How to Say Goodbye
by Wendy MacNaughton
Excerpt:
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to be an artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice project, a six-bed residential facility situated in a light-filled house in San Francisco that, for thirty years until its closing in 2018, provided care for people at the end of their lives. I was in the house twice a week for nearly a year. During my time there, I witnessed nurses, aides, and volunteers care for the dying. More than just administering palliative aid and medication, the hospice caregivers created an atmosphere of compassion and helped the dying (and the people who love them) find peace in those final weeks, days, and hours of their life.
While there, I asked caregivers about their work: what it means to serve people at the end of their life. Why they do it. What they’ve learned through their experiences. I sat with the residents as they reflected on their lives and shared their feelings about death. And I wrote everything down. Meanwhile, I drew what I saw around the house and in the rooms of the people who were dying.
These drawings from inside the house, the words of the caregivers, and the pencil drawings I made of my own aunt Tildie drawn while she was dying under hospice care became this little book.
Author Bio:
Wendy MacNaughton is a New York Times best-selling artist and graphic journalist with a degree in social work who combines these practices to tell the stories of people who are often overlooked. She has illustrated or authored 11 books, including Salt Fat Acid Heat, The Gutsy Girl, and Meanwhile in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words. Her visual storytelling series Meanwhile was The New York Times’ first weekly drawn journalism column. The creator of DrawTogether and cofounder of Women Who Draw, she lives in the Bay Area.
Excerpted with permission from “How to Say Goodbye” Text and Images © 2023 Wendy MacNaughton. © 2023 Bloomsbury USA