What matters most when someone close to you has been diagnosed as terminal? Time and quality of life for both of you. Coping with both the practical and emotional questions of this challenging passage. We area ll going to die one day, yet every death is individual -- as is the walk toward that individual death both for the one leaving and for the ones they leave behind. Focusing on what truly matters between human beings while taking care of the business of living at the end of life is what this book is about.This book offers:•Practical tips for coping with the physical changes that will impact both the person and the caregiver emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually. •Advice on what to put in place before the person dies to make things a little easier for those they leave behind. •The stories and examples of others to let people know they are not alone•Advice and tips for those who are not going to be primary caregiver, but whole are friends, neighbors, colleagues or any other part of the relationships we all share in lifeThere is no perfect way to walk through this time in life. (There’s no perfect way to walk through all of life for that matter). But there are good ways to do it. Focusing on what matters while taking care of the practical business of living and dying can make this walk slightly less scary and more rewarding for everyone. How to use this book:Browse the chapter headings; skip around in the TIPS for ways to approach or solve specific problems. Search the Sources lists at the end of the chapters for additional information on a question or need. Read the stories of others’ experiences. For the co-worker, the friend and the neighbor, this book offers advice and helpful hints on what to say or do as well as what not to say or do. For the loved one, spouse, and relative it’s a practical guide to what you might expect at each stage and offers realistic and reasonable coping strategies. It includes examples born of the experience of a range of people -- professionals in the field as well as no-professionals like yourself -- of what you might experience on this difficult journey.Yet, as we’ve said, each death is individual just as are the relationships, personalities and personal dynamics involved in each death. Despite the individuality of experience, there are also issues and threads that are universal in human life. This book can act as a practical guide, an encouraging friend, and support, and offers hope for the best possible experience as you help to walk someone home. Across America, 43.5 million people, (nearly one in five adults) care for a loved one 50 or older according to AARP.The Writers:Sue Collins has been a nurse for 38 years and a hospice nurse for 28 years. She has the extensive experience of the professional caregiver and has seen virtually everything at the end of life. As much as anything this book arises out of the OMG!I-can’t-believe-they-said-that/did-that moments as well as the anger, frustration, grace and poignancy she has witnessed during the last days of patients for whom she has cared.Nancy Taylor Robson, author of three other books, lost her father to bone cancer, which took approximately three years from diagnosis to departure, and her mother-in-law to a long decline and a series of strokes. She has sat by deathbeds and seen more than one friend through the last months, weeks, days and hours of life and knows that as painful a journey as this is, there can be gifts and blessings along the way. She knows, (at least intellectually), that none of us is getting out of here alive.
Sue Collins, who has been a nurse for 40 years and a hospice nurse for28 years, has the extensive experience of the professional caregiver.
"I've been askedmany times over the years, "How can you do hospice work? You must bean angel!" The statement makes me feel uncomfortable, because honestly, I get a lot of secondary gains from the work.
"You have a lot of critical influence with caregivers," she says. "You watch them growand have a better understanding of life and death and of themselves. You see the dying also getting in touch with themselves and creatingclosure situations that are meaningful. It is very rewarding to watchthis unfold and know you were a catalyst. But all the hard work belongsto the families and the dying."
A rower, party-giver and besotted grandmother of two, Sue iscurrently working on her next book,
I've Never Died Before with Head toWind Publishing. Look for excerpts in the future on this website.
Nancy Taylor Robson, one of the first women in the country to earn a US Coast Guard license to run coastal tugboats, grew up sailing and building boats with her father on the Chesapeake Bay. After earning a degree in history, she married a tugboat captain and spent six years working on coastal tugs until the birth of her first child. Woman in The Wheelhouse (reissued in paperback by Head to Wind Publishing in 2013) is the story of those six romantic, adventure-filled, sometimes harrowing years. She is the author of two novels: the award-winning coming of age story, Course of the Waterman (River City Publishing, 2004) and A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story (Head to Wind Publishing 2012). Her essays, features, travel, garden writing and maritime reporting and analysis have appeared in regional, national and international magazines and newspapers. She is an organic Master Gardener, food writer, cook and avid eater, wife and the mother of two grown children.
