Customer Reviews

Coming Home: A Guide to Dying at Home with Dignity

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This wonderful book is a practical guide for caregivers and family members helping someone they love who is dying at home. It explains the logistics of bring a dying patient home from the hospital, resources available to home caregivers, how to give pain medications, how to make the patient comfortable (bathing, skin care, bedsores, catheters, etc.), how to deal with depression (both yours and the patient's), dealing with feelings about dying, legal considerations, preparation for death and afterward. Without this book I would have been terrified to take care of my grandmother at home until she died. With it, I was able to share her last six months and become closer to the amazing woman that was my grandmother. Those days are some of the most precious of my life, and I used "Coming Home" everyday. We bought a case of the books and distributed them to others sharing similar experiences.

A practical book offering just the right kind of help when you are grappling with the grief and trauma of having a loved one who is terminally ill. For those who have the courage and situation calling for a dignified, loving death at home, this book is invaluable.

It's been 10 years since reading this book while caring for my mother-in-law.I have recommended it to many friends since then to help them with the care and preparation of death of their loved ones. Deborah Duda is an inspiration and her love and humor at such a difficult time is tremendously uplifting.

Have a number of books on caring for a loved one before and after death, but had never read this book before.

The value of the book for a newcomer, could be in her chapters on how to deal and care for being with someone who is dying and the medical care they need at home, the smells, insomnia, depression, pain, as well as the red tape areas of life be it doctors, hospitals, funeral homes, insurance, etc. Something people need to know of BEFORE they are dealing with someone who has become ill and then is dying.

My husband was an agnostic so didnt believe in the heaven hell someplace else idea as far as I know. He and I did believe that we live on in others by the lessons we have taught in how we have lived as humans. Which is why I have such great respect for my Amish, Mennonite friends and neighbors.

This is for the NEW Revised and Updated Fourth Addition due out the 12th. of October 2010.

And there wasnt enough about how an agnostic or non believer handles death and grief. But her Chapter 16 on Life After Death was geared toward folks who have some non agnostic, non believer ideas.


Her brief section on Green Burial (page 273-274) was all to brief, but I may feel this way simply because green burial is so popular where I live and in areas where friends and family have been buried. It is a fast, less expensive and environmenatlly sound idea that more people need to embrace.

She makes some interesting observations on page 276 in regard to the colour black which is often worn for funerals and why it may not be a good choice. I personally have never understood the whole black idea, and am fortunate to attend services where black was NOT wanted, opting instead for happy colours.

To be honest it was a bit to new age for me in many areas. Like her Chapter 12 on Healing and Energy Work and Guided Meditation. Bear in mind if you are a practicing Christian her Gnostic Gospel ideas may be a major turn off as they are seen by many traditional or non new age mode Christians as heresy.