Final Chapters: A Hospice Social Worker's Stories of Courage, Heart and Power

A Dignity Rises, One Common Hero After Another

Evelyn Amdur, a hospice social worker, began to write these stories midway through her career, collaborating with her daughter, Shelley, a respected teacher of meditation in the Chicago area. Many traditional cultures have a custom of ‘death songs,’ which rest on the idea that at one’s last moment, one somehow sums up the essence of one’s life in a phrase or a song. These are truly American death songs. Unlike the austere poetry of the Japanese...