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Showing 881 - 900 of 2362 items
By Carolyn Ambler Walter. 2003
Although there is extensive research on the loss of a spouse, predominantly focusing on the experiences of widows, much less…
attention is paid to bereaved partners not married to their significant other, whether or not the partners are of the same sex. This first-of-its-kind work explores both socially sanctioned and disenfranchised grief, highlighting similarities and differences. Combining a discussion of various theories of grief with personal narratives of grieving men and women drawn from numerous interviews, and detailed case study analysis, Carolyn Ambler Walter has produced a penetrating examination of the bereavement experiences of partners in varying types of relationships. She views narratives of widows, widowers, and bereaved domestic gay and lesbian partners from a postmodern perspective that breaks away from the traditional belief that the living must detach themselves from the dead in order to move on with their lives. Instead, building on the works of postmodern grief theorists such as Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, Walter views ongoing bonds with the dead as a resource for enriching functionality in the present, and as a key to looking to the future.By Allison R. Miller. 2021
The Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE) was a foundational period for the artistic culture of ancient China, a fact…
particularly visible in the era’s funerary art. Iconic forms of Chinese art such as dazzling suits of jade; cavernous, rock-cut mountain tombs; fancifully ornate wall paintings; and armies of miniature terracotta warriors were prepared for the tombs of the elite during this period. Many of the finest objects of the Western Han have been excavated from the tombs of kings, who administered local provinces on behalf of the emperors.Allison R. Miller paints a new picture of elite art production by revealing the contributions of the kings to Western Han artistic culture. She demonstrates that the kings were not mere imitators of the imperial court but rather innovators, employing local materials and workshops and experimenting with new techniques to challenge the artistic hegemony of the imperial house. Tombs and funerary art, Miller contends, functioned as an important vehicle of political expression as kings strove to persuade the population and other elites of their legitimacy. Through case studies of five genres of royal art, Miller argues that the political structure of the early Western Han, with the emperor as one ruler among peers, benefited artistic production and innovation. Kingly Splendor brings together close readings of funerary art and architecture with nuanced analyses of political and institutional dynamics to provide an interdisciplinary revisionist history of the early Western Han.By Ann Burack-Weiss. 2015
When she started working with the aged more than forty years ago, Ann Burack-Weiss began storing the knowledge and skills…
she thought would help when she got old herself. It was not until she hit her mid-seventies that she realized she had packed sneakers to climb Mount Everest, not anticipating the crevices and chasms that constitute the rocky terrain of old age. The professional gerontological and social work literature offered little help, so she turned to the late-life works of beloved women authors who had bravely climbed the mountain and sent back news from the summit. Maya Angelou, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, M. F. K. Fisher, Doris Lessing, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, and Florida Scott-Maxwell were among the many guides she turned to for inspiration. In The Lioness in Winter, Burack-Weiss blends an analysis of key writings from these and other famed women authors with her own wisdom to create an essential companion for older women and those who care for them. She fearlessly examines issues such as living with loss, finding comfort and joy in unexpected places, and facing disability and death. This book is filled with powerful passages from women who turned their experiences of aging into art, and Burack-Weiss ties their words to her own struggles and epiphanies, framing their collective observations with key insights from social work practice.By Gene Newman, Abby Schneiderman, Adam Seifer. 2020
A step-by-step program for getting your life in order, so you&’re prepared for the unexpected. The odds of getting…
hit by a bus are 495,000 to 1. But the odds that you&’re going to die some day? Exactly. Even the most disorganized among us can take control of our on- and off-line details so our loved ones won&’t have to scramble later. The experts at Everplans, a leading company in digital life planning, make it possible in this essential and easy-to-follow book. Breaking the task down into three levels, from the most urgent (like granting access to passwords), to the technical (creating a manual for the systems in your home), to the nostalgic (assembling a living memory), this clear, step-by-step program not only removes the anxiety and stress from getting your life in order, it&’s actually liberating. And deeply satisfying, knowing that you&’re leaving the best parting gift imaginable. When you finish this book, you will have:A system for managing all your passwords and secret codesOrganized your money and assets, bills and debtsA complete understanding of all the medical directives and legal documents you need––including Wills, Powers of Attorney, and TrustsA plan for meaningful photos, recipes, and family heirloomsRecords of your personal history, interests, beliefs, and life lessonsAn instruction manual for your home and vehiclesYour funeral planned and obituary written (if you&’re up for it)In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to…
minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of health and well-being, suffering, and death. In Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century.By Jeannie Banks Thomas, Diane Goldstein, Sylvia Grider. 2007
Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment,…
commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.This book explores the experiences of Muslims in the United States as they interact with the health care system during…
serious illness and end-of-life care. It shifts "actively dying" from a medical phrase used to describe patients who are expected to pass away soon or who exhibit signs of impending death, to a theoretical framework to analyze how end-of-life care, particularly within a hospital, shapes the ways that patients, families, and providers understand Islam and think of themselves as Muslim. Using the dying body as the main object of analysis, the volume shows that religious identities of Muslim patients, loved ones, and caregivers are not only created when living, but also through the physical process of dying and through death. Based on ethnographic and qualitative research carried out mainly in the Washington, D.C. region, this volume will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, sociology, public health, gerontology, and religious studies.By Tracie White. 2021
A Father, His Son, and an Unrelenting Quest for a CureAt the age of twenty-seven, Whitney Dafoe was forced to…
give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. Finally, even the sound of a footstep in his room became unbearable. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers from specialist after specialist, where at one point his 6'3" frame dropped to 115 lbs. For years, he underwent endless medical tests, but doctors told him there was nothing wrong. Then, finally, a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.In the 80s, when an outbreak of people immobilized by an indescribable fatigue were reported near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, doctors were at a loss to explain the symptoms. The condition would alternatively be nicknamed Raggedy Ann Syndrome or the Yuppie Disease, and there was no cure or answers about treatment. They were to remain sick.But there was one answer: Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.In The Puzzle Solver, journalist Tracie White, who first wrote a viral and award-winning piece on Davis and his family in Stanford Medicine, tells his story. In gripping prose, she masterfully takes readers along on this journey with Davis to solve one of the greatest mysteries in medicine. In a piercing investigative narrative, closed doors are opened, and masked truths are exposed as Davis uncovers new proof confirming that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a biological disease.At the heart of this book is a moving story that goes far beyond medicine, this is a story about how the power of love -- and science -- can shine light in even the darkest, most hidden, corners of the world.By Steve Leder. 2021
From the author of the bestselling More Beautiful Than Before comes an inspiring book about loss based on his most…
popular sermon.As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains.This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before.Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined.By Liz Tichenor. 2021
Called "such a sad, tough story, but finally so life-affirming, filled with spirit and love" by Anne Lamott, this is…
a raw and intensely affecting memoir by a young priest about loss of a child, its grief and its aftermath, and the hard-won joy that can follow.Liz Tichenor has taken her newborn son, five weeks old, to the doctor, from a cabin on the shores of Lake Tahoe. She is sent home to her husband and two-year-old daughter with the baby, who is pronounced "fine" by an urgent care physician. Six hours later, the baby dies in their bed. Less than a year and a half before, Tichenor's mother jumped from a building and killed herself after a long struggle with alcoholism. As a very young Episcopal priest, Tichenor has to "preach the Good News," to find faith where there is no hope, but she realizes these terrible parts of her own life will join her in the pulpit. The Night Lake is the story of finding a way forward through tragedies that seem like they might be beyond surviving and of carving out space for the slow labor of learning to live again, in grief.By Danielle Kean-Grassi. 2020
Grief is Only Suppressed Gratitude tells the empowering story of a young woman who finds her way into unconditional self-love…
and strength. The moment Danielle’s life turns upside down, she realizes that there is loving benevolence that can only be experienced when she chooses to embrace the hidden beauty behind her deepest fear. Even more, Danielle discovers something that she never expected to find…. There is soul-shifting, life-changing gratitude deep within the heart of profound grief. "This story is poignant, profound and a powerful journey back to self-love." Laura Jackson Loo "A deep and profound mother-daughter story bejeweled with inspirational compassion and love." Johanna Gardner "Reading the Journey of a mother and daughter’s love, adventure, heartbreak and eventually peace was inspiring. I laughed, cried, felt connected while reading and didn’t want to the book to end. Reading this was a true pleasure." Brooke Teeter Grief is Only Suppressed Gratitude is a self help memoir anyone moving through grief will relate to. This story helps readers transform grief into a source of unlimited power.By Linda Hale Bucklin. 2021
Linda Hale Bucklin made a pact with her husband, Bill, to communicate after death. Here she shares her personal experience…
and other stories of love and faith in the afterlife.We all deal with grief in different ways. Bill, my beloved husband of forty years, died unexpectedly after a short illness. As shocked and devastated as I was, I came to accept that his not lingering was his final earthly gift to me. Moreover, he honored our agreement, coming to me in dreams and through music, showing me that death may end a life, but a relationship with one we love endures.Bill’s guiding spirit shows me I am stronger than I think. As he encourages me to appreciate the beauty and wholeness of this life, I find unexpected riches in my family, friends, and nature. I am comforted, knowing Bill and I will be together again one day. I hope this book will bring solace, peace, and hope to others."If you have ever wondered if there is an afterlife, The Distant Shore will give you faith. This book will profoundly touch your heart, fill you with hope and joy, and encourage you to be more mindful in your daily life." ~SUSAN SMITH JONES, PHD"As Linda Bucklin’s friend and co-author of Come Rain or Come Shine: Friendships about Women, I’ve been one of her life witnesses for 25 years. The Distant Shore carries us into her lifelong quest for a deeper understanding and experience of love. We celebrate Linda’s successes, weep with compassion over her losses, and see our own lives differently as a result. Most of all, this book inspires us to reflect on our own connection to that distant shore." ~MARY KEIL, AUTHORAbout Linda Hale BucklinA fourth-generation San Franciscan, Linda Bucklin has worked in public relations and as a freelance writer. Her articles have appeared in House & Garden, Journal of Commerce, and Nob Hill Gazette. She now lives in Mill Valley and feels blessed to be surrounded by her three sons, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren.With Mary Keil, she wrote Come Rain or Come Shine (Adams Press, 1999), a book about women’s friendships. More recently, she received accolades for Beyond His Control (ePublishing Works, 2008), her memoir about growing up in a privileged family that was shattered with the suicide of her beloved mother. The book went on to become a New York Times Bestseller in paperback and ebook editions.The Love of Angels (ePublishing Works, 2016), her third book, a collection of stories, including the author’s own, chronicles encounters with angels, spiritual beings, and living people who show up to remind us of love’s power. In The Distant Shore, her fourth book, a combination of her thoughts and memories together with others’ stories, written after her husband died in 2016, she explores the possibility of life after death.Linda served for many years as a trustee of Grace Cathedral. A nationally ranked tennis player, in 2006 she became #1 in the U.S. in 60’s mixed doubles with her long-time partner Charlie Hoeveler. Linda now holds six national titles. In addition to her family and friends, her other passions include duplicate bridge (she recently became a Life Master), fly-fishing, and camping under the star-studded Montana sky.By James Kelman. 2016
Booker Prize winner James Kelman's new novel, Dirt Road, tells the story of a teenage boy who travels with his…
father from Scotland to Alabama to visit with relatives after the death of his mother. In the American South, he becomes swept up into the world of zydeco and blues. ""A powerful meditation on loss, life, death, and the bond between father and son. . . . Kelman has created a fully–realized, relatable voice that reveals a young man’s urgent need for connection in a time of grief." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) After his mother’s recent death, sixteen–year–old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving with a gift of two CDs of Southern American songs. On this first visit to the States, Murdo notices racial tension, religious fundamentalism, the threat of severe weather, guns, and aggressive behavior, all unfamiliar to him. Yet his connection to the place strengthens by way of its musical culture. Murdo may be young but he is already a musician.While at their relatives’ home, the grieving father and son experience kindness and kinship but share few words of comfort with each other, Murdo losing himself in music and his reticent and protective dad in books. The aunt, “the very very best,” Murdo calls her, provides whatever solace he receives, until his father comes around in a scene of great emotional release.As James Wood has written of this brilliant writer’s previous work in The New Yorker, “The pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half–finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present” with his characters. Dirt Road is a powerful story about the strength of family ties, the consolation of music, and one unforgettable journey from darkness to light.By Max Winter. 2017
[A] heartbreaking novel about the devastations of severed attachments.” —NPRFor Clay Blackall, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, the…
place has become an obsession. Here live the only people who can explain what happened to his brother, Eli, whose suicide haunts this heartbreaking, hilarious novel–in–fragments.A failed actor impersonates a former movie star; an ex–con looks after a summer home perched atop a rock in the bay; a broken–hearted salutatorian airs thirteen years’ worth of dirty laundry at his school’s commencement; an adjunct struggles to make room for her homeless and self–absorbed mother while revisiting a scandalous high school love affair; a recent widower, with the help of a clever teen, schemes to rid his condo’s pond of Canada geese. Clay compiles their stories, invasively providing context in the form of notes that lead always, somehow, back to Eli. Behind Clay’s possibly insane, definitely doomed, and increasingly suspect task burns his desire to understand his brother’s death, and the city that has defined and ruined them both.Full of brainy detours and irreverent asides, Exes is a powerful investigation of grief, love, and our deeply held yet ever–changing notions of home.By Rachel Kodanaz. 2019
Personal possessions tell a beautiful story of a person's life. Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time helps to capture…
and share these stories by providing tools for how to thin, repurpose, and redistribute these possessions so they continue to be with us today and for future generations. In the digital era, personal possessions include not only physical objects but also the accumulated data of a lifetime. These physical and digital footprints combine into an extension of ourselves and what we signify. Finding a new home for these items helps maintain a connection to those who are no longer physically with us. Their possessions embody memories that should be saved, shared, and treasured in the hands of those who want to forever be connected.By Lu Spinney. 2017
“Like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Beyond the High Blue Air is a spare, sharp memoir about…
the speed with which a comfortable existence can be blighted by grief.” —Bee Wilson, The Sunday Times Lu Spinney’s memoir Beyond the High Blue Air is at once a portrait of the fearlessness of familial love and the profound dilemma posed by modern medicine. When Spinney’s twenty–nine–year–old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead . . .” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss—Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness—that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home. They hold out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family’s intimate experience. And yet, as personal a book as this is, it offers universal meaning, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney’s story takes a turn. The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Spinney, cutting her last thread of hope, wishes for her son to die. And yet, even as she allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Because Miles is diagnosed as being in a “minimally conscious state” rather than a “persistent vegetative state,” there is no legal way to bring about his death, a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom. This profound book encompasses the lyrical revelations of a memoir like Jean–Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as the crucial medical and moral insights of a book such as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.By Marion Winik. 2019
Marion Wink is esteemed for bringing humor and wit to that most unavoidable of subjects: death. At last, Winik's critically…
acclaimed, cult favorites, Glen Rock Book of the Dead and Baltimore Book of the Dead, have been carefully combined in their proper chronological order, revealing more clearly than ever before the character hidden throughout these stories: Winik herself. Featuring twelve additional vignettes along with a brand–new introduction, The Big Book of the Dead continues Winik's work as an empathetic, witty chronicler of life.By Sylvia Brownrigg. 2008
When this novel's unnamed narrator meets the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layman's line in…
Zen philosophies), he offers her a friendly escape from her dreary domestic life. Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex–wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a "second marryer" leaves much to be desired. As their friendship develops, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais. There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layman's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Bristling with honesty and wit, Morality Tale explores the triangular complications that can befall a modern marriage and the tragicomic forces that surround them.By Elizabeth Farnsworth. 2017
"It has been a long time since I read a book so moving, plainspoken, and beautiful." —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize…
winner and author of MoonglowHow much of our memory is constructed by imagination? And how does memory shape our lives? As a nine–year–old, Elizabeth Farnsworth struggled to understand the loss of her mother. On a cross–country trip with her father, the heartsick child searches for her mother at train stations along the way. Even more, she confronts mysteries: death, time, and a locked compartment on the train.Weaving a child’s experiences with memories from reporting in danger zones like Cambodia and Iraq, Farnsworth explores how she came to cover mass death and disaster. While she never breaks the tone of a curious investigator, she easily moves between her nine–year–old self and the experienced journalist. She openly confronts the impact of her childhood on the route her life has taken. And, as she provides one beautifully crafted depiction after another, we share her journey, coming to know the acclaimed reporter as she discovers herself.By Laura Pritchett. 2017
Winner of the 2018 Colorado Book Award, "Pritchett writes with an evident love for the mountains and the people that…
call them home (Westword).The residents of Blue Moon Mountain form a tight–knit community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy are felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways. The housecleaner rediscovering her sexual appetite, the farrier who must take in his traumatized niece, the grocer and her daughter, the therapist and the teacher, reaching out to the world in new and surprising ways, and the ragged couple trapped in a cycle of addiction and violence. They will all rise and converge upon the blue hour—the l'heure bleu, a time of desire, lust, honesty—and learn to navigate the often confusing paths of mourning and love.Writing with passion for rural lives and the natural world, Laura Pritchett, who has been called ""one of the most accomplished writers of the American West,"" graces the land of desire in vivid prose, exploring the lengths these characters—some of whom we've met in Pritchett's previous work—will traverse to protect their own.