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A Review of “Death—The beginning of a relationship”

Dr. Christine Davis has written the book she wished for to help her understand her own experience of her father’s death 15 year ago. Using a narrative storytelling style, she has written a very readable and deceptively simple book about the end-of-life experience, relationships, and communicating with and about a person dying with the support of hospice. The book is based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews with a team of hospice providers, patients, and their families. She utilized grounded theory to analyze the extensive transcripts of their hospice team meetings, interviews, and observation of interactions with team members, dying patients, and their families. The analysis of her research is interwoven with narratives about the death of her own father under hospice care. She also integrates background from an extensive review of the available research literature, which is interspersed throughout the book rather than presented as a review of the literature, again in a very readable style. The rigorous methodology and unique writing style are noteworthy. Dr. Davis did 8 months of ethnographic research with a team of hospice providers and their patients and families. She “conducted 15 interviews, sat in on 23 interdisciplinary team meetings, and observed 18 interactions” (p. 13). As she explains in the marketing materials about the book found on the back cover, “This book takes a social constructionist approach to examine communication with and about people with terminal illness and, in so doing, illustrates and explains health communication theories in an understandable, concrete manner.” It is a layered book presenting stories of undertaking and analyzing the research, along with stories of her experience of her own father’s death. Ethnography and autoethnography are interwoven based on analysis using grounded theory. Each chapter title is a single noun about a step in the process of relating to and experiencing dying such as escalation, edification, limitation, separation, and adoration and each chapter begins with a brief poem. Her stories about her father’s dying and her experience of his death are interwoven and presented in italics. This book is an important addition to the literature about communication and relationships with and about the dying. It is clearly relevant to