A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

On Living is the second book by Kerry Egan, who is a hospice chaplain and graduate of Harvard Divinity School.  She lives in South Carolina.  This is a very readable, 'unputdownable' book.  For me the first two chapters were slow.  Once the third chapter started, which was the first chapter in which Egan shares one of the stories a former patient told her, I was hooked. On Living is a series of meditations on various themes in the life humanity lives as seen through the lens of counselling and supporting patients who are terminally ill and their families.  Egan often does not meet these people until they know they are in their final months or weeks and have begun hospice care.  Usually the meditation is predicated on the story or stories shared by specific patients.  These stories serve as a gateway to further meditation on a broader theme, such as salvation and change; identity; that there is kindness in the gray areas of life. This is also a ...

Changing The Way We Die: Compassionate End-Of-Life Care And The Hospice Movement was written by journalists, Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel.  The two women also write a blog of the same title for the magazine Psychology Today .  After vastly different experiences in the end of life care received by each author's respective father, they decided to explore hospice as a movement and a service.  The book itself is divided into several sections that explore different aspects of the movement. The first section explores the history of hospice both as a movement and a service provided for the dying and their families and caregivers.  This section recounts how the movement took hold in mid-twentieth century America as well as the differences between hospice in America and hospice in England where the first hospice in that country provided the spring board for its sister movement in the U.S.  It also addresses the challenges and struggles of the early movement to gain...