Death studies have, over the last twenty years, witnessed a flourishing of research and scholarship particularly in areas such as dying and bereavement, cultural practices and fear of dying. But, despite its importance, a specific focus on the nature of personal mortality has attracted surprisingly little attention. Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. Chapters are organized around the question of how an ongoing relationship might be possible when the threat of consciousness coming to an end points to an unspeakable nothingness. The book then argues that, despite this threat, an ongoing relationship with one's own death is still possible by means of conceptual devices, or 'enabling frames', that help shape personal mortality into a relatable object. In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events.

"Singular Paths, " based extensively on interviews, breaks fresh ground by describing specifically the situations, experiences, and feelings of the often-overlooked single and widowed elderly male. Robert L. Rubinstein suggests that these men must be viewed as individuals and it is this approach which colors the presentation of his research findings. He shows how older men find enjoyment in life using personal and social resources and existing opportunities.

Many modern theories hold that the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, freeing the survivor to develop new relationships. This work, however, argues that proper resolution of grief should enable one to develop and maintain a continuing healthy bond with the deceased.

1933. The object of these notes is to show the origin and development of the practice of the separation of the body at death into two or more parts, and to suggest the circumstances which lead to the special treatment of the heart, for which, hitherto, reasons apparently not quite adequate have been advanced.

Afterlife argues that proper conduct was believed essential for determining one's post-mortem judgment from the earliest periods in ancient Egypt and Greece. affects one's afterlife fate. Dramatists and demonstrates that post-mortem reward and retribution, based on one's conduct, is already found in Homer. Pythagoreanism and Orphism further develop the afterlife beliefs that will have such enormous impact on Plato and later Christianity. for their understanding of virtues and vices that have afterlife consequences. both societies are compared. the elite: the king in Egypt's Pyramid Texts and the heroes in Homeric Greece. Nevertheless, we show that, from the earliest times, both societies believed that the gods, primarily Maat in Egypt and Dike in Greece, were responsible for the proper ordering of the cosmos and anyone's violations of that order would reap the direst consequence--the loss of a beneficent afterlife.

Like all great & important reforms which aim at the abolishment of a custom as old & revered as the custom is of burying the dead, cremation, as a substitute for inhumation, until a comparatively recent date, did not find many adherents, beyond a small circle of scientists. It is rapidly gaining favor in the United States, thanks to an enlightened press, which gave & still gives encouragement & support to the advocates of cremation. This work is an expose of the dangers caused by inhumation & an explanation of the superior merits of incineration upon new & scientific principles.

The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources-from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed-and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

Life, Death, and the Western Way of War traces when and how western soldiers-once regarded as simple fighting tools-became the far less expendable beings that we know today. In Kant's terms, the study traces the process through which soldiers have been turned from mere military means into ends in themselves. The book argues that such a major transformation is largely the result of a shift in the social meaning ascribed to soldiers' death. It suggests that looking at death can somehow provide a privileged angle to understanding the value that societies attach to life. The narrative emerging from the empirical evidence will show that the story of attitudes towards soldiers' death is the story of a gradual, increasing process of individualization in the social meaning attached to human loss in war. Such a development, which took centuries to emerge in full, was neither simple nor linear. It was a process that the state was temporarily able to frame in the collective narrative of the nation, but which ultimately has seen the increasing importance of the life of the individual soldier. In tracing the process through which soldiers have been turned from an amorphous collective into distinct individuals, this book shows how the emphasis on the primacy of the individual has further eroded the effectiveness of western warfare as an instrument of foreign policy. In particular, the modern, liberal conception of the soldier has had the unintended consequence of jeopardizing the Clausewitzian relationship between military means and political ends.

When someone dies violently (through homicide, suicide, or accident) there are unique circumstances surrounding the mourning of that death that do not occur when the death is prolonged or due to illness. Often the violent death is retold through personal narrative. While retelling the events of a death can be therapeutic, without guidance the recounting can entrench the person in his/her grief. Retelling Violent Death provides the guidance necessary for making the retelling of the violent death restorative and therapeutic.
This book provides insight and instruction for bereaved readers and those who work with them. The emphasis of the retelling is placed on helping the person reframe the story they tell, to make them a participant in the story and allow them to reconnect with the living memories of the deceased. In this way, the mourner can remember the way the person lived, and not just the violent way they died.
Edward K. Rynearson writes from his extensive clinical expertise in he area of loss, and from his own personal experience with violent death. Retelling Violent Death is skillfully crafted, and is an excellent resource for bereaved individuals and the people who seek to help them through their grief.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ORGANIZED MIND 'Everyone we know needs this remarkable book ... Essential for the rest of your life' Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive' 'The secrets of ageing well ... a serious, evidence-based guide to what really works and why' Sunday Times ____________________________________________ We have long been encouraged to think of old age as synonymous with a decline in skills. Yet recent studies show that our decision making improves as we age, and our happiness levels peak in our eighties. What really happens to our brains as we get older? In The Changing Mind (published in America as Successful Aging), neuroscientist and internationally bestselling author Daniel Levitin invites us to dramatically shift our understanding of aging, demonstrating the many benefits of growing older. He draws on cutting-edge research to offer realistic guidelines and practical tips for readers to follow during every decade of life, showing us we all can learn from those who age joyously. Find out: -Why the story that older people don't need as many hours of sleep is a myth -What part environment, behaviour and luck play in how our brains age -How to increase the proportion of your life span spent in good health and decrease the time you spend sick -What you can do to maintain strength of body, mind and spirit whilst coping with the limitations of aging Combining science and storytelling, The Changing Mind is a radically new way to think about aging. 'Read this book. Wise, sensitive, and insightful' David Eagleman, author of The Brain 'A comprehensive and fascinating insight into the evolving human brain. This book could change your life' Professor Stephen Westaby, author of Fragile Lives

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the U.S. Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions that emerged within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials to negotiate the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death and used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In "The Dominion of the Dead," Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living--the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.
This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.
"The Dominion of the Dead" is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, the author follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. The author also wrote "Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland".

Child mortality has been widely perceived and addressed as a medical issue. Regardless of the fact that there has been a substantial decrease in child mortality world-wide it continues to be a concern in developing countries. Millions of children die each year due to preventable causes. This book argues that there is a clear and consistent pattern of preventable child deaths, which is, at its core, a problem of justice. Modern theories of justice can offer important lessons for the design and assessment of child survival policies from an equity perspective. The book considers Amartya Sen's multifocal metric of justice as more plausible than its Rawlsian or resourcist counterparts. It argues that such an approach to justice is relevant for affirmative action policies, which have long been a source of resentment among historically better-off groups around the world, especially in two of the world's largest and most vibrant democracies-India and the United States.

This unique book recounts the experience of facing one's death solely from the dying person's point of view rather than from the perspective of caregivers, survivors, or rescuers. Such unmediated access challenges assumptions about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of dying, showing readers that -- along with suffering, loss, anger, sadness, and fear -- we can also feel courage, love, hope, reminiscence, transcendence, transformation, and even happiness as we die. A work that is at once psychological, sociological, and philosophical, this book brings together testimonies of those dying from terminal illness, old age, sudden injury or trauma, acts of war, and the consequences of natural disasters and terrorism. It also includes statements from individuals who are on death row, in death camps, or planning suicide. Each form of dying addressed highlights an important set of emotions and narratives that often eclipses stereotypical renderings of dying and reflects the numerous contexts in which this journey can occur outside of hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices.Chapters focus on common emotional themes linked to dying, expanding and challenging them through first-person accounts and analyses of relevant academic and clinical literature in psycho-oncology, palliative care, gerontology, military history, anthropology, sociology, cultural and religious studies, poetry, and fiction. The result is an all-encompassing investigation into an experience that will eventually include us all and is more surprising and profound than anyone can imagine.

Although much has been published on the social history of death, this is the first book to give a comprehensive account of attitudes toward the dead--above all the "placing" of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social terms--in order to reveal the social and religious outlook of past societies. The contributions range widely geographically, from Scotland to Transylvania, and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes toward the corpse, patterns of burial, forms of commemoration, the treatment of dead infants, the nature of the afterlife, and ghosts.

The first book length anthropological study of voluntary assisted dying in Switzerland, Leaving is a narrative account of five people who ended their lives with assistance. Stavrianakis places his observations of the judgment to end life in this way within a larger inquiry about how to approach and understand the practice of assisted suicide, which he characterizes as operating in a political, legal, and medical "parazone," adjacent to medical care and expertise. Frequently, observers too rapidly integrate assisted suicide into moral positions that reflect sociological and psychological commonplaces about individual choice and its social determinants. Leaving engages with core early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and sociological texts arguing for a contemporary approach to the phenomenon of voluntary death, seeking to learn from such conceptual repertoires, as well as to acknowledge their limits. Leaving concludes on the anthropological question of how to account for the ethics of assistance with suicide: to grasp the actuality and composition of the ethical work that goes on in the configuration of a subject, one who is making a judgment about dying, with other participants and observers, the anthropologist included.

Within this book are rituals, stories, traditions and experiences of magicians' scholars and artists who work with death. Some of the contributors such as Nema, Mogg Morgan, Louis Martine and Nevill Drury (to name but a few) have helped define contemporary transformative spirituality. Others are less well known but just as learned. As there should be in such a collection there is comedy, anger, confrontation and practicality. This anthology is about who we are, and where we come from. It is also about how we change. A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead contains voices and visions that acknowledge our past, feed our present and guide the direction of our future. "I was musing on Singapore in all its affluent glory still having shrines for the dead on every street corner during 'The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts'. Then I was musing on how the socially mobile of modern western society eschew death rites and grieving in the name of 'holding it together' and being progressive. I thought of which civilisations are falling and which are rising again, and wondered whether acknowledging death and the ancestors is a vital part of maintaining personal identity and our place in society. I remember how my grieving father mourned for all the information he had relied on his deceased wife remembering; information which was now lost. I recalled Michael Crichton's words 'If you don't know (your family's) history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.' Then I thought maybe someone should write about the cults of the ancestors and death, perhaps an anthology, perhaps cross relate experiences of loss to personal spirituality and magick and history. I know that years of working with the dead in the name of art and spirituality, didn't prepare me for the death of my mother. What helped me was the advice of someone from a long tradition of working with the ancestors. I think that collecting the experiences of spiritual practitioners in their working with grief and death is part of a living and necessary tradition that will give respect to the dead and strength, identity and support to our own personal spirituality.' "

In spite of society's wish to protect and insulate children from death, the experience of loss is unavoidable and there is surprisingly little guidance on how to help children cope with grief and bereavement. Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children's Lives is the first book to bring together diverse fields of study, offering a practical as well as multifaceted theoretical approach to how children cope with death. Using stories of children's own experiences supported by data from a large research study, Silverman explains the wide range of effects of loss upon children and the challenges they face as they grieve. Silverman presents grief as a normal part of the life cycle which results not only in pain and sadness but also in change and growth. She further explains that children can and do cope effectively with loss and the changes it brings as long as they are taught to understand that death is a part of life and that they will be included appropriately in the family drama. Never Too Young To Know: Death in Children's Lives is divided into three parts. The first section includes an overview and theoretical framework that examines the social, historical, developmental, and familial forces that frame and focus childrens lives as they experience loss. The second section offers a detailed analysis of how children experience mourning different types of death including the death of siblings, parents, and friends, and death due to illness, suicide, accidents, and violence. The final section includes an accessible guide to helping children cope with grief, emphasizing the importance and the necessity of social support as children learn to adapt to their new lives. Never Too Young To Know: Death in Children's Lives is not only ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students learning about children but it is also useful for courses on death and dying and the family. It is also an invaluable book for mental health practitioners, clergy, school teachers, nurses, pediatricians, as well as the general reader interested in learning how to deal with death in children's lives.

Suicide is increasingly recognized as a major global issue of public health, with far-reaching social, economic, and emotional consequences. The World Health Organization estimates that around 800,000 people die each year by suicide, with suicide attempts perhaps up to twenty times more frequent than the completed act. Moreover, in the past thirty years global suicide rates have increased by a dizzying 60 per cent. (For example, in Japan-after Russia, the developed world's leading suicide nation-more than 33,000 people committed suicide in 2007.) Some general facts are now widely known. For instance: suicide is mainly a (young) male act; mental disorders (such as depression and schizophrenia) are strongly associated with the majority of suicide cases; and suicide rates tend to increase during times of economic downturn, and decrease when individuals within society are well integrated-which probably explains why suicide rates tend to decline during wars. Also, certain groups of people (e.g. alcoholics, the bereaved, prisoners, and migrants) are recognized to be at particular risk of suicide. While it is possible to make such generalizations, many urgent questions, of course, remain unanswered. Consequently, practical and scholarly research better to understand the complex interaction of psychological, genetic, sociological, and environmental factors that may lead to suicide flourishes as never before, not least in the hope of instigating effective suicide-prevention strategies and initiatives. However, much of the literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is often difficult to obtain an informed overview. To enable users to make sense of the sheer scale of the growth in research output-and the breadth of the field-this new four-volume collection from Routledge's Major Themes in Health and Social Welfare series answers the need for a comprehensive reference work offering wide-ranging and multidisciplinary perspectives on suicide and suicidal behaviour. Edited by two of the world's leading authorities, the collection brings together canonical and the very best cutting-edge research. Suicide will be welcomed by professionals and policy-makers. It will also be an invaluable reference resource for students and scholars working in the field, as well as users from a wide range of allied disciplines-such as nursing, education, social work, and law-who increasingly require an understanding of the issues this collection explores.

This examination of death rituals in early Japan finds in the practice of double burial a key to understanding the Taika Era (645-710 A.D.). Drawing on narratives and poems from the earliest Japanese texts--the Kojiki, the Nihonshoki, and the Man'yoshu, an anthology of poetry--it argues that double burial was the center of a manipulation of myth and ritual for specific ideological and factional purposes. "This volume has significantly raised the standard of scholarship on early Japanese and Man'yoshu studies."--Joseph Kitagawa "So convincing is the historical and religious thought displayed here, it is impossible to imagine how anyone can ever again read these documents in the old way."--Alan L. Miller, The Journal of Religion "A central resource for historians of early Japan."--David L. Barnhill, History of Religions

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, "Hitch-22," Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.
Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.
MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.