Love Death Love

by Ellen Long Stilwell

Overview

This book is for readers who are dealing with grief and pain while facing an end of life experience. An easy-to-read book like this is likely all he or she would want to read at such a time.

This is a collection of stories that showcase the experience of a loved one's death and how to best process the emotions felt during that time of grief. The goal is for the reader to begin accepting the journey of death with love. In these pages I express my own experiences and I hope that you can recognize yourself, that you can relate to something that lightens the pain of death and/or allows your loved one to pass over, and that you can cherish your time together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982243302
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	124
Sales rank:	683,045
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.26(d)

About the Author

ELLEN LONG STILWELL is a registered nurse certified in hospice and palliative care. While raising her two boys, she volunteered as part of the hospice team with Metropolitan Jewish Health System. She worked several years for Visiting Nurse Service of New York, where she cared for hospice patients and families in their homes. She also worked with Calvary as a Liaison at Weill Cornell, transitioning patients and families from the acute care setting into hospice care. Ellen is working with patients and families at home, the heart of hospice. She is also trained as a death doula by a Buddhist Monk. Ellen is on the faculty at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, teaching Caring for the Patient Nearing End of Life.

Editorial Reviews

2021-03-24
A debut volume of true stories explores the myriad facets of loss and grief.

Stilwell asserts at the beginning of her slim book that she’s extremely experienced when it comes to final care and death. She was taught by a Buddhist monk/hospice chaplain to be a death doula,a kind of trained companion for somebody who’s going through a momentous health change. The author was raised Irish Catholic, became a registered nurse, and is now a certified hospice palliative nurse, skilled at helping patients and their loved ones through the ends of their journeys. She makes clear that she’s also well acquainted with death in her personal life, and her book is intended to distill all that suffering—as well as the happiness and serenity—into a series of stories and insights that might help readers going through similar things. Stilwell fills the volume with her own experiences: the losses of loved ones and relatives, the various jobs she’s had, and so on. This autobiographical strand continues through her reflections on various patients she’s known, individuals whose backgrounds stretched across many religions and cultures, from a spry, older Jewish woman to a Muslim refugee from Yemen. A wealthy, cantankerous woman named Gertie was brought gradually over the course of months to a peaceful acceptance of her own impending death, and Stilwell writes how she felt herself transformed by that recognition. These and other stories are told with an affecting simplicity that neither cloys nor preaches. The hard realities of the hospice experience are present on every page, but so, too, are the author’s compassion and faith in the value of simple connections. These tales are touchingly filled with little details: whispering with a sick individual in the mornings; sitting with patients while they remember their intricate lives; hearing people’s final attempts to make sense of their complicated family relationships. Readers who have been through the palliative care experience will be quite moved.

A poignant collection of subtle and emotional tales of the dying.

Kirkus Reviews