A series of losses prompts s.e. smith to wonder why, if it’s inevitable, we tend to view death as failure.
dying
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
How Much is Too Much to Save a Dying Cat?
A series of losses prompts s.e. smith to wonder why, if it’s inevitable, we tend to view death as failure.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
Cory Taylor Answers Your Questions About Dying
To help demystify dying, Cory Taylor answers questions about what it’s like to have a terminal illness.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Questions for Me About Dying
Celebrated Australian novelist Cory Taylor was diagnosed with cancer in 2005. Rejecting the taboos that prevent humans from talking openly about death, she goes on the record with her answers to some of the most typical questions people have asked her about dying.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Death Doulas to the Rescue?
With the onset of death doulas, no one need die alone.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Death Trips
Is dying alone the worst possible thing that can happen? With the onset of death doulas, you need not impose on friends and relatives in your inevitable decline or suffer the shame of kodokushi, the Japanese term for ‘“lonely death,” meaning the quiet but messy end of a solitary life.’
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Rise of Embalming
Ironically, it was this desire to be close to the dead that ultimately helped usher bodies out of the home. Embalming—which advanced as a science around the same time as the Civil War—allowed for the corpses of men who had died on far-off battlefields to return home for some semblance of the Good Death. “Families […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Hospital Chaplain Reflects on Poetry and Dying
A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]