Home Safe Home

During a pandemic lockdown full of pyjama dance parties, life talks, and final goodbyes, a family helps a father die with dignity. In April 2020, journalist Mitchell Consky received bad news: his father was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer, with less than two months to live. Suddenly, he and his extended family — many of them healthcare workers — were tasked with reconciling the social distancing required by the Covid-19 pandemic with a family-based approach to end-of-life care. The result was a home hospice during the first lockdown. Suspended within the chaos of medication and treatments were dance parties, episodes of Tiger King, and his father’s many deadpan jokes. Leaning into his journalistic intuitions, Mitchell interviewed his father daily, making audio recordings of final talks, emotional goodbyes, and the unexpected laughter that filled his father’s final days. Serving as a catalyst for fatherly affection, these interviews became an opportunity for emotional confession during the slowed-down time of a shuttered world, and reflect how far a family went in making a dying loved one feel safe at home.

Home Safe Home is the ultimate reference of its kind, written by the leading authority on eliminating toxics in the home. It offers more than four hundred tips, including do-it-yourself formulas for inexpensive, safe products to replace the harmful substances we are exposed to in our own households. If you suffer from unexplained headaches, fatigue, or depression, or if you worry about the link between increased use of toxic chemicals and the rising rate of cancer, the many suggestions in this book can make your life virtually toxic-free! Here are some of the many useful facts you'll learn: - You can make a window cleaner from vinegar and water that is safe, more effective, and less expensive than any product on the market. - A mineral powder, which costs pennies per use, is the safest way to get whites their whitest. - Simply changing your type of sheets and pillows may cure insomnia.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Elizabeth Berg's Once Upon a Time, There Was You. In this novel, beloved bestselling author Elizabeth Berg weaves a beautifully written and richly resonant story of a mother and daughter in emotional transit. Helen Ames–recently widowed, coping with loss and grief, unable to do the work that has always sustained her–is beginning to depend far too much on her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Tessa, and is meddling in her life, offering unsolicited and unwelcome advice. Helen’s problems are compounded by her shocking discovery that her mild-mannered and loyal husband was apparently leading a double life. The Ameses had painstakingly saved for a happy retirement, but that money disappeared in several large withdrawals made by Helen’s husband before he died. In order to support herself and garner a measure of much needed independence, Helen takes an unusual job that ends up offering far more than she had anticipated. And then a phone call from a stranger sets Helen on a surprising path of discovery that causes both mother and daughter to reassess what they thought they knew about each other, themselves, and what really makes a home and a family.

After being victimed by crime, Helen and Mike Maxwell became experts at safeguarding their personal and home security. In this essential book, they detail the ways you can make your home and family safe against the threat of break-ins. Subjects covered include: Homes That Lure Criminals; Locks: Which Ones Work; The Tree Leads Straight to the Balcony; and Protecting Latch-Key Children.

A writing couple searches for answers when Alzheimer's causes one of them to lose the place where stories come from — memory. At the age of fifty-three, Tony walks away from a life of journalism and into an unknown future. June is forty-eight, a writer and teacher, and over the following decade watches as her husband changes — in interests, goals, and behaviour — until Tony has a fall, ending the life they had known. A diagnosis is seven years away, yet the signs of Alzheimer’s are all around. A suitcase Tony packs for a trip is jammed with four umbrellas, a visual symbol of cognitive looping. But how far back do these signs go? The couple starts probing the past and finding answers. This is not an old person’s disease.

Housing matters for everyone, as it provides shelter, security, privacy, and stability. For survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), housing takes on an additional meaning; it is the key to establishing a new life, free from abuse. IPV survivors often face such inadequate housing options, however, that they must make excruciating choices between cycling through temporary shelters, becoming homeless, or returning to their abusers. Home Safe Home offers a multifaceted analysis that accounts for both IPV survivors’ needs and the practical challenges involved in providing them with adequate permanent housing. Incorporating the varied perspectives of the numerous housing providers, activists, policymakers, and researchers who have a stake in these issues, the book also lets IPV survivors have their say, expressing their views on what housing and services can best meet their short and long-term goals. Researchers Hilary Botein and Andrea Hetling not only examine the federal and state policies and funding programs determining housing for IPV survivors, but also provide detailed case studies that put a human face on these policy issues. As it traces how housing options and support mechanisms for IPV survivors have evolved over time, Home Safe Home also offers innovative suggestions for how policymakers and advocates might work together to better meet the needs of this vulnerable population.

Home Safe by Kate Denton released on Apr 24, 1990 is available now for purchase.