A Sunday Times Bestseller March 2022 (Ireland) Soon, the lockdown would start. People would die alone, without any proper ceremony. Charlotte's death would be washed away, the first drop in a downpour. Nobody knew it then but hers would be the last good funeral of the year. It was February 2020, when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and acclaimed novelist in a new, colder light. He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. He saw he was mourning his former self, not Charlotte. The search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. He remembers his brother Simon, a suicide at thirty; the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, wars that are hard to explain and never really stopped; his habit of shedding baggage, an excuse for hurrying past and not dwelling on things. Moving, funny, and searingly honest, The Last Good Funeral of the Year takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present: 'Could any true story end any other way?'

The theme of death is an essential component of film narrative, particularly in how it affects the hero. Filmmakers from different cultures and backgrounds have developed distinct yet archetypical perspectives on death and the protagonist's response. Focusing on Western and Japanese period genre films, the author examines the work of John Ford (1894-1973), Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) and Sergio Leone (1929-1989) and finds similarities regarding death's impact on the hero's sense of morality.

Within popular culture, death is not the end, but instead a space where the dead can exert agency whilst entertaining the consumer. Popular culture enables the dead to be consumed by the living on a mass global scale, actively engaging them with issues of mortality. This book develops the sociological intersectionality between death, the dead and popular culture by examining the agency of the dead. Drawing upon the posthumous careers of the celebrity dead and organ transplantation mythology in popular culture the dead are shown to not be hampered by death but to benefit from the symbolic and economic value they can generate. Meanwhile the fictional dead - the Undead and the dead in crime drama - are conceptualised through morbid sensibility and morbid space to mobilise consumer consideration of mortality and even challenge the public wisdom that contemporary Western society is in death denial and that death is taboo. Death and the dead, within the parameters of popular culture, form a palatable and normative bridge between viewers and mortality, iterating the innate value and hidden depths of popular culture in the study of contemporary society. This book will be of interest to anybody who researches death, popular culture and questions of mortality.

Promoting Resilience offers a fresh perspective that views resilience through a sociological lens, emphasizing the significance of loss issues and highlighting a range of practice implications across a wide range of fields. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of contributors, the book provides a solid foundation for developing a fuller and more holistic picture of the many challenges associated with promoting resilience. Chapters present a range of sociological perspectives that cast light on trauma and vulnerability. Combining theoretical richness with practical insights, chapter authors bring a sociological lens to enrich understanding of loss and adversity. This volume offers a bedrock of understanding for students, clinicians, and researchers who want to extend and deepen their knowledge of the sociological aspects of overcoming life challenges.

From the ritual object which functions as a substitute for the dead - thus acting as a medium for communicating with the 'other world' - to the representation of death, violence and suffering in media, or the use of online social networks as spaces of commemoration, media of various kinds are central to the communication and performance of death-related socio-cultural practices of individuals, groups and societies. This second volume of the Studies in Death, Materiality and Time series explores the ways in which such practices are subject to 're-mediation'; that is to say, processes by which well-known practices are re-presented in new ways through various media formats. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary new empirical case studies and fieldwork from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Mediating and Remediating Death shows how different media forms contribute to the shaping and transformation of various forms of death and commemoration, whether in terms of their range and distribution, their relation to users or their roles in creating and maintaining communities. With its broad and multi-faceted focus on how uses of media can redraw the traditional boundaries of death-related practices and create new cultural realities, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in ritual and commemoration practices, the sociology and anthropology of death and dying, and cultural and media studies.

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it was pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral? In the tradition of Randall Munroe's What If?, Doughty's new book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious and candid answers to thirty-five urgent questions posed by her youngest fans. Readers will learn what happens if you die on an airplane, the best soil for mummifying your dog and whether or not you can preserve your friend's skull as a keepsake. Featuring illustrations from Dianne Ruiz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? will delight anyone interested in the fascinating truth about what will happen (to our bodies) after we die.

In order to understand how adults deal with children's questions about death, we must examine how children understand death, as well as the broader society's conceptions of death, the tensions between biological and supernatural views of death and theories on how children should be taught about death. This collection of essays comprehensively examines children's ideas about death, both biological and religious. Written by specialists from developmental psychology, pediatrics, philosophy, anthropology and legal studies, it offers a truly interdisciplinary approach to the topic. The volume examines different conceptions of death and their impact on children's cognitive and emotional development and will be useful for courses in developmental psychology, clinical psychology and certain education courses, as well as philosophy classes - especially in ethics and epistemology. This collection will be of particular interest to researchers and practitioners in psychology, medical workers and educators - both parents and teachers.

The letters Gillian Griffith wrote to her elderly, demented mother were never intended to be read - they were simply Gillian's way of dealing with her own anger and guilt towards her high-handed, infuriating and impossibly challenging mother. To Gillian's own surprise, "as the words bounced back at me off the page, magic happened". The letters began to morph into a book, and the writing of it gradually released Gillian from her mother's influence. The result is a powerful, touching, uplifting and often very funny account of one woman's emotional and practical battle with the chaos caused by dementia. This book (the title comes from a small piece of nonsense spoken by Gillian's mother) brings a new insight into the effects of dementia on those caught up in it. It will make a valuable and original contribution to the debate on dementia care.

Winner of the 2018 Media Ecology Association's Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction Winner of the Eastern Communication Association's Everett Lee Hunt Award A behind-the-scenes account of how death is presented in the media Death is considered one of the most newsworthy events, but words do not tell the whole story. Pictures are also at the epicenter of journalism, and when photographers and editors illustrate fatalities, it often raises questions about how they distinguish between a "fit" and "unfit" image of death. Death Makes the News is the story of this controversial news practice: picturing the dead. Jessica Fishman uncovers the surprising editorial and political forces that structure how the news and media cover death. The patterns are striking, overturning long-held assumptions about which deaths are newsworthy and raising fundamental questions about the role that news images play in our society. In a look behind the curtain of newsrooms, Fishman observes editors and photojournalists from different types of organizations as they deliberate over which images of death make the cut, and why. She also investigates over 30 years of photojournalism in the tabloid and patrician press to establish when the dead are shown and whose dead body is most newsworthy, illustrating her findings with high-profile news events, including recent plane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes, homicides, political unrest, and war-time attacks. Death Makes the News reveals that much of what we think we know about the news is wrong: while the patrician press claims that they do not show dead bodies, they are actually more likely than the tabloid press to show them-even though the tabloids actually claim to have no qualms showing these bodies. Dead foreigners are more likely to be shown than American bodies. At the same time, there are other unexpected but vivid patterns that offer insight into persistent editorial forces that routinely structure news coverage of death. An original view on the depiction of dead bodies in the media, Death Makes the News opens up new ways of thinking about how death is portrayed.

Across the contiguous 48 states, populations in states with more activist civic cultures have lower mortality than states that do not follow this model. Several different factors can be pointed to as causes for this discrepancy - net income, class inequality, and the history of settlement in each of the different states and regions. These observations are true of Non-Hispanic Whites and African Americans but not of American Indians, and Hispanics, neither of which is fully integrated into the state political culture and economy in which it resides. In Regional Cultures and Mortality in America, the struggles these various populations face in regard to their health are explored in terms of where they reside.

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past. Some authors capture their subjects in the most intimate of moments: killing and dying, grieving and remembering, and believing and despairing. Others uncover the intentional efforts of Southerners to publicly commemorate their losses through death rituals and memorialization campaigns. Together, these poignantly told Southern stories reveal profound truths about the past of a region marked by death and unable, perhaps unwilling, to escape the ghosts of its history.

Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries - of taste, of bodies, of reason - are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of 'gynaehorror': films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference; the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion; reproductive technologies, monstrosity and 'mad science'; the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood; and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and 'abject barren' bodies in horror. The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being misogynistic. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy.

About 30 percent of hospice patients report a "visitation" by someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions-from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New Guinea-report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the historical record. But in recent years, we have tended to explain them in either the fantastical terms of the supernatural or the reductive terms of neuroscience. This book is about how, when, and why our dead visit us. Allan Kellehear-a medical sociologist and expert on death, dying, and palliative care-has gathered data and conducted studies on these experiences across cultures. He also draws on the long-neglected work of early anthropologists who developed cultural explanations about why the dead visit. Deathbed visions conform to the rituals that underpin basic social relations and expectations-customs of greeting, support, exchange, gift-giving, and vigils-because the dead must communicate with us in a social language that we recognize. Kellehear emphasizes the personal consequences for those who encounter these visions, revealing their significance for how the dying person makes meaning of their experiences. Providing vital understanding of a widespread yet mysterious phenomenon, Visitors at the End of Life offers insights for palliative care professionals, researchers, and the bereaved.

Near-death experiences offer a glimpse not only into the nature of death but also into the meaning of life. They are not only useful tools to aid in the human quest to understand death but are also deeply meaningful, transformative experiences for the people who have them. In a unique contribution to the growing and popular literature on the subject, philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin examine prominent near-death experiences, such as those of Pam Reynolds, Eben Alexander and Colton Burpo. They combine their investigations with critiques of the narratives' analysis by those who take them to show that our minds are immaterial and heaven is for real. In contrast, the authors provide a blueprint for a science-based explanation. Focusing on the question of whether near-death experiences provide evidence that consciousness is separable from our brains and bodies, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin give a naturalistic account of the profound meaning and transformative effects that these experiences engender in many. This book takes the reality of near-death experiences seriously. But it also shows that understanding them through the tools of science is completely compatible with acknowledging their profound meaning.

A day in the life of Carla Valentine - curator, pathology technician and 'death professional' - is not your average day. She spent ten years training and working as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist: where the mortuary slab was her desk, and that day's corpses her task list. Past Mortems tells Carla's stories of those years, as well as investigating the body alongside our attitudes towards death - shedding light on what the living can learn from dead and the toll the work can take on the living souls who carry it out. Fascinating and insightful, Past Mortems reveals the truth about what happens when the mortuary doors swing shut or the lid of the coffin closes ...

Communication is at the heart of any complete understanding of the end of life. While it is true that individuals physically die as a single entity, the process of ending an individual life is located within a complex system of relationships and roles connected and constructed through communicative processes. In this volume, top scholars from numerous disciplines showcase the latest empirical investigations and theoretical advances that focus on communication at the end of life. This multi-contextual approach serves to integrate current findings, expand our theoretical understanding of the end of life, prioritize the significance of competent communication for scholars and practitioners, and provide a solid foundation upon which to build pragmatic interventions to assist individuals at the end of life as well as those who care for and grieve for those who are dying. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in Death and Dying, Communication and Aging, Health Communication, Life Span Development, Life Span Communication, Long term care, Palliative care and Social Work.

The issue of death has loomed large in Chinese cities in the modern era. Throughout the Republican period, Shanghai swallowed up lives by the thousands. Exposed bodies strewn around in public spaces were a threat to social order as well as to public health. In a place where every group had its own beliefs and set of death and funeral practices, how did they adapt to a modern, urbanized environment? How did the interactions of social organizations and state authorities manage these new ways of thinking and acting? Recent historiography has almost completely ignored the ways in which death created such immense social change in China. Now, Scythe and the City corrects this problem. Christian Henriot's pioneering and original study of Shanghai between 1865 and 1965 offers new insights into this crucial aspect of modern society in a global commercial hub and guides readers through this tumultuous era that radically redefined the Chinese relationship with death.

This collection of essays presents a contextual view of genocide. The authors, who are academic authorities and practitioners in the field, explore the legal treatment, but also the social and political concepts and historical dimensions of the crime. They also suggest alternative justice solutions to the phenomenon of genocide. Divided into five parts, the first section offers an historical perspective of genocide. The second consists of case studies examining recent atrocities. The third section examines differences between legal and social concepts of genocide. Part four discusses the treatment of genocide in courts and tribunals throughout the world. The final section covers alternatives to trial justice and questions of prevention and sentencing.

Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics-such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death-as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics.

How is the memory of traumatic events, such as genocide and torture, inscribed within human bodies? In this book, Paul Connerton discusses social and cultural memory by looking at the role of mourning in the production of histories and the reticence of silence across many different cultures. In particular he looks at how memory is conveyed in gesture, bodily posture, speech and the senses - and how bodily memory, in turn, becomes manifested in cultural objects such as tattoos, letters, buildings and public spaces. It is argued that memory is more cultural and collective than it is individual. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology, social psychology and philosophy.

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings-from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe-brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Although today in France church attendance is minimal, when death occurs many families still cling to religious rites. In exploring this common reaction to one of the most painful aspects of existence, Thomas Kselman turns to nineteenth-century French beliefs about death and the afterlife not only to show how deeply rooted the cult of the dead is in one Western society, but how death and the behavior of mourners have been politicized in the modern world. Drawing on sermons preached in rural and urban parishes, folktales, and accounts of seances, the author vividly re-creates the social and cultural context in which most French people responded to death and dealt with anxieties about the self and its survival. Inspired mainly by Catholicism, beliefs about death provided a social basis for moral order throughout the nineteenth century and were vulnerable to manipulation by public officials and clergy. Kselman shows, however, that by mid-century the increase in urbanization, capitalism, family privacy, and expressed religious differences generated diverse attitudes toward death, causing funerals to evolve from Catholic neighborhood rituals into personalized symbolic events for Catholics and dissenters alike--the civil burial of Victor Hugo being perhaps the greatest symbol of rebellion. Kselman's discussion of the growth of commercial funerals and innovations in cemetery administration illuminates a new struggle for control over funeral arrangements, this time involving businessmen, politicians, families, and clergy. This struggle in turn demonstrates the importance of these events for defining social identity.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In order to understand how adults deal with children's questions about death, we must examine how children understand death, as well as the broader society's conceptions of death, the tensions between biological and supernatural views of death and theories on how children should be taught about death. This collection of essays comprehensively examines children's ideas about death, both biological and religious. Written by specialists from developmental psychology, pediatrics, philosophy, anthropology and legal studies, it offers a truly interdisciplinary approach to the topic. The volume examines different conceptions of death and their impact on children's cognitive and emotional development and will be useful for courses in developmental psychology, clinical psychology and certain education courses, as well as philosophy classes - especially in ethics and epistemology. This collection will be of particular interest to researchers and practitioners in psychology, medical workers and educators - both parents and teachers.