Living Well with a Serious Illness

"Robin's book is an impassioned plea to advance the availability, access, and use of palliative care services. This book fills a gap. Highly relevant and practical."

"Robin Kanarek teaches us vital lessons on living life in this important book. We all have to face the fact of our inevitable death, but in the 'mean-while' we hopefully can live a life with meaning in the time we have."

"This book is essential reading for anyone who will live with a serious illness or care for someone with one—which is essentially everyone. Kanarek writes as a mother who shares the loss of her son and has spent three decades sharing her experience with others to support their journeys. It is a book written from the heart and is both a practical guide as well as a deep reflection of how to navigate the challenging, and sacred, time of the end of life."

"Robin Kanarek's personal story supports and comforts those who have experienced the sorrowful loss of a child. The expertise she synthesizes to catalyze palliative care and manage grief and loss provides a seminal guide to managing serious illness, for patients, families and healthcare communities."

"This compelling story and resource is written with the tenderness and understanding that can only come from a loving mother, passionate nurse, and dedicated educator-advocate. Robin Kanarek gives absolutely all of herself to help us prioritize quality of life while treating serious illness. Her plea—know, ask, demand, educate!"

"As a parent and a nurse, Robin Kanarek depicts the journey no parent ever wants to imagine—a child with a life threatening illness. Robin's heartfelt narrative skillfully offers something for everyone: the patient, the family, the consumer, the nurse, the health care professional, and the advocate. She calls on us to advance palliative care through clinical care, education, leadership, and philanthropy."

"Ms. Kanarek has performed a great service for all of us in the palliative care field. She has managed to write a book that explains, in layman's terms, what everyone should understand about the uses and benefits of palliative care. Even medical professionals will benefit from her discussions of how patients, their families, and their caregivers should be interacting when someone has a serious illness. This book should be on every bookshelf, to be read and reread as the need arises."

"What a difference it would make in their quality of life and the parents' ability to advocate for their child's and family's well-being if every child diagnosed with a serious illness received palliative care. Thank you Robin, for making the case for why every parent receiving a horrible diagnosis for their child should ask for palliative care, to help them navigate parenting in the face of overwhelming medical decision-making and emotional tsunamis, and to help them foreground love in the face of fear and uncertainty."