How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants seeking refuge from their war-torn homes, and the more banal declines in life expectancy in broad swaths of the United States—what kinds of death do we memorialize, and what kinds do we …
Tag Archives: Death
Anthony Stavrianakis’s Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide
Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide
University of California Press, 2020. 248 pages.
Everyone discovers an academic doppelgänger at some point. We invest time in projects that take years to develop with requisite hunts for external funding, time-consuming efforts to carry out research that aspire to some kind of broadly defined depth, the subsequent endless transcribing, analyzing and …
Stepping into the hospital side room: a place for death in England
I hovered in the doorway as the palliative care nurse who I was shadowing that day indicated I should. She entered the darkened side room to check on a male patient. I could barely make out his shape on the bed; it looked like he was slightly propped up and in a pale green hospital gown. Besides him in the …
Abou Farman’s On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience
Abou Farman
University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages.
Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and President Emeritus of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is of the opinion that most of us are caught in a “deathist”[1] trap. Aubrey de Grey, a noted gerontologist whose presence …
Mourning while fighting for justice: The first months of the NOI DENUNCEREMO association, Bergamo, Italy
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
This post was co-authored by members of CoMeSCov program who contributed to the development of research questions, data collection tools and data analysis: Firmin Kra, Francesca Mininel, Fleur Beauvieux, Carlotta Magnani , Sandrine Musso . (See bios below for affiliations).
The authors are researchers in the collective CoMeSCov research program: Containment and Health Measures to Limit Covid-19 Transmission: Social Experiences …
Burning down the house: When crisis becomes daily life in early-onset dementia
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not his real name, was the fourth person I interviewed in April 2015. Since he lived in a remote village in the east of the Netherlands, we met at a train station to …