Writing death: a personal essay (original) (raw)
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Uitgeverij, 2011
Writing Death opens a meditation on the possibility of mourning; of whether there is a subject, or even object, that one mourns—of whether one is mourning, can only mourn, the very impossibility of mourning itself. The manuscript is framed by two attempts at mourning—Avital Ronell’s “The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout” and Jeremy Fernando’s “adieu.” In-between—for this is where both pieces posit the possibility of attending to the passing, the memory, the fading of the person—is an attempt to think this impossibility. The text is continually haunted by the question of whether one is mourning the person as such, or a particular version of the person, a reading of the person. And in reading another, in attempting to respond to the other, one can never have the metaphysical comfort that one is reading accurately, correctly; in fact, one may always already be re-writing the person. Thus, all one can do is attempt to mourn the name of that person, whilst never being certain of whether her name even refers to her any longer. All one can do is write death.
Loss and Mourning: Writings on Death and its Appeal to the Reader
2006
How do writers deal with loss and mourning? Which response do they hope to evoke from their readers? In the absence of any mourners, Scott Fitzgerald himself takes up the role of prime mourner in The Great Gatsby. Proust prefers to immerse the reader in countless memories of his grandmother’s death. Thus he and the reader arrive at the idea of his own imminent death. Joyce emphasizes that death really is the appropriate response to life here and now, however happy it might seem. Finally, in my own ‘death novel’ I endeavour to detach the reader from the experience of loss and mourning. Instead, by using the first person singular narrator, the reader is made to see and experience the beauty of death. As the body of the boy is slowly hauled from the frozen lake, the onlookers drop to their knees one by one. They cross themselves and pray for the eternal life of the soul of this young boy. The last person to kneel and cross himself is the boy’s father. He is a self-acknowledged atheist,...
Death, Dying and Mysticism: The Ecstasy at the End, 2015
In the early 1970s, the death awareness movement publicized dying as a human experience, spearheaded by Kübler-Ross' On Death and Dying and other public education efforts on behalf of the dying and their families. One result was a sudden proliferation of personal narratives by the terminally ill and their caretakers, a literature whose intent was both to tell an individual's own story, and to warn the rest of us mortals what it would be like to be a prisoner of modern medicalized dying. Although most of the protagonists admired and trusted their doctors and nurses, the alien and depersonalized environment of high-tech hospitals was, as in Kübler-Ross, a target of bitter reproaches. Dying was both sad and frightening anyway; how could we have made it so much more so, by our futile efforts to defeat death at all costs? But the narratives did more than complain. They showed how people mobilized support and responded as suffering humans to the existential crisis of impending death. In almost all of these, the narrators find "acceptance" and a sense of peace, purpose and meaning as their life comes to an end. When a relative or close friend tells the story, the book may close with a funeral or an anniversary celebration, and with the assurance that something has been completed, and has been done well. Remember, these are published, carefully-edited narratives rather than "raw experience." Yes, there are some "bad deaths" and some very angry, bitter narrators-but these are the exceptions among the texts. Now, autobiographies as a genre flourish in an era when available standard cultural models of how to be an ideal human being no longer seem compelling. An underlying 1
Loss and Mourning: Writings on Death and its Appeal to the Reader 1
2020
Abstract. How do writers deal with loss and mourning? Which response do they hope to evoke from their readers? In the absence of any mourners, Scott Fitzgerald himself takes up the role of prime mourner in The Great Gatsby. Proust prefers to immerse the reader in countless memories of his grandmother's death. Thus he and the reader arrive at the idea of his own imminent death. Joyce emphasizes that death really is the appropriate response to life here and now, however happy it might seem. Finally, in my own 'death novel' I endeavour to detach the reader from the experience of loss and mourning. Instead, by using the first person singular narrator, the reader is made to see and experience the beauty of death. As the body of the boy is slowly hauled from the frozen lake, the onlookers drop to their knees one by one. They cross themselves and pray for the eternal life of the soul of this young boy. The last person to kneel and cross himself is the boy's father. He i...
Researching death: some reflections on life
Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, 2011
Purpose -The paper seeks to make reflections on some ethnographic work undertaken with dying patients. The reflections cover the practical and social implications of carrying out this work but, also the emotional impact it had on the author.
Life Writing and Death: Dialogues of the Dead
European Journal of Life Writing, 2020
One thing in life we can be certain of: death. But how we talk about death—its inevitability, its causes and its course, its effects, or its places—is susceptible to changing cultural conditions. Reviewing a history of death that begins in prehistory, the distinguished historian of death Thomas Laqueur doubts it is possible to comprehend (in both senses) the topic: ‘Our awareness of death and the dead stands at the edge of culture. As such they may not have a history in the usual sense but only more and more iterations, endless and infinitely varied, that we shape into n engagement with the past and the present’.
Coming to Terms with Death - Final Paper - Lauren Yarnell
2019
Coming to Terms with Death We will die one day, sooner or later. Traditionally, we approach death from a stoic perspective (Gawande, 2014, p.170). Dead bodies are covered up and quickly whisked away as if there is a shameful connotation affiliated with viewing them. The bereaved, who hide their grief to the point that no one would guess anything had happened, receive social praise. Philippe Ariès delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1973. He pointed out that at the start of the 1930s, there had been a cultural shift regarding how Western societies viewed death. "Death," he wrote, "would become shameful and forbidden." (Didion, 2006, p.45) We can attribute this dismissal of grieving in public based on contemporary trends. This epicurean philosophy dictates
Personal narratives about death and dying: a case study with nursing students
8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'22)
This study aimed to explore qualitatively students' meanings of a significant death or dying experience by describing the effects in the first-person: psycho-emotional and spiritual life reflections. Using a narrative-reflection approach, we performed a multiple case study. Ten nursing students from 3rd year palliative nursing course were selected based on their richeness experiences. Topics such as the timing of the death loss, the manner of death, role changes that followed after the death loss, and adjustment patterns were discussed. The role of the narrative is multi-faceted – contributing to the development of a student's identity, comfort, and help making sense of a 'senseless' event.
Mortality, 2023
Kenneth Doka's two seminal contributions to Death Studies and loss include the term Disenfranchised Grief, which initiated many studies on Transparent Bereavement, as well as raising extensive clinical attention to the phenomenon; and his book (with Terry Martin) 'Men Don't Cry, Women Do' on gender-based differences in the processing of loss, and specifically men's difficulty to express distress and be assisted by social networks during times of grief. By way of generalisation, I argue that Doka is a pioneer in what can be referred to as the study of 'Grief Regime'. Even more than that, and without him having meant to do so or maybe even been aware of it, he is also the leading contributor to the study of the 'Sociology of Grief'. Following his contributions hundreds of studies were initiated on topics involving the impact of social discourse on the ability to grieve. At the centre of Doka's new book, we find not the grievers, nor society or discourse, but the dying person. Here we see a clear transition from focusing on grief, to focusing on the 'phenomenology of the dying'. The dying person is the main character of the book, dictating its themes, its chapters and even its scientific concepts. Had Thomas Kuhn, the Sociologist of Science, who discussed how scientific paradigms are formed and how they closely and even violently protect their borders to prevent 'subversive' texts from penetrating scientific fields been alive today, he would undoubtedly have been intrigued to follow the book's reception in hegemonic scientific community, maybe even writing its preface. Each chapter of Doka's book 'captures' a delineated theme consistently recurring in the incredible life journey that Kenneth Doka has undergone. Into each theme he has deduced the most relevant moments, conversations and interactions that best correspond and illustrate it, showing how each theme exists in and characterises the dying person. Thus showing himself in a unique and exclusive matter (through conversations he held with those he accompanied, exceptional requests, memories that left their mark), while on the other hand, presenting themes that can be used to identify those who are in an 'End of life condition', having what can be identified as an 'End of life conversation'. This type of discourse is characterised by the persistent questions, passions, emotions and longings of this unique and emotional point in life. These themes, that have become the chapters of the book, were developed through unique interactions held by a unique researcher, who has dedicated his life to 'End of life interactions' with special people who have found in him the perfect partner to whom to expose their deepest emotions during this unique time. It should be said: as theoretical constructs, these chapters may have been perceived as quasi-legitimate in some academic circles, had they been included in a book on loss which is based on anything other than an ethnographic journey. But of course, Doka did not choose to include theoretical chapters in a deductive-scientific book about loss. The chapters were essentially dictated to him by his patients, following an inductive process. Those same chapters and themes are the organising and consistent categories which summarise the topics of conversation, the deliberations, thoughts and associations raised by his partners in dialogue, as they approached the end of their lives. They are an organisation of the empirics which the MORTALITY
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, 2020
Abstract & Contents Page: The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more. Table of Contents Introduction PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide – Introduction The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death – Brian McHale "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart – Donovan Sherman Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello – Daniel K. Jernigan Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives – Jan Alber Literature and the Afterlife – Alice Bennett The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones – Neil Murphy Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave – Philippe Carrard The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts – Jessica Goodman PART II Genres – Introduction Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature – Lesley D. Clement In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature – Karen Coats Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative – José Alaniz Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation – Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter Death and the Fanciulla – Reed Way Dasenbrock Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre – Ronald Schleifer PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality – Introduction Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment – Flore Coulouma A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife – Stacy Thompson Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition – Kelly McGuire Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners – Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric – Samuel Caleb Wee The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf – Ian Tan "Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry – Jen Crawford PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs – Introduction Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece – Arianna Gullo Fictional Will – Helen Swift Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare – John Tangney Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs – Carol Margaret Davison Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era – Jolene Zigarovich The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead – Angela Frattarola Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets – Laura Davies Biography: Life after Death – Ira Nadel PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation – Introduction "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern – Christopher Hamilton Paradox, Death, and the Divine – Jamie Lin Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing – Lara O’Muirithe Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry – Ivan Callus When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives – Rosalía Baena "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories – Graham Matthews PART VI Historical Engagements – Introduction On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions – Catherine Belling Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death – Catherine Hoffmann Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser – W. Michelle Wang Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor – Kit Ying Lye "Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages – Walter Wadiak Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn – Wanlin Li 42. Coda – Julian Gough