A Healing Touch: True Stories of Life, Death, and Hospice - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892727519 ISBN 13: 9780892727513

Publisher: Down East Books, 2008

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Russo and five other Maine authors here prove that the close of life need not be filled with darkness, when hospice help is at hand. These writers recount intensely personal and profoundly moving end-of-life accounts that cover a wide spectrum of human experience. All six authors are donating their royalties to a Maine hospice; Down East will also donate 10 percent of proceeds to the same cause.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Russo is the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, and Straight Man. He lives off the coast of Maine with his wife and two daughters.

From Booklist:

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Russo (Empire Falls, 2001) edits and, with five others, contributes to this tiny collection of stories of people who have benefited from grief intervention via hospice. While the focus is parochial—all contributors are Mainers who worked with the Waterville, Maine, hospice—the message is universal: hospice counseling is not, as many believe, limited to preparation for death but may help those who have already lost a loved one. In fact, the majority of these accounts are about families who have experienced a child’s sudden, unexpected death: the mother of marine Major Jay T. Aubin, the first American casualty in Operation Iraqi Freedom; the parents of a teenage suicide victim; those of a son killed in a car crash; and a father who lost his infant son. Members of several of these families now voluntarily give their time and expertise to the Waterville hospice. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, the stories become all the more poignant as each author personalizes them with references to his or her own experience of loss. --Donna Chavez

About this edition

• Publisher: Down East Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0892727519
• ISBN 13: 9780892727513
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Russo Richard