Meaningful Deaths: Home Health Workers' Mediation of Deaths at Home

After several generations in the United States in which medicalized deaths have become normal, more people are seeking to die at home. However, home deaths lead to emotional uncertainty and practical confusion, in which kin lack a cultural script. In this article I draw on interviews with patients' kin and their African immigrant home health workers, and show that the care workers helped create a more meaningful death through their knowledge of death, familiarity with the physical processes of death, and their presence, which they used to create pathways for their patients and their kin.