Contents:
Part 1 The Child's Perspective of Death: Children's Understandings of Death - Striving to Understand Death; Grieving Children: Can We Answer Their Questions. Part 2 The Child's Response to Life-Threatening Illness: Talking to Children About Illness; The Child and Life-Threatening Illness; Children and HIV: Orphans and Victims. Part 3 Children Mourning, Mourning Children: Grief of Children and Parents; Children and Traumatic Loss; How Can We Help; The Role of School. Part 4 Innovative Research: World of Dying Children and Their Well Siblings; The Empty Space Phenomenon: The Process of Grief in the Bereaved Family; A Sampler of Literature for Young Readers: Death, Dying and Bereavement.

This second edition contains 10 new essays. It addresses itself to certain basic issues inherent in a philosophy of death. Principal themes explored are: the meaning of death; the nature of the soul; and the prospects for immortality.

From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or homegoing ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead.

During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on racial segregation to secure their foothold in America s capitalist marketplace. With the dawning of the civil rights age, these entrepreneurs were drawn into the movement to integrate American society, but were also uncertain how racial integration would affect their business success. From the beginning, this tension between personal gain and community service shaped the history of African American funeral directing.

For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the hush harbors of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long and often violent struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. "To Serve the Living" offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.

Capital punishment is one of the more controversial subjects in the social sciences, especially in criminal justice and criminology. Over the last decade or so, the United States has experienced a significant decline in the number of death sentences and executions. Since 2007, eight states have abolished capital punishment, bringing the total number of states without the death penalty to 19, plus the District of Columbia, and more are likely to follow suit in the near future (Nebraska reinstated its death penalty in 2016). Worldwide, 70 percent of countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice. The current trend suggests the eventual demise of capital punishment in all but a few recalcitrant states and countries. Within this context, a fresh look at capital punishment in the United States and worldwide is warranted. The Routledge Handbook on Capital Punishment comprehensively examines the topic of capital punishment from a wide variety of perspectives. A thoughtful introductory chapter from experts Bohm and Lee presents a contextual framework for the subject matter, and chapters present state-of-the-art analyses of a range of aspects of capital punishment, grouped into five sections: (1) Capital Punishment: History, Opinion, and Culture; (2) Capital Punishment: Rationales and Religious Views; (3) Capital Punishment and Constitutional Issues; (4) The Death Penalty's Administration; and (5) The Death Penalty's Consequences. This is a key collection for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology, and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in prison service or in related agencies.

Does a dying child understand death? How can we help children who are dying? Originally published in 1993, this book concerns a young girl, Rachel, terminally ill with leukaemia. The book describes a series of drawings she made and shows how they reveal her inner experience, how she became fully aware that she was dying and even came to accept death. The result is a moving and informative story that will be invaluable to caregivers and families with a dying child. It provides new understanding of the experience of a dying child and suggests practical strategies for coping.

At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories, based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice, Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness and isolation. This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and, increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns of socialising, or their continuation. This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in the final stage of our lives.

Major religious traditions of the world contain perspectives of perennial importance on the topic of death and afterlife. Such concepts and beliefs are not only reflected directly in mortuary and funerary practices, but also inform patterns of beliefs and rituals that shape human lifestyles. Though evidenced in sacred texts, they cannot be fully understood in isolation by textual study alone. Rather, they must be explored in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the given religious system as rooted in an overall culture. Here thirteen scholars, each a specialist in a particular religious tradition, outline the beliefs, myths, and practices relating to death and afterlife. The volume introduction provides a framework for understanding the evolutionary relationships among world religions and the unity as well as the diversity of their quest for overcoming death. Part I comprises chapters on African religions representing the nonliterate religious experience and on ancient religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. Studies of these religions serve as background for comprehending concepts relating to death and afterlife in the major world religions, which are dealt with in Part II, on Western religions, and Part III, on Eastern religions. The particular method of approach to each tradition is determined by the nature of the material. With death and afterlife as the common focus, this group of scholars has brought to bear its diverse expertise in anthropology, classics, archaeology, biblical studies, history, and theology. The result is a text important for comparative religion courses and, beyond that, a book extending our understanding of human thoughts and aspirations. It offers aglobal perspective from which an individual can ponder his or her own personal issues concerning death and afterlife.

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity's advent and Islam's rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.

"The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia" provides the most thorough overview of the ethical and legal issues raised by assisted suicide and euthanasia--as well as the most comprehensive argument against their legalization--ever published.

In clear terms accessible to the general reader, Neil Gorsuch thoroughly assesses the strengths and weaknesses of leading contemporary ethical arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia. He explores evidence and case histories from the Netherlands and Oregon, where the practices have been legalized. He analyzes libertarian and autonomy-based arguments for legalization as well as the impact of key U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the debate. And he examines the history and evolution of laws and attitudes regarding assisted suicide and euthanasia in American society.

After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia, Gorsuch builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization, one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate--the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong. At the same time, the argument Gorsuch develops leaves wide latitude for individual patient autonomy and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and life-sustaining care, permitting intervention only in cases where an intention to kill is present.

Those on both sides of the assisted suicide question will find Gorsuch's analysis to be a thoughtful and stimulating contribution to the debate about one of the most controversial public policy issues of our day.

Konflikte im Zusammenhang mit dem Themenkomplex Erben und Vererben sind unumganglich und Alltag in der Praxis des erbrechtlich tatigen Anwalts. Fur Erblasser kann sich nun die Frage stellen, ob die Aufnahme einer Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel in die geplante Verfugung von Todes wegen die Entstehung von Konflikten vermeiden oder reduzieren kann. Ebenso ist fraglich, ob die Erben oder Vermachtnisnehmer uberhaupt verpflichtet werden koennen ihren erbrechtlichen Streit durch ein Schieds- oder Mediationsverfahren beilegen zu mussen. Bei der Beantwortung dieser Fragen muss zuerst der erbrechtliche Konflikt naher betrachtet werden und anschliessend versucht werden, die Schieds- und Mediationsklausel rechtsdogmatisch einzuordnen. Nur so ist es moeglich, diese im System des Erbrechts zu platzieren und die Fragen nach der Rechtswirksamkeit einer letztwilligen Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel zu beantworten.

This unique book recounts the experience of facing one's death solely from the dying person's point of view rather than from the perspective of caregivers, survivors, or rescuers. Such unmediated access challenges assumptions about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of dying, showing readers that -- along with suffering, loss, anger, sadness, and fear -- we can also feel courage, love, hope, reminiscence, transcendence, transformation, and even happiness as we die. A work that is at once psychological, sociological, and philosophical, this book brings together testimonies of those dying from terminal illness, old age, sudden injury or trauma, acts of war, and the consequences of natural disasters and terrorism. It also includes statements from individuals who are on death row, in death camps, or planning suicide. Each form of dying addressed highlights an important set of emotions and narratives that often eclipses stereotypical renderings of dying and reflects the numerous contexts in which this journey can occur outside of hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices.Chapters focus on common emotional themes linked to dying, expanding and challenging them through first-person accounts and analyses of relevant academic and clinical literature in psycho-oncology, palliative care, gerontology, military history, anthropology, sociology, cultural and religious studies, poetry, and fiction. The result is an all-encompassing investigation into an experience that will eventually include us all and is more surprising and profound than anyone can imagine.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler's survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.

The latest volume in this multidisciplinary series on key topics in evolutionary studies, Evolutionary Perspectives on Death provides an evolutionary analysis of mortality and the consideration of death. Bringing together noted experts from a variety of fields, the books emanate from conferences held at Oakland University, and are dedicated to providing wide ranging and occasionally provocative views of human evolution. The volume on death covers topics from biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology and philosophy, with contributors addressing how evolution informs the process of comprehending, grieving, depicting, celebrating, and accepting death. Among the topics covered: Evolutionary perspectives on the loss of a twin Nonhuman primate responses to death Death in literature Witnessing and representing the death of pets The role of human decomposition facilities in shaping American perspectives on death This insightful volume showcases groundbreaking empirical and theoretical research addressing death and mortality from an evolutionary perspective, demonstrating the intellectual value of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding psychological processes and behavior. Chapter 6 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures, explores death practices and beliefs, before and after death, around the non-Western world. It includes chapters on countries in Africa, Asia, South America, as well as indigenous people in Australia and North America. These chapters address changes in death rituals and beliefs, medicalization and the industry of death, and the different ways cultures mediate the impacts of modernity. Comparative studies with the west and among countries are included. This book brings together global research conducted by anthropologists, social scientists and scholars who work closely with individuals from the cultures they are writing about.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The five stages of grief, first formulated in this hugely influential work forty years ago, are now part of our common understanding of bereavement. The five stages were first identified by Elisabeth K?bler-Ross in her work with dying patients at the University of Chicago and were considered phases that all or most people went through, when faced with the prospect of their own death. They are now often accepted as a response to any major life change.

However, in spite of these terms being in general use, the subject of death is still surrounded by conventional attitudes and reticence that offer only fragile comfort because they evade the real issues. This groundbreaking book is still relevant ? giving a voice to dying people and exploring what impending death means to them, often in their own words. People speak about their experience of dying, their relief in expressing their fear and anger and being able to move forward to a state of acceptance and peace.

Ideal for all those with an interest in bereavement or the five stages of grief, this book contains a new extended introduction from Professor Allan Kellehear. This additional chapter re-examines On Death and Dying looking at how it has influenced contemporary thought and practice.

Social Palliation is a pioneering study on living and dying as articulated by first-generation Iranian and Ismaili Muslim communities in Canada. Using ethnographic narratives, Parin Dossa makes a case for a paradigm shift from palliative care to social palliation. Experiences of displacement and resettlement reveal that life and death must be understood as an integrated unit if we are to appreciate what it is like to be awakened to our human existence. In the wake of structural exclusion and systemic suffering, social palliation brings to light displaced persons' endeavours to restore the integrity of life and death. Dossa highlights the point that death conjoined with life is embedded within the socio-cultural and spiritual experience. Here, a caring society is not perceived in fragments, as is the case with traditional institutional care or care offered during end-of-life. Rather, Dossa draws attention to an organic form of caring, illustrated through the trajectories of storied lives. In exemplifying more humane aspects of social palliation, this book foregrounds sacred traditions to illustrate their potential to evoke deep-level conversations across socio-political boundaries on what it is like to live and die in the contemporary world.

Sabarl island--created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent--is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true islanders: persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity--of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society--is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the new ethnographies addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.

A mass fatalities response goes far beyond returning the remains of a loved one to surviving family members. Those charged with this grim but critical responsibility will find themselves immersed in multiple tasks involving diverse individuals, organizations, and priorities. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response examines multiple complex issues while providing practical guidance to communities and responders as they plan for, respond to, and recover from a mass fatalities incident. This book explores the immense array of tasks such as: Managing resources and personnel Protecting a potential crime scene Conducting a comprehensive search and recovery of the remains Identifying and returning the remains and personal effects Ensuring family members of the deceased are treated with compassion, dignity, and respect Making sure responders have the proper tools to complete their responsibilities Providing family members, responders, and the impacted community the necessary support to cope with the physical, spiritual, and emotional stressors of a mass fatalities incident The book explains in detail the functions performed at the mass fatalities operational sites, including the Disaster Site, Victim Identification Center, Family Assistance Center, and Staff Processing Center. It provides organizational charts with job descriptions detailing the roles and responsibilities for an effective leadership team and describes the management of the disaster site, presenting step-by-step procedures for search and recovery. The book also discusses the registration, initial interview, and Notification of Death for family members at the Family Assistance Center and covers best practices for the Victim Identification Center operations. Throughout, chapters emphasize the need for mental health services-exploring the essential elements of providing effective and compassionate support to surviving family members (including children), to responders and their families, and to the community. An increase in catastrophic disasters in recent years has highlighted the need for sound guidance outlining the protocol for handling these events. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response is an indispensable resource for this formidable task. Peter Teahen discusses the book in a video on the CRC Press YouTube channel.

The study of death has the capacity to bring together a range of policy areas. Yet death is often overlooked within policy debates in the UK and beyond, and within gerontology. Bringing together a range of scholars engaged in policy associated with death, this collection provides a holistic account of how death factors in social policy. Within this, issues covered include inheritance, palliative care, euthanasia, funeral costs, bereavement support, marginalised deaths and disposal practices. At the heart of the book, the volume recognises that the issues identified are likely to intensify and expand over the next twenty years, as death rates continue to rise.

Since the rise in deaths through Covid-19, there has been an increase in the need for personal, heartfelt ceremonies to celebrate the end of life. More and more people are questioning traditional ideas and realising that there are choices out there. Drawing upon her years of experience in working in the funeral industry, Sarah Chapman uniquely collates all the key information needed into a single comprehensive resource. This must-have guide will holistically support you from the moment someone dies to their funeral, while also empowering you to plan your own end-of-life care and ceremony. This step-by-step guide will take away the fear and uncertainty you may feel when faced with arranging the funeral of a loved one. It gives you back control in creating a fitting ceremony to celebrate their life, while also providing you with the tools to plan your own funeral in a way that is unique to you. It will help you to decide on the legacy you would like to leave for future generations, and you may even decide to plan your own living ceremony before you die.

Book & CD-ROM. International comparisons of mortality aimed at revealing age-specific and time-specific differences in survival between Denmark and nine developed countries have been carried out by estimating surfaces of ratios of death rates in the last decades. To gain deeper insights into this phenomenon comparative analyses of death rates by causes of death for Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan have been performed. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM including colour Lexis maps, graphs of trends in death rates by causes of death, animated graphs of common survival indicators and a Lexis program for producing Lexis maps.

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.