My neighbor died as I was finishing this essay. We were two weeks into the stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 […]
Plastered Skulls: What can a 10,000 year old tradition teach us about coping with death?
Teaching about Death and Burial “Design your own burial” is an activity on my course syllabus. No matter how many […]
Straightened Up and Dying Right? Queering Puritan Deathbeds
When I was ten, I was present at a close family friend’s deathbed, an experience that sparked my lifelong curiosity […]
A Different Kind of Expert
In the spring of 1813, Abigail Adams wrote to her friend Julia Rush inquiring after the death of Julia’s husband […]
Death before Birth: Pregnancy Loss and Funerals in England
A pregnancy loss is a site of tension, situated between waiting for the baby, the unanticipated loss, and the often […]
Dying Like the Savior, Dying Like the Saved
Sister Alberta Marie Hanley felt like Christ on her deathbed. Blood seeping into her eyes from a low platelet count, […]
Heart Transplantation, Democracy, and Collective Forgetting in Contemporary Spain
Throughout my life, Spain – the country where I was born and raised – has been the global leader in […]
Reconsidering How We Die
I arrived home ready to relax and watch The Crown after an intense work day, which included debriefing the family […]
Weaving Wool into Death: Burial in 17th-Century England
The rituals we use to honor someone in death often reflect the way that they lived, from their religion to […]
What to Expect When You’re Expiring: Pregnancy and Death in Seventeenth-Century England
On October 12, 1622, a 26-year-old English woman named Elizabeth Jocelin gave birth to her first child, a baby girl. […]
