Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death though literature, history, poetry, and societal practices. Does death change--and if it does, how has it changed in the last century? And how have our experiences and expressions of grief changed? Did the traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust transform our thinking about mortality? More recently, did the catastrophe of 9/11 alter our modes of mourning? And are there at the same time aspects of grief...
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"The most comprehensive multidisciplinary contemplation of mortality we are likely to get."—Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review
List of Illustrations xvPreface: A Matter of Life and Death xviiAcknowledgments xxvArranging My Mourning: Five Meditations on the Psychology of GriefDeath OpensAll Souls' Day 1A Door Opens 5On the Threshold 11Voices 14WidowPhone Call 19Keening/Kissing 21Plath's Etymology 25Sati 28The Widower's Exequy 30The Widow's Lament 33The Widow's Desire 36Mr. Lowell and the Spider 38YahrzeitWhy Is This Day Different from Other Days? 40Caring for the Dead 43Gravestones 45The Buried Life 50The Buried Self 55E-mail to the DeadThe Hypothetical Life 62Purgatories 69Textual Resurrections 71Psychic Research 73Letters to the Virtual World 79Allas the Deeth 82Writing WrongKeynote 86Weep and Write 88This Is the Curse. Write 92You Must Be Wicked toDeserve Such Pain 94A Hole in the Heart 95Impossible to Tell 96History Makes Death: How the Twentieth Century Reshaped Dying and MourningExpiration/Termination"Modern Death" 103"Expiration" vs. "Termination" 106Ash Wednesday 109Timor Mortis 112Ghosts of Heaven 121Nada 124The Souls of Animals 130Technologies of DeathExtermination 135Conditio Inhumana 138Annihilation in History 144The Great War and the City of Death 147Hell on Earth 152The German Requiem 159Technologies of DyingIn the Hospital Spaceship 164Questions of Technology 167The Inhospitable Hospital 178The Doctor's Detachment 189What Vivian Is Bearing 196A Day in the Death of...Recording Death 204Death Watching 205Home Movies 209Flashbulb Memories 210The Celluloid Afterlife 216Death and the Camera 218Seeing and Believing 222Mortality on Display 224Haunting Photographs 230Millennial MourningA Prayer Flag 242Mourning Becomes Electronic 245The Embarrassment of the Comforter 247The Shame of the Mourner 255Mourning as Malarkey 264Ritual Offerings 275Monumental Particularities 283The Handbook of Heartbreak: Contemporary Elegy and LamentationOn the Beach with Sylvia PlathBerck-Plage 295"Berck-Plage" 297This Is the Sea, Then, This Great Abeyance 310Nobodaddy 317It Is Given Up 323Sylvia Plath and "Sylvia Plath" 327Was the Nineteenth Century Different, and Luckier?The Death Book Stuff 332"Not Poetry" 335Whitman-and Mother Death and Father Earth 340Dickinson-and Death and the Maiden 347Grave, Tomb, and Battle Corpses 359"Rats' Alley" and the Death of PastoralThe Army of the Dead 366What Was "Pastoral"? 371The Poetry Is in the Pity 372Down Some Profound Dull Tunnel 381I Think We Are in Rats' Alley / Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones 384The Man Who Does Not Know This Has Not Understood Anything 390Monsters of ElegyRyoan-ji 398Let the Lamp Affix Its Beam 399How to Perform a Funeral 406Documenting Death 410Death Studies 413Listening, Looking 420Remembering 429Imagining 433Is There No Consolation? 435Apocalypse Now (and Then)Y2K 439The Unspeakable Emergency 442Apo-kalypso 448Ground Zero 456Closure? 459Endnotes 464Bibliography 525Illustration Credits 554Index 557
