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Mongolian Air Sacrifice
The multi-stepped process for sending off a loved one with respectLooking back to my junior high history class (or trying to anyway), I only remember learning about Genghis Khan and the Mongolian empire because I found their culture the most fascinating. It occurs to me now that we never spent much time on the burial rites of the culture. In my attempt to rekindle some…
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Death Cafes Create a New Kind of Space to Talk about Death and Dying
They’re popping up all around the world now and prompting this important conversation.Sometimes you just need to talk about death. You don’t need a therapist. You don’t need a self-help book. You don’t need a support group. You just need to say the word death and talk about what it means to you and in your life. Jon and Sue Barsky Reid are spreading this idea around the…
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“Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo
It’s a classic for a reasonAt this point, it might feel superfluous to talk about Les Mis. It’s a literary classic that’s been adapted time and time again into film. To be honest, I’m tired of seeing trailers of Anne Hathaway belting her heart out in a dingy alleyway (even if she’s an amazing talent and Oscar-winning actress now).…
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The Afterlife of Billy Fingers by Annie Kagan
A sneak preview of the book and the afterlifeYears ago, I went to a past life regression therapy session with Dr. Peter Wright, an experienced hypnotherapist. I don’t tell many people this story for a couple of reasons. For one, most people I know aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea of reincarnation; for another, almost no one I know likes to talk about…
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Metaphors on Death
Cultural beliefs about life, death, and the afterlife dictate how people around the world experience and ritualize the end of life.A common tactic for understanding the complexity of death and end-of-life is to liken it to other parts of life that are a little simpler to comprehend. Though this is done commonly across cultures, the metaphors used differ from culture to culture. Here’s a smattering of ways various people visualize death around the world: The…
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Mourning and Transformation — Sifting for Gold
A mourning father tries to make sense of his experience through an academic analysis of grief.The following is an analysis by Jimmy Edmonds of a recent thesis “Mourning and Transformation — Sifting for Gold” by Fiona Rodman (MA University of Middlesex), a psychotherapist, and a dear family friend. Jimmy interprets some of Fiona’s ideas as they relate to his own experience with loss and grief after losing his son, Joshua. Joshua…
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“A Candle in The Wind”
A song that deals with the loss of a national celebrity also can be interchanged to deal with the loss of a loved oneBack in 1997, the world watched as Elton John sang and played the piano at the unexpected funeral of the beloved Princess Diana. He had transformed the words in one of his most hauntingly beautiful tunes, “Candle in the Wind”, to specifically tailor to the loss of Princess Diana. Through his words, Elton John helped…
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“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
On this fiftieth anniversary of The Bell Jar, we look at one of Plath’s most complex charactersRecently, The Guardian posted a tribute to Sylvia Plath with reflections from writers such as Jennifer Egan and Lena Dunham. Published fifty years ago, Sylvia Plath createdin The Bell Jar a surprisingly relatable suicidal character that navigates womanhood in 1950’s America. While Esther Greenwood comes across as an unreliable narrator by most standards, she also…
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