" a unique opportunity to learn about caregiving from a true veteran and practitioner of the art."-Jon D. Kaiser, M.D., Physician and Author of Healing HIV Coping with illness and dying is a challenge. How do we allocate resources? What are the rights and responsibilities of the sick and those tending them? Can the burdens of caregiving be blessings in disguise? In The Caregiving Zone, Peggy Flynn, founder and director of The Good Death Institute, describes the everyday challenges of caregiving. She encourages us to think about illness and death as incontrovertible realities that can be anticipated and made less burdensome for everyone involved. "Death is hard, but it doesn't have to be hideous." Using personal stories and reflections, Ms. Flynn illuminates life "in the Zone" with understanding and empathy. She suggests that individuals and families "take charge of the inevitable" by confronting their fears and preparing for illness and death before events overtake them. She envisions "a program designed for families or groups of friends who want to be proactive about the inevitable." The Caregiving Zone illustrates how both giving and receiving care can provide opportunities and rewards in addition to burdens. Sometimes, with insight, information and compassion, the benefits can outweigh the costs.

".a unique opportunity to learn about caregiving from a true veteran and practitioner of the art." -Jon D. Kaiser, M.D., Physician and Author of Healing HIV Coping with illness and dying is a challenge. How do we allocate resources? What are the rights and responsibilities of the sick and those tending them? Can the burdens of caregiving be blessings in disguise? In The Caregiving Zone, Peggy Flynn, founder and director of The Good Death Institute, describes the everyday challenges of caregiving. She encourages us to think about illness and death as incontrovertible realities that can be anticipated and made less burdensome for everyone involved. "Death is hard, but it doesn't have to be hideous." Using personal stories and reflections, Ms. Flynn illuminates life "in the Zone" with understanding and empathy. She suggests that individuals and families "take charge of the inevitable" by confronting their fears and preparing for illness and death before events overtake them. She envisions "a program designed for families or groups of friends who want to be proactive about the inevitable." The Caregiving Zone illustrates how both giving and receiving care can provide opportunities and rewards in addition to burdens. Sometimes, with insight, information and compassion, the benefits can outweigh the costs.

The story of one woman’s struggle to care for her seriously ill husband—and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support. Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver. Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: “You’re already toast!” Through it all, she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly. As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast—with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers—is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.

In The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (releasing June 24, 2016 as a Netflix Original Film titled The Fundamentals of Caring, starring Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez), Jonathan Evison, author of the new novel This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! and the New York Times bestseller West of Here, has crafted a novel of the heart, a story of unlikely heroes in a grand American landscape. For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he will learn to take care of people with disabilities. He is instructed about professionalism, about how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider, and about the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability. But when Ben is assigned his first client--a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy--he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world. Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev’s ailing father--a journey rerouted by a series of bizarre roadside attractions that propel them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life. Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life’s terrible surprises as well as what it takes to truly care for another human being.

Rural ministry can be a frustrating endeavor. Traditional metrics of success are misleading and anecdotal, one-size-fits-all approaches which often fall flat in the field. In Recognizing Rural Ministry, Carl Greene uses his research to suggest tools to customize your ministry to your community and effectively engage often-overlooked mission fields. These tools come from data-driven academic research presented through the lens of the author's lived experience as a dairy farmer, rural pastor, hospice chaplain, rural layperson, rural policy advocate, and administrator of a network of churches. The book is intended for rural ministry practitioners who want to use current scholarship to better examine the complexity and diversity of rural contexts. The book engages with the rural ministry impact of cultural phenomena such as the rise of the "Spiritual but Not Religious" (SBNR) phenomenon and "early old age" (EOA) demographics. The text also addresses key theories surrounding rural subcultures, demographic tools available to describe rural communities, and the shaping influence of rural community rituals on religiosity. Intended for pastors, seminarians, college students, and rural laypersons who are passionate about adding to their toolbox of rural ministry assessment.