BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SPECTATOR AND THE TIMES 'Fascinating.... Deeply disturbing... Brilliant' Sunday Times 'Powerful and moving.' Louis Theroux Meet Adam. He's twenty-seven years old, articulate and attractive. He also wants to die. Should he be helped? And by whom? In The Inevitable, award-winning journalist Katie Engelhart explores one of our most abiding taboos: assisted dying. From Avril, the 80-year-old British woman illegally importing pentobarbital, to the Australian doctor dispensing suicide manuals online, Engelhart travels the world to hear the stories of those on the quest for a 'good death'. At once intensely troubling and profoundly moving, The Inevitable interrogates our most uncomfortable moral questions. Should a young woman facing imminent paralysis be allowed to end her life with a doctor's help? Should we be free to die painlessly before dementia takes our mind? Or to choose death over old age? A deeply reported portrait of everyday people struggling to make impossible decisions, The Inevitable sheds crucial light on what it means to flourish, live and die.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound and persistent impact. A tragic loss of life, change to established patterns of life and social inequalities laid bare. It brought out the good in many and the worst in others and raised questions around what is truly important in our lives. In this book, academics, activists and artists come together to remember and to reflect on the pandemic. What lessons should we learn? And how can things be different when this is over? Sensitive to inequalities of gender, race and class, it highlights the experience of marginalised and minority groups and the unjust and uneven spread of violence, deprivation and death. It combines academic analysis with personal testimonies, poetry and images from contributors including Sue Black, Led By Donkeys, Lucy Easthope, Lara- Rose Iredale, Michael Rosen and Gary Younge. Taken together, this truly inclusive commemorative overview honours the experience of a global disaster lived up close and suggests the steps needed to ensure we do better next time.

Near death experiences fascinate everyone, from theologians to sociologists and neuroscientists. This groundbreaking book introduces the phenomenon of NDEs, their personal impact and the dominant scientific explanations. Taking a strikingly original cross-cultural approach and incorporating new medical research, it combines new theories of mind and body with contemporary research into how the brain functions. Ornella Corazza analyses dualist models of mind and body, discussing the main features of NDEs as reported by many people who have experienced them. She studies the use of ketamine to reveal how characteristics of NDEs can be chemically induced without being close to death. This evidence challenges the conventional 'survivalist hypothesis', according to which the near death experience is a proof of the existence of an afterlife. This remarkable book concludes that we need to move towards a more integrated view of embodiment, in order to understand what human life is and also what it can be. Ornella Corazza is a NDE researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2004-5 she was a Member of the 21st Century Centre of Excellence (COE) 'Program on the Construction of Death and Life Studies' at the University of Tokyo.

What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or voluntary death have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time? In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives. This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.

Just as everyone must die, almost everyone will deal with death among close friends or loved ones. This collection explores the often difficult issues of human relationships with the dying, as well as the many stresses and burdens faced by the survivors.

The intent of Death and Ethnicity emphasizes that death occurs to us as unique individuals living within particular sociocultural settings. Those who provide and plan services need to recognize both the differences among groups and the differences among individuals within these groups; and to provide options for those representative of their group as well as for those whose wants and needs are atypical. This book is valuable for those who plan projects, programs, courses, and services concerned with death and bereavement, and those who fund, plan, direct, and perform those services.

This collection of articles is an outgrowth of the Death, Dying, Bereavement and Widowhood Interest Group of the Gerontological Society of America and comprises empirical accounts of several distinct family losses: the death of a spouse, sibling, parent, child, and grandchild. These articles represent normative and non-normative losses; the juxtaposition of short-term and long- term bereavement reactions; cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons; sociological, psychological, and psycholinguistic research paradigms; national and regional level data; and qualitative and quantitative analytic strategies. The articles and their approaches are as diverse and varied as are the experiences they describe, yet each contributes something of value to the more singular and superordinate goal of understanding kinship bereavement in the later years.

Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society is an authoritative guide to the study of and work with major themes in bereavement. Its chapters synthesize the best of research-based conceptualization and clinical wisdom across 30 of the most important topics in the field, including the implementation of specific models in clinical practice, family therapy for bereavement, complicated grief, spirituality, and more. The volume's contributors come from around the world, and their work reflects a level of cultural awareness of the diversity and universality of bereavement and its challenges that has rarely been approximated by other volumes. This is a readable, engaging, and comprehensive book that will share the most important scientific and applied work on the contemporary scene with a broad international audience, and as such, it will be an essential addition to anyone with a serious interest in death, dying, and bereavement.

During a pandemic lockdown full of pyjama dance parties, life talks, and final goodbyes, a family helps a father die with dignity. In April 2020, journalist Mitchell Consky received bad news: his father was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer, with less than two months to live. Suddenly, he and his extended family -- many of them healthcare workers -- were tasked with reconciling the social distancing required by the Covid-19 pandemic with a family-based approach to end-of-life care. The result was a home hospice during the first lockdown. Suspended within the chaos of medication and treatments were dance parties, episodes of Tiger King, and his father's many deadpan jokes. Leaning into his journalistic intuitions, Mitchell interviewed his father daily, making audio recordings of final talks, emotional goodbyes, and the unexpected laughter that filled his father's final days. Serving as a catalyst for fatherly affection, these interviews became an opportunity for emotional confession during the slowed-down time of a shuttered world, and reflect how far a family went in making a dying loved one feel safe at home.

Every living thing must die, but only human beings know it. This knowledge can bring to the living, anxiety and despair or new richness and meaning. This volume explores the problems and possibilities of coping with this universal experience.

The Art of Life and Death explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being. Encompassing twenty years of working alongside persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York, Irving documents the radical but often unspoken and unvoiced transformations in perception, knowledge, and understanding that people experience in the face of death. By bringing an "experience-near" ethnographic focus to the streams of inner dialogue, imagination, and aesthetic expression that are central to the experience of illness and everyday life, this monograph offers a theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological contribution to the anthropology of time, finitude, and the human condition. With relevance well-beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, this book ultimately highlights the challenge of capturing the inner experience of human suffering and hope that affect us all of the trauma of the threat of death and the surprise of continued life.

Death, a topic often neglected by historians, is in this book given the attention it deserves as one of the most important aspects of personal and societal experience. Facing the "King of Terrors" examines changes in the roles and perceptions of death in one American community, Schenectady, New York, from 1750 to 1990. It combines an in-depth look at patterns of death in society as a whole with an investigation of personal responses to such cultural customs.

The Labour of Loss explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss during and after the First and Second World Wars. Based on an examination of private loss through letters and diaries, this study makes a significant contribution to understanding how people came to terms with the deaths of friends and family. Unlike other studies in this area, The Labour of Loss considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyzes the gendered dimensions of grief.

The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we can learn not only about the attitudes of prehistoric people to death and the afterlife, but also about their way of life, their social organisation and their view of the world. This ambitious new book reviews the latest research in this huge and important field, and describes the sometimes controversial interpretations that have led to rapid advances in our understanding of life and death in the distant past. It provides a unique overview and synthesis of one of the most revealing fields of research into the past, It creates a context for several of archaeology's most breath-taking discoveries, from Tutankhamen to the Ice Man, and will find a keen market among archaeologists, historians and others who have a professional interest in, or general curiosity about, death and burial.

In this introductory text on thanatology, Alan Kemp continues to take on the central question of mortality: the centrality of death coupled with the denial of death in the human experience. Drawing from the work of Ernest Becker, Death, Dying, and Bereavement in a Changing World provides a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach to the study of death, putting extra emphasis on the how death takes place in a rapidly changing world. This new, second edition includes the most up-to-date research, data, and figures related to death and dying. New research on the alternative death movement, natural disaster-related deaths, and cannabis as a form of treatment for life-threatening illnesses, and updated research on physician-assisted suicide, as well as on grief as it relates to the DSM-5 have been added.

Loss and consequent grief permeates nearly every life changing event, from death to health concerns to dislocation to relationship breakdown to betrayal to natural disaster to faith issues. Yet, while we know about particular events of loss independently, we know very little about a psychology of loss that draws many adversities together. This universal experience of loss as a concept in its own right sheds light on so much of the work we do in the care of others. This book develops a new overarching framework to understand loss and grief, taking into account both pathological and wellbeing approaches to the subject. Drawing on international and cross-disciplinary research, Judith Murray highlights nine common themes of loss, helping us to understand how it is experienced. These themes are then used to develop a practice framework for structuring assessment and intervention systematically. Throughout the book, this generic approach is highlighted through discussing its use in different loss events such as bereavement, trauma, chronic illness and with children or older people. Having been used in areas as diverse as child protection, palliative care and refugee care, the framework can be tailored to a range of needs and levels of care. Caring for people experiencing loss is an integral part of the work of helping professions, whether it is explicitly part of their work such as in counselling, or implicit as in social work, nursing, teaching, medicine and community work. This text is an important guide for anyone working in these areas.

Throughout the centuries, different cultures have established a variety of procedures for handling and disposing of corpses. Often the methods are directly associated with the deceased's position in life, such as a pharaoh's mummification in Egypt or the cremation of a Buddhist. Treatment by the living of the dead over time and across cultures is the focus of study. Burial arrangements and preparations are detailed, including embalming, the funeral service, storage and transport of the body, and forms of burial. Autopsies and the investigative process of causes of deliberate death are fully covered. Preservation techniques such as cryonic suspension and mummification are discussed, as well as a look at the ?recycling? of the corpse through organ donation, donation to medicine, animal scavengers, cannibalism, and, of course, natural decay and decomposition. Mistreatments of a corpse are also covered.

McIlwain (culture and communication, New York U.) examines Americans' shifting focus on death as a feared private experience to a no longer taboo topic of public discourse. Through a survey of death-related television programming since the 1970s, e.g., Six Feet Under and Crossing Over, he traces trends. He also discusses online virtual communities

When a family member or close friend dies, it can be difficult to know how best to help the children and teenagers involved. Someone Very Important Has Just Died is a practical book written for those caring for children and teenagers suffering a close bereavement. Intended for use immediately or soon after the death has occurred, this book gives practical and detailed guidance on what adults might say and do to help children.;This much-needed resource tackles the sensitive issues of what to tell children, how far to include them in the events immediately after the death, and how to tend to their physical and emotional needs. The material is suitable for anyone regardless of their background and beliefs, and is supplemented with information on where to go to obtain longer term bereavement support.;Someone Very Important Has Just Died is an ideal resource for professionals in all areas of work relating to bereavement. It is designed to be given to adults with children in their care at the time of a death.

"Alessia Ricciardi's The Ends of Mourning is a cogently argued and beautifully written work that deals with the fascinating and timely question of mourning. Ricciardi's book advances the existing body of work on trauma by considering the place of mourning in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. This place is, we learn, a missing place, for there is an important sense in which mourning is absent from the collective theoretical consciousness of our time; with a few exceptions, theory of the postmodern era has tended to promote a sense of the post-historical, as though we could somehow be simply free and clear of the past without ever having to mourn it." --Peter Connor, Barnard College
"Alessia Ricciardi's truly outstanding book makes a significant contribution to critical theory in general and to psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism in particular. In many respects, it will prove to be a landmark study. . . . The End of Mourning is an extensive, brilliant, and brilliantly executed exposition of a complex and challenging theoretical and historical argument: that twentieth-century culture and thought has been impoverished--in spite of a fascination and indeed obsession with all things historical--by refusal to consider the implications of Freud's emphasis on mourning as a proper way of relating to the past." --Ulrich Baer, New York University

As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites that ensure that the departed attains a "good state" after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world. This book is primarily about the priests and other kinds of "sacred specialists" who serve them, about the way in which they organize their business, and about their representations of death and understandings of the rituals over which they preside.

Death comes to all, and yet death is not the end. For some, death is the beginning of unending bliss, for others, unending despair. In this latest edition of the bestselling book One Minute After You Die, Pastor Erwin W. Lutzer weighs the Bible’s words on life after death. He considers:

• Channeling, reincarnation, and near-death experiences
• What heaven and hell will be like
• The justice of eternal punishment
• Trusting in God’s providence
• Preparing for your own final moment

Though the afterlife is shrouded in mystery, the Bible does peel back the curtain. Dr. Lutzer will help you understand what is on the other side.

May the reality of eternity quicken and comfort you today.

In zahlreichen Landern wird uber das Thema "Selbstbestimmung am Ende des Lebens" diskutiert. Dabei gehen die Auffassungen weit auseinander, in welchen Formen die Autonomie Schwerkranker und Sterbender rechtlich abzusichern ist bzw. welche objektiven Grenzen die Rechtsordnung der Selbstbestimmung und Selbstverwirklichung ziehen oder anderen Disziplinen (insbesondere der medizinischen Wissenschaft) uberantworten darf. Die hier vorgelegte Dokumentation umfasst 23 Landesberichte, die diese und weitere (vor allem zivilrechtliche) Fragen der Patientenautonomie am Ende des Lebens aus dem jeweiligen nationalen Blickwinkel aufarbeiten. Die Dokumentation soll dazu beitragen, auslandische Erfahrungen in die Diskussion um die Fortentwicklung des deutschen Rechts einzubringen; sie soll daruber hinaus aber auch den internationalen Diskurs um das rechtliche Umfeld von - im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes - "Lebensentscheidungen" fordern.
The topic of "patient autonomy at the end of life" is currently under discussion in various countries. The opinions differ about the legal means of securing the autonomy of fatally ill patients on the one hand and about the limits of selfdetermination on the other hand. This documentation contains 23 country reports presenting a thorough picture of the national regulations in the field of private law to safeguard the autonomy of patients at the end of their life. It was prepared as a contribution to the "63. Deutscher Juristentag 2000" (63rd German lawyers'conference) where (from the German point of view) the question will be discussed whether additional private law regulations are recommendable to safeguard the autonomy of patients at the end of life. The documentation also aims at intensifying the international discourse on the legal aspects of what may - in the utmost sense of the world - be called "life decisions.""