City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

The trauma cleaner, one woman's extraordinary life in death, decay & disaster, by Sarah Krasnostein

eng

Includes bibliographical references

individual biography

illustrationsportraits

no index present

non fiction

The trauma cleaner

bibliography

by Sarah Krasnostein

one woman's extraordinary life in death, decay & disaster

It's not the police, firefighters, or EMTs that clean up a crime scene—that's the job of a trauma cleaner, specifically Sandra Pankhurst. Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife…But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his loungeroom. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose. Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead—and the book she has written is equally extraordinary. Not just the compelling story of a fascinating life among lives of desperation, but an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together