GOD'S WAITING ROOM, racial reckoning at life's end

221pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781776149490

First published in the USA in 2025.

Casey Golomski spent a year interviewing the older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid. His research findings are narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. 

"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! This is 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 Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at the 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.