Showing titles in Death & Dying

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? How did a thousand skulls come to be stacked beneath a church in Kent? Why is the music hall star who sang "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea?

No one who listen to this book will ever again think of his or her own death in the same way. The first part of the book consists of a thought-provoking essay, in which Fingarette examines the metaphors that mislead us: death as parting, death as sleep, immortality as the denial of death, and selflessness as a kind of consolation. He also thinks through some of the more illuminating metaphors: death as the end of the world for me, death as the conclusion of a story, life as ceremony, and life as a tourist visit to earth.

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness.

De un modo sencillo, pero profundo, este libro nos habla del viaje completo que realizamos tras la muerte, explicando detalladamente cómo es nuestra vida en el mundo espiritual y la influencia que ella tiene en nuestra actual vida en la Tierra. Gracias a este conocimiento, encontramos respuestas a las cuestiones que siempre nos hemos planteado: ¿Dónde vamos tras la muerte? ¿A qué hemos venido? ¿Qué sentido tiene esta vida? ¿Por qué me suceden siempre las mismas cosas? ¿De qué manera pueden comunicarse los espíritus con sus seres queridos?

From spooky stories and real-life ghost hunting, to shows about murder and serial killers, we are fascinated by death—and we owe these modern obsessions to the Victorian age. Death and the Victorians explores a period in history when the search for the truth about what lies beyond our mortal realm was matched only by the imagination and invention used to find it. Walk among London’s festering graveyards, where the dead were literally rising from the grave. Visit the Paris Morgue, where thousands flocked to view the spectacle of death every single day.

Tapping their personal histories and drawing on numerous interviews, authors Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair, Ph.D., explore unexpected death and its role in the cycle of life. I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye provides survivors with a rock-steady anchor from which to weather the storm of pain and begin to rebuild their lives.

Dementia is an unmaking, a de-creation - an apocalypse of meaning. Since my father's slow-motion dying and his actual death in November 2014, I have been much preoccupied with dementia: by those who have it, by those who look after them, by the hospital wards whose beds are occupied by those in advanced stages of this self-loss, by the way society denies it, by the science of it, the art and literature about it, the philosophy, by what it means to be human, to have an identity. What is it to be oneself, and what is it to lose one's self?

Euthanasia is one of the most controversial issues in contemporary medicine, involving profound ethical, medical, and psychological dilemmas. This work explores the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide, challenging medical traditions by questioning the extent to which we have the right to decide the end of our lives. With technological advancements artificially prolonging life, new questions arise about the meaning of a "dignified death" and how far extreme suffering should be alleviated, even if it means shortening life.

In 2018, Joe Hammond, wrote a piece for the Guardian about the 33 birthday cards he was writing for his two sons. It was shared by thousands. In A Short History of Falling he tells the story behind that piece, about the experience of living with - and dying of - motor neurone disease (ALS). A Short History of Falling is not a lament. It is a deeply imaginative meditation on what it feels like to confront the fact that your family will persist through time without you.

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.

The case for assisted suicide can seem so compelling. Surely it can't be wrong to help desperate people to kill themselves? Don't we have a right to take our own lives in certain circumstances? There are no trite or easy answers. John Wyatt helps us to navigate the arguments with hearts and heads engaged, and above all with our Bibles open. There are practical and compassionate alternatives to assisted suicide, and as many who have gone before us have found, the end of our lives on this earth may turn out to be a strange and wonderful opportunity for growth and internal healing.

Explaining the important difference between grief and mourning, this book explores every mourner's need to acknowledge death and embrace the pain of loss. Also explored are the many factors that make each person's grief unique and the many normal thoughts and feelings mourners might have. Questions of spirituality and religion are addressed as well.

In the widening grey zone between life and death, doctors fight with doctors, families feel pressured to make tough decisions about their loved ones and lawyers are left to argue life-and-death cases in the courts. Meanwhile, intensive care patients are caught in purgatory, attached to machines and unable to speak for themselves. In Death Interrupted, Dr Blair Bigham seeks to help listeners understand the options facing them at the end of their lives.

This gripping narrative explores today's scientific pursuit of immortality, with exclusive visits inside Silicon Valley labs and interviews with the visionaries who believe we will soon crack into the aging process and cure death. We live in an age when billionaires are betting their fortunes on laboratory advances to prove aging unnecessary and death a disease that can be cured.

Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office chronicles the exploits of a diverse team of investigators at a coroner's office in Pittsburgh. Ed Strimlan is a doctor who never got to practice medicine. Instead he discovers how people died. Mike Chichwak is a stolid ex-paramedic, respected around the office for his compassion and doggedness. Tiffani Hunt is 21, a single mother who questions whether she wants to spend her nights around dead bodies.

Sharing his more than three decades of research into the afterlife and paranormal phenomena, award-winning documentary filmmaker Daniel Drasin shows that the continuity of human consciousness beyond the physical body and after death constitutes a legitimate area of scientific inquiry and that it can be objectively demonstrated. Drasin begins by revealing how our belief in materialism—through its effects on our social norms, taboos, and even language—has deeply constrained our civilization’s understanding of the nature of space, time, life, death, and consciousness.

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'. 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.

Fatima Ali won the hearts of viewers as the Fan Favorite of Bravo’s Top Chef in season fifteen. Twenty-nine years old, she was a dynamic, boundary-breaking chef and a bright new voice for change in the food world. After the taping wrapped and before the show aired, Fati was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Not one to ever slow down or admit defeat, the star chef vowed to spend her final year traveling the world, eating delicious food, and making memories with her loved ones. But when her condition abruptly worsened, her plans were sidelined.

'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In Lifescapes, the acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.

In this deeply affecting and uplifting book, Janet Wehr shares the real-life stories of her many years as a hospice nurse. Her first-hand account gives illuminating and comforting insight into the spiritual aspect of what occurs in the transition between life and death, highlighting the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection as it manifests in the dying process. It also gives a candid impression of hospices and hospice nurses and the services they can provide. All of Janet’s 46 personal stories are true, fascinating, heart-felt, and thought-provoking.