cure the illness, Nikki Hill explained, but it could help a person live through it.
A 1988 Winchester Star story featured Blue Ridge Hospice nurse Nikki Hill and the difference hospice care made for patient Ralph Baile, whose severe pain from bone cancer was brought under control.
“I Learn About Life”
By the time Nikki Hill retired in 2003, the organization looked considerably different from the one she had joined.
Blue Ridge Hospice had grown. More nurses had joined the team, more patients were being served and hospice itself was becoming more established.
But Nikki Hill remained focused on the part of the work that had drawn her there in the first place: the people.
“I love hospice,” Nikki Hill told The Winchester Star at her retirement. “I learn about life as well as dying from my patients.”
A Legacy Passed From Nurse to Nurse
Nikki Hill died on November 8, 2020, at Blue Ridge Hospice’s Inpatient Care Center, surrounded by family. Years earlier, Nikki Hill had helped dedicate the center when it opened.
But Nikki Hill’s influence had already traveled much farther.
Lisa Eiland went from volunteer training to nearly three decades of caring for Blue Ridge Hospice patients and families. Jennifer Martin built a career at Blue Ridge Care that has spanned nursing, management, leadership and community outreach. Jenni has been unequivocal about the person who helped point her toward that life’s work. “Nikki Hill was the number one reason I joined BRC,” Jenni wrote in 2026.
And decades after first watching Nikki Hill care for patients at Winchester Medical Center, Jennifer Martin described Nikki Hill’s influence in even simpler terms:
“When I met Nikki Hill, I knew by observing her that that was where I was supposed to be.” That may be Nikki Hill’s most lasting contribution to Blue Ridge Care. She showed people what this work could be. And then they carried it forward.
A plaque honoring Nikki Hill hangs in Blue Ridge Care’s Inpatient Unit, recognizing the inspiration, compassion and example Nikki left for generations of nurses.
