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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Why We Need to Talk About Death Right Now
I can hear some of you say, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” That’s the same question American cartoonist […]
The Deathbed: A New Nursing Clio Series
This past fall, when we began work on a Nursing Clio series about death, we never imagined the world would […]
Ordinary Death in a Pandemic
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, shortly after noon, my mother, Carol Lenoir Price Swedberg, died in home hospice at the […]
Waiting for a Death Revolution: A Review of HBO’s Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America
I can’t decide what to do with my corpse. Embalming, the bread-and-butter of the American funeral industry, feels wrong. Is […]
