The unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Paris on August 31st 1997 led to a period of mourning over the next week that took the world by surprise. Major institutions - the media, the royal family, the church, the police - for once had no pre-planned script. For the public, this was a story with an ending they had not anticipated. How did these institutions and the public create a cultural order in the face of such disorder? Both those involved in the mourning and those who objected to it struggled to understand the depth and breadth of emotion shaking Britain and the world.
Mourning was focused on London, where Diana's body lay, and on Diana's home, Kensington Palace. Throughout the city and especially in Kensington Gardens, millions left shrines to the dead princess made of flowers, messages, teddy bears and other objects. In towns and villages around the UK, this was repeated. The mourning was also global, with media dominated by Diana's death in scores of countries. The funeral itself had a record-breaking world television audience, and messages of condolence floated around the globe in cyber-space.
How unique was all this? Does it mark a shift in the culture of mourning, of the position of the monarchy, of the role of emotion in British culture? How does it compare with the mourning for other super-icons - JFK, Evita, Elvis, and Monroe? Was it media-induced hysteria? Or was it simply a magnification of normal mourning behaviour? Focusing on the extraordinary actions of millions of ordinary people, this book documents what happened and shows how a modern rational society coped with the unexpected in a proto-revolutionary week that left participants and objectorsalike asking 'why did we behave like this?

The unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Paris on August 31st 1997 led to a period of mourning over the next week that took the world by surprise. Major institutions - the media, the royal family, the church, the police - for once had no pre-planned script. For the public, this was a story with an ending they had not anticipated. How did these institutions and the public create a cultural order in the face of such disorder? Both those involved in the mourning and those who objected to it struggled to understand the depth and breadth of emotion shaking Britain and the world.
Mourning was focused on London, where Diana's body lay, and on Diana's home, Kensington Palace. Throughout the city and especially in Kensington Gardens, millions left shrines to the dead princess made of flowers, messages, teddy bears and other objects. In towns and villages around the UK, this was repeated. The mourning was also global, with media dominated by Diana's death in scores of countries. The funeral itself had a record-breaking world television audience, and messages of condolence floated around the globe in cyber-space.
How unique was all this? Does it mark a shift in the culture of mourning, of the position of the monarchy, of the role of emotion in British culture? How does it compare with the mourning for other super-icons - JFK, Evita, Elvis, and Monroe? Was it media-induced hysteria? Or was it simply a magnification of normal mourning behaviour? Focusing on the extraordinary actions of millions of ordinary people, this book documents what happened and shows how a modern rational society coped with the unexpected in a proto-revolutionary week that left participants and objectors alike asking 'why did we behave like this?

Mourning the Dreams is an accessible and moving account of parents' experiences of grief and recovery after losing an infant during pregnancy, childbirth, or within the first month of life. Drawing from the sociology of emotions, health research and psychology, her own experience, and a range of qualitative methods, Claudia Malacrida finds that bereaved parents not only grieve their child and its unrealized potential, but often find their personal experiences are at odds with social forces and prevailing assumptions about the nature of their loss and how they should react to is. She explores the meanings parents create as they face denial, silence, and other reactions from friends, family, communities, coworkers, the medical community, and even within spousal relationships. She also describes the courage and creativity of parents who create and negotiate meanings that help them grieve, recover, and manage relationships.

This is a book filled with activities to allow individuals, families, and groups in bereavement support groups, at retreats, memorial services, and conferences to acknowledge the death of a loved one or community member in a gentle but effective way. The rituals include information about the appropriate age for specific rituals, materials needed for them, a description of how to go about creating them, and suggested meditations, poems, and thoughts that can be read during rituals.

With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work provides an up-to-date examination of the ways people face dying and bereavement. In this third edition previous chapters are throrughly revised, and new contributors expand areas that have changed significantly. Reflecting the field's complex interdisciplinary character, the chapters cover such diverse areas as psychology, nursing, medicine, AIDS, family studies, sociology, education, philosophy, law, religion, the humanities and political science, whilst highlighting thanatology's core psychological and therapeutic caregiving dimensions.; First, the text offers broad examinations of death systems from the vantage points of various cultural, historical and disciplinary perspectives. The second section represents the core of the book, offering detailed surveys of the "data" of death, dying and bereavement as they relate to different phases of our encounter with death as an abstract possibility and concrete reality. Next are chapters addressing a cluster of death-related issues and challenges that confront us at both a societal and individual level - such as AIDS - and finally the volume closes with a few reflections on the complexity of contemporary thanatology, framing some issues and recommendations that deserve greater attention by scholars, researchers, policy makers and practitioners. Also included is a comprehensive resource bibliography on the topic.; This text is intended to be of use as a resource for all those interested in reading about death studies, both professionals and students alike.

'I have quite a bit of understanding of white man's ways, but it is difficult for me to understand this one.' An Australian Senate committee investigation of the Northern Territory's Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, the first legislation in the world that allowed doctors to actively assist patients to die, found that for the vast majority of Indigenous Territorians, the idea that a physician - or anyone else - should help end a dying, suffering person's life was so foreign that in some instances it proved almost impossible to translate. The Good Death Through Time asks how such a death became a 'thinkable'-even desirable-way to die for so many others in Western cultures. For centuries a good death - the 'euthanasia' - meant a death blessed by God that might well involve pain, for suffering was seen as ultimately redemptive. But in the Victorian age, when doctors started to treat the dying with painkillers as well as prayers, a painful death came to be thought of as an aberrant, dehumanising experience. As this book explores, the modern idea that a good death should be painless spurred sometimes troubling developments in palliative medicine as well as an increasingly well-organised assisted dying movement. Delving into what euthanasia activists, doctors, lawyers, religious leaders and lay people have thought and felt about dying, The Good Death Through Time shows that understanding the radical historical shift in Western attitudes to managing dying and suffering helps us better grasp the stakes in today's contestations over what it means to die well.

The purpose of this volume is to ask and propose a positive answer to the question: "Can we attend to the personhood of individuals within systems and cultures which are mass oriented?" One of the most interesting changes in contemporary thinking has been the emphasis on the unique person. While the distinction between a person (a unique rational being) and individual (one of several similar things) has long existed, it is in the twentieth century that we seem to have become fully conscious of this distinction. There is good reason for such as emphasis today. Repeatedly in this century the case of the person was deemed less important than some policy. Innocent persons slaughtered in the name of some "ism," political bombings and kidnappings, and mass unemployment to name but a few. The cause of our dehumanization seems to be the reduction of the individual person to a part of the political, economic or religious system.

This book, written in the genre of "Imaginal Psychology", presents the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. The "angels" it greets are the interior figures who greet the bereaved during the course of their mourning process. In memory, reverie, and dream, images of the dead return to heal and be healed. As the bereaved enter into relationship with these images, the grief in which they are sequestered is particularized and individualized into the precise nuances of significance which make mourning possible.

This book, written in the genre of "Imaginal Psychology", presents the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. The "angels" it greets are the interior figures who greet the bereaved during the course of their mourning process. In memory, reverie, and dream, images of the dead return to heal and be healed. As the bereaved enter into relationship with these images, the grief in which they are sequestered is particularized and individualized into the precise nuances of significance which make mourning possible.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Allison C. Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent. While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass graves, a fate brought into the public eye during the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice today is not unlike burials in the potter's fields of the colonial era. Burial is not the only option, of course, and Meier analyzes the rise of cremation, green burial, and new practices like human composting, investigating what is next for the grave and how existing spaces of death can be returned to community life. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

A Sunday Times Book of The Year A Mail on Sunday Book of The Year An Independent Book of The Year A The Times Book of The Year During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.

The definitive reference on the anthropology of death and dying, expanded with new contributions covering everything from animal mourning to mortuary cannibalism Few subjects stir the imagination more than the study of how people across cultures deal with death and dying. This expanded second edition of the internationally bestselling Death, Mourning, and Burial offers cross-cultural readings that span the period from dying to afterlife, considering approaches to this transition as a social process and exploring the great variations of cultural responses to death. Exploring new content including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology, this text retains classic readings from the first edition, and is enhanced by twenty-three new articles and two new sections which provide increased breadth and depth for readers. Death, Mourning, and Burial, Second Edition is divided into eight parts reflecting the social trajectory of death: conceptualizations of death; death, dying, and care; grief and mourning; mortuary rituals; and remembrance and regeneration. Sections are introduced through foundational texts which provide the ideal introduction to this diverse field. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals. * A thoroughly revised edition of this classic anthology featuring twenty-three new articles, two new sections, and three reformulated sections * Updated to include current topics, including organ transplantation, institutionalized care for the dying, HIV-AIDs, animal mourning, and biotechnology * Must reading for anyone concerned with issues of death and dying, as well as violence, terrorism, war, state terror, organ theft, and mortuary rituals * Serves as a text for anthropology classes and provides a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to all those studying death and dying

We live in a society where people struggle to look death in the eye. Death has become the territory of professionals and we rarely see a dead body, unless it is someone very close to us. Death has become hidden, and so more traumatic. This book shows that, if we start talking openly about death, it can change the way we live. It is a collection of stories and images about death, dying and bereavement. People from all walks of life share their experiences and what they have learned from accompanying others. Heartbreaking, angry, questioning and contradictory - laugh-aloud funny, even - the stories illuminate, inspire, reassure and inform. They are accompanied by commentaries from professionals working in end-of-life planning, health, bereavement and funeral care.

A wonderfully quixotic, charming and surprisingly uplifting travelogue which sees Jack Cooke, author of the much-loved The Treeclimbers Guide, drive around the British Isles in a clapped-out forty-year old hearse in search of famous - and not so famous - tombs, graves and burial sites. Along the way, he launches a daredevil trespass into Highgate Cemetery at night, stumbles across the remains of the Welsh Druid who popularised cremation and has time to sit and ponder the imponderables at the graveside of the Lady of Hoy, an 18th century suicide victim whose body was kept in near condition by the bog in which she was buried. A truly unique, beautifully written and wonderfully imagined book.

Our understandings of both ageing and spirituality are changing rapidly in the twenty-first century, and grasping the significance of later life spirituality is now crucial in the context of extended longevity. Spiritual Dimensions of Ageing will inform and engage those who study or practise in all fields that relate to the lives of older people, especially in social, psychological and health-related domains, but also wherever the maintenance and development of spiritual meaning and purpose are recognised as important for human flourishing. Bringing together an international group of leading scholars across the fields of psychology, theology, history, philosophy, sociology and gerontology, the volume distils the latest advances in research on spirituality and ageing, and engages in vigorous discussion about how we can interpret this learning for the benefit of older people and those who seek to serve and support them.

"Americans came to fight the Civil War in the midst of a wider cultural world that sent them messages about death that made it easier to kill and to be killed. They understood that death awaited all who were born and prized the ability to face death with a spirit of calm resignation. They believed that a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave. They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity. They grasped that death itself might be seen as artistically fascinating and even beautiful." from Awaiting the Heavenly Country

How much loss can a nation bear? An America in which 620,000 men die at each other's hands in a war at home is almost inconceivable to us now, yet in 1861 American mothers proudly watched their sons, husbands, and fathers go off to war, knowing they would likely be killed. Today, the death of a soldier in Iraq can become headline news; during the Civil War, sometimes families did not learn of their loved ones' deaths until long after the fact. Did antebellum Americans hold their lives so lightly, or was death so familiar to them that it did not bear avoiding?

In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark S. Schantz argues that American attitudes and ideas about death helped facilitate the war's tremendous carnage. Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent, Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.

Schantz addresses topics such as the pervasiveness of death in the culture of antebellum America; theological discourse and debate on the nature of heaven and the afterlife; the rural cemetery movement and the inheritance of the Greek revival; death as a major topic in American poetry; African American notions of death, slavery, and citizenship; and a treatment of the art of death including memorial lithographs, postmortem photography and Rembrandt Peale's major exhibition painting The Court of Death. Awaiting the Heavenly Country is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the Civil War and the ways in which antebellum Americans comprehended death and the unimaginable bloodshed on the horizon."

Embodied encounters with death affect humans deeply, with the power to crush, transform and strengthen individuals and relationships. Understanding that these encounters often have a musical accompaniment, this edited collection offers a range of critical, analytic, discursive and personal reflections on how music provides both a container and a medium for experiencing, processing and integrating embodied encounters with death. The collection showcases new and original interdisciplinary case studies written by authors from several different countries across Australia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and the UK. Taking an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive approach, this carefully curated collection elaborates embodied encounters with death through music across a variety of praxes and disciplines such as death & grief, queer studies, disability, philosophy, and more. Providing a mix of personal perspectives and insights on the impact of music and death alongside more conventional academic studies, the chapters reveal how music and human nature are intimately, and bodily, entwined. Framed by opening and closing chapters written by the team of three editors, this core text in the field provides a unique overview of the implications and ramifications of the embodiment of death through music and the musicalisation of death through the body, and signposts possibilities for further research.

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.

Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.

In this book, the author of 'True Crime Diary' and other popular crime book presents a vivid and shocking study of men entrusted with the ghastly duty of carrying out public executions. Individual hangmen whose careers are explored in this gruesome history include: Gregory Brandon, John Ketch, John Price, John Thrift and William Curry. Despite its many horrors, this book offers a fascinating gallery of outlandish figures, full of authentic details from contemporary sources of information. No serious student of crime will want to miss it; no connoisseur of the macabre will want to part with it.