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A Review of: “Foster, E. (2007). Communicating at the End of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane.”

Communicating at the End of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane bravely and boldly explores the world of hospice care from the perspective of the hospice volunteer. At first glance it seems that this is going to be a melancholy read, or at the very least an emotionally difficult text. Perhaps one’s initial reaction to this text is the result of our Western cultural predisposition to perceive talk about death and dying as depressing—the darker side of health communication. This text flips our notion of what it means to be a hospice volunteer on its head, as it turns out that being a hospice volunteer is not about death and dying talk, it’s about learning to just be with someone and live in the present moment. As the stories in this book reveal, hospice volunteers engage in seemingly mundane tasks that are meaningful for both the volunteer and the patient, and often those tasks have little to do with death and dying. Foster makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of interpersonal communication in end-of-life care. Utilizing narrative and ethnographic methods to show the multiple dimensions of the hospice volunteer–patient relationship, Foster offers a detailed account of her own volunteer experiences, from the time she signed up to volunteer through the death of her first patient, as well as six other volunteers’ experiences during their first year. Readers will feel as though they are embarking on the journey with Foster and the other volunteers as the text is organized chronologically, beginning with Foster’s initial interactions with hospice care, and ending with her reflections on hospice volunteer work. Throughout, she engages in insightful reflection about interpersonal communication at the end of life. Chapters 1–2 describe Foster’s initial experience with hospice care. Chapter 1 orients the reader to the hospice philosophy through a detailed narrative of Foster’s first interactions with her hospice volunteer coordinator Norma. In this chapter, Foster reveals her personal and professional reasons for studying dying and hospice care and how the difficult loss of her grandmother informs her understanding. In Chapter 2, Foster recounts her training experiences as well as her discovery that hospice is a philosophy, an organization, and a place where individuals can receive end-of-life care. In the next section of the book (Chapters 3–5), we learn about the range of everyday activities and talk in which hospice volunteers engage. In Chapter 3, we are introduced to Dorothy, Foster’s first patient. Here Foster explains how her first volunteer experience did not match the ‘‘prototypical’’ hospice volunteer experience she had read about in the hospice training materials. Foster then describes how she approached Norma with doubt and anxiety about this nontypical experience and Journal of Health Communication, 13:518–520, 2008 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1081-0730 print/1087-0415 online DOI: 10.1080/10810730802208513