Dying at home A family guide for caregiving

Sankar's book is more than just a practical how-to for those who are caring for the terminally ill at home. It is also a deeply moving, painfully honest look at the experience of tending a dying loved one. Drawing on her home-care expertise and training as a medical anthropologist, Wayne State University professor Sankar (coauthor of The Home Care Experience ) interviewed 13 caregivers. What's essential, say she and her subjects, is to give patients ``the recognition that they are still among the living.'' The process can provide families with a sense of intimacy and empowerment they might never feel in a hospital setting. Chapters are organized around significant issues discussed by the caregivers: the decision to take the patient home to die, use of professional help in the home, caregiving and social support, and death. All of the caregivers evidently felt that they were not ``special'' because of their efforts. They were beneficiaries, too. ``Home death is a powerfully significant experience. . . . Its power lies in the fact that . . . the caregiver can give the person life, that is, the continuation of life as a social being.'' (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Sankar, a medical anthropologist and co-editor of The Home Care Experience: Ethnography and Policy (Sage Pubns., 1990), has written a book on home death for those already caring for a terminally ill loved one at home or those considering it. The author examines the physical, social, and emotional toll involved and illuminates each topic--discharge to home, formal and informal support, caregiving, signs of death, and after death--with apt and often moving observations made by people who experienced the home death of a child, parent, or spouse or companion. Recommended for health, hospice, gerontology, and larger general collections. See also Harry A. Cole's Helpmates: Support in Times of Chronic Illness, reviewed in this issue, p. 105.--Ed.-- Anne C. Tomlin, Auburn Me morial Hosp . Lib., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.