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    In 1921, eight ash trees were planted in the dorset village of Charlton Ambrose as a timeless memorial to the men killed in World War One. Overnight a ninth appeared, marked only as for 'the unknown soldier'. But now the village's ashgrove is under threat from developers. Rachel Elliot, a local reporter, sets out to save the memorial and solve the mystery of the ninth tree. In so doing, she uncovers the story of Tom Carter and Molly Day: two young people thrown together by the war, their love for each other, their fears for the present and their hopes for the future. Embroiled in events beyond their control, Tom and Molly have to face up to the harsh realities of the continuing war, the injustices it allows and the sacrifices it demands.

    The buttons Laura cherishes the most belonged to her mother—a button from her prom dress, a white one off her wedding dress, and a single small button from the nightgown she was wearing on the day she died. When the string breaks, Laura’s new stepmother, Jane, is there to comfort Laura and search for a missing button, just as Laura’s mother would have done. But it’s not the same—Jane isn’t Mom. In Eve Bunting’s moving story, beautifully illustrated by Ted Rand, Laura discovers that a memory string is not just for remembering the past: it’s also for recording new memories.

    Leaving his teaching job at Harvard, Ram Dass embodied the role of spiritual seeker, showing others how to find peace within themselves in one of the greatest spiritual classics of the twentieth century, the two-million-copy bestseller Be Here Now. As many of that generation enter the autumn of their years, the big questions of peace and of purpose have returned demanding answers. And once again, Ram Dass blazes a new trail, inviting all to join him on the next stage of the journey.

    That's why being careful is so important, even if it does mean giving up some of her favorite things, like bike races with her best friend, Rebecca, and hot dogs on the Fourth of July. Everyone keeps telling Annie not to worry so much, that she's just fine. But they thought her brother, Jared, was just fine too, and Jared died.

    This book will help them understand that death is a natural complement to life, and that grief and a sense of loss are normal feelings for them to have following a loved one's death.Parents, teachers, and gift givers will find: language that is simple, direct, and easier for younger children to understandinformation on how to cope with the loss of a loved onea helpful book written by a psychotherapist and counselora whole series of books for children to explore emotional issuesThe A First Look At series promotes positive interaction among children, parents, and teachers, and encourage kids to ask questions and confront social and emotional questions that sometimes present problems. Books feature appealing full-color illustrations on every page plus a page of advice to parents and teachers.

    Each year about eight million Americans suffer the death of a close family member. The list of high visibility disasters, human suffering and sudden loss in long and will continue to grow. From TWA Flight 800 to Egypt Air 990, from Oklahoma City to Columbine, daily we face incomprehensible loss. Outside the publicized tragedies there are many families and individuals that are suffering behind closed doors in our neighborhoods, in our own homes, in hospital waiting rooms. Now for those who face the challenges of sudden death, there is a hand to hold written by two women who have experience sudden loss. In a book that will touch, comfort, uplift and console, authors Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair, Ph.D. explore sudden death and its role in the cycle of life. Tapping the personal histories of both authors and numerous interviews, I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye shows grieving readers how to endure, survive and grow from the pain and turmoil surrounding human loss. For survivors this valuable book provides a rock-steady anchor from which to weather the storm of pain and begin to rebuild their lives.

    Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live.Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."

    . . . Terkel’s interviews may not allay fears about death. But reading them certainly encourages life while we have it.”–The New York TimesWhether it’s Working or The Great War, the legendary oral histories of Studs Terkel have offered indispensable insights into all areas of American life. Now, at eighty-eight, the Pulitzer Prize winner creates his most important work on a subject few can comfortably discuss: death.Here, in the voices of people both esteemed and unknown, are wise words, meaningful memories, and compassionate predictions about the experience of life’s end–and what may come after. A grad student explains how her two-year coma convinced her of the existence of reincarnation . . . A Hiroshima survivor reconciles her painful memories with the stoicism of her Japanese culture . . . Actress Uta Hagan expresses how her art is her religion and will be her legacy . . . Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler relives his World War II ordeal, after a torpedo left him in a lifeboat among injured and dying comrades . . . An AIDS counselor reveals why healthy gay men may require the most crucial psychological help . . . and a retired firefighter admits he “never felt so alive” as when he was doing his dangerous job.From the sheer physical facts to the emotional realities to spiritual speculations, all aspects of death are openly expressed in this wonderful work, the stirring culmination of Studs Terkel’s brilliant career.

    Author David Kessler has identified key areas of concern: the need to be treated as a living human being, the need for hope, the need to express emotions, the need to participate in care, the need for honesty, the need for spirituality, and the need to be free of physical pain. Examining the physical and emotional experiences of life-challenging illnesses, Kessler provides a vocabulary for family members and for the dying that allows them to communicate with doctors, with hospital staff, and with one another, and—at a time when the right words are exceedingly difficult to find—he helps readers find a way to say good-bye. Using comforting and touching stories, he provides information to help us meet the needs of a loved one at this important time in our lives.

    These tough realities are not given much attention by many people until midlife, when they become harder to avoid. Using a Buddhist text known as the Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection, Larry Rosenberg shows how intimacy with the realities of aging can actually be used as a means to liberation. When we become intimate with these inevitable aspects of life, he writes, we also become intimate with ourselves, with others, with the world—indeed with all things.

    When his own wife of thirty-five years died of cancer, however, he was thrown head-first into the kind of painful and confusing abyss he had known before only in theory. An honest account of being in transition, this uncommonly wise and moving book is a richly textured map of the personal, professional, and emotional transformations that grow out of tragedy and crisis. Demonstrating how disillusionment, sorrow, or confusion can blossom into a time of incredible creativity and contentment, Bridges highlights the profound significance and value of endings in our lives.

    Visit Lisa's Legacy Fund to learn more or to make a direct donation.A story from the comic strips that will make you laugh and cryTom Batiuk spent several years as a middle school art teacher before creating the comic strip Funky Winkerbean in 1972. Originally a "gag-a-day" comic strip that portrayed life in high school, Funky has evolved into a mature series of real-life stories examining such social issues as teen dating abuse, teen pregnancy, teen suicide, violence in schools, the war in the Middle East, alcoholism, divorce, and cancer.In 1999, Lisa Moore, one of Funky's friends and a main character, discovered she had breast cancer. Batiuk, unsure about dealing with such a serious subject on the funny pages, decided to go ahead with the story line. He approached the topic with the idea that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the reader's interest. Lisa and husband Les faced the same physical, psychological, and social issues as anyone else dealing with the disease.After a mastectomy and chemotherapy, Lisa was cancer free. She finished her law degree, opened a practice, and had a baby daughter, Summer. Then, in the spring of 2006, the cancer returned and metastasized. Lisa's Story: The Other Shoe is a collection of both the 1999 comic strips on Lisa's initial battle with cancer and the current series examining her struggle with the disease and its outcome. Additionally, it contains resource material on breast cancer, including early detection, information sources, support systems, and health care.

    Louis and his grandmother are inseparable. They know each other so well that Louis feels he can even see his grandmother, though he has been blind since birth. That love carries him through the very worst moments when Gran is gone, and when Louis seems to be forgotten.

    Preschool children and adults alike can explore the mysteries of heaven.

    Assists us in reflecting on the reality of purgatory. Aides us in remembering, station by station, the Passion and death that Christ endured for those souls.

    In "Night of Stone," Catherine Merridale asks Russians difficult questions about how their country's volatile past has affected their everyday lives, aspirations, dreams, and nightmares. Drawing upon evidence from rare Imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, memoirs, letters, newspapers, literature, psychiatric studies, and interviews, "Night of Stone" provides a highly original and revealing history of modern Russia.

    This carefully researched, beautifully illustrated work was the first to consider this art in depth as a meaningful aesthetic-spiritual expression. It is reissued for today's readers, with a new preface outlining changes in the field since the book appeared in 1966.

    The book was awarded the Eminescu Gold Medal' in 2000, when Eminescu was declared 'UNESCO-Year-2000-Poet-Of-The-Year'. The volume includes some the 'national' poet's time-honored gems like Luceafarul/The Evening Star, Glossa, Scrisoarea I / First Epistle Satire, Stelele-n Cer/Stars in the Sky, La Steaua/Onto the Star, among others.

    She draws on 20 years of working with animals at her sanctuary, Howling Success, and includes inspirational stories and suggestions on how to be involved with an animal during the transition into death and beyond.

    Among the Monarchs is filled with unforgettable metaphors, unconventional and unpredictable juxtapositions, turns and angles of perception, and seductive free verse rhythms. Through all of this, Garren captivates readers in a unique exploration of the nature of desire, the raptures and burdens of love and loss, the peculiarities of family life and, perhaps most compelling, the power of poetic imagination to shape what we see and feel. At once engaging and disquieting, Among the Monarchs attests to the inexhaustible possibilities of lyric poetry.

    To Lee Goff and his fellow forensic entomologists, each body recovered at a crime scene is an ecosystem, a unique microenvironment colonized in succession by a diverse array of flies, beetles, mites, spiders, and other arthropods: some using the body to provision their young, some feeding directly on the tissues and by-products of decay, and still others preying on the scavengers.Using actual cases on which he has consulted, Goff shows how knowledge of these insects and their habits allows forensic entomologists to furnish investigators with crucial evidence about crimes. Even when a body has been reduced to a skeleton, insect evidence can often provide the only available estimate of the postmortem interval, or time elapsed since death, as well as clues to whether the body has been moved from the original crime scene, and whether drugs have contributed to the death.An experienced forensic investigator who regularly advises law enforcement agencies in the United States and abroad, Goff is uniquely qualified to tell the fascinating if unsettling story of the development and practice of forensic entomology.

    In her later books, she almost reverses this process to show life as veiled and inconclusive, suggestive rather than definitive. The elliptical yet lucid craft of her poems presents experience as only imperfectly graspable. The poems ride lightly on the waves of thought, more textures than statements. Some readers have characterized Valentine as a "deep image" writer, but syntactically her work is more akin to the work of Mandelstam and Paul Celan than to that of Lorca and Neruda.The Cradle of the Real Life is divided into two sections, the shorter first section dealing with loss and death and the longer second section, entitled "Her Lost Book," which weaves memories with various metaphors for writing, and deals specifically with the "problem" of women's writing. These finely wrought pieces take stark subject matter and make it shimmer; the poems take their shape as much from the absences as from the words, just as life is given meaning by the losses we survive.

    Here, in journal form, is the story of her illness, her healing process, and her acceptance of life and death. Breathtakingly honest about the factors she feels contributed to her cancer, Woodman also explains how she drew upon every resource-physical and spiritual-available to her to come to terms with her illness. Dreams and imagery, self-reflection and body work, and both traditional and alternative medicine play distinctive roles in Woodman's recovery. Her personal treasury of art, photographs, and quotations-from Dickinson to Blake to Rumi-embellish this unique chronicle of a very personal journey toward transformation.

    Botticelli gave stunning visual form to the poet's epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the project was never completed and the sheets were scattered. Now, more than 500 years after their creation, all 91 existing -- and very fragile -- vellum sheets will be shown together for the first time, in Berlin, Rome, and London. This book, which accompanies the exhibition, illustrates each of Botticelli's canto sheets in superb color, faced by a commentary on Botticelli's pictorial response to Dante's poem by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where 84 of the sheets are permanently housed. Eight essays on Botticelli, the Medici, and the Divine Comedy complete this unprecedented volume.

    Artificial eyes have been placed in the sockets. Between the bandages lie pieces of jewelry, a gold vulture with outstretched wings, and a stone beetle, a symbol of life after death...Thousands of years ago, their bodies were carefully prepared for the journey to the afterlife. Today, state-of-the-art technology allows researchers to examine more closely than ever before these people who have remained so miraculously preserved through time. Their findings portray the most intimate picture yet available of the everyday lives of ancient Egyptians.In this lavishly illustrated book, internationally acclaimed paleopathologist Rosalie David and writer Rick Archbold guide us through the fascinating world of Egyptian mummies and the international teams who study them. In an absorbing text, we meet ancient people from every walk of life -- from pharaohs to peasants -- and learn how they lived and why they died. High-tech autopsies -- using X-rays, CAT scans, and endoscopes -- uncover the agonizing afflictions that spared no one, from Pharaoh Ramesses II to a temple musician named Djedmaatesankh. And with electron microscopes and DNA testing, scientists can look deeper still, to reveal the secrets hidden inside three-thousand-year-oId cells -- secrets that may one day help provide cures for modern illnesses."Conversations with Mummies" also conveys a wealth of information about daily life in the time of the pharaohs -- from diets and dentistry to magic and medicine. Features and sidebars on recent mummy studies provide new insights into everything from the family trees of the pharaohsto the hypnotic appeal of the blue lotus flower. A special illustrated feature documents the work of daring modem researchers who are performing the ultimate experiment: re-enacting the age-old ritual of mummification. And amazing images demonstrate how the latest forensic techniques allow artists to reconstruct the faces of mummies, so that these ancient people almost seem able to speak to us from across the centuries.

    Published at long last, in her ninety-first year, this book includes ninety of her photographs along with a conversation in which Welty shares her impressions and her memories of the 1930s and 1940s when she rambled through Mississippi cemeteries taking pictures. She recalls poignant and sometimes chilling experiences that occurred."I took a lot of cemetery pictures in my life," she said. "For me cemeteries had a sinister appeal somehow." Her camera eye focused on distinctive funerary emblems, statuary, storied urns, and appealing folklife qualities expressed in the gravestones. Just as many pieces of Welty's fiction feature lyrical descriptions of cemeteries and graves in a way that is expressly Weltian, so too do these photographs taken in the cool, sequestered churchyards and graveyards of Jackson, Port Gibson, Churchill, Rodney, Utica, Crystal Springs, Vicksburg, Rocky Springs, and sites near the old Natchez Trace.They not only document her rambles but also accent the images of regional cemeteries that appear in her stories and novels. This is her unique view of the southern graveyard and of its unusual artworks that arrested her attention -- chains, willows, baskets, angels, lambs, pointing hands, doves, and wreaths. "I like the tombstones showing children asleep in seashells," she says. For her, an absorbed observer, there is charm in the stone motifs and in the sentimental modes of commemorating the dead.As a contemplative loner she called no attention to herself as she wandered quietly through small-town cemeteries with her camera. Both the country settings and the heart-felt inscriptions on decaying marble heightened her imagination and triggered her creative impulses.Accompanying the photographs are selected passages about graveyards and funerals from her fiction -- Losing Battles, The Golden Apples and Other Stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, and The Optimist's Daughter -- and from her essay "Some Notes on River Country."In the introduction Elizabeth Spencer, a Mississippi writer who has been a life-long friend of Welty's, explores the photographic images for the meanings they yield, for the light they throw onto Welty's fiction, and for her own memories of their home state's evocative graveyards and burial customs.Eudora Welty, one of America's most acclaimed and honored writers, is the author of many novels and story collections, including The Optimist's Daughter (Pulitzer Prize), Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, and A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and two collections of her photographic work Photographs and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression (both from University Press of Mississippi).

    This compassionate book acts as a daily devotional companion to hurting people. Designed for adult readers of all ages and stages in the grieving process, it is sensitively written by an author who suffered three miscarriages and the death of an infant son. She knows from firsthand experience that there are no easy answers for those who mourn. Sixty devotions cover the many stages of grieving, including readings for holidays, birthdays, and special occasions, when grief can be particularly painful. Readers will walk away from the short thematic devotions and feel validated, connected to someone who knows how they truly feel, and with renewed hope in God. Friends and family members who sincerely want to help the grieving can give this book as a meaningful, beneficial expression of their love and concern.

    Yet from 1980 to 1995, suicides among black youths increased 114 percent.This alarming statistic demonstrates a real crisis in America's health care system. The most prominent African-American psychiatrist and an award-winning journalist (both of whom lost siblings to self-destructive behavior), offer Lay My Burden Down as an essential response to a national emergency.Beginning with a concise analysis of the often troubled relationship between African-Americans and a white medical establishment, Poussaint and Alexander trace the historical, cultural, and social factors that prevent blacks from seeking medical treatment and document the failed response of white health professionals. Most important, they ask us to look again at abuse, gunplay, and the increase in HIV cases among African-Americans not exclusively as predictable products of racism and poverty but also as examples of self-destructive, suicidal behavior. Intervention is possible, and Poussaint and Alexander cite many ways that our national health care system and health care professionals may help, while noting the programs and policies that have already begun to make a difference. A crucial initiative, Lay My Burden Down will change how we view mental health care in America. About the Authors:A former consultant for The Cosby Show, Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Amy Alexander is a freelance journalist and editor of The Farrakhan Factor. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Now in paperback, this critically acclaimed book features photographs, poems, and interviews with nine children who reveal the hardships and hopes of today's Mexican-American migrant farm workers and their families.

    The women in this book were told they'd be able to get on with their lives after abortion. But their lives would never be the same.Giving Sorrow Words includes the personal accounts of 18 women who had abortions and draws on the experiences of more than 200 others. These women share their stories of personal suffering and loss -- stories that have often gone unheard in a society eager to dismiss abortion-related trauma.Australian journalist and women's rights advocate Melinda Tankard Reist examines the experiences of women, including the lack of resources and support, the misinformation and lack of informed consent, and the intension pressure and coercion often applied by partners, parents and society in general to force women into unwanted abortions.

    Is it really possible to force any thinking person to act in a way completely alien to his character? What makes so-called brainwashing so different from the equally insidious effects of indoctrination and conditioning, or even advertising and education? Research findings from psychology show that brainwashing is not a special subversive technique; it is the clever manipulation of unrealized influences that operate in all our lives. This book, by breaking down so-called brainwashing to its individual elements, shows how social conditioning, need for approval, emotional dependency and much else that we are unaware of, prevent us from being as self-directed as we think; and, conversely, which human traits make us the least susceptible to subtle influence.

    In Practicing the Presence of the Goddess, Barbara Ardinger offers a wide variety of meditations and personal rituals to help women honor the feminine spirit and commune with the Goddess. These include creating a sacred space at home, building a meaningful altar, using ritual and meditation to enrich awareness, and inventing new rituals to celebrate personal events. The author's wry, gentle humor and loving attitude shine through the text, which offers possibilities ranging from bringing love into one's life to having a heart-to-heart with the Goddess.

    There is no single source of power or knowledge, rather beings exist and coexist on many levels in the 'nine worlds'. While people live much of their lives in communities within an 'innangard' of what is known and familiar, this exists in tension with the worlds around and the unknowns that they represent. Moving between the worlds occurs in birth and death, dreams and trance, and the beings that may be met with have their own understandings of the meeting, and their own wyrd to fulfil." Includes: descriptions of beings, and ways in which they are conceptualised within Heathen (Northern European pre-Christian) thought; a meditative process to facilitate contact with nature spirits; discussion of 'shamanism'; respecting 'sacred sites', places of the ancestors...

    He explores the way in which pastoral care shapes our doctrine of God and how faith in the triune God in turn shapes the practice of pastoral care. Fiddes elaborates on the Trinitarian context for the pastoral acts of intercessory prayer, suffering, granting forgiveness, the facing of death, the exercising of spiritual gifts, and the sacraments.

    Grandpa has magical explanations for ordinary things—a frosty windowpane, dewdrops sparkling on the grass, even his own bald head—and Grandpa never lies. Whimsical humor and deep feeling are skillfully layered together in this touching, lyrical account of a grandpa and a granddaughter who love and trust each other.