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, which catch the evanescence of life in an image, both beautiful and stark, or the glorious courage of the warriors of the Great Plains, summing up their lives up in a final burst of ecstatic joy, here in language almost artless, in the simplicity of lives much like our own, a dignity rises, one common hero after another.
Woven into these stories are instructions on how to die well—or at least, as well as we can—not only in what spirit we face death itself, but also through instructions on what is necessary to prepare our families, to ready our estates, and to manage all the players who may be involved in our deaths. Finally, these stories also teach others who hold the same responsibilities that Evelyn herself had, be they social services, medical staff, caregivers or families—how to offer the dying as much grace as she did.
I’ve only met Evelyn Amdur through the pages of this book. She seems like a character from the old days, when people connected personally, with genuine care and love. She knew, intuitively, what others needed to hear, understanding their moral dilemmas. A multi-talented and gifted being, perhaps what stands out most for me was her genius at common sense. Particularly at the end of our lives, she’s what we wish for and rarely receive. This is a book for social workers, to be sure, but beyond that, for all of us. Most of all, it is a message from a remarkable woman on how to face our final days, and also how to care for those who walk that road before us. – Ondrea Levine, Author The Life I Took Birth For
Statement from Ellis Amdur
My mother began writing this book in the 1990’s, then including my sister in the project. The writing went slowly went slowly, and upon my mother’s death in 2004, it went into limbo. I picked it up in 2019, and finished it, in collaboration with my sister. My mother and sister left the world something quite special, similar in its way to the work of Oliver Sacks. Each chapter is a story of someone—a single person or a family—facing the end of life. Each describes a different dilemma, something that must be faced or completed in order that this person can die—and their family live on—with as much peace and grace as is possible. After each story is a commentary, ostensibly directed towards hospice social workers on what the story teaches and how best to care for an individual in the situation described. The truth is, the commentary is for anyone and everyone—they are not clinical notes, they are messages on how to bring the most loving and powerful humanity to each individual facing the end of their life. For myself, the writing was a wonderful experience as, in writing in my mother’s voice, I grew, once again, ever closer to her.
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