Showing titles in Death & Dying

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

Vanessa's husband, Paul, dies suddenly and tragically on their regular Sunday morning swim. How will she cope with her dilapidated house, her teenage children, the patients who depend on her? Will therapy help? Why do mysterious white feathers start appearing in unexpected places? Beautifully written and honestly relayed, Vanessa uses her professional skills to explore the many questions posed by unanticipated death and to try to find a way forwards.

Unexpected Loss and Grief Recovery takes you through the process of grieving, coping, and managing your emotions over time, so you can not only get along but also find a way forward that honors both your grief and your future.

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.

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.

What to Expect When You're Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What's the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?

We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences. In this revelatory audiobook, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we have little control and lays bare the cultural charades that shield us from this knowledge.

In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her. 88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilised catatonia. Her son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result. In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother - son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this audiobook is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, Jenn Ashworth emerged from lockdown with a compulsive need to walk—and to walk away. Armed with little more than the knowledge imparted by a two-day orienteering course and a set of maps, she embarked on the most epic of English walks: Wainwright's Coast to Coast. Guided not just by Wainwright's writing but also by daily letters from her friend Clive—facing an epic journey of his own—Jenn's pilgrimage soon becomes more than just walking: a chance to reconnect and excavate, to re-engage with the act of caring for others and for oneself.

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions - shock, sadness, fear - that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up? Kathryn Harkup turns her discerning scientific eye to the Bard and the varied and creative ways his characters die.

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?

From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world.

If you caught a glimpse of heaven, would you choose to comeback to life?

Investigative journalist Judy Bachrach has collected accounts of those who died and then returned to life with lucid, vivid memories of what occurred while they were dead, and the conclusions are astonishing. Clinical death - the moment when the heart stops beating and brain stem activity ceases - is not necessarily the end of consciousness, as a number of doctors are now beginning to concede.

Unlock a life of freedom and fulfillment with "The Art of Letting Go: Mastering Emotional Freedom, Overcoming Past Mistakes, and Embracing Change for a Fulfilling Life." This isn't just another self-help guide; it's your roadmap to breaking free from the chains of the past. Whether you're struggling with overthinking in relationships or learning how to let go of the past, this book delivers practical, powerful strategies to transform your life.

Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has tended thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love, meaning and grace. They reveal that there is hope beyond cure as they transition to focus on personal meaning. In this extraordinary and beautiful book, Dr Kerr shares his patients' stories and his own research pointing to death as not purely the end of life but as a final passage of humanity and transcendence.

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.

When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.

Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways.

What happens to consciousness during the act of dying? The most compelling answers come from people who almost die and later recall events that occurred while lifesaving resuscitation, emergency care, or surgery was performed. These events are now called near-death experiences (NDEs). As medical and surgical skills improve, innovative procedures can bring back patients who have traveled farther on the path to death than at any other time in history. Physicians and healthcare professionals must learn how to appropriately treat patients who report an NDE.

Rebecca Little and Colleen Long, childhood friends who grew up to be journalists, both experienced late-term loss, and together they take an incisive, deeply reported look at the issue, working to shatter taboos that have made so many pregnant people feel ashamed and alone.