Download or read book This Party s Dead written by Erica Buist and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we responded to death... by throwing a party? By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies. While her husband maintained a semblance of grace and poise, Erica found herself consumed by her grief, descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether any of them had also dropped dead without warning, unable to extract herself from the spiral of death anxiety... until one day she decided to reclaim control. With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety. This Party’s Deadis the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.

Download or read book Estimation of the Time Since Death written by Burkhard Madea and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estimation of the Time Since Death remains the foremost authoritative book on scientifically calculating the estimated time of death postmortem. Building on the success of previous editions which covered the early postmortem period, this new edition also covers the later postmortem period including putrefactive changes, entomology, and postmortem r

Download or read book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning written by Margareta Magnusson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *The basis for the wonderfully funny and moving TV series developed by Amy Poehler and Scout Productions* A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life. In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.

Download or read book Don t Sleep There are Snakes written by Daniel Everett and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Daniel Everett was a missionary, far from converting the Pirahãs, they converted him. He shows the slow, meticulous steps by which he gradually mastered their language and his gradual realisation that its unusual nature closely reflected its speakers' startlingly original perceptions of the world. Everett describes how he began to realise that his discoveries about the Pirahã language opened up a new way of understanding how language works in our minds and in our lives, and that this way was utterly at odds with Noam Chomsky's universally accepted linguistic theories. The perils of passionate academic opposition were then swiftly conjoined to those of the Amazon in a debate whose outcome has yet to be won. Everett's views are most recently discussed in Tom Wolfe's bestselling The Kingdom of Speech. Adventure, personal enlightenment and the makings of a scientific revolution proceed together in this vivid, funny and moving book.

Download or read book Continuing Bonds written by Dennis Klass and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1996. This new book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. The dominant 20th century model holds that the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief has been defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination reveals that this model is based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do. Presenting data from several populations, 22 authors - among the most respected in their fields - demonstrate that the health resolution of grief enables one to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased. Despite cultural disapproval and lack of validation by professionals, survivors find places for the dead in their on-going lives and even in their communities. Such bonds are not denial: the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present. Chapters examine widows and widowers, bereaved children, parents and siblings, and a population previously excluded from bereavement research: adoptees and their birth parents. Bereavement in Japanese culture is also discussed, as are meanings and implications of this new model of grief. Opening new areas of research and scholarly dialogue, this work provides the basis for significant developments in clinical practice in the field.

Download or read book People Who Don t Know They re Dead written by Gary Leon Hill and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2005-05-24 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In People Who Don't Know They're Dead, Gary Leon Hill tells a family story of how his Uncle Wally and Aunt Ruth, Wally's sister, came to counsel dead spirits who took up residence in bodies that didn?t belong to them. And in the telling, Hill elucidates much of what we know, or think we know, about life, death, consciousness, and the meaning of the universe. When people die by accident, in violence, or maybe they're drunk, stoned, or angry, they get freeze-framed. Even if they die naturally but have no clue what to expect, they might not notice they're dead. It's frustrating to see and not be seen. It's frustrating not to know what you're supposed to do next. It's especially frustrating to be in someone else's body and think it's your own. That's if you're dead. If you're alive and that spirit has attached itself to you, well that's a whole other set of frustrations. Wally Johnston, a behavioral psychologist, first started working with a medium in the 70s to help spirits move on to the next stage. Some years after that, Ruth Johnston, an academic psychiatric nurse, who'd become interested in new consciousness and alternative healing, began working with Wally to clear spirits who weren't moving on. These hitchhikers had attached themselves to the auras of living relatives or strangers in an attempt to hold on to a physical existence they no longer need. Through her pendulum, Ruth obtains permission from the higher self of both hitchhiker and host to work with them. Then Wally speaks with them, gently but firmly, to make sure they know they are no longer welcome to inhabit the bodies and wreak havoc on the lives of the living. Hill has woven this fascinating story with the history and theory of what happens at death, with particular emphasis on the last 40 years and the work of such groundbreaking thinkers as Elmer Green, Raymond Moody, William James, Aldous Huxley, Edith Fiore, Martha Rogers, Mark Macy, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Bruce Lipton, and a host of others, whose work helps inform our idea of what it is to live and to die. As it turns out, our best defense against hitchhikers is to live consciously. And our best chance of doing that is by paying attention and staying open to possibilities.

Download or read book The Work of the Dead written by Thomas W. Laqueur and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Download or read book Phone Calls from the Dead written by D. Scott Rogo and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bringing Out the Dead written by Joe Connelly and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-22 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps only someone who has worked for almost a decade as a medic in New York City's Hell's Kitchen--as Joe Connelly has--could write a novel as riveting and fiercely authentic as Bringing Out the Dead. Like a front-line reporter, Connelly writes from deep within the experience, and the result is a debut novel of extraordinary power and intensity. In Frank Pierce, a brash EMS medic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen, Connelly gives us a man who is being destroyed by the act of saving people. Addicted to the thrill ("the best drug in the world") and the mission of the job, Frank is nevertheless drowning in five years' worth of grief and guilt--his own and others': "my primary role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness." His wife has left him, he's drinking on the job, and just a month ago he "helped to kill" an eighteen-year-old asthmatic girl. Now she's become the waking nightmare of all his failures: hallucination and projection ("the ghosts that once visited my dreams had followed me out to the street and were now talking back"), and as real to him as his own skin. And in reaction to her death, Frank has desperately resurrected a patient back into a life now little better than death. In a narrative that moves with the furious energy of an ambulance run, we follow Frank through two days and nights: into the excitement and dread of the calls; the mad humor that keeps the medics afloat; the memories, distant and recent, through which Frank reminds himself why he became a medic and tries, in vain, to convince himself to give it up. And we are with him as he faces his newest ghost: the resurrected patient, whose demands to be released into death might be the most sensible thing Frank has heard in months, if only he would listen. Bringing Out the Dead is a stunning novel.

Download or read book Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories written by Randall Kenan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable collection of twelve short stories is about the diverse folk--black and white, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated--who live in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek. Among the memorable characters are Clarence Pickett, who at age three began receiving messages from beyond the grave and whose gift seems tied to a hog's ability to talk; matronly Ida Perry, haunted by a boy her judge husband may have drowned years before; Dean Williams, hired to seduce the richest black man in Times Creek, yearning after innocence while he betrays love.

Download or read book Death to Dust written by Kenneth V. Iserson and published by Gale Group Incorporated. This book was released on 2001 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our culture, we rarely speak about death -- partly because it is seen as a sort of pornography, shrouded in indecency and immersed in taboos; and partly because we know so little about it. Yet nearly everyone at some point has questions about what happens after death. At long last, here is a book to answer many of those questions: What physical changes occur to a dead body?

Download or read book From Here to Eternity Traveling the World to Find the Good Death written by Caitlin Doughty and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Doughty chronicles [death] practices with tenderheartedness, a technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

Download or read book The Coffin Confessor written by Bill Edgar and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2021-07-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you’ve never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish – a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace. Now imagine there’s a man who can take care of all that, who has no respect for the living, who will do anything for the dead. Bill Edgar is the Coffin Confessor – a one-of-a-kind professional, a man on a mission to make good on these last requests on behalf of his soon-to-be-deceased clients. And this is the extraordinary story of how he became that man. Bill has been many things in this life: son of one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters, homeless street-kid, maximum-security prisoner, hard man, family man, car thief, professional punching bag, philosopher, inventor, private investigator, victim of horrific childhood sexual abuse and an activist fighting to bring down the institutions that let it happen. A survivor. As a little boy, he learned the hard way that society is full of people who fall through the cracks – who die without their stories being told. Now his life’s work is to make sure his clients’ voices are heard, and their last wishes delivered: the small-town grandfather who needs his tastefully decorated sex dungeon destroyed before the kids find it. The woman who endured an abusive marriage for decades before finding freedom. The outlaw biker who is afraid of nothing . . . except telling the world he is in love with another man. The dad who desperately needs to track down his estranged daughter so he can find a way to say he's sorry, with one final gift. Confronting and confounding, heartwarming and heartbreaking, The Coffin Confessor is a compelling story of survival and redemption, of a life lived on the fringes of society, on both sides of the law – and what that can teach you about living your best life . . . and death.

Download or read book Taphonomy of Human Remains written by Eline M. J. Schotsmans and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A truly interdisciplinary approach to this core subject within Forensic Science Combines essential theory with practical crime scene work Includes case studies Applicable to all time periods so has relevance for conventional archaeology, prehistory and anthropology Combines points of view from both established practitioners and young researchers to ensure relevance

Download or read book Dining with the Dead written by Mariana Nuno Ruiz McEnroe and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dining with the Dead is an unforgettable cultural and culinary odyssey. Traditional, celebratory Mexican food is the soul of this one-of-a-kind cookbook. Make tamales, pozoles, pan de muerto, and many other festive, iconic dishes. Learn about altars, sugar skulls, and decorations. Unlock the essence of chiles, make scratch tortillas, and perfect the king of the moles. Highlights:? 112+ delicious recipes? 540+ beautiful and mouthwatering photos? 8 x 10-inch hardcover? Ingredients and how to find them and treat them? Numbered instructions? Photographic step-by-step instructions? Homemade foods, created from scratch? Crafting instructions included as well? Learn the origins of Día de Muertos? Learn about altars and ofrendas (offerings)? Venture into the night vigil at the cemetery in Mexico

Download or read book The Dead Moms Club written by Kate Spencer and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kate Spencer lost her mom to cancer when she was 27. In The Dead Moms Club, she walks readers through her experience of stumbling through grief and loss, and helps them to get through it, too. This isn't a weepy, sentimental story, but rather a frank, up-front look at what it means to go through gruesome grief and come out on the other side. An empathetic read, The Dead Moms Club covers how losing her mother changed nearly everything in her life: both men and women readers who have lost parents or experienced grief of this magnitude will be comforted and consoled. Spencer even concludes each chapter with a cheeky but useful tip for readers (like the "It's None of Your Business Card" to copy and hand out to nosy strangers asking about your passed loved one).

Download or read book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory written by Caitlin Doughty and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).