Customer Reviews

Standing the Watch: Memories of a Home Death

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I am always surprised how few people realize the sacredness of death, what an honor and privilege it is to be present at that moment. By participating in the death of a loved one, by attending to their death with the same seriousness of purpose as their birth, we learn how to die. After all, who else teaches us? How else do we learn? I like STANDING THE WATCH because it faces death head on. Rebecca Brown pulls no punches. Since we are all going to die, and know people who will die before us, this is definitely a book to keep within easy reach.

Helping a friend or loved one through their final transition is one of life's most rewarding treasures. As a hospice nurse I consider midwifing death a challenge with a payoff in unmeasurablly rich emotional & spiritual experiences.
Rebecca takes us on her journey thru her deathing gift to "Poppa" and lets us see the healing, the insights & the blessings a Home Death can be. She artfully weaves her history, Popa's story & current bedside happenings. The humor of willful equipment balances frustrations with the medical system and the clergy. The long hours keeping watch & the fearfulness of managing cardiac pain are authentically detailed from her journal.
This story is very timely with so many families taking on the challenge of a Home Death and Rebecca's articulate and folksy writing style make for a very readable and fascinating tale.

STANDING THE WATCH grew out of the logs I had to keep for the State & the home health nurses, emails with my friends who gathered around me, & essays & memories of when I took care of my beloved father-in-law in the last years of his long-lived life.

You know how death can be a conversation-stopper! It came into my adopted family's home in London, England, when I was 15, & my father died after a long illness, at home in his bed. While my mother told me I was too young to participate, I thought much about dying & death. I learnt it was a taboo subject, as if dying was like getting an F in life.

In the early 1990s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, I married a man who had promised his father that he would take care of him for the rest of his life. As we homesteaded in the rainforest, I felt I was being given a second chance at both having a father in my life again, & being gifted with participating in Standing The Watch for a loved-one.

STANDING THE WATCH takes you gently into my world as my elder lies dying. You will read about my fears & joys, anger & affection, as well as precious funny moments. Day by day, memory after memory, you will be at my side during one of the most difficult & thrilling times in the life of a family.

"Soon more people will have matured into eldership than ever before. No matter our ethnic roots, our age will make us a majority. No one gets out of life alive, so how then will we choose to die?"

I have written STANDING THE WATCH as if you have come to tea to listen to the memories of Poppa's enjoyment of living in a cabin he helped build, relish his companion Buddy-dog, & enjoy his golden years until he begins to experience dramatic & painful "heartburn" episodes.

If you are facing the death of your parents, or a loved-one. If you are undecided about taking care of them. If the idea of dying worries you - then reading STANDING THE WATCH will give you some comfort & some idea of what you will face in the future. It will answer many of your questions about death, dying and what a home death is like.

While STANDING THE WATCH is about Poppa's final thirteen days, it is also my tribute to all parents. I hope it brings you tears, laughter & comfort when your time comes to step forward & Stand The Watch for your parents.

During a recent online search, I met Rebecca Brown, who offered me the opportunity to review Standing The Watch. I approached Standing The Watch with great interest, and was immediately drawn to this tiny family, a husband and wife, and his elderly father, sharing a piece of land with a dog who is more like a family member than a pet. This wife is Rebecca Brown, and these are her memories.

As we accompany Lincoln Brown in his journey through the Shadow of Death, his daughter-in-law shares the wisdom gained from the experience of Standing The Watch for her much loved Elder. A vivid sense of humour is evident in the liberally scattered and light-hearted ancedotes. This is surely a tribute to a tradition that is sadly lacking in much of our modern day society.

The author is as honest in her assessment of the professionals in modern society as she is fiercely tender in her regards toward her much loved Poppa, her husband David Brown, and the supportive online friends who stuck with both her and her husband through this troublesome and exhausting time.

I was able to look back upon sitting with my own elder and sharing with her this part of her journey. I was blessed to know that she left with no remorse, or regret.

"By attending death with the same seriousness as birth we learn how to die. We gather around to welcome new life, yet disappear when a loved-one signals it's time to die. This is why you must make space in your schedule for writing Standing The Watch", said one of the women in her support system. What a gift we have received, and what a lesson we can take from the experience of Rebecca Brown and her husband.

Standing The Watch is a compelling endorsement for home death, as well as a lesson in the social, financial and psychological impact of death, providing a list of books that deal with many of life's more difficult issues including grief. A short, but fascinating eulogy pays tribute to the life of this most endearing man who's epitaph reads, HERE LIES A GOOD MAN.

Death is a sacred and holy rite of passage and to be there to share this most important journey of all, is a privilege, not a burden as many in first world societies believe it to be. Perhaps they see it as a burden out of fear because it goes against all that the media throws at us encouraging us to believe in our longevity. And so, we do not prepare ourselves for our own passing, let alone the passing of a loved one. But those who do enter the fray and embrace this most natural and normal part of the cycle of life, are left the richer for having the courage to go through such an experience. Such a person is Rebecca Brown, Standing The Watch over her father -in-law as he prepared for his sacred and holy rite of passage.

Rather than being a heavy tome, Rebecca's writing is fluid and insightful, poetic, lyrical and uplifting in the face of a subject that many shy away from. Throughout she is honest about her thoughts and emotions, still able to maintain a sense of humor and woven in the fabric she has threaded a ribbon of love.

If you have embraced the death of a loved one, Standing The Watch will be a healing and reverberating experience. If you have not had the opportunity to embrace the death of a loved one, then this book is a must read in order to prepare yourself. My mother died three years ago and Rebecca's experience helped heal my wounds, her words reverberating in tune with my own watch which lasted six months. And Poppa is so like my 90 year old father-in-law, who is about to embark on this sacred and holy passage of his own that I feel as though I am reading my own story....... even though we are oceans apart.

Note: as with other reviews I've written about books authored from very personal experiences, this one should be considered unrated, as I don't assign numbers to such accounts.

The author's initial experience with death was of a double absence: she not only lost her father, but was prevented from seeing him or even speaking about her feelings to her family. If this level of silencing is somewhat unusual, bear in mind that the American phobia of death has motivated a clinical-medical bureaucracy designed to make this most final of departures clean and pretty. (In Southern California we even have Forest Lawn, a kind of Disneyland of Death, where the fast food paradigm has been applied to the managing of passed-on loved ones.) What it does instead is hold the dying at a distance while traumatizing those who survive.

Much of this book was written during the author's caretaking of her father-in-law as he lay ill, sometimes comfortable and sometimes in pain. It is not a book to entertain or philosophize, but to reveal what such an experience can be like: the details to tend, the feelings that surface, the constant struggles against laws written to protect people from getting close to death's unpleasantness. For the author, "standing the watch" was a way to deepen her connections with her patient as well as with her husband and family members. It also allowed her to deal with the unfinished pain around her previous inability to properly mourn her father.

Some among the existential philosophers have insisted that we all die alone. That is often true given the legal and medical and psychological isolation of the dying in our death-fearing culture. But what's so often taken as a normal state of the end of an existence need not be. The man tended by a woman who started life as a war orphan and the son who married her died at home in the presence of loving family members who took the time to see him off.

For him this was a great gift, and for them a reminder to seize the time while refusing to let our pioneer cult of individuality keep us from exploring those healthy interdependencies that make life worth valuing enough to end on a note of dignity.

Standing The Watch: Memories Of A Home Death is the personal memoir of Rebecca Brown, a woman who took care of her dying father. A profound testimony and tribute filled with grief, love, and courage, narrating a terrible trial, Rebecca Brown wrote this candid, sensitive, at times inspiring autobiographical treatise in order to help others prepare for the inevitable day when they too must say goodbye to a loved one. Standing The Watch is very highly recommended reading for anyone charged with the responsibility of caring for a terminally ill parent, whether at home or in a residential care facility.

Length:: 3:31 Mins

I have experienced several home births never
questioning the rightness of being present when
someone draws their first breath, yet I have lived in
fear of being present when someone draws their last.
Is this because I think they aren't worth it? No. Is it
because I think dying is best done in a hospital? No.
It's simply because it's unknown to me and therefore,
I'm scared.

Lynn Lott, M.A., M.F.T.

If you're a Baby-Boomer, deciding to care for your aging parents, Standing The Watch: The Greatest Gift offers answers to your questions, lists of useful things to know, and insights into your worries.

After reading Rebecca Brown's wonderful and in many ways, groundbreaking STANDING THE WATCH, I couldn't help wishing I had this book during the time my father was dying from Alzheimer's. What a comfort it would have been to read it and follow Rebecca and David Brown's thirteen-day odyssey as they lovingly care for Lincoln, David's father, during the last days of the elder's life.

There are many remarkable things about this book--one of the most obvious is the extraordinary bond between David and his father, and how the son kept his promise to care for him at home. Rebecca's solid support of her husband's decision and her unwavering devotion to her father-in-law is no less than heroic. Both are compassionate people who loved Lincoln enough to respect his wishes to keep him at home in his beloved cabin in the Seattle peninsula until he drew his last breath at age 89.

STANDING THE WATCH is not only a wise book, and a practical lesson in caring for our elderly, especially in our homes--a topic Americans avoid--but so very well written that the reader is eager to follow Rebecca wherever she takes us.

For those of us who are put into the usually overwhelming position of caring for our ill and elderly parents, STANDING THE WATCH is an invaluable book to read for its wisdom, humor, and most of all, for the guidance Rebecca and David Brown offer.

Standing The Watch is a heartwarming story that will take you through a range of emotions, including tears and laughter. Author Rebecca Brown guides the reader through her father in-law's final days which she and her husband lovingly attend to in every way. The couple brings an attitude of honor and gratitude to a time that most people turn away from. If you are worried about death or taking care of a loved one who is dying, I highly recommend this book.