One of the lovely experiences of having a novel published is having people share their impressions, and then take the time to tell me their own stories. Both are gratifying because at many times during the writing of the manuscript I would stop and say “Why am I doing this? Does the world really need one more book?” What kept me motivated were my goals. They were:
- to start conversations within families, and among friends and neighbors about how we manage end-of-life care
- to influence positive changes in the provision of palliative care (more skilled practitioners, more home support, more residential hospice care)
- to have Autumn’s Grace appear as a recommendation on the reading lists of students in health care programs.
So…it was heartening to receive a letter that had been written to my sister by a young woman beginning her third year of nursing school. I am sharing it below with her permission:
Dear Barb,
I just finished reading your sister’s novel, Autumn’s Grace. I very much enjoyed reading it and found it an interesting piece of literature, especially as a nursing student. In my nursing curriculum at [name of a Canadian University] the topic of palliative care is quite neglected, I think we had one lecture on palliative care last year (2nd year). It seemed to be a difficult topic to teach as our professor did not have any experience with palliative work and we do not have any clinical practice in that field of nursing.
I thought Autumn’s Grace did an excellent job at describing the struggles with palliative care (from both the family’s perspective and health care perspective) and really opened my eyes to an area of nursing I had never thought about. I learned many important lessons that I hope to adopt into my own nursing practice, such as maintaining quality of life till the very end, caring for not only the patient but the family as well and that the healthcare system needs to be constantly changing and improving and not to simply accept the minimum standard healthcare practices. Also that first impressions and how I dress/look is very important too!
I just wanted to let you know how glad I am that I read the novel and I think it will improve/change my own nursing practice, not only when I graduate but at clinical too. Food for thought!
I was wondering where I could get 4-5 copies of the book? Online? Or at Chapters or Indigo? I want to purchase some copies so I can circulate them within my nursing class. I think my classmates will benefit from reading the novel and that they will be interested in the topic too!
If you wouldn’t mind passing this email along to Bonnie please? I would like her to know how much I enjoyed and benefited from her novel!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
I am delighted that Elizabeth registered the need to be addressing palliative care as a family care-giving experience. When my father was diagnosed, we were fortunate to have a healthy mother and six like-minded siblings to share the emotional and care-giving burden. That was not the case with my husband’s parents. He is an only child and the care-giving was managed between the two of us. It was strenuous in the extreme to add this care-giving component into a family life that had us both fully committed on other fronts. Having said that, we would commit to it again in a heart-beat. There were positive outcomes for our sons; there were tender expressions of love; there were stories to be told. And these things happened during a period where we struggled to find the support that we needed, to provide the support my husband’s parents needed. But what if we had not had the personal resources to hire in help? What if there had been another sibling who had conflicting views of how to manage? What if my in-laws’ family doctor had not been on-side?
The Campbell Family and their experience is, I am learning through discussions with readers, more typical than even I had imagined. As a society we spend time preparing for child-birth and learning how to care for babies and toddlers, yet we spend almost no time learning how to manage the end-of-life. It is unfortunate. By focusing on only one end of the life journey, we risk limiting our own personal development.
I look forward to hearing how your conversations are developing!
Bonnie Lendrum 