Crossing Over Narratives of Palliative Care [Paperback]

Crossing Overprovides a unique view of patients, families, and their caregivers striving together to maintain comfort and hope in the face of incurable illness. The narratives weave together emotions, physical symptoms, spiritual concerns, and the stresses of family life, as well as the professional and personal challenges of providing hospice and palliative care. Based on a vast amount of participant-observation and in-depth interviews, Crossing Over moves far beyond dry technical manuals for symptom control, and tired clich?s about death with dignity, to depict the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the daily in patients homes and the palliative care unit. It captures the breathtaking diversity of people's aspirations and ideals as they face death, and the views of the professionals who care for them. Anger and fear, tenderness and reconciliation, jealousy and love, social support and falling through the cracks, unexpected courage and unshakable faith-- all of these are part of facing death in late twentieth-century North America, and this book brings them to life in an extraordinary portrait of the processes of giving and receiving palliative care.

1. Introduction
Part I: NARRATIVES
2. Raymond Hynes: When the Storm of a Lifetime Really Hits in Mid-Dance
3. Albert Hoffer: Bonds Through Thick and Thin
4. Klara Bergman: Burdens from the Past
5. Frances Legendre: The Price of a Death Bed of One's Own
6. Shamira Cook: Who am I?
7. Rose Picard: I'm Allowed to be Happy Even Though I'm Dying
8. Victor Sloski: I Want to Die at Home
9. Leonard Patterson: Jagged Edges
10. Miriam Lambert: Total Pain and the Despair of an Unlived Life
11. Sadie Fineman: A Question of Denial
12. Stanley Gray: Like Lazarus, He Came Back From the Dead
13. Martin Roy: Trying to Live and Die Well
14. Richard Johnson: Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night
15. Jenny Doyle: Do I Really Belong In A Hospice Program Yet?