A Christian’s Perspective On Hospice Care

The cousin of our author is a strong Christian who happens to be a nurse.  She has made many visits to remote villages on missionary trips.   Her domestic specialty became hospice care.  She was well qualified to do a number of things which nurses do.  True to form, she chose to focus on caring for seniors who had little time left. What she discovered was that, as challenging her missionary work was to her, it was not as challenging as providing hospice care.

Leigh knew that somehow she had to make people understand hospice care providers.  More importantly, she found it critical to encourage people to “come to grips” with what hospice care really means.  She published a book called “A Journey of One: Hospice: Healing and Teaching by Storytelling.”

This book describes the basic scenarios that a person is likely to find themselves in at the end of their own life or at the end of a loved one’s life. Leigh has interwoven the top terminal illnesses (cancer, heart disease, COPD, dementia) with various social situations (large or limited family support, elderly spouse only, young caregivers, addiction issues) into easy to read stories. There is even a chapter on how a holistic approach might be used.

At some point all (or almost all) of us will face a decision about hospice care in our own lives or the life of someone we care about.  This book will almost certainly help in facing those circumstances.  Each chapter contains discussion questions, making it a good book study for self-help or grief support. Throughout the book Leigh has gently woven in the reassuring Christian message that we have a place to go, and the journey there does not have to be a difficult one. This book takes a distressing topic and makes it easy to start the conversations that we all must have at some point in our lives. In her own loving, caring style, Leigh honestly relates her experiences dealing with a few of the situations in which she found herself.

We have never recommended a book by someone else before.  We are not in any way being compensated from this promotion or from any sales.  This book is not a study in the Bible, although we know the author to be a woman of great faith.   With those disclaimers in mind, we highly recommend this book.  It can be read in a day, and you are unlikely to be able to put it down.

The book is by Leigh Cromwell, MS, BSN, RN.  It is called ““A Journey of One: Hospice: Healing and Teaching by Storytelling” and it is available from Amazon here: