Presents the phenomena of grief and loss and the concept that death is not the end.

"Why do we die? Why can't we live forever? What happens to us after death? Moving between science and culture, After Life: Ways We Think About Death takes a straightforward look at these and other questions long taboo in our society. By showing the fascinating, diverse ways in which we understand death, both today and throughout our history, the book also shines a light on what it is to be human. Each chapter includes a brief telling of a death legend,...

"In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by deprivation -- material, emotional, sexual -- but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate. An expectant mother's worst fears about her husband's entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A...

""The thin knife that severed your tumor," writes Brooke Matson in these poems, "it cleaves me still." What to do when a world is split-terribly, wholly-by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives...

"A young child navigates grief after losing a beloved family pet and learns what it means for a loved one's presence to remain even after they are gone. Angus may be gone, but memories of him are still here: his tail wagging under the dinner table, his nails clicking on the floor, and his hopeful sniff when snacks are being prepared. Angus's presence is felt everywhere, until one day . . . it's not. In this poignant and beautiful picture book, a child...

"In a world that often chooses to ignore pain and suffering, J.S. Park provides an unflinching look at the one human experience that cannot be easily explained away: grief. As a hospital chaplain, he has seen all manner of sickness and pain -- terminal patients, estranged families, and victims of devastating accidents. Using stories from his own life experience and his many hours in the hospital, Chaplain Park unpacks the various losses that lead...

"After her brother's death from a congenital heart defect, twelve-year-old Lucy is not prepared to be the new kid at school -- especially in a grade full of survivors of a shooting that happened four years ago. Without the shared past that both unites and divides her classmates, Lucy feels isolated and unable to share her family's own loss, which is profoundly different from the trauma of her peers. Lucy clings to her love of math, which provides...

Poems about the various stages of grief, with 150 selections from a variety of 20th-21st century poets.

"Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer's evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn't...