Corporate coach Allison Clarke was on a plane to Atlanta when she realized that in order to fully live, she had to first be surrounded by death. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Not to Allison: a fearless mother of two who built her own consulting firm from the ground up. To Allison, it felt like a challenge, and as soon as she got home, she met with a funeral director. Her idea was simple: attend the funerals of exceptional strangers and learn from their adventurous lives. It began with the newspaper. She read countless obituaries, looking for people who interested her. It didn't matter specifically what they had done. Her thirty funerals ranged in scope from basketball fan to hundred-and-four-year-old Austrian immigrant. What mattered was the effect they'd had on the lives of their friends and families. Once the choice was made, Allison donned her black dress and headed to the cemetery. Some people might scoff at this behavior. However, when Allison thought back to the funeral of her own grandmother, she realized she would have been proud to have strangers there -- proud to tell them, "That was my grandma, and she was amazing." In the end, Allison attended thirty funerals over the course of sixty days. At each, she learned a little more about living life to the fullest ... and what is life if not lived bravely, passionately, and with heart? Allison Clarke is the founder and president of Allison Clarke Consulting, a company that teaches corporations, associates, and individuals how to reach their full potential. Previously, she was a master trainer with Dale Carnegie Training. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two daughters, Jenna and Jamie. Allison is a member of the National Speakers Association. To find out how to hire Allison to speak for or to train your company, visit her website: www.allisonclarkeconsulting.com.

Describing a great variety of funeral ritual from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures not only cope with corpses but also create an added value for living through the encouragement of afterlife beliefs. The explosion of interest in death in recent years reflects the key theme of this book - the rhetoric of death - the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life. This new edition is one third longer than the original with new material on the death of Jesus, the most theorized death ever which offers a useful case study for students. There is also empirical material from contemporary/recent events such as the death of Diana and an expanded section on theories of grief which will make the book more attractive to death counsellors.

The evidence of death and dying has been removed from the everyday lives of most Westerners. Yet we constantly live with the awareness of our vulnerability as mortals. Drawing on a range of genres, bands and artists, Mortality and Music examines the ways in which popular music has responded to our awareness of the inevitability of death and the anxiety it can evoke. Exploring bereavement, depression, suicide, violence, gore, and fans' responses to the deaths of musicians, it argues for the social and cultural significance of popular music's treatment of mortality and the apparent absurdity of existence.

This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years, different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on the continent of Europe. Irvine Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality - the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His scholarly and comprehensive study sets out to answer a number of important questions. What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? Death in Childbirth makes an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.

This is an examination of human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church. Luther's doctrine of salvation by faith alone made the foundation of the traditional funeral, intercession for the dead in Purgatory, obsolete. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

The inevitability of death-that of others and our own-is surely among our greatest anxieties. Mortality's Muse: The Fine Art of Dying explores how art, mainly literary art, addresses that troubling reality. While religion and philosophy offer important consolations for life's end, art responds in ways that are perhaps more complete and certainly more deeply human. Among subjects treated: the ars moriendi or "art of dying" tradition; the contrast between past and more recent cultural values; the religious consolation's value but shortcoming for some people; the role of art in offering a secular consolation; dying as a performing art; the philosophic ideal of good death; the lively appeal of carpe diem or living for the present moment; the elegiac sense of life; and the two opposite parts Mortality's Muse has played in dealing with war, the most senseless and unnecessary cause of death. The idea of an aesthetic sense of life forms the basis of these discussions. Human beings are makers in the largest sense of the word, and art represents everything they make-civilization itself with all its greatness and failings. Our civilization may ultimately be nothing but an evanescent blip in the cosmos. Even so, the creation of beauty, meaning, and purpose from disorder and suffering defines us as human beings. In the words of Robinson Jeffers, even if monuments eventually crumble and all art perish, yet for thousands of years carved stones have stood and "pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems."

The Last Choice establishes that preemptive suicide in advanced age can be rational: that it can make good sense to evade age-related personal diminishment even at the cost of good time left. Criteria are provided to help determine whether soundly reasoned, cogently motivated,and prudently timed self-destruction can be in one's interests late in life. In our time suicide and assisted suicide are being increasingly tolerated as ways to escape unendurable mental or physical suffering, but it isn't widely accepted that suicide may be a rational choice before the onset of such suffering. This book's basic claim is that it can be rational to choose to die sooner as oneself than to survive as a lessened other: that judicious appropriation of one's own inevitable death can be an identity-affirming act and a fitting end to life. Discussion of preemptive suicide goes beyond contributing to current widespread debate about assisted suicide. It is a matter tightly interrelated with other right to die questions and one bound to become a national issue. If there are good arguments for escaping intolerable situations caused by age-related deteriorative conditions, most of those arguments will equally support avoidance of those conditions. If assisted suicide becomes more generally acknowledged and accepted, preemptive suicide will almost certainly follow. It is crucial, then, to examine whether preemptive suicide constitutes a rational option for reflective aging individuals.

With the aspiration for a long life now achievable for many individuals, the status of old age as a distinct social position has become problematic. In this radical re-examination of the nature of old age, Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard reveal the emergence of a 'fourth age' that embodies the most feared and marginalised aspects of old age, conceptually linked to and yet distinct from traditional models of old age. Inspired by the authors' ground-breaking work on the third and fourth age and supported by extensive sociological, medical and historical research, Rethinking Old Age offers a unique and timely analysis of the fourth age as a 'social imaginary' that is shaped and maintained by the social, cultural and political discourses and practices that divide later life. It stands as a significant resource for students, academics and practitioners of sociology, ageing studies, gerontology, social policy, health studies, social work and nursing.

Are you ready to discover what lies beyond the ordinary experience of grief?

Sacred Grief offers an intriguing exploration of the far-reaching rippleeffect of our present-day opinions about surviving grief's emotionalroller-coaster and the unnecessary suffering our judgments unconsciouslypromote. You'll find comfort in discovering that there's anotherdimension to this universal experience--a dimension that fosters trust, kindness and compassion, peacefully heals, and steadfastly moves youtowards your soul's deepest desires and dreams.
Praise for Sacred Grief
"Because we will all have the experience, Sacred Grief is a compellingguide for everyone searching for the sweetness in life's great passages."
--Gregg Braden, author, "The Divine Matrix" and "The God Code"
"Sacred Grief is a holy handbook for gleaning the gifts of the journeycalled grief."
--Mary Manin Morrissey, Co-founder, Association for Global New Thought
"Sacred Grief is a welcome departure from the conventional advice about'surviving' grief."
--Jill Carroll, Ph.D., Executive Director, Boniuk Center for the Study andAdvancement of Religious Tolerance, Rice University
"I highly recommend this book to anyone that has experienced any type of loss in their livesand is willing to look at the loss through a different set of eyes. Tessman, in Sacred Grief, willlead the reader to a place of compassion for oneself, create a relationship with his/her own grief, and ultimately create a place of understanding and a healed soul."
--Irene Watson, Managing Editor, Reader Views
Learn more about this book at www.SacredGrief.com
Another great self-help book from Loving Healing press www.LovingHealing.com
SEL010000 Self-Help: Death, Grief, Bereavement
FAM014000 Family & Relationships: Death, Grief, Bereavement
SOC036000 Social Science: Death & Dying

Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The twentieth century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of human rights in far-flung prison camps.We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. "The Culture of Death" explores this moment to analyze our exposure to death in modern culture.

How do doctors and nurses communicate with frightened patients who are dying, address the needs and concerns of the patients, and help the patients arrive at an acceptance of death? This work deals with the relationship that the health care team has with the dying and how well that team is prepared to address the fears of the dying. In addition, the health care team must learn to deal with their own emotions and ignorance concerning death. This work should be of interest to those professions that deal closely with dying people.

Attitudes towards death are shaped by our social worlds. This book explores how beliefs, practices and representations of dying and death continue to evolve and adapt in response to changing global societies. Introducing students to debates around grief, religion and life expectancy, this is a clear guide to a complex field for all sociologists.

Chapter 12 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. Well-established scholars from a variety of disciplines - including sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and political sciences - use the social construction of death and dying to analyse a wide variety of meaning-making practices in societal fields such as ethics, politics, media, medicine and family.

This book offers a new approach by combining the disciplines of history, psychology, and religion to explain the suicidal element in both Western culture and the individual, and how to treat it. Ancient Greek society displays in its literature and the lives of its people an obsessive interest in suicide and death. Kaplan and Schwartz have explored the psychodynamic roots of this problem--in particular, the tragic confusion of the Greek heroic impulse and its commitment to unsatisfactory choices that are destructively rigid and harsh. The ancient Hebraic writings speak little of suicide and approach reality and freedom in vastly different terms: God is an involved parent, caring for his children. Therefore, heroism, in the Greek sense, is not needed nor is the individual compelled to choose between impossible alternatives.

In each of the first three sections, the authors discuss the issues of suicide from a comparative framework, whether in thought or myth, then the suicide-inducing effects of the Graeco-Roman world, and finally, the suicide-preventing effects of the Hebrew world. The final section draws on this material to present a suicide prevention therapy. Historical in scope, the book offers a new psychological model linking culture to the suicidal personality and suggests an antidote, especially with regard to the treatment of the suicidal individual.

The Segelberg Lecture Series explores the intersection of religious faith and public policy. This book contains the lectures of the Trust's fi rst series, which were focused on The Ends of Life. Dalhousie University's School of Public Administration managed the series through a lecture committee under the able leadership of the former Dean of Dalhousie Law School, Professor Innis Christie, Q.C.

Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father's hardware store after her parents' unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers' keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn't. Not until her life is overturned, again, when her marriage falls apart. Lou gives in to temptation, letting herself into Euphemia Rosenbaum's home. What follows is a tale of blackmail, break-ins, an unsolved mystery, and more secrets than Lou ever wanted to know. Lou must confront not only the lives of her neighbors, but the unspoken truths of her family and the doors within herself for which there are no keys. Told over the course of one long winter, Unlocking is a poignant and penetrating exploration of grief, community, family, and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves.

On a blustery night, detectives from the Massachusetts State Police knocked on Amy Gleason's door. Gleason, along with fellow nurse Kim Hoy, had helped a patient deal with pain and suffering at the end of her life. Now the patient was dead, and the two nurses were being investigated for murder. Both believed they had done the right thing, but they had no idea what it would cost them. In this captivating and powerful true story, Dr. Lewis M. Cohen uses the experiences of Gleason, Hoy, and the nursing assistant who accused them of murder to explore what happens when decisions about end-of-life care shift from the hospital to the courtroom and the church. Tracing this issue from the uproar over Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to the controversial figure of Jack Kevorkian, and to the legitimate threat of serial killer medical professionals, Cohen goes behind the scenes on both sides of this debate. He examines how advances in modern medicine have given us tremendous tools for prolonging life but have also forced us to address how we treat patients who are dying and suffering.

Do Funerals Matter? is a creative interweaving of historical, sociocultural, and research-based perspectives on death rituals, drawing from myriad sources to create a picture of what death rituals have been, and where, especially in the Western world, they are going. Death educators, researchers, counselors, clergy, funeral-service professionals, and others will appreciate the book's theory- and research-based approach to the ways cultural groups memorialize their dead. They will also find clear clinical and practical applications in the author's exploration of the five 'ritual commonalities' of death-related ritual practice, and help for professionals counseling the bereaved surrounding the funeral ritual. Based on nearly three decades of research and teaching on funeral rites, this volume promises to fill an important gap in the cross-cultural literature on bereavement while answering an important question for our generation: do funerals matter? Do Funerals Matter? is a creative interweaving of historical, sociocultural, and research-based perspectives on death rituals, drawing from myriad sources to create a picture of what death rituals have been, and where, especially in the Western world, they are going. Death educators, researchers, counselors, clergy, funeral-service professionals, and others will appreciate the book's theory- and research-based approach to the ways cultural groups memorialize their dead. They will also find clear clinical and practical applications in the author's exploration of the five 'ritual commonalities' of death-related ritual practice, and help for professionals counseling the bereaved surrounding the funeral ritual. Based on nearly three decades of research and teaching on funeral rites, this volume promises to fill an important gap in the cross-cultural literature on bereavement while answering an important question for our generation: do funerals matter?