Read
Anderson, Megory. Sacred Dying: Creating Rituals for Embracing the End of Life. 2003. Death may be inevitable, but dying alone or in fear does not have to be. Sacred Dying is theologian Megory Anderson's essential testimonial and handbook for creating a dignified, peaceful, and more sacred end to life.
Butler, Katie. The Art of Dying Well. 2019. This down-to-earth manual for living, aging, and dying with meaning and even joy is based on Butler’s own experience caring for aging parents, as well as hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated a fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths.
Callanan, Maggie, and Patricia Kelley. Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying. 2012. Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts—of wisdom, faith, and love—that the dying leave for the living to share.
Devine, Megan. It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
Offering a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we try to help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides―as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner―Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.
Ellison, Koshin Paley, Matt Weingast. Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care. 2016. Pioneers of palliative and end-of-life care as well as doctors, chaplains, caregivers and even poets offer wisdom that will challenge, uplift, comfort—and change the way we think about death.
Fersko-Weiss, Henry. Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death. 2017. Explores how the dying and their families can bring deep meaning and great comfort to the care given at the end of a life. Created by Henry Fersko-Weiss, the end-of-life doula model is adapted from the work of birth doulas and helps the dying to find meaning in their life, express that meaning in powerful and beautiful legacies, and plan for the final days.
Foor, Daniel. Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. 2017. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace.
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal. 2014. Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. 2008. Follows families who found in green burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off offered at the local funeral parlor.
Herring, Lucinda. Reimagining Death, Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials. 2019. Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways.
Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger. A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. 2019. Their book offers everything from step-by-step instructions for how to do your paperwork and navigate the healthcare system to answers to questions you might be afraid to ask your doctor, like whether or not sex is still okay when you’re sick. You’ll be walked through how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you’d hoped, and to how to talk to your children about your will.
O’Donahue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. 2008. A compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight offers readers comfort and encouragement at life’s thresholds, offering invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory.
Ostaseski, Frank. The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. 2017. An exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves. As a renowned teacher of compassionate caregiving and the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, Ostaseski distills the lessons gleaned over the course of his career, offering an evocative and stirring guide that points to a radical path to transformation.
Puri, Sanita. That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. 2019. With exquisite prose, keen insight, and endless intellectual curiosity, Puri shows us the ways that dying is woven into living and, as such, deserves not just acceptance but close attention, deep respect, even celebration. This is a lively and fascinating book that will be a crucial part of the expanding cultural conversation about how we think about death.
Roe, Gary. Shattered: Surviving the Loss of a Child. 2017. Hospice chaplain, and grief specialist Gary Roe uses his three decades of experience interacting with grieving parents to give us this heartfelt, easy-to-read, and intensely practical book. In Shattered, Roe walks the reader through the powerful impact a child's death can have - emotionally, mentally, physically, relationally, and spiritually.
Webster, Lee. Planning Guide and Workbook for Home Funeral Families. 2015. This home funeral-specific, all-in-one planning guide and workbook ensures that your family will have all the information needed to follow through with your final wishes for a home funeral or vigil. Task lists give everyone something to do and direction on how to do it. Leave a meaningful legacy of trust by writing it all down - and then have the conversation with friends and loved ones.
Wright Glenn, Amy. Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go. 2017. A look at the spiritual, emotional, and philosophical implications of end-of-life care. As a hospital chaplain, Amy Wright Glenn has been present with those suffering from suicide, trauma, disease, and unforeseen accidents and has been witness to the intense grief and powerful insights that so often accompany loss. She weaves together memoir, philosophical inquiry, and cutting-edge research on death/dying to chronicle how we, as individuals and as a culture, handle everything from grief to mortality.
Butler, Katie. The Art of Dying Well. 2019. This down-to-earth manual for living, aging, and dying with meaning and even joy is based on Butler’s own experience caring for aging parents, as well as hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated a fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths.
Callanan, Maggie, and Patricia Kelley. Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying. 2012. Through their stories we come to appreciate the near-miraculous ways in which the dying communicate their needs, reveal their feelings, and even choreograph their own final moments; we also discover the gifts—of wisdom, faith, and love—that the dying leave for the living to share.
Devine, Megan. It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
Offering a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we try to help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides―as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner―Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.
Ellison, Koshin Paley, Matt Weingast. Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care. 2016. Pioneers of palliative and end-of-life care as well as doctors, chaplains, caregivers and even poets offer wisdom that will challenge, uplift, comfort—and change the way we think about death.
Fersko-Weiss, Henry. Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death. 2017. Explores how the dying and their families can bring deep meaning and great comfort to the care given at the end of a life. Created by Henry Fersko-Weiss, the end-of-life doula model is adapted from the work of birth doulas and helps the dying to find meaning in their life, express that meaning in powerful and beautiful legacies, and plan for the final days.
Foor, Daniel. Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. 2017. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace.
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal. 2014. Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. 2008. Follows families who found in green burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off offered at the local funeral parlor.
Herring, Lucinda. Reimagining Death, Stories and Practical Wisdom for Home Funerals and Green Burials. 2019. Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways.
Dr. BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger. A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. 2019. Their book offers everything from step-by-step instructions for how to do your paperwork and navigate the healthcare system to answers to questions you might be afraid to ask your doctor, like whether or not sex is still okay when you’re sick. You’ll be walked through how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you’d hoped, and to how to talk to your children about your will.
O’Donahue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. 2008. A compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight offers readers comfort and encouragement at life’s thresholds, offering invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory.
Ostaseski, Frank. The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. 2017. An exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves. As a renowned teacher of compassionate caregiving and the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, Ostaseski distills the lessons gleaned over the course of his career, offering an evocative and stirring guide that points to a radical path to transformation.
Puri, Sanita. That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. 2019. With exquisite prose, keen insight, and endless intellectual curiosity, Puri shows us the ways that dying is woven into living and, as such, deserves not just acceptance but close attention, deep respect, even celebration. This is a lively and fascinating book that will be a crucial part of the expanding cultural conversation about how we think about death.
Roe, Gary. Shattered: Surviving the Loss of a Child. 2017. Hospice chaplain, and grief specialist Gary Roe uses his three decades of experience interacting with grieving parents to give us this heartfelt, easy-to-read, and intensely practical book. In Shattered, Roe walks the reader through the powerful impact a child's death can have - emotionally, mentally, physically, relationally, and spiritually.
Webster, Lee. Planning Guide and Workbook for Home Funeral Families. 2015. This home funeral-specific, all-in-one planning guide and workbook ensures that your family will have all the information needed to follow through with your final wishes for a home funeral or vigil. Task lists give everyone something to do and direction on how to do it. Leave a meaningful legacy of trust by writing it all down - and then have the conversation with friends and loved ones.
Wright Glenn, Amy. Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go. 2017. A look at the spiritual, emotional, and philosophical implications of end-of-life care. As a hospital chaplain, Amy Wright Glenn has been present with those suffering from suicide, trauma, disease, and unforeseen accidents and has been witness to the intense grief and powerful insights that so often accompany loss. She weaves together memoir, philosophical inquiry, and cutting-edge research on death/dying to chronicle how we, as individuals and as a culture, handle everything from grief to mortality.
Watch
What I learned about life from death, Jane Whitlock
Jane Whitlock, aka, Doula Jane, is an end-of-life doula. Whitlock provides guidance and emotional support for individuals and families through the end-of-life process. Why is it okay to ask strangers at the supermarket about their pregnancy but not about their impending death?
Virtual coffee date with Death Doula, Jane Whitlock
Jane Whitlock talks openly over a cup of coffee about what is the role of being an End-of-Life Doula.
End Game This Academy Award-nominated short documentary explores the difficult choices patients and their loved ones face at the end of life and how their care teams help them navigate this experience. Currently streaming on Netflix
Coco Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer. Availble for online streaming.
Defining Hope shows the current state of the end-of-life experience. The film serves as a powerful reminder that ending well looks different for everyone and that we are empowered to make choices that align with our wishes. Available for online streaming.
A Will for the Woods What if our last act could be a gift to the planet? Determined that his final resting place will benefit the earth, musician, psychiatrist, and folk dancer Clark Wang prepares for his own green burial while battling lymphoma.
The Order of the Good Death The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears — whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.
Jane Whitlock, aka, Doula Jane, is an end-of-life doula. Whitlock provides guidance and emotional support for individuals and families through the end-of-life process. Why is it okay to ask strangers at the supermarket about their pregnancy but not about their impending death?
Virtual coffee date with Death Doula, Jane Whitlock
Jane Whitlock talks openly over a cup of coffee about what is the role of being an End-of-Life Doula.
End Game This Academy Award-nominated short documentary explores the difficult choices patients and their loved ones face at the end of life and how their care teams help them navigate this experience. Currently streaming on Netflix
Coco Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer. Availble for online streaming.
Defining Hope shows the current state of the end-of-life experience. The film serves as a powerful reminder that ending well looks different for everyone and that we are empowered to make choices that align with our wishes. Available for online streaming.
A Will for the Woods What if our last act could be a gift to the planet? Determined that his final resting place will benefit the earth, musician, psychiatrist, and folk dancer Clark Wang prepares for his own green burial while battling lymphoma.
The Order of the Good Death The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears — whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.
Listen
End of life University If you are searching for information about aging, later life, and death and dying, you will LOVE this podcast! EOLU features interviews with experts from all aspects of the end-of-life and is hosted by hospice physician Dr. Karen Wyatt.
NPR News with Kari Miller a conversation with Kerri Miller and Dr. BJ Miller. They share advice that's both practical — like tips for cleaning up your attic — to the more pithy — like advice on how to tell someone you're dying. The authors join MPR News host Kerri Miller for a conversation about why they were inspired to write this guide, and why planning for death can be more comforting than you might think.
NPR News with Kari Miller a conversation with Kerri Miller and Dr. BJ Miller. They share advice that's both practical — like tips for cleaning up your attic — to the more pithy — like advice on how to tell someone you're dying. The authors join MPR News host Kerri Miller for a conversation about why they were inspired to write this guide, and why planning for death can be more comforting than you might think.
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