Posts Categorized: death

The most important – and hopefully impactful – thing about this book’s publication is the sentence “research studies show that unresolved grief is at the root of 15% of psychiatric referrals” and the publicity that fact and problem is getting due to numerous and favourable reviews.  It’s not the pain of grief – it’s the… Read more »

We’re used to seeing unconventional coffins at some funerals now, tho not many people decorate or paint their own. It does happen – I know an artist who’s painted someone else’s coffin for them and to their instruction.  And twenty years ago I knew a woman who, on knowing her cancer was definitely terminal, began… Read more »

Whilst death and love are probably the two biggest and constant themes of theatre in general, it’s good to see death being a central character in a number of new plays.  It’s all an encouraging sign of how our culture is opening up slowly but surely more and more to death, every act of creation… Read more »

This is the best book about dying and death in twenty years – not least in terms of its widespread publicity and public impact –  since ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ by Sogyal Rimpoche. The way we die has always been connected to the way we live. And so it is now. 200… Read more »

The Assisted Dying Bill, discussed in the Lords in July, probably won’t become law this time – but that paradigm changing moment in UK culture around death is definitely on the cards now. More Peers requested to speak on this bill than any other bill ever.  There were 120 speeches in the ten hour debate… Read more »

I’m writing this to give you a heads up about Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill and to ask you to support it. The bill- briefly introduced last May 2103 – gets its second reading sometime this spring/summer, which means it will be properly debated this time and could go further.  I hope so.  I agree… Read more »

I’ve had some responses and several conversations with friends about fraility in the last few days.  This follows on from my 30 Oct post, http://www.janparker.co.uk/how-more-and-more-of-us-are-dying-in-the-21st-century-and-how-doctors-choose-to-die/ and Peter Saul’s TED talk, about how more and more people are now dying, not suddenly or from a terminal illness, but from organ failure, or after years of dwindling capacity… Read more »

We live, on average, around 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago.  Isn’t that an astonishing sentence. I’m gonna have to read that again. This means there’s been a big shift in the way people die.  How we die has changed beyond all recognition in a single generation.  Despite the fact this has… Read more »

Fellow Dying Matters member James Norris has created  www.DeadSoci.al   a free social media tool that enables you to create a series of secret messages that are only published to your social networks once you die. “Ensure your digital afterlife is in order” it says on the site.  Jeez, I can’t even get my Facebook… Read more »

I have a sizeable death library.  In it are several books by people who wrote about the death of others.  CS Lewis and Ken Wilber wrote about their wives, Joan Didion about her husband, Simone de Beauvoir about her mother. What’s less common is for someone to write about their own process of dying. Observer… Read more »