100 books like Reimagining Death

I am so impressed with Caitlin’s work on demystifying funeral practices (The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and opening up our eyes to new possibilities through her writing and her Order of the Good Death. With this book, I was so engaged with the sheer variety of the death and funeral practices that she details.

We need this kind of writing: engaging, funny, and grounded while teaching us that we are not as bound as we might think we are. I left this book more resolved than ever that we can die differently, and especially if we can use our imaginations better to explore alternatives. The world is wide and beautiful: this book teaches us that we can see that beauty even in—maybe especially in—death. 

I placed at least 30 post-it notes in this book as every page includes practical and compassionate advice for planning an affordable and sustainable green burial. This book’s pragmatic step-by-step suggestions were especially useful as I took my one-year journey to revise my own final wishes with climate and community in mind. The author operates the first green funeral home in the Portland, Oregon area, and she draws on her experiences to help you avoid exorbitant funeral expenses while helping the Earth and your community. 

I read this book for the first time about five years ago, and my first thought when I finished it was, “Everyone who is going to die needs this book.” This is the best thing I’ve read on the personal choices around dying and supporting someone who is dying.

I love the clear, level-headed, plain-spoken, simple, and elegant text and the way that Tisdale uses personal storytelling and philosophical reflection to help us address what we might otherwise avoid. I will return to this book over and over as I support sick or dying friends, and you can bet it will be on my bedside table if I am ever diagnosed with a terminal illness.

A friend recommended this slim book of 100 pages that poses a profound and direct question: How should we live in the end times when the climate crisis threatens our very existence? How can we garner the moral courage to live with the responsibility our times demand of us—as individuals and in collective? These are heavy queries but the philosophical and poetic lens of the authors opens that space to approach the challenge with more grace than fear. Plus, it’s a book that can fit in your back pocket, perfect for walks outside when you’re thinking about life and death in uncertain times. 

I love books that see ways to bridge domains of experience and understanding normally kept apart, and this book does that brilliantly. I was so touched by the author’s personal story of grief and its relationship to her experience of art in the rural community in which she was raised.

But I also learned immensely about how this talented neuropsychologist channeled that experience into studies that helped me understand the neurological components of grief, including how to diminish their amplitude through thoughtful practice.

For me, it provided a new conceptual framework for “learning to die,” a new sense of the ancient maxim of philosophy. 

Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by “inner vision”: what do people think, feel, and experience in extreme states that they struggle to describe to others?

This book is based on such an approach to the question: a palliative care doctor and team gather the stories of people experiencing visions while undergoing the massive transformation of dying. By re-thinking these deathbed visions not as feverish delusions but as insights into human experience, I was deeply moved on multiple levels. You can sense the dying person’s powerful drive to connect with the past and sometimes with the present, which makes the “hallucinations” quite real emotionally. You can also sense how important sharing the stories is to the loved ones in their grieving process. 

I am in absolute awe of this essential American writer. This book made me cry, laugh, and shout in pleasure at the same time. I could hear, taste, and feel myself present in this book of poems, which explore loss and grief, but also tradition and legacy, our connection to the beloved dead through traditions.

Black food, music, and religious traditions are strongly present, but so is Wilco and Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel,” and we are immersed in one human’s attempt to sort out his place. Along with Heather Cahoon’s Horsefly Dress, which explores grief in the context of a Montana tribe, this book taught me how to think both beyond and more deeply within my own sense of “legacy.” 

A great anthropological read about the past 150 years of death care in this country. She discusses the ingrained traditions held so closely by the public over decades of death. There are so many destructive practices we cling to when someone dies. Suzanne unpacks the sack of societal behaviors that have been none-too-friendly on our precious environment. Our customary American demise practices, which include the procedure of embalming, hardwood and metal caskets, and concrete burial vaults and grave liners, only strengthen this saga.

I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.

All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation on what it means to live ethically; as he puts it “there is no social space entirely outside the shared space with the dead. To learn to live is to learn to inhabit this space in a responsible way. Life is a life after, as inheritance, ancestry, legacy and fate.”     

I write about death. A lot. I might also be a death-expert, in fact (deathxspert?). My first book was on death, dying, and grief, and since then, I’ve been interviewed by NPR, Jodi Kantor for the NYT, various news outlets, and an awful lot of podcasts. Frankly, I thought I knew everything there was to know—then I read Hayley Campbell’s book. I was asked to consider not the dying, nor the grieving, but the death workers. Who cleans the body? Who embalms? Who tidies a crime scene? I was shocked to discover there are companies that specialize in plane-crash management, or that someone is still sifting through the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire and collapse. This book is a literal journey, weaving a take from peculiar unknowns and delivering an utterly riveting story.