Evelyn AmdurEvelyn Amdur, MSW, LSW, was motivated to go into social work as a second career after her husband and both parents died in the early 1970s. After earning her master's degree in social work at the University of Pittsburgh in 1982, she worked at Mercy ospital, Pittsburgh, providing counseling and discharge planning for patients in the Intensive Care and the Burn Units. Mrs. Amdur worked for the Visiting Nurse Association of Allegheny County in a hospice-type program for ten years. She counseled individuals with life-threatening and/or terminal diseases, helped their family members cope with the stress of the illness and helped them obtain needed social services. After ten years of service she left to build a private counseling practice and to write the vignettes of her clients that now comprise Final Chapters. She was invited to return to hospice work in 1996, at which time she continued to work through the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hospice as a social worker/counselor, until one month before her death in 2004, at the age of eighty-two. Evelyn regarded her co-authorship with her daughter Shelley as one of the most rewarding challenges she had attempted as a mother. Read More Read Less