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 immersive 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.

At its core, the book confronts the painful history of apartheid, a system of racial segregation that displaced millions and dehumanised generations. 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 ageing and mortality.

What sets God’s Waiting Room apart is its narrative form. Golomski artfully combines creative non-fiction with ethnography, weaving together the past and present of his subjects’ lives in a single day-long tour of the home. 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. 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

‘God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End’ is published by Wits University Press