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Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.

With the help of medicine and technology we are living longer than ever before. As human life spans have increased, the moral and political issues surrounding longevity have become more complex. Should we desire to live as long as possible? What are the social ramifications of longer lives? How does a longer life span change the way we think about the value of our lives and about death and dying? Christine Overall offers a clear and intelligent discussion of the philosophical and cultural issues surrounding this difficult and often emotionally charged issue. Her book is unique in its comprehensive presentation and evaluation of the arguments—both ancient and contemporary—for and against prolonging life. It also proposes a progressive social policy for responding to dramatic increases in life expectancy. Writing from a feminist perspective, Overall highlights the ways that our biases about race, class, and gender have affected our views of elderly people and longevity, and her policy recommendations represent an effort to overcome these biases. She also covers the arguments surrounding the question of the \"duty to die\" and includes a provocative discussion of immortality. After judiciously weighing the benefits and the risks of prolonging human life, Overall persuasively concludes that the length of life does matter and that its duration can make a difference to the quality and value of our lives. Her book will be an essential guide as we consider our social responsibilities, the meaning of human life, and the prospects of living longer.

The experience of living with dying has attracted limited research. We utilized interpretive phenomenological analysis to explore the lived experience of individuals with terminal cancer receiving palliative care in Ireland. Participants were purposely selected from public interviews that had been conducted between 2006 and 2011. The study included the accounts of eight participants (N = 8; six females and two males) with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Participant ages ranged from 36 to 68 years. Three master themes emerged from the analysis: the personal impact of diagnosis, the struggle in adjusting to change, and dying in context. The results revealed that participants were still living while simultaneously dying. Interestingly, participants did not ascribe new meaning to their lives. The terminal illness was understood within the framework of the life that had existed before diagnosis. They strove to maintain their normal routines and continued to undertake meaningful activities. Management of unfinished business and creation of a legacy were salient tasks. Social withdrawal was not present; rather, participants engaged in emotional labor to sustain valued roles. However, we found that within the public domain there is a paucity of education and discourse supporting individuals at the end of life. The hospice was noted as an important external resource. Each participant experienced a unique dying process that reflected their context. Healthcare professionals need to recognize the subjectivity of the dying process. Dying individuals require support and options to maintain their personhood.

This paper is located at the intersection of scholarship on creative geographies and geographies of dying, death and “living on” (survival). It explores the intimate experience of breast cancer through the practice of creative bricolage which uses autobiographical poetry and photographs. Employing a roving writing strategy that allows for multiple entry points and connectivities surrounding the complex meshworks of precarious cancer survival, the paper traverses health, emotional, environmental and political concerns. In so doing, the paper makes three key contributions: first, in considering how a creative sensibility might bring more visceral, emotionally sensitive and politically embedded accounts of death, dying and survival into the realm of geographical visibility; second, in exploring some of the potentials and limitations of using do‐it‐yourself bricolage as a creative practice; and third, in revealing how a geographical mindset, with its attention to multiple intersecting sites and its ability to promulgate holistic relational understanding, can widen the aesthetic terrain of breast cancer beyond dominant tropes of consumerist sentimentality or heroic femininity towards an aesthetics of precarity.

This study aimed to examine changes in the number of live and dying trees in central Lithuanian forests over time. Results were obtained using stochastic differential equations combined with the normal copula function. The examination of each tree’s individual size variables (height and diameter) showed that the mean values of dead or dying trees’ size variables had significantly lower trajectories that were particularly pronounced in mature stands. According to the data set under examination, the tree mortality rate gradually declined with age, reaching approximately 7% after 10 years. Birch trees 60–70 years old were the first species to reach the 1% mortality rate, followed by spruce trees 70–80 years old and pine trees 80–90 years old. The Maple symbolic algebra system was used to implement all results.

The debate over the determination of death has been raging for more than fifty years. Since then, objections against the diagnosis of brain death from family members of those diagnosed as dead-have been increasing and are causing some countries to take novel steps to accommodate people’s beliefs and preferences in the determination of death. This, coupled with criticism by some academics of the brain death criterion, raises some questions about the issues surrounding the determination of death. In this paper, we discuss some of the main approaches to death determination that have been theoretically proposed or currently put into practice and propose a new approach to death determination called \"weak pluralism\" as a reasonable ethical and political alternative to respect diversity in death determination.

Taking a novel approach to the contradictory impulses of violence and care, illness and healing, this book radically shifts the way we think of the interrelations of institutions and experiences in a globalizing world.Living and Dying in the Contemporary Worldis not just another reader in medical anthropology but a true tour de force-a deep exploration of all that makes life unbearable and yet livable through the labor of ordinary people.This book comprises forty-four chapters by scholars whose ethnographic and historical work is conducted around the globe, including South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Bringing together the work of established scholars with the vibrant voices of younger scholars,Living and Dying in the Contemporary Worldwill appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, health scientists, scholars of religion, and all who are curious about how to relate to the rapidly changing institutions and experiences in an ever more connected world.

The findings of Pinnock and colleagues' study on the longitudinal perspectives of people with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have implications for other non-malignant conditions. 1 Some of the findings echo strongly with the experience of people with advanced chronic kidney disease, although there are also notable differences. 2...

The article describes a new mortuary in Cameroon, which has been constructed in a government hospital by the Bali-Nyonga Development and Cultural Association (BANDECA). The history and character of this hometown association is analysed and the article then argues that the mortuary has changed the temporality of death celebrations, and that this change is largely driven by the needs of national and international migrants. It claims that the association and the traditional authorities are attempting to steer recent changes within a longer historical process of ‘modernizing’ burial. The construction of the mortuary reveals some of the tensions within the community and the challenges these present to the association's leadership. In particular it illustrates the potential conflicts of interest between the hometown association and the national government that result from this form of self-help development project. Finally, the article shows that, despite the increased mobility of the Bali-Nyonga population, it is becoming more important, not less, to be buried at ‘home’, and that the mortuary and remittances are contributing to this process. Since the mortuary enables burials to take place at home, BANDECA is unwittingly reinscribing ethnic territoriality and thereby contributing to a political process of deepening the sense of ethnic belonging in Cameroon. L'article décrit une nouvelle morgue au Cameroun, construite dans un hôpital public par l'association BANDECA (Bali-Nyonga Development and Cultural Association). Après une analyse de l'histoire et du caractère de cette association, l'article soutient que la morgue a modifié la temporalité descélébrations de la mort et que ce changement est essentiellement déterminé par les besoins des migrants nationaux et internationaux. Il affirme que l'association et les autorités traditionnelles tentent d'orienter les changements récents dans le cadre d'un processus historique plus ancien de “modernisation” de l'enterrement. La construction de la morgue révèle certaines des tensions qui existent au sein de la communauté et les difficultés que celles-ci présentent aux dirigeants de l'association. En particulier, il illustre les conflits d'intérêts potentiels entre l'association et le gouvernement national qui résultent de cette forme de projet de développement d'entraide. Enfin, l'article montre qu'en dépit de la mobilité accrue de la population de Bali-Nyonga, il devient plus important, et non moins, d'être enterré dans sa ville natale et que la morgue et les sommes versées contribuent à ce processus. Puisque la morgue permet aux enterrements d'avoir lieu dans la ville natale, BANDECA réinscrit involontairement la territorialité ethnique et contribue par là-même à un processus politique de renforcement du sens d'appartenance ethnique au Cameroun.