God's Waiting Room

Racial Reckoning at Life's End

By Casey Golomski

SERIES: Global Perspectives on Aging

Rutgers University Press

Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life’s lessons, God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski’s years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, are narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. Told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home’s residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison nurse, readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not available in the South African Development Community and Kenya.

Reviews
Author

There is nothing frail or distant in God’s Waiting Room. We are pressed up against stories—some hard, some wanting—and invited in. Casey Golomski masterfully collapses the priorities and politics of past, present, and future into the workings of the everyday, with a closeness and lyrical attention to form. Todd Meyers, author of All That Was Not Her

A delightful surprise of a book! A tale of big-hearted patients and staff, racism, and eldercare in post-apartheid South Africa. Placed within the context of the country's history of white supremacy, these subtle and moving stories of patients in the present day being sustained by Grace offer a striking portrait of our shared humanity despite racial and other differences. Theresa Brown, author of Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient

CASEY GOLOMSKI is an associate professor of anthropology and women and gender studies at University of New Hampshire in Durham, and lives in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom.

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