Honest Endings

Meet Robbie, a forty-two-year-old with heart disease; Esther, a woman in her late fifties with metastatic breast cancer; and Matt and Janet, a very loving couple facing his extremely painful illness bravely together. All have one thing in common: they are dying. All the patients you will meet here are the dying patients of a caring, attentive hospice social worker, Katherine Cullen. This memoir is full of heartwarming stories of patients and their families. It is the story of one social worker navigating the ways of hospice work without much training or support. Learn about the hospice team and the stresses and pressures they face daily as patients come and go at an alarming rate. Watch a social worker’s journey of life through death, maturing from a fear of dying to a sense of ease and comfort with the dying process. She faces her anxieties with courage, never shortchanging those who depend on her for strength, support, and emotional comfort. Katherine also shares about her conflict when her own parents health began to fail, and the irony involved in working at a hospice agency while her parents needed hospice care. This book is a simple, direct telling of a professional social worker’s experience in a nonprofit hospice agency. It is a helpful read for professionals and the public alike, given its honest report of daily life in the field of hospice.