Thank you NetGalley and Dundurn Press for accepting my request to read and review Home Safe: A Memoir of End-of-Life Care During Covid-19.

Published: 11/29/22

Respectfully, this is a 3.5 star read. I like that it was not complicated with medical terms and tests. The author's father becomes noticeably thin and is diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the time when Covid restrictions were high. The dynamics of ER visits, home health, inpatient visitors, and picking up groceries and medications all come into play.

I found this to be refreshing in that they didn't fight as a family. They worked together. I wonder if Covid brought the best out of them as individuals. The book is straightforward, not overly written.

Thank you to the author, Dundurn Press and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This beautifully written memoir tells the story of a father, son and family coping with a devastating diagnosis, and the decisions that had to made as a result. This all happens during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, which of course upends conventional planning for therapy and care. Yes, it's sad - but it's also funny, personal, emotional and shows the power of love and resilience. Highly recommend!

This memoir was a bit out of character for me; but, I’ve been reading quite a few memoirs this year and this one caused me to pause. Is it too soon to read about Covid-19? We’re not quite past it yet, are we? Given that Covid-19 remains looming in so many places and may very well make a comeback, I figured it might help my own healing to read about someone else’s pandemic experience. Admittedly, mine was mild, privileged, and uneventful in comparison to so many millions of others on this planet. What did others feel? How did others live through this? We talked amongst each other, but too often we said a lot of nothing to avoid the anxiety that a deeper, more nuanced conversation could too easily trigger.

From a historian’s perspective, memoirs like this — indeed, the millions of posts, tweets, blog posts, articles, stuff — that we produced in the past few years say something poignant about this strange and traumatic moment in our individual and collective lives. What was this moment in our history? Memoirs give us entrée into others’ internal lives, see how others experienced this.

Consky’s account of the past couple of years, encompassing the dying and death of his father and others, delivered on both points. What was living and dying in the pandemic like?

But readers should not expect a litany of statistics or a step-by-step replay of WHO’s or the American CDC’s decisions and policies. This is a memoir, a deeply personal and individualized account of a global experience. Death is always subjective, always individual, always very personal. Readers should not expect this book to discuss everyone’s experience of Covid-19. The deaths in this book are not coronavirus related deaths necessarily; this book is about the non-pandemic deaths that occurred during the past two years. Ordinary life and ordinary death did not pause for the pandemic. Pandemic deaths eclipsed the distress of other kinds of deaths, but only insofar as their appearance in the news, social media, public forums. The trauma of those passings remained, but was invisible in contrast.

That said, this book is about life too. It is about resilience and the ways in which we communicate those important things in life that need to be said and done before death makes it impossible to do so. This memoir is about memory, not only Consky’s but those of his father’s and the surviving friends and family of those who lost loved ones — during the pandemic and at other times too. Life and death during the pandemic of 2020-2022 was unique in our lifetimes, but also… not. Life and death was also familiar… too familiar? Scarily familiar. Comfortingly familiar. I cannot decide. Neither can Consky, I think.

This book is also about memorializing and the ways in which we do this, for ourselves and for the dead. One act struck me in particular: when a group of friends gathered their memories of another among them who had passed away and gave the resultant artifact to the deceased’s family. This book is about how we can commune over death, that common event, that inevitable process that erases (or should) differences and animosities among us.

The end of life care Consky refers to? I think he means us, the surviving family members and friends of the ones who have passed away. For that reason, the book transcends the pandemic. The pandemic is (was?) a great thing, a momentous thing, but life and death will go on with or without it.

Set against the backdrop of the covid pandemic and the rules and regulations that we all abided by, this book allows the reader into the most personal journey. While his family of frontline workers come together with their knowledge, what lies at the centre is a father, a husband and much loved family member who is suffering from cancer.
Our author gifts you something special. A father with an unwavering love for his son and that son determined to ensure that his end of life care is everything it should be. Mitchell has to learn to let his father go. Fathers and heroes and warriors and best friends to sons. As a child you think your father is invincible, but home safe is about realising that this is not the case.
To our author: thank you for this beauty. Written so well and as a nurse of 30 years I could relate to it. As a widow of 3 years, I could relate to your mum, and as someone who lost her mum to lung cancer 18 months ago, I was walking your path.

Thank you for the advanced copy. What a truly amazing book this is. COVID has touched many, we have lost people we know, love and care for and for some life will never be the same again. This book is beautiful in that its focus on his father and end of life care (something of which I am very passionate about) is amazing especially during COVID when everything just became so much harder. A loving family and a the father as their focus.

Highly recommended

A very moving tribute about a father, a life, and what his last days meant to those in his orbit. Sent against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, parts of this story have been told by any of us, but this story was for all of us who have experienced loss and heartbreak since March 2020.