"What's the point of giving someone a beautiful death if you can't give yourself a beautiful life? From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering...

"Edith and Ashley have been best friends for over forty-two years. They've shared the mundane and the momentous together: trick or treating and binge drinking; Gilligan's Island reruns and REM concerts; hickeys and heartbreak; surprise Scottish wakes; marriages, infertility, and children. As Ash says, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.' But now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and spending her last days...

A dedicated nurse, Stella finds comfort at the hospice where she works the late shift, especially since her husband returned from Afghanistan cold, distant, and shattered by painful memories he refuses to share. The hospice at night is another world, where the dying receive closure by creating the letters that Stella helps them write. The pages are filled with love and humor, sometimes regret, and, occasionally, even instructions for a perplexed husband...

"Straightforward and empathetic . . . Bell details what to expect in both physical and spiritual terms . . . as well as ways to find closure and cope with loss" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). As death approaches, both patient and family must cope with grief, pain, and seemingly unanswerable questions. A hospice nurse for more than a decade, Karen Whitley Bell has seen and learned much about these challenges and concerns. In Living at the...

At the age of twenty-one, Dorothy Woodrum decided to follow her mother's footsteps and become a nurse. She graduated from Connecticut's Hartford Hospital Nursing School in 1961, the same place where her mother had received her training. At the monumental moment, when her mother put Dorothy's nurse's cap on her for the time, Dorothy experience one of the proudest parts of her life. Presented in Dorothy's own words, In My Mother's Footsteps tells an...

"In this graphic novel, the author documents his reconciliation with his father, dying of emphysema, as he cares for him in hospice"--Provided by publisher.

Deborah Birch is a seasoned hospice nurse whose daily work requires courage and compassion. But her skills and experience are tested in new and dramatic ways when her easygoing husband, Michael, returns from his third deployment to Iraq haunted by nightmares, anxiety, and rage. She is determined to help him heal, and to restore the tender, loving marriage they once had. At the same time, Deborah's primary patient is Barclay Reed, a retired history...

As a part-time hospice volunteer, Eric Lindner provides "companion care" to dying strangers. They're chatterboxes and recluses, religious and irreligious, battered by cancer, congestive heart failure, Alzheimer's, old age. Some cling to life amazingly. Most pass as they expected. In telling his story, Lindner reveals the thoughts, fears, and lessons of those living the ends of their lives in the care of others, having exhausted their medical options...

"Lessons for the Living reveals a unique subculture of Hospice volunteers as they reflect on their experiences and philosophies of life and death"--Container.