God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End – 9781776149490

Description

God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End is a poignant and immersive exploration of life in a South African nursing home, built atop a graveyard left behind by the forced removals of apartheid. Through the lens of Casey Golomski’s seven years of in-depth research, the book offers a glimpse into the lives of the residents and caregivers of Grace nursing home. This institution, both a symbol of apartheid’s lingering scars and a microcosm of racial, social and generational divides, becomes a space for exploring the tensions and reconciliations that emerge at the end of life.

Golomski artfully combines creative nonfiction with ethnography, weaving together the past and present of his subjects’ lives in a tour of the home over a single day. As the older white residents and younger Black caregivers co-exist within Grace, they must navigate a complex dynamic born from decades of systemic violence. Golomski reveals, through vivid conversations and reflections, how these everyday interactions become moments of racial reckoning, tempered by the shared reality of aging and mortality.

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 as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds. The stories of seven individuals highlight the tension between care and prejudice, survival and memory, as they reckon with the apartheid era’s haunting legacy.