The Memoir
Art Therapy in Hospice and Vegetative State Wards — a professional and human journey
This memoir was born from years of work in wards where life meets its boundary. Ten Hospice rooms, seven Vegetative State rooms: each with a story, a face, a gesture.
It is addressed to healthcare professionals and anyone seeking to understand how the creative process can accompany end-of-life care with gentleness, respect, and beauty.
Why this book, why work with the dying, and the personal story that brought me here.
What a hospice is, who its patients are, and how art therapy finds its place in such a delicate setting.
The diary of a typical day in hospice. Ten rooms, ten stories, ten different ways of being in the world.
A fifty-year-old woman, an advanced carcinoma, and the discovery of a talent she never knew she had.
A self-taught painter of eighty-eight, an anarchic spirit, and a final painting that closes a chapter of life.
A lucid and talkative woman who, through mark-making, color, and dedications, fights the fear of leaving her children alone.
Seven rooms, minimal signals, and the art of perceiving what the body tells us when words are no longer there.
Three men, three stories of motionless bodies and inner worlds that ask to be reached.
Sara, Antonio, Luisa, and the Tuesday women. Stories of those who live alongside illness and find in art a space to breathe.
Working with the multidisciplinary team, the challenges of integration, and proposals for building cohesion and mutual listening.
From pastels to clay, from music to reinvented medical supplies: the tools of art therapy practice.
Reflections on the meaning of accompanying the end of life, on our society, and on the importance of learning to let go.