Description: This enlightening volume provides first-hand perspectives and ethnographic research on communication at the end of life, a topic that has gone largely understudied in communication literature. Author Elissa Foster's own experiences as a volunteer hospice caregiver form the basis of the book. Communicating at the End of Life recounts the stories of Foster and six other volunteers and their communicative experiences with dying patients, using communication theory and research findings to identify insights on the relationships they form throughout the process. What unfolds is a scholarly examination of a subject that is significant to every individual at some point in the life process.
Review Quotes:
"This is an account of Elissa Foster's moving experiences as a hospice volunteer, focusing in particular on communication and drawing on many stories of her experiences of being with dying people. It also reflects a critical engagement with a wide range of existing academic literature derived from sociological, anthropological and other kinds of studies of dying and hospice care. In bringing these two areas of experience and scholarship together, the author has produced a significant and insightful work, likely to be of great value to people involved both in hospice care and in developing academic perspectives on this. I congratulate the author on her achievement."
--Clive Seale
Brunel University
"Communicating at the End of Life views out-patient hospice care through the eyes of a doctoral student doing ethnography by volunteering. The book offers an honest record of what volunteer visits feel like, moment by moment. New hospice volunteers and volunteer-coordinators will find the book of particular interest."
--Arthur W. Frank
University of Calgary
"This book offers extraordinary insight into the emotions and surprising beauty of dying experiences. Foster strikes just the right balance between personal experience and empirical rigor."
--Athena du Pre'
University of West Florida
"Although an abundance of literature concerned with end-of-life concerns has been rapidly growing in the last 10 years, much of the work has been from the viewpoint of the medical profession. Communicating at the End of Life alone deals with volunteers' experiences with palliative care. Its depiction of the hospice volunteer and, on a larger scale, of a volunteer in any social service offers a realistic overview of the limitations, difficulties, and pleasures of volunteer activities. It is also a realistic picture, although a sad one, of the sometimes ineffectual functioning of hospice organizations in general." --Viola Mecke, PsycCRITIQUES