What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure.From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.

    So opens the singular testimony of the poet Thomas Lynch who like many poets is inspired by death, but unlike the others, he is also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. Here is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between the living and the living who have died with outrage and amazement, awe and calm, straining for the brief glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species.

    Her mother, Alyssa Buchanan, is wild with rage and regret for placing her trust in her husband Seth, a former pro surfer who has a drug problem. Seth is adamant that he was clean the night of Nevaeh’sdeath, yet a dirty drug test contradicts his story. His parental rights ripped and criminal charges looming, he battles to prove his innocence, love, and family devotion. Adding to the couple’s grief, their five-year-old daughter Daisy hasn’t uttered a word since her sister’s death. Alyssa turns to childhood friends and local police officer, Greg Wallace, for comfort and support. Although Greg portrays heroic devotion and justice, inwardly he swims with loss, narcissism, and explosive rage. He has long despised Seth and is more than willingto meet Alyssa’s needs that reach far beyond friendship.Into this fragile scene steps therapist Katherine Middlebrook. Her practice consumes nearly all her time–time that is even more precious now that her mother’s cancer has returned. She hesitantly accepts three new clients­–Greg Wallace, and Seth & Alyssa Buchanan, unaware oftheir intertwined history. Buried deep in Katherine’s past is the loss of her own child. She’s sure she can keep the boundaries of her past and her clients’ lives clear until their intersecting tragedies awaken old demons.An award winner in the South West Writer’s Contest for literary and mainstream novel, Out of Breath is an exploration of parental grief, addiction, compassion fatigue, and suicide; it’s the prodigal story of grace undeserved. Salluce’s expertise as a psychotherapist and grief specialist enables her to create dynamic characters that will leave you breathless as you jeer their shadow sides and cheer their heroic journeys.

    Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine--a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

    Instead, she discovered she’d been granted an invaluable chance to witness firsthand what she calls the “spiritual work of dying”—the work of finding or making meaning of one’s life, the experiences it’s contained and the people who have touched it, the betrayals, wounds, unfinished business, and unrealized dreams. Instead of talking, she mainly listened: to stories of hope and regret, shame and pride, mystery and revelation and secrets held too long. Most of all, though, she listened as her patients talked about love—love for their children and partners and friends; love they didn’t know how to offer; love they gave unconditionally; love they, sometimes belatedly, learned to grant themselves. This isn’t a book about dying—it’s a book about living. And Egan isn’t just passively bearing witness to these stories. An emergency procedure during the birth of her first child left her physically whole but emotionally and spiritually adrift. Her work as a hospice chaplain healed her, from a brokenness she came to see we all share. Each of her patients taught her something—how to find courage in the face of fear or the strength to make amends; how to be profoundly compassionate and fiercely empathetic; how to see the world in grays instead of black and white. In this poignant, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along all their precious and necessary gifts.

    Earl Grollman), Life after Loss is the go-to resource for anyone who has suffered a significant life change. Loss can be overwhelming, and recovery often seems daunting, if not impossible. With great compassion and insight, Deits provides practical exercises for navigating the uncertain terrain of loss and grief, helping readers find positive ways to put together a life that is necessarily different, but equally meaningful. With two new chapters and significant changes throughout reflecting Deits's ongoing experience in counseling, Life after Loss is an essential "roadmap for those in grief" (Lawrence J. Lincoln, MD, Staff, Elisabeth KÿRoss Center).

    The new edition from Chopra includes many topics encompassing the theory of structural dynamics and the application of this theory regarding earthquake analysis, response, and design of structures. No prior knowledge of structural dynamics is assumed and the manner of presentation is sufficiently detailed and integrated, to make the book suitable for self-study by students and professional engineers.

    Learn the Alphabet and pronunciation as well as useful phrases in 8 categories, such as greetings, travel and directions, making friends to business and emergencies. Download, read and enjoy your vacation like never before.

    Each year, Kean University in Union, New Jersey, offers an exclusive class called Death in Perspective. Led by Professor Norma Bowe, the objective of the class is to “develop an understanding of the nature and experiences of the stages of dying, death, and bereavement.” It has a three-year waiting list.But as acclaimed journalist Erika Hayasaki discovers, by teaching mortality, Dr. Bowe is quietly rescuing students from tragedy. As she takes her students to cemeteries, prisons, morgues, and hospitals, she shows how the contemplation of the end can change an adult’s beginning. Over the course of two years, she intervenes with one student and her suicidal mother, mentors another with a mentally ill brother, and redeems a third from his life in a gang. And in the end, the students themselves heal Dr. Bowe herself from the lingering pain of a childhood she has long repressed. On one level, The Death Class is about the loss of life; on another level, it’s a celebration of what the human spirit can conquer. It’s about how we can survive and learn to live a meaningful life.

    We have only known this life, so dying scares us—and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What would it look like if you could approach dying with curiosity and love, in service of other beings? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice?   Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush began their friendship more than four decades ago at the foot of their guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. He transmitted to them a simple philosophy: love everyone, tell the truth, and give up attachment to material things. After impacting millions of people through the years with these teachings, they have reunited once more with Walking Each Other Home to enlighten and engage readers on the spiritual opportunities within the dying process. They generously share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices, told with courage, humor, and heart, gently exploring every aspect of this journey. And, at 86 years old, Ram Dass reminds us, “This time we have a real deadline.”   In Walking Each Other Home, readers will learn about: guidelines for being a “loving rock” for the dying, how to grieve fully and authentically, how to transform a fear of death, leaving a spiritual legacy, creating a sacred space for dying, and much more.   “Everybody you have ever loved is a part of the fabric of your being now,” says Ram Dass. The body may die, but the soul remains. Death is an invitation to a new kind of relationship, in the place where we are all One. Join these two lifelong friends and spiritual luminaries as they explore what it means to live and die consciously, remember who we really are, and illuminate the path we walk together.

    So when he enlisted his eighty-one-year-old dad to help him build his own casket, he thought of it mostly as an opportunity to sharpen his woodworking skills and to spend time together. But the unexpected deaths of his mother and, a year later, his best friend, coupled with the dawning realization that his father wouldn’t be around forever for such offbeat adventures—and neither would he—led to a harsh confrontation with mortality and loss. Over the course of several seasons, Giffels returned to his father’s barn in rural Ohio, a place cluttered with heirloom tools, exotic wood scraps, and long memory, to continue a pursuit that grew into a meditation on grief and optimism, a quest for enlightenment, and a way to cherish time with an aging parent. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with some of the hardest questions we all face as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss. Furnishing Eternity is “an entertaining memoir that moves through gentle absurdism to a poignant meditation on death and what comes before it” (Publishers Weekly). “Tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought. Furnishing Eternity continues Giffels’s unlikely literary career as the bard of Akron, Ohio…Only a very skilled engineer of a writer can transform the fits and starts, the fitted corners and sudden gouges of the assembly process into a kind of page-turning drama” (The New York Times Book Review).

    But in the past three decades, medical advances have extended our lives and changed the way we die. In "Last Rights," Stephen Kiernan reveals the disconnect between how patients want to live the end of life--pain free, functioning mentally and physically, surrounded by family and friends--and how the medical system continues to treat the dying--with extreme interventions, at immense cost, and with little regard to pain, human comforts, or even the stated wishes of patients and families. Backed with surveys, interviews, and intimate portraits of people from all walks of life, from the dying and their families to the doctors and nurses who care for them, this book will be for our time what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's books were for a previous generation.

    Now, an internationally respected authority on personal change maps the terrain between life as it was and life as it can be. Readers can move at their own pace through the seven distinct phases of loss and can work towards a stronger, more balanced self. The author's own story of the loss of a young husband, combined with the tales of dozens of individuals, and the most recent research on coping with loss, helps readers to become happier, healthier, and wiser beings.

    She feels the painful loss of her father acutely and seeks solace both in the security of her local library and the escape her phone screen provides by blocking out the world around her. As Daphne tries to make sense of what has happened she recalls memories of shared times and stories past, and in facing the darkness she finds a way back from the tangle of fear and confusion, to feel connected once more with her friends and family. The Girl Who Became a Tree sees Joseph Coelho deploy a wide variety of poetic forms with consummate skill in its narration of events. He seamlessly but searingly weaves together the ancient legend of Daphne, who was turned into a tree to avoid the attentions of the god Apollo, and a totally modern tale, mixing real-life and fantasy, in which a latter-day Daphne seeks her own freedom. This is a heart-stoppingly imaginative story told in poems, at times bleak and even tragic, which is layered, rich and ultimately a tour de force of poetic skill and energy.

    The prospect was devastating, and also scary—how would she navigate the world without the person who gave her life? She thought about all the motherly advice she would miss—advice that could help her through the challenges to come, including the ordeal of losing a parent. The next day, Hallie asked her mother, writer Suzy Hopkins, to record step-by-step instructions for her to follow in the event of her mom’s death. The list began: “Pour yourself a stiff glass of whiskey and make some fajitas” and continued from there, addressing issues great and small—from choosing a life partner to baking a quiche. The project became a way for mother and daughter to discuss everyday realities with humor, openness, and gratitude. It led to this book.Combining Suzy’s witty and heartfelt advice with Hallie’s quirky and colorful style, What to Do When I’m Gone is the illustrated instruction manual for getting through life without one’s mom. It’s also a poignant look at loss, love, and taking things one moment at a time. By turns whimsical, funny, touching, and pragmatic, it will leave readers laughing and teary-eyed. And it will spur conversations that enrich family members’ understanding of one another.