Art as a Mirror: Exploring Grief at the Met Museum
Grief is one of the most powerful emotional responses that human beings deal with regularly when experiencing loss, and art is often used as an outlet and way to understand it. That’s one reason the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City this month will offer “Art as a Mirror: Exploring Grief at the Met Museum.”
A Quote From Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Pioneer in Death and Dying Studies
26 Poetic Quotes as Symbols of Life’s End
“Ordinary People” Movie Review: Redford Directorial Debut Explores Coping With Loss
Official poster for “Ordinary People,” directed by Robert Redford.
In Robert Redford’s 1980 directorial debut, a wealthy family deals with coping with loss as they struggle with the death of the oldest son, Buck Jarrett. “Ordinary People” explores how grief can affect people differently, as well as how losing a family member can reveal what truly happens behind closed doors. It remains an intriguing and heartfelt study of the importance of acknowledging grief.
Death: The “Great Equalizer”? African American Deathways and Inequality
Credit: Dr. Kami Fletcher
Dr. Kami Fletcher is a death scholar and associate professor of U.S. and African American history at Albright College. Her work focuses on African American deathways and deathwork, examining African American norms and ideas surrounding death as well as ways that death intersects with race, class, gender, religion, and region. Back in 2010, when Dr. Fletcher was a Ph.D. student of history at Morgan State University in Baltimore, she got a job working with Sharp Street Church, the first African American Methodist Church in the city to research the avenues available to restore and preserve Mount Auburn Cemetery — one of the oldest African American owned and operated burial grounds in the country. When Dr. Fletcher first set foot in the cemetery, it had been so neglected that it was completely overgrown with trees. “The cemetery just looked like a forest,” she said.
“Wind Phone” Provides Grievers a Chance To Call Their Loved Ones
Wind phones are providing an outlet for those seeking to reconnect with their loved ones. Matthew Komatsu /Wikimedia
Little did Itaru Sasaki know that a phone he set up to use to call his deceased cousin would end up resonating with so many people.
Sasaki in 2010 built a phone booth and installed it in his garden, some 300 miles northeast of Tokyo. He used the disconnected phone to talk to his cousin, who had recently died of cancer, as Reuters reported — just months before a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, killing 20,000 people.
After the devastation, Sasaki moved his disconnected phone to a hill overlooking the Pacific and invited others to use it.
In the years since, wind phones have sprung up all over.
Who Cares for the Caregivers?: 
Final Messages of the Dying: 
Will I Die in Pain?: 
