IRELAND – A bitter day, as a white coffin is carried along a West Cork hillside. Afterwards, red-eyed relatives drink whiskey at the graveside but tradition grants no shelter from cold or loss. At dusk, a motorboat bobs on a river as two strangers
IRELAND – We tend to judge things by their endings. You can have a bad day, but if it ends well, you go to sleep happy. In fact it’s scientifically proven, in studies about pain, that people’s memories of things and the taste an experience leaves
USA – At the end, they both required antipsychotics. Each had become unrecognizable to their families. On the day that Sandy Bem, a Cornell psychology professor, 65, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she decided that
What is it like to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O’Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow.
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
US – In July 2013, some 1.2 million Twitter users followed a remarkable series of tweets from NPR’s Scott Simon. He was sending updates from the hospital room where his mother was living the last days of her life.
Two years after reports suggesting his imminent death, Clive James still has plenty of life left in him. Ahead of a new collection of poetry next month, the polymath and former Observer TV critic discusses the poems written to his wife, his place in history and ‘dying by inches’
USA – So imagine how I feel when days after my mother dies I find myself staring down an endless line of black dresses and dark suits; a veritable who’s who of my family’s past, all waiting to do the awkward hug-or-no-hug tango.
USA – What we do with our dead can seem bizarre to outsiders. In a Tibetan tradition called sky burial, the deceased are cut into small pieces by a man known as therogyapa, or “breaker of bodies,” and laid atop mountains to be picked apart by vultures.
Liesl Graz’s husband, Gerard, wanted to die with professional help rather than face a slow, painful decline. She recalls their last
