My neighbor died as I was finishing this essay. We were two weeks into the stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. When the ambulance came, I stood on the front porch and watched the paramedics don hazmat suits before entering his home. His wife stood on the street as they loaded him into… Read more →
Category: The Deathbed
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 times students see it on their handout and on the lecture screen, it takes them a minute to comprehend these words. Watching my twenty-something-year-old students think about their own mortality, their own death— sometimes for… Read more →
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 about what happens when a person moves from this life into whatever might or might not exist beyond it. Hence my interest in the Puritans. Few folks have expended more time and effort trying to… Read more →
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 physician Benjamin Rush.1 “[O]h how shall I address you. how offer the consolation I need for myself upon an occasion which has torn my heart in anguish, filled by Bosom with Grief, and so overwhelmed… Read more →
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 complicated grieving that follows. Although still often a taboo subject, pregnancy loss has been gradually attracting more recognition as a life event that does not benefit from being silenced. Support for people going through a… Read more →
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, the twenty-six-year-old told Sister Mary Mercy that her head felt tight, like the crown of thorns must have made Jesus’ head feel. Hanley took her last moments to wonder if she had done enough for… Read more →
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 organ donation and transplantation, a horn we toot frequently and proudly. We hear about this every time new data on organ donation becomes available, every time someone wants to make an argument about the goodness… Read more →
Reconsidering How We Die
I arrived home ready to relax and watch The Crown after an intense work day, which included debriefing the family of a person in hospice who had died that night. Although we’d advised the family about the often brutal nature of dying from throat cancer, it can be difficult to imagine for anyone who hasn’t… Read more →
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 their favorite color. People have strong preferences for what will happen to their body after they die and what kind of funeral they want. Twenty-four percent of UK adults have already chosen which songs they… Read more →
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. Nine days later, she died of puerperal fever, an infection of the genital tract — most likely from bacteria accidentally introduced by a birthing attendant during labor — that can cause fatal sepsis in postpartum… Read more →