1st Edition
Remember Me Constructing Immortality - Beliefs on Immortality, Life, and Death
Remember Me brings together contributors from around the world with unique insight on the ways in which one's relationship with loved ones continues, endures, and perhaps even grows after death.
Much of the available literature speaks of healthy bereavement as letting go of the deceased and moving forward with life. This new text challenges that notion, discussing the meaning attributed to death and to the anticipation of death.
The living, as presented in these innovative chapters, construct social entities of those who have died, via the carrying out of wishes in the Will; pursuing legal claims; or simply attributing certain desires, emotions, or choices to the deceased reconstitutes them as active, even vital, voices even after biological death. Just as life itself, the end of life and death is an interdisciplinary matter. A clear psychological theme and focus ties together these perspectives under three conceptual areas: the anticipation of death; the social life of the deceased and the legal embodiment of the deceased.
Acknowledgments. Mitchell, Constructing Immortality: The Role of the Dead in Everyday Life. Howarth, The Rebirth of Death: Continuing Relationships with the Dead. Hockey, Kellaher, Prendergast, Sustaining Kinship: Ritualization and the Disposal of Human Ashes in the United Kingdom. Bourke, “Rachel Comforted”: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body After Death. Fowler, Collective Memory and Forgetting: Components for a Study of Obituaries. Hughes, Fever. Drake, The Will: Inheritance Distribution and Feuding Families. Allsop, Complaints About Health Care in the United Kingdom Following a Person’s Death. Johnson, Knowing by Heart: Remembering Victims of Intrafamilial Homicide. Herbert, Psychosocial Death Following Traumatic Brain Injury. Sullivan, Should Suicide be Reported in the Media? A Research Note. Breen, O’Connor, Family Disputes, Dysfunction, and Division: Case Studies of Road Traffic Deaths. Lennon, Mitchell, Dark Tourism: The Role of Sites of Death in Tourism. Beloff, Immortality Work: Photographs as Memento Mori. Wyatt, Art as Afterlife: Posthumous Self-presentation by Eminent Painters. Kornell, The Eternal Cadaver: Anatomy and its Representation. Read, Representing Trauma: The Case for Troubling Images.
Biography
Margaret Mitchell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia and Director of the Sellenger Centre for Research in Law, Justice and Policing. She first became interested in the social context of death while working with Strathclyde Police in Glasgow, Scotland on the aftermath of the Lockerbie Disaster in 1988 and studying its impact on emergency workers and the community.
"This fascinating collection of perspectives brings together a group of international academics and researchers, and provides the reader with a wide- ranging approach to contemporary social issues in the study of mortality. It will be an especially valuable text for students of death, dying and bereavement and will serve to remind practitioners of the complex social factors which influence emotional reactions to death."
-Linda Machin, Cruse Bereavement Care (Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer 2008)
