The terminal diagnosis is given, the knock on the door comes, and someone you love is dying or has just died. Death happens every day, yet as one hospital chaplain said, "Most of the time we just live life as if it isn't an issue until it's in our face."

It's not as if death is a secret. It's on the news and in the newspaper daily, but we don't talk about it very much, almost pretending as if it won't happen to us or our loved ones. But by not talking and not preparing, we make dying and death scarier and more difficult than it needs to be. That is one of the messages that the storytellers in What Obituaries Don't Tell You: Conversations about Life and Death want to impart. Talk and prepare is a theme repeated over and over.

In these stories and interviews you are sure to find people and narratives that are meaningful to you, helping you heal from loss, assuring you that you are not alone in your experiences, and allowing you to find your voice and speak your truth in your own conversations about life and death.

You may also be surprised. Did you know that there is a strong correlation between whether a death is deemed good or bad, easy or difficult, and the relationships in a person's life, including one's relationship to religious or spiritual beliefs?

Whether you are a person who has lost a loved one, a person thinking about your own death and wanting to prepare for it, or a student or professional preparing to or already working with issues of death in any way, you may find that the information that helps you the most is not imparted to you in obituaries but in the stories behind the scenes.

Death is Serious is not a simple dignified, economical look into the funeral industry. It is a slap in the face look, with a bloody towel. Death is Serious presents itself like a virus in black and white through a collection of stories told as if you were listening to them in a bar. In graphic detail events which occurred behind and in front of that big green door in the funeral home are expressed that will captivate the curious, constipate the courageous and instigate conversation. Reading Death is Serious may cause serious emotional outbursts. The reader accepts all responsibility for reading Death in Serious.

The number of deaths due to substance abuse and addiction is difficult to calculate - the actual causes are varied, often hushed - and numbers are skewed though rising starkly. More immeasurable is the impact of these deaths on a community. Parents, friends, partners in business and life, coworkers, sons and daughters, and acquaintances of these casualties live with the grief. Their despair in turn affects everyone they contact. No community member is left unaffected by abuse of both legal and illicit drugs. The personal stories in Untimely relate experiences of people who have lost a loved one from substance abuse. These stories extend the legacies of the deceased and help survivors to deepen compassion for the afflicted and their untimely deaths. The wisdom that surfaces in these testimonials adds to the global discussion of substance abuse.

Death is a hard topic to talk about, but exploring it openly can lead to a new understanding about how to live. In this series of eighteen essays, college students examine death in new ways. Their essays provide remarkable ideas about how death can transform people and societies.

Alfred G. Killilea, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, teams up with former student Dylan D. Lynch and various contributors to share insights about a multitude of issues tied to death, including terrorists, child soldiers, Nazism, fascism, suicide, capital punishment and the Black Death.

Other essays explore death themes in classic and contemporary literature, such as in Dante, Peter Pan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Christopher Hitchens. Still others explore death in modern context, considering the work of Jane Goodall, the threat of death on Mount Everest, the origins of the "Grim Reaper," and how violent street gangs deal with death.

At a time when American politics suffers from deep ideological divisions that could make our nation ungovernable, our mutual mortality may be the most potent force for unifying us and helping us to find common ground.

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.

This collection of over 1100 epitaphs is not only the largest collection of epitaphs extant, it's the only one devoted to the epitaphs of ordinary people. Arranged by categories such as humor, eulogies, romantic, or borrowed quotes, it's an enlightening and sometime emotional window onto the final thoughts covering more than a thousand people. Sources of quotes have been annotated for relevance. Aside from being arranged by categories, each epitaph is indexed by first line and name(s) of the interred, as well as by cemetery. The majority of the entries are modern though some date as far back as the 1840s. All-in-all, an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of ordinary people and a reference book unlike any that have come before. It opens a new world in the study of folklore and anthropology. It mines untouched veins of gold. In many ways, epitaphs are haiku for the dead. They should be read with patience, discretion, and a glass of wine. Do not hurry through them.