On August 24, 2021, 98-year-old David Saunders died from COVID-19 at a hospital near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nearly two months […]
Screaming Over the Rubble: The Shifting Role of the Family in American Disaster Victim Identification
When the South Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, collapsed in the early hours of June 24, I shuddered to think […]
Irish Keens, Modern Grief, and the Digital Landscape of Mourning
In January 1833, an author known only as O’G published their musings on the Irish funeral cry, or caoine, in […]
Alone, Together: Memory and Death in a Pandemic
“You’re lucky, then, that your mom died before all this began,” my friend said. “At least you got to be […]
Dead Babies in Boxes: Dealing with the Consequences of Interrupted Reproduction
One morning in June 2019, two city workers in Lyon, France, pulled a plastic bag out of the river that […]
Burying the Dead, and Then Digging Them Up
About a week after my partner Clayton was murdered in 2015, I went back to his gravesite with one of […]
News from the Dead
On December 14, 1650, 22-year old Anne Greene was led up the gallows in Oxford. She had been charged with […]
The Deathbed and the Sound of Rebirth
What is the soundscape of the deathbed? Most often, for Chinese Buddhists, it has involved the sound of human voices […]
“Heroic Effort Beyond the Call of Duty”: Death Care Workers and the 1947 Texas City Disaster
On April 16, 2020, the New York Times published an op-ed about the challenges facing overwhelmed funeral directors around the […]
To Let Die: COVID-19 and the Banalization of Evil
The course of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a disturbing paradox as to how we deal with the disease. The […]
