I am writing to enthusiastically recommend Rosemary Wallace. Last year, Ms. Wallace cared for my mother during the last week of her dying - easing her pain, comforting us all, and helping to organize an emotionally and practically chaotic, not to speak of exhausting experience. For the last three years, she has helped care for my now 12 year-old daughter, enriching both her life and ours, her parents. During the last acute stage of my mother's lung cancer, Ms. Wallace brought my daughter to Florida, where I was staying with a cousin who lived near my mother's nursing home. Ms. Wallace and my daughter moved in with us there and began her work instantly, helping my 74 year-old cousin, myself, and my daughter accept and understand my mother's dying. We were all so grateful she was there, including my mother, who was terrifically comforted by her empathic, authoritative, and soothing ways. Ms. Wallace's skills are impressive; with her body work, she was able to ease the panic that made my mother's breathing more difficult, release the terrible tension in her limbs and help her find the best ways of sitting. My mother trusted her as much as she did us her kin, and clearly felt safe when she was there. In fact. quite fortunately, Ms. Wallace was with her the last night of her life, holding my mother's thrashing body with her own, helping - with her skill, her understanding of the dying process, and her extraordinary sensitivity - to calm her terror. At home, during that week, we functioned like one family - all of us focused on this tremendous life event, all discussing it constantly, and even enjoying the bits of leisure and quiet we stole between our shifts. Ms. Wallace also made my mother's dying that much more meaningful to my daughter by helping her to write poems and draw pictures for my mother's room, by modeling the kind of care and sensitivity that my daughter cultivated herself, and by taking her off on excursions to give her the child time we, in our preoccupation, could not provide for her then. Ms. Wallace has become a bright star in my daughter's constellation of significant adults and several times a week, she does interesting activities with her - often the kinds of activities that help her to express the full range of her emotions, which she has a tendency to hold in. I wholeheartedly recommend Ms. Wallace. In truth, I believe anyone who brings her care into their family will be as lucky as I feel we are. Yours truly Joan K. Peters
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