Part memoir, part practical guide, and part love letter to the patients and families he has had the privilege of serving, Walking You Home offers an honest, compassionate look at one of life’s most universal—and least understood—experiences: dying.
Drawing on his years as a hospice nurse, Richard Width takes readers beyond the fear and mystery surrounding end-of-life care and explains what families may see, feel, and face as someone they love begins to decline. With humor, candor, memorable patient stories, and plainspoken explanations, he helps make the unfamiliar a little less frightening.
Walking You Home explores not only what happens to the body as life draws to a close, but also what happens to the people gathered around the bedside: the questions, the difficult decisions, the guilt, the hope, the exhaustion, the laughter, the grief, and the profound moments of connection that can emerge when time becomes precious.
Width writes from both sides of the hospice journey—as a nurse who has guided families through death and as a man who once found himself completely unprepared to care for someone he loved.
He cannot make dying easy.
But he can help make it less bewildering.
And perhaps, by replacing some of our fear with understanding and curiosity, to help us become more fully present for the people we love as we walk them home.
