"If a good death exists, what does it look like? This question lies at the heart of SITTING VIGIL, a rigorously researched and intimately told journey along the ultimate borderland of American life: American death. From church basements to hotel lobbies,hospital wards to prison cells, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann charts contemporary society and political, religious, and medical culture to tell us how we die today. In 2005, Neumann left her job in New York City to care for her father who had been suffering from non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. She became a full-time caregiver--cooking, cleaning, and coordinating medications with hospice for three months in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When her father died, two days after Thanksgiving, she was undone by the experience, by the grief and visceral quality of death. It set Neumann on a course of research and investigation. Was her father's death a good death? Do others die this way? Is there a best way to die? SITTING VIGIL is the result of more than six years of hospice work, research, and examination into these questions and more. SITTING VIGIL deftly interweaves these personal accounts with a historical telling of the movements and developments that have changed the way we die, including the medical advancements that have altered the definition of death forever, patients' rights legislation, the prevalence of hospice and palliative care, Catholic hospitals that apply the Vatican's laws to a pluralistic society, the increasing successes ofthe Death with Dignity movement, health care reform, and the rise of excessive, ineffective medical treatment. SITTING VIGIL is the first book to survey the breadth and variation of death in America, and Neumann writes with engaging warmth, wit, and frank detail. "--