title: A Gentle Death: Personal Caregiving to the Terminally Ill
author:  Elizabeth S. Callari 
description: It is a commonplace by now that as a society we fall to provide adequate comfort and care to the dying. Whether as an expression of our fear or a result of real indifference, we shrink from the dying as if nothing momentous were happening to them, as if they were beings without interests or feelings. Author Callari, R.N., former Director of Nursing Service for the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Hospice and Founder and Executive Director of the Center For Awakening, provides an excellent and sensitively written guide for those who give care to the terminally ill. Callarl alerts us to the need to help open communication between the patient and caregiver in order to eliminate the loneliness and sense of abandonment that the patient often feels. Her primary concern is for the patient's physical and emotional well-being. The book contains anecdotes about the deaths of some of her patients as they finished their final business in life (some even making arrangements for their own funerals) and then peacefully letting go of living. Finally, she discusses the grief process in the survivors, suggesting that the bereaved can begin to detach and get on with their lives when they honestly acknowledge the wide range of feelings they had toward the dead person.While the book is nicely written and thoughtful, the author's calm acceptance of death comes from her own view that death is a transitional stage to another life. Unfortunatley, the more skeptical among us will not experience the same comfort. Recommended for general readers and health care providers. -- <i>From <a href="/exec/obidos/subst/partners/marketing/independent-pub.html/${0}">Independent Publisher</a></i>
zlib_text: # Seven
  
  
  Lady Blanche Pomfret had become decidedly tired of her uncongenial guest. She
  was a woman who derived her principal pleasure from management; when her only
  sister was killed, and the sister’s husband injured, it had been some
  consolation to be able to busy herself in selecting a housekeeper to look
  after Luke Paget’s orphaned family, procuring the best surgeons and nursing
  attendants to care for the injured man, and arranging for his convalescence to
  be passed under the roof of the Bishop’s Palace. But Blanche’s generosity and
  good nature had definite limits, once the first period of activity,
  negotiation, and arrangement was gone by; and it quite frequently occurred
  that these limits had been reached before the necessity for her help was
  finished—as in the present case.
  
  
  “It is a great trial that Luke must remain with us until the end of the
  month,” Lady Blanche told the Bishop. “I have had quite enough of his gloomy
  face and surly ways, I can tell you! No wonder poor dear 