Showing results for "The Essays" in Death & Dying

Bittersweetness recognises that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. As Bittersweet shows, our obsession with happiness is not making us happy, healthy or whole. It's only by embracing our darker emotions—as well as the light—that we discover our deepest meaning and connection, love and joy. It can change the way we work, the way we create and the way we love—for it is the hidden source of our love stories, moonshots and masterpieces.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers. Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, 20 writers face this fact.

¿Quién no ha sentido, al menos una vez en la vida, el deseo de alejarse del mundo? ¿Quién no ha soñado con dejarlo todo y desaparecer? La tentación de la huida, el motivo de la fuga mundi, es recurrente en nuestra cultura porque permanece vivo a lo largo de la historia, y siempre provoca una mezcla de fascinación, nostalgia y callado remordimiento. Para seguir su rastro, de la huida al desierto predicada en el siglo IV por el eremitismo cristiano al exaltado elogio de la evasión entonado por los hippies de la década de 1960, el sociólogo Rémy Oudghiri se ha deshecho de las herramientas habituales de su oficio.

How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.

Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer's, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace - and, ultimately, inspiration.