"There was an old man who dwelt in the land of New Mexico, and he lost his wife." From that opening line, this tender novella is at once universal and deeply personal. The nameless narrator, a writer, shares his most intimate thoughts about his wife, their life together, and her death. But just as death is inseparable from life, his wife seems still to be with him. Her memory and words permeate his days. In "The Old Man's Love Story," master storyteller Rudolfo Anaya crafts the tale of a lifelong love that ultimately transcends death.

An elegy not just for the dead but for the vitality of youth, the old man's story captures both the heartaches and ironies of old age. We follow him as he proceeds through days of grief and memory, buying his few groceries, driving slower than the other travelers on the road. He talks with his wife along the way. "Go slow," he hears her admonish. As he sits in the garden with their dogs, he senses her worry over his loneliness. A year passes. He longs to care for someone, but--to love again?

Like characters in Anaya's previous fiction, the old man lives in a real New Mexico, but one inhabited by spirits. Death provides a gateway to other worlds, just as memories connect him to other times and places. When he eventually begins a new friendship with a woman, a widow, they share a bittersweet understanding of joy mixed with sorrow, promise mixed with loss.

Anaya's reflections, as shared through the experiences of this old man, point to the power and importance of love at every stage of life. Lyrical and earthy, sad yet suffused with humor, " The Old Man's Love Story" will speak to all readers, perhaps especially to those who have suffered a recent loss.

"Talking to the Dead" is an ethnography of seven Gullah/Geechee women from the South Carolina lowcountry. These women communicate with their ancestors through dreams, prayer, and visions and traditional crafts and customs, such as storytelling, basket making, and ecstatic singing in their churches. Like other Gullah/Geechee women of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, these women, through their active communication with the deceased, make choices and receive guidance about how to live out their faith and engage with the living. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant emphasizes that this communication affirms the women's spiritual faith--which seamlessly integrates Christian and folk traditions--and reinforces their position as powerful culture keepers within Gullah/Geechee society. By looking in depth at this long-standing spiritual practice, Manigault-Bryant highlights the subversive ingenuity that lowcountry inhabitants use to thrive spiritually and to maintain a sense of continuity with the past.

Surveying funerary rites and attitudes toward death from the time of Homer to the fourth century B.C., Robert Garland seeks to show what the ordinary Greek felt about death and the dead. The Second Edition features a substantial new prefatory essay in which Garland addresses recent questions and debates about death and the early Greeks. The book also includes an updated Supplementary Bibliography. Praise for the first edition: "This volume] contains a rich and remarkably complete collection of the abundant but scattered literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence on death in the ancient world as well as an extensive bibliography on the subject. Robert Garland conceives of death as a process, a rite of passage, a mutual but changing relationship between the deceased and his or her] survivors. . . . A most useful collection of evidence, sensibly organized (no small feat) and lucidly presented. . . . A valuable source on the Greeks and on the always-lively subject of death." American Historical Review "Much can be learned from this engaging survey of popular attitudes toward death, the dying, and the dead in Greece down to the end of the Classical period. . . . Appealing to scholars and the general audience." Religious Studies Review"

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials - to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism - have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

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.

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.

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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In our contemporary Western society, death has become taboo. Despite its inevitability, we focus on maintaining youthfulness and well-being, while fearing death's intrusion in our daily activities. In contrast, observes Maria Serena Mirto, the ancient Greeks embraced death more openly and effectively, developing a variety of rituals to help them grieve the dead and, in the process, alleviate anxiety and suffering. In this fascinating book, Mirto examines conceptions of death and the afterlife in the ancient Greek world, revealing few similarities--and many differences--between ancient and modern ways of approaching death.

Exploring the cultural and religious foundations underlying Greek burial rites and customs, Mirto traces the evolution of these practices during the archaic and classical periods. She explains the relationship between the living and the dead as reflected in grave markers, epitaphs, and burial offerings and discusses the social and political dimensions of burial and lamentation. She also describes shifting beliefs about life after death, showing how concepts of immortality, depicted so memorably in Homer's epics, began to change during the classical period.
"Death in the Greek World "straddles the boundary between literary and religious imagination and synthesizes observations from archaeology, visual art, philosophy, politics, and law. The author places particular emphasis on Homer's epics, the first
literary testimony of an understanding of death in ancient Greece. And because these stories are still so central to Western culture, her discussion casts new light on elements we thought we had already understood.
Originally written and published in Italian, this English-language translation of "Death in the Greek World" includes the most recent scholarship on newly discovered texts and objects, and engages the latest theoretical perspectives on the gendered roles of men and women as agents of mourning. The volume also features a new section dealing with hero cults and a new appendix outlining fundamental developments in modern studies of death in the ancient Greek world.

When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades. In Funeral Festivals in America, author Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. Thursby suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links or strengthens ties between family members and friends. The increasingly important funerary banquet, for example, honors an often well-lived life in order to help survivors accept the change that death brings and to provide healing fellowship. At such celebrations and other forms of the traditional wake, participants often use humor to add another dimension to expressing both the personality of the deceased and their ties to a particular ethnic heritage. In her research and interviews, Thursby discovered the paramount importance of food as part of the funeral ritual. During times of loss, individuals want to be consoled, and this is often accomplished through the preparation and consumption of nourishing, comforting foods. In the Intermountain West, AFuneral Potatoes, @ a potato-cheese casserole, has become an expectation at funeral meals; Muslim families often bring honey flavored fruits and vegetables to the funeral table for their consoling familiarity; and many Mexican Americans continue the tradition of tamale making as a way to bring people together to talk, to share memories, and to simply enjoy being together. Funeral Festivals in America examines rituals for loved ones separated by death, frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites, and personalized memorials and grave markers. Thursby concludes that though Americans come from many different cultural traditions, they deal with death in a largely similar approach. They emphasize unity and embrace rites that soothe the distress of death as a way to heal and move forward.

What is it really like to die? Though our understanding about the biology of dying is complex and incomplete, greater complexity and diversity can be found in the study of what human beings encounter socially, psychologically and spiritually during the experience. Contributors from disciplines as diverse as social and behavioural studies, medicine, demography, history, philosophy, art, literature, popular culture and religion examine the process of dying through the lens of both animal and human studies. Despite common fears to the contrary, dying is not simply an awful journey of illness and decline; cultural influences, social circumstances, personal choice and the search for meaning are all crucial in shaping personal experiences. This intriguing volume will be of interest to clinicians, professionals, academics and students of death, dying and end-of-life care, and anyone curious about the human confrontation with mortality.

In this major new study Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet provide a timely and wide-ranging account of the changing nature of suicide in the world today. The suicide rate is soaring in the former Communist bloc, in India and in China, which now has the highest female suicide rate in the world. This rise coincides with those countries accelerated entry into a period of brutal modernization. In the developed countries of the West, suicide rates are rising fastest amongst young men and those social groups that are furthest down the social scale. How can we explain these trends and what do they tell us about modern societies?
The social impact of suicide has preoccupied sociologists from Emile Durkheim onwards. For Durkheim, the rising suicide rate was an effect of the rise of modernity and the individualism, growing affluence and increased anomie that accompanied it. Baudelot and Establet draw upon Durkheim and his successor Maurice Halbwachs to argue that classic sociological theories of suicide require some modification. The link between suicide, affluence and individualism is more complex: suicide rates do reflect broad social trends but they are also influenced by the structural position and lived experience of small social groups. The notion of social well-being is demonstrated to be a key factor in changes in suicide rates. Whilst it is well-known that sociology cannot explain why individuals commit suicide, the suicide of individuals and the micro-groups to which they belong can tell us a lot about the societies in which they live.

In this exploration of how people lived and died in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century New Mexico, Martina Will de Chaparro weaves together the stories of individuals and communities in this cultural crossroads of the American Southwest. The wills and burial registers at the heart of this study provide insights into the variety of ways in which death was understood by New Mexicans living in a period of profound social and political transitions. This volume addresses the model of the good death that settlers and friars brought with them to New Mexico, challenges to the model's application, and the eventual erosion of the ideal. The text also considers the effects of public-health legislation that sought to protect the public welfare, as well as responses to these controversial and unpopular reforms. Will de Chaparro discusses both cultural continuity and regional adaptation, examining Spanish-American deathways in New Mexico during the colonial (approximately 1700-1821), Mexican (1821-1848), and early Territorial (1848-1880) periods.

The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today's rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning--from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized "necro-waste," the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that there are two major currents running through the new death--reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. Pushing back against the folklorization endemic to anthropological studies of death practices and the whiteness of death studies as a field, the chapters strive to override divisions between the Global South and the Anglophone world, focusing instead on syncretization, globalization, and magic within the mundane.

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness. Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

If any anthropologist living today can illuminate our dim understanding of death's enigma, it is Robert Desjarlais. With Subject to Death, Desjarlais provides an intimate, philosophical account of death and mourning practices among Hyolmo Buddhists, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people from Nepal. He studies the death preparations of the Hyolmo, their specific rituals of grieving, and the practices they use to heal the psychological trauma of loss. Desjarlais's research marks a major advance in the ethnographic study of death, dying, and grief, one with broad implications. Ethnologically nuanced, beautifully written, and twenty-five years in the making, Subject to Death is an insightful study of how fundamental aspects of human existence--identity, memory, agency, longing, bodiliness--are enacted and eventually dissolved through social and communicative practices.

In "Necro Citizenship" Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to--and even dependent on--death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement.
Moving from medical engravings, seances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, "Necro Citizenship "explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. "Necro ideology," he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, "Necro Citizenship" successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" has resonated so strongly in the American imagination.

"How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?"

Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated their lives in new, unsuspected ways. The widows speak about how they relate to their children, their friends, to men. With powerful emotions they describe their husbands' final illnesses and deaths, and the challenging early days of widowhood. Disputing stereotypes about older women and widows, "The Widowed Self" allows the reader to visualize the impact of losing one's life partner and offers a new way of thinking about widowhood.

This new book by Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard fills a void in previous work on widowhood. Rather than seeing these women as unfortunate, passive victims of life, the reader will come to appreciate the strength and creativity with which these women face one of life's greatest challenges, a challenge that affects more than half of all women over the age of sixty-five.

Widows and their families, scholars, social workers and other professionals who work with older adults will all be interested in reading "The Widowed Self: The Older Woman's Journey through Widowhood."

Konflikte im Zusammenhang mit dem Themenkomplex Erben und Vererben sind unumganglich und Alltag in der Praxis des erbrechtlich tatigen Anwalts. Fur Erblasser kann sich nun die Frage stellen, ob die Aufnahme einer Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel in die geplante Verfugung von Todes wegen die Entstehung von Konflikten vermeiden oder reduzieren kann. Ebenso ist fraglich, ob die Erben oder Vermachtnisnehmer uberhaupt verpflichtet werden koennen ihren erbrechtlichen Streit durch ein Schieds- oder Mediationsverfahren beilegen zu mussen. Bei der Beantwortung dieser Fragen muss zuerst der erbrechtliche Konflikt naher betrachtet werden und anschliessend versucht werden, die Schieds- und Mediationsklausel rechtsdogmatisch einzuordnen. Nur so ist es moeglich, diese im System des Erbrechts zu platzieren und die Fragen nach der Rechtswirksamkeit einer letztwilligen Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel zu beantworten.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.

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.

'Ground-breaking. Everyone should read this book' Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score When it comes to understanding the connection between our mental and physical health, we should be looking at the exceptions, not the rules. Dr Jeff Rediger, a world-leading Harvard psychiatrist, has spent the last fifteen years studying thousands of individuals from around the world, examining the stories behind extraordinary cases of recovery from terminal illness. Observing the common denominators of people who have beaten the odds, Dr Rediger reveals the immense power of our immune system and unlocks the secrets of the mind-body connection. In Cured, he explains the vital role that nutrition plays in boosting our immunity and fighting off disease, and he also outlines how stress, trauma and identity affect our physical health. In analysing the remarkable science of recovery, Dr Rediger reveals the power of our mind to heal our body and shows us the keys to good health. 'In an era of incurable chronic diseases causing 60% of all deaths worldwide, this book provides one potential way out' Dr Mark Hyman, author of The Blood Sugar Solution 'Seasoned with the author's penetrating insights about healing, clearly articulated science and illuminating case histories, Cured opens genuine vistas of transforming illness into health' Gabor Mate, author of When the Body Says No

'A beloved genius of storytelling and illustration' Observer In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death... and doesn't like them much. Illustrated with Briggs's inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog... He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But most, like this one, are about his home in Sussex: Looking round this house, What will they say, The future ghosts? There must have been Some barmy old bloke here, Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, Did pictures for kiddy books Or some such tripe. You should have seen the stuff He stuck up in that attic! Snowman this and snowman that, Tons and tons of tat.

Death is inevitable, but our perspectives about death and dying are socially constructed. This updated third edition takes us through the maze of issues, both social and personal, which surround death and dying in Canada. Topics include euthanasia and medically assisted death, palliative care and hospices, the high incidence of opioid deaths, the impact of cyber bullying in suicide deaths, the sociology of HIV/AIDS, funeral and burial practices, the high rates of suicide in Canada and dealing with grief and bereavement, among others. Additionally, Auger explores alternative methods for helping dying persons and their loved ones deal with death in a holistic, patient-centred way. Each chapter includes suggested readings, discussion questions and in-class assignments.