A Healing Touch: True Stories of Life, Death, and Hospice
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Russo (Empire Falls, 2001) edits and, with five others, contributes to this tiny collection of stories of people who have benefited from grief intervention via hospice. While the focus is parochial—all contributors are Mainers who worked with the Waterville, Maine, hospice—the message is universal: hospice counseling is not, as many believe, limited to preparation for death but may help those who have already lost a loved one. In fact, the majority of these accounts are about families who have experienced a child’s sudden, unexpected death: the mother of marine Major Jay T. Aubin, the first American casualty in Operation Iraqi Freedom; the parents of a teenage suicide victim; those of a son killed in a car crash; and a father who lost his infant son. Members of several of these families now voluntarily give their time and expertise to the Waterville hospice. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, the stories become all the more poignant as each author personalizes them with references to his or her own experience of loss. --Donna Chavez