Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers

Whether you're coping with a loved one who has received a terminal diagnosis, has a long-term illness or disability, or suffers with dementia, caregiving is challenging and crucial. Those who face this responsibility, whether occasionally or 24/7, are brushing up against life's sharpest point. In this book, Stan Goldberg offers an honest, caring, and comprehensive guide to those on this journey. Everyone wants to "do the right thing," and this book provides the often-elusive how-to; from bedside etiquette to advice on initiating difficult conversations, caring for oneself while caring for another, navigating rapid changes in your loved one's condition, and even offering "permission" for them to die. Goldberg's stories demonstrate how to address the most difficult topics and will facilitate more open and useful communication and caregiving.

About the Author :
Stan Goldberg, PhD, was named Hospice Volunteer Association's Volunteer of the Year in 2009. His book Lessons for the Living won the London Book Festival's Grand Prize for Best New International Book of 2009 and was featured in Best Buddhist Writing of 2010. A hospice bedside and vigil (period of active dying) volunteer for many years, he has served more than four hundred patients and their loved ones at four different hospices, and was both a trainer and consultant at each. As a professor of communicative disorders at San Francisco State University and a private therapist, he counseled clients and did research on how to understand and communicate difficult emotions. For thirty years he taught more than three thousand graduate students in speech-language pathology to implement techniques that were based on his original research. He was a bedside volunteer at the internationally known Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco for two years until its Guest House closed. Subsequently, he had similar responsibilities with Hospice By The Bay, the second oldest home hospice agency in the country, and the George Mark Children's House, the first free-standing hospice for children in the United States. He currently serves as a bedside volunteer at Pathways Home Healthcare and Hospice in the Sun in the San Francisco Bay Area and is involved in their volunteer training and philanthropy programs. He was a special guest of the South Korean Government's National Cancer Center at the opening of its Proton Beam Therapy Center. He lives in San Francisco, CA. His website is stangoldbergwriter.com.

Review :
"Gentle and supportive, Stan Goldberg's essential book should stay on your nightstand throughout the long process from diagnosis to death. You will turn to it again and again for practical, crucial guidance that you will use immediately, and often."