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Livestreaming and filming death rites and funeral ceremonies to enable remote engagement proliferated rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many expect these options to remain prevalent going forward. This paper draws on interviews with a diverse UK sample of 68 bereaved people, funeral directors, officiants and celebrants. It illustrates how, and explains why, people's experiences and evaluations of hybrid funerals can vary. In a context when in-person gatherings were limited, hybridisation played a valuable role in enabling more people to engage with funerals. However, virtual attendance was often considered less satisfying than in-person attendance because it did not enable people to participate well in the funeral activities that mattered to them or to participate with others as they would in person. Scope for participation was partly contingent on the functionality and use made of technology, including whether and which steps were taken to facilitate engagement and a sense of connection for those joining online. People's evaluations of hybrid funerals could also reflect their relationships to the deceased and their frames of reference – for example, whether they were comparing virtual attendance to attending in person, or to being unable to attend at all, or to an overwhelmingly large funeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talking about death and dying is promoted in UK health policy and practice, from a perception that to do so encourages people to plan for their end of life and so increase their likelihood of experiencing a good death. This encouragement occurs alongside a belief that members of the public are reluctant to talk about death, although surveys suggest this is not the case. This paper describes findings from a research study in which people participated in deliberative discussion groups during which they talked about a range of topics related to death, including talking about death, the good death, choice and planning and compassionate communities. Here we report what they had to say in relation to talking about death and dying. We identified three themes: 1. The difference between talking about death as an abstract concept and confronting the certainty of death, 2. how death and dying presents issues for planning and responsibility, and 3. approaches to normalising death within society. For our participants, planning was considered most appropriate in relation to wills and funerals, while dying was considered too unpredictable to be easy to plan for; they had complex ideas about the value of talking about death and dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of death studies has a rich interdisciplinary history but little scholarship examining the process of interdisciplinary collaboration. The development of, and inquiry into, a more rigorously interdisciplinary death studies is a topical pursuit. The aim of this paper is to shed critical light on researcher experiences in an interdisciplinary collaboration on the topics of dying, death of grief, and examine what possibilities and challenges it prefaces for future interdisciplinary research in the field. An interdisciplinary study group called Exploring Narratives of Death (END) is examined over a period of one year through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The conclusion is that researchers strongly advocate for more interdisciplinary agendas in death studies in order to develop greater intellectual advancement in the field and/or practical application of research in society. However, a lack of structural and temporal latitude in researchers' professional roles in the university could inhibit their ability to perform such research in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how the human corpse can function as an aesthetic-therapeutic for the deceased, the bereaved and for death care professionals. It understands the human corpse as a liminal entity that is characterised by a specific materiality, biography and self-referentiality. Because of these attributes the corpse can be employed as an aesthetic-therapeutic by the bereaved and by death care professionals in response to a death. On the basis of participant observation in the death care industry and qualitative interviews with bereaved people and funeral professionals in the Netherlands, the paper discusses four engagements with the dead body in the period prior to the funeral: i) caring, ii) sustaining, iii) restoring, and iv) disregarding the dead body. Crucially, it shows how such engagements can contribute to the well-being of those involved, including the deceased, who is often understood to be sentient. Furthermore, by focusing on cases where the corpse is disregarded, the paper argues that an aesthetic-therapeutic understanding of the human corpse is hegemonic in the death care industry. The analysis and conclusion offer insights to scholars in the interdisciplinary field of death studies, as well as reflections for practitioners in end-of-life and death care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadside memorials are made up of objects, usually flowers, candles and crosses, placed at the roadside to mark the sites of fatal accidents. The paper introduces the potential of Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis and geography of rhythms in exploring roadside memorials. The aim of the paper is to investigate rituals and rhythms at roadside memorials in Poland. Data were collected during two-year field observations of 12 roadside memorials and from 10 semi-structured interviews. Polish roadside memorials are part of widespread rituals which either generate material changes to roadside memorials, like cleaning up works, leaving candles and flowers at memorials or which do not generate such changes, like saying prayers or reminiscing about the deceased. The specifics of roadside memorialisation in Poland are expressed in prayers being said and no personal belongings being left at the sites. We found that the coexistence of individual and social rhythms at roadside memorials was deeply rooted in Catholic liturgy and commonly accepted cemetery rituals in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 is the first pandemic to be broadcast and photographed as it happens worldwide. However, despite the plethora of images on countless aspects of the pandemic, few media images have covered its more sensitive issues, such as the collapse of the healthcare system, the process of dying alone, or the disruption to funeral rites and mourning. Consequently, the visual narratives of the pandemic are biased. They lack images that show its more dramatic aspects. This affects not only how the public perceives and reacts to Covid-19, but also the visual evidence that will remain for historical memory in the future. With one of the world's highest case rates and most stringent states of emergency, Spain offers an interesting case study to analyse the pandemic's photographic narratives and its missing images during lockdown. This paper focuses on the presence or absence of images dealing with illness, death, dying and grief, as well as their ways of representation. It delves into the framing of particular visual narratives through an analysis of the images that appeared in Spain's leading newspapers, together with semi-structured interviews conducted with renowned photojournalists who worked on the front line to document Covid-19 during lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant popular perception in contemporary Romania is that its people have strong, persistent and genuine Christian beliefs that are the main source of their attitudes towards death and of their representations of the afterlife. Questioning this assumption, this paper is based on two exploratory studies consisting of 80 semi-structured interviews and aims at investigating the features of personal representations related to death in contemporary Romania. It highlights the emergence of new patterns of representation and new and unexplored attitudes towards death, dying and the afterlife, identifying three categories of interviewees: the believers, the personalists, the atheists. The paper pleads for further study of Romanian beliefs and representations related to the topic of death from a sociological perspective. As it is the case with the majority of Romanian post–communist studies on death and dying, elements related to religion and folklore should not be considered the only ones that matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a brief social history of the hospice movement in Russia. The author explains why the hospice movement has become so relevant over the last five years in modern Russia; who the people are who lead this movement; how their ideas collide with 'reality'; and what consequences of this collision can already be observed. The author presents the Russian hospice movement as a dynamic social process which arises in the particular context of the political protests of 2011–2012. The paper is based on the first results of ethnographic research conducted in several hospices in Siberia, as well as on data from in-depth interviews with hospice movement activists and archival materials. The author argues that the hospice movements in contemporary Russia serve a social function as grassroots mediation for social and economic care between local bureaucracy and patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicalisation of hospice care has been discussed simultaneously with the development of palliative care into a medical speciality. However empirical knowledge of the role of medicalisation in hospice practice is underexplored. This paper considers hospice managers' perspectives on hospice care in the complex between values related to hospice philosophy and a specialised medical approach to hospice care. Focus groups and small group interviews were conducted with hospice managers from 16 out of the 19 Danish hospices. Drawing on hope as a theoretical framework, the study contributes to further understanding of the complexity of navigating hospice care in the impasse between an existential hope focused on meaning at the end of life and a medical hope for control of the dying body. Hospice care appeared as pulled between these dimensions of hope. The hospice managers took a pragmatic approach to medicalisation but their emphasis on dying as an existential event also points to a role for hospices as a critical voice against over-medicalisation of dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dying alone is portrayed as undesirable in terms of policy, health and social care provision, the wishes of family and friends, and in popular culture. Despite this, people do often die alone, both in institutional and domestic settings. This paper reports findings from a study which explored ways of investigating individuals' perspectives on dying alone at home. It tested methods of recruitment and data collection, gathered preliminary data and explored the ethical issues involved. Interviews with 11 older people living alone and 7 hospice at home nurses are reported here. For the older people, the idea of dying alone was less problematic than the idea of needing care and support from others, and the perceived loss of independence that this would entail. Participants reacted in differing ways to threats to their independence, but all utilised a form of relational reflexivity when considering the effect their actions might have on others. The nurses would prefer no one to die alone, but believed they had seen patients managing their own dying so that they could be alone at the moment of death. The paper suggests that dying alone may be a problem for survivors, rather than for the person who is dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a 'resurrection' of death in the post-socialist countries brought about by a rediscovery of religious norms and values in the context of the global processes of (de)secularisation? Based on a sample of 20 in-depth biographical interviews with men and women 75 years old and over from Bulgaria, this paper examines the complex dynamics of the privatisation and liberation of religiosity from the grasp of the communist regime. This religiosity developed along with the surge in the interest in Christian rituals, including Christian funeral and mourning, with their reinvention and integration into systems of personal values. However, it lacked the understanding of the Orthodox religious ideas of (preparation for) the afterlife. What emerged was an original death culture, driven largely by pursuits for a reconfirmation of family, national and anti-communist identity. It reproduced an unstable knowledge about the formal aspects of rituals and, paradoxically, was permeated by internalised ideological patterns of mourning, enforced by cultural experts of the communist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the place of animals in the contemporary Swedish human cemetery. It does this by looking at how animals are admitted to cemeteries – alive and dead, above and below ground, physically as well as symbolically. The aim is to shed light on the various ways that animals are experienced and treated in the cemetery, and to explore how this both reflects our changing attitudes to animals and our changing attitudes to death. The paper draws on the findings from a qualitative interview study carried out at the Eastern Cemetery in Malmö, Sweden, and a follow-up study of a turtle pond, in Malmö-Limhamn Cemetery. Two different perspectives relating to animals in the cemetery were common to these studies: (1) the liminal role of the companion animal; and (2) aesthetics and care in relation to wild and domesticated animals. The two perspectives, considered as findings in their own right, are used in this paper as a foundation for discussing questions relating to how urban cemetery animals can enrich the cemetery environment and increase the importance of urban cemeteries today and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper primarily examines the perspectives of dying persons in Germany, in terms of if and when the dying feels lonely during their final weeks. The author contrasts emic perceptions with public discourses in regards to the non-dying ones possibly neglecting or tabooing the terminally ill. Secondly, the paper explores how and where the dying persons included in the study want to pass away. The dying individuals involved did not feel tabooed or ignored by non-dying persons. Dying at home did not necessarily remain the preferred option compared to dying at institutions. The author collected data between 2013 and 2015 in Western Germany, using long-term participant observation and interviews with individuals diagnosed as terminally ill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses some of the results from a large-scale-funded research project into the coronial conceptualisation and adjudgement of suicide, founded upon an ongoing dissatisfaction with the validity of suicide data. The research is based upon in-depth interviews with 32 coroners from all but one Australian jurisdiction and focuses upon the administrative, epistemological and ontological categorisation of suicide as a type of death. The coroners express a range of concerns over the options available to them in order to produce more defensible statistics. First, coroners generally expressed a dissatisfaction with the fundamental binary finding of 'suicide/not suicide', but see little point in expanding the administrative categories available to them Second, epistemologically, coroners are open to the introduction of a classification of 'sub-intentional suicide/self-manslaughter' as a way of dealing with the issue of intent. Finally, those coroners who have significant experience with Indigenous suicide– propose the abandonment/replacement of the category of suicide altogether, due to its ontological incoherence, and its cultural flexibility. The central conclusion is that, if more valid statistics of self-inflicted death are to be produced, at very least, coroners need more choices of finding than are currently available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on interviews with self-identified surfers from both Australia and Hawaii who have extensive histories of participation in the surfing funeral or post-funeral ritual of the paddle-out ceremony. The paddle-out is an ocean-based death ritual in which the deceased are symbolically, and often materially through cremains, placed in the ocean and farewelled through highly physical ritual actions. In a paddle-out, surfing communities located at specific, and sometimes multiple places, come together to acknowledge, remember and tell stories of a member who is missing in the line-up. As a rite of passage, the paddle-out does not neatly fit anthropology's, and particularly van Gennep's idea of the funeral as primarily a separation ritual. Indeed, our research suggests that ideas of separation and connection, departure and continuing to mingle with the living all operate in how the ritual is experienced and interpreted. While co-extensive with Hawaiian surfing traditions, the paddle-out is also an adaptive, modern, flexible ritual open to personalisation in its form and meaning. The paddle-out ceremony is a rite passage for both the living and the dead and the deeply physical nature of the ritual provides a transformational experience of emotional release while also creating and renewing bonds and group solidarity. The circle formation, a key symbolic practice in the ritual, is central to production and self-recognition of community as participants face each other with the bereaved often placed inside the circle's centre in a visual, physical act of support. The deceased are also symbolically placed in the centre as the ritual mourns their loss and invariably celebrates their life and surfing identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population increase has drawn attention to the need in cities for easily accessible and attractive public spaces that will promote interaction regardless of gender, age, ethnicity and religious belief. This paper focuses on the role urban cemeteries play in a culturally and religiously diverse society. Norway is described as an increasingly secularised society. Immigration and transmigration, on the other hand, have brought a revived interest in religion and interreligious interaction. We explore two questions that relate to the cemetery as a public shared urban space: The first concerns the need for communities of all faiths and none to access burial space that meets their need. The second relates to the appropriateness of using cemetery as amenity space in a multicultural context. Diverse qualitative methods have been used; a focus group interview with participants from different religious and life-philosophy communities, interviews with key informants representing various religious communities and with visitors in two cemeteries in Oslo in 2014. The findings imply that there is a commonality that bridges differences: sharing human compassion. These sites have a potential in stimulating intercultural and interreligious encounters. Their special character as open shared urban sites can increase understanding and acceptance of each other's difference and hereby render strangeness and differences harmless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores design students’ proposals for a redesign of the interior of a room of silence at the SUS hospital in Malmö. Reflection and existential meaning-making are discussed in relation to the material culture of design, and more specifically in relation to four different themes found among the students’ proposals: nature as common symbolic framework and salutary force; lighting creating a visual and spatial ambience for retreat; interactive objects allowing ritualised activities; and the presence and absence of religious symbols. In this paper, we argue that architecture and design more profoundly could support people with varying existential viewpoints when it comes to providing religiously and culturally shared public spaces for dealing with existentially crucial moments. We also argue for an interdisciplinary research approach to healing environments, where existential meaning-making is included in the overall discussion of the design of health care architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper proposes that during the terminal stage of parental illness, children are involved in ‘writing’ a ‘penultimate chapter’. This is a prospective chapter and the quality of its content is dependent on the extent to which children are included in conversations and information sharing about the illness. The ‘writing’ of the ‘penultimate chapter’ is important in helping children make meaning from their current lived experience and helps prepare them in the writing of their final chapter about their parent. This paper develops and extends the ideas proposed by Walter in the 1990s. Walter delineated his ideas about bereaved people maintaining a relationship with the deceased person and through this being involved in ‘writing a last chapter’ about their lives. Part of the process of maintaining the relationship with the deceased person and finding a stable place for them is achieved through ‘the writing of the last chapter’. The last chapter is written after the death and involves conversations with people who knew the deceased. Walter’s model is developed here to incorporate the pre-bereavement period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This qualitative study explores the way in which a group of 12 undocumented migrants from Latin America who live in the United States have experienced the process of coping with dying and with deaths in their home countries. The paper argues that the grieving process is unique for a group like this, where the undocumented status means that the migrants cannot go back home to help the dying, support the ones left behind, or receive consolation. The sadness and the guilt experienced in the process have particular characteristics when you are undocumented in a host country, and the mechanisms used to cope with the situation are different than if you are at home or away but are free to travel back and forth. One avenue for coping, for instance, is the use of communication technologies to create the illusion of ‘being there’, even when that is not an option. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the training and supervision offered to volunteers at a bereavement centre for children in the Northeast United States. Drawing on interviews with 15 former volunteers, five current volunteers, and two staff members, the analysis illustrates how the feeling rules of the organisation shape interactional dynamics during group supervision meetings, and how these organisational processes reflect broader themes in contemporary talk therapeutic culture. Volunteers at the centre were socialised to believe that their ability to support others in their grief was produced through expressing their feelings during weekly supervision meetings, although some volunteers were not interested in talking about their feelings and others wished to speak about matters that could not be held so easily within the peer support model practiced at the centre. A tension emerged in the bereavement groups as well, as the focus on talk led some volunteers to privilege verbal expressions despite the understanding that children grieve most naturally through play. This paper questions whether training and supervision of volunteers who support grieving children should best take the form of a self-help group and proposes alternative approaches to supervision that would be consistent with the goal of offering non-clinical bereavement support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cemeteries garner considerable academic attention as anthropologists, landscapers, archaeologists, sociologists, geographers and historians examine their layout, purpose and use. Emerging from these studies is a body of literature that considers cemetery and burial ground design, memorialisation, mourning behaviour and ‘dark tourism’. Beyond interdisciplinary journals such as Mortality and edited multi-disciplinary books however, the insight generated in this literature can be fragmented through publication in discipline specific periodicals. As a result cemeteries are often analysed and presented as places that contain, for example, design or tourism and heritage or emotion and mourning. Framed by concerns over the sustainability of cemeteries nationwide, this paper considers the contemporary English cemetery as a simultaneous space of emotion, commerce and community. Using data from an ethnographic case study of a cemetery in East London, it illustrates the contestation that can result from these concurrent contrasting interpretations. The paper concludes that care needs to be taken when implementing initiatives and policy to balance the varying demands and expectations of a cemetery's purpose and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores six young women's experience of grief following the death of their mother. Employing a narrative approach, the focus is placed on exploring the meanings the six participants may make from the experience of the death of their mother and how these meanings are incorporated into their sense of self. The paper highlights how the women's narratives which emerge through the process of making meaning of death can be more complex, ambiguous and ambivalent than traditional grief models account for. Judith Butler's (2004) idea of 'coming undone' by grief is thus used to explore the possibility that the death of a mother causes not only an interruption in a young woman's world but an interruption in their sense of self. In accepting the ambivalence of the ties the women held with their mothers, and acknowledging the transformative effect of grief, this paper argues that it is possible to look beyond recovery and finally accept the death of a mother as the making of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents draws on interviews with individuals who have experience of creating, maintaining and utilising Facebook sites in memory of a loved one who has died by suicide. We argue that Facebook enables the deceased to be an on-going active presence in the lives of the bereaved. We highlight the potential of the Internet (and Facebook in particular) as a new and emerging avenue for the continuation of online identities and continuing bonds. Our study offers unique insight into survivors’ experiences of engaging with the virtual presence of their deceased loved one: how mourners come and go online, how this evolves over time and how the online identity of the deceased evolves even after death. We discuss how Facebook provides new ways for people to experience and negotiate death by suicide and to memorialise the deceased, highlighting the positive impact of this for survivors’ mental health. Finally, we describe the creation of tension amongst those who manage their grief in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the loss of a parent in young adulthood, showing how this emergent and distinctive life stage shapes Dutch young people’s experience of bereavement. Youth material cultures have commonly been analysed in terms of the construction and expression of youth identities, for example, through style, music and leisure. In this research, we highlight three themes in young people’s relationship to material culture as part of their everyday lived experience of parental loss: first, the parental home as a space of departure, memory and return, and the potential for conflict, destabilisation and misunderstanding when the remaining parent transforms the home or embarks on a new relationship; second, the different strategies young adults use to commemorate their parent in their own temporary or shared accommodation and online space; and third, the role of small, portable but effective keepsakes and adornment, such as jewellery or tattoos, that meet their need for the emotional experience of closeness with the memory of their parent. A focus on the material trajectories of grief grants insights into how young adults cope with loss in their everyday life, generating understanding of the ways young people may support themselves and be supported by others in the context of parental bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers’ grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choice-limited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The reported absence of distinguishing features upon British Gypsy-Traveller memorials has been used to support the widely accepted, and influential, argument that dead people are not the focus of social continuity within Gypsy-Traveller society. However, based upon cemetery surveys and interviews with members of the Gypsy-Traveller community in Sheffield, England, this paper demonstrates that explicit displays of ethnicity are now common upon memorials, and describes their characteristics. The reasons behind this apparent shift in mortuary practices are discussed in relation to wider socio-political factors. Based upon these findings, we argue for a reconsideration of the relationship between living and dead people within British Gypsy-Traveller society, and a recognition of the importance of commemoration in the negotiation of identity and social reproduction within these communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research undertaken to explain the experience of those bereaved by suicide has gained momentum over the past decade. This increase in activity assists those seeking to support people bereaved by suicide to better understand their needs. However, the literature in this area remains limited. This qualitative research data discussed here provides an in-depth, narrative exploration of a sample of 22 parental experiences following the suicide death of a young adult child. Contrary to the classic grief literature, a key finding of this study is that parents need to maintain a relationship with their child. The ways in which parents do this is many and varied ranging from public and private memorials to internal dialogues. However, the practices associated with remaining connected emotionally and/or spiritually occurred in the absence of socially condoned ways in which to honour such memorial places and spaces. This paper will present deep and complex narratives of parents who participated in this research to present and explore the varied ways in which memorials (as physical, emotional, spiritual spaces and places) are developed in the wake of suicide death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on the literature of metaphor, movement and memorialisation, this paper focuses on the ‘final journey’, a metaphoric journey undertaken by dead residents which allowed workers in care homes for older people to cope with the amounts of death that they encountered working in care homes for the elderly. Movement plays a key role in the routine functioning of the home and the metaphoric language of a journey is an important conclusion to the stages that have preceded this. It helps explain the care that surrounds death and dying within the care home. Workers’ experiences show that there is a rich oral tradition which symbolism, spirituality, ritual and memorial language explain and at the same time creates continuity for workers within care homes. I argue that the search for meaning is important for staff as they continually face the deterioration of people during their working lives. Further, the use of a metaphorical journey is a practical device for remembering and is imbued with the caring culture of the home and the individual beliefs of the workers involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a sub-set of findings from the first interview (T1) of an Australian longitudinal study that documents the living donor's experience with renal transplant. There has been limited Australian research on this topic to date. A qualitative methodological approach was used, involving open-ended interviews with prospective living kidney donors (n = 20) from the Renal Transplantation Unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The interviews were analysed using qualitative research methods of coding and thematic analysis. A significant majority of participants reported that the decision to become a living kidney donor was a positive, easy and spontaneous decision. It was driven by their natural instincts and they offered to be a donor at the earlier opportunity, rather than waiting to be asked. The offer was based on their desire to relieve the recipient's suffering and possible death associated with dialysis and kidney failure. While concerns associated with the medical operation for donation (nephrectomy) were a consideration, this was significantly overshadowed by their desire to improve the recipient's quality of life and avoid their possible death. In the face of such suffering and death, the donation of a kidney was considered ‘no big deal’. Such findings can be used to inform the assessment process for live donor screening. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spirituality is increasingly understood to be important in healthcare provision, as seen in policy, guidelines and practice across many Western healthcare systems. Definitions of spirituality remain controversial, despite their importance for consistency in research and practice. This paper reports on the definition findings of a nation-wide New Zealand (NZ) study (2006–2008) that examined understandings, experiences and ways to improve spiritual care, primarily focused in hospices. A mixed methods approach included 52 semi-structured interviews and a survey of 642 patients, family members and staff from 25 (78%) of NZ's hospices. A generic qualitative design and analysis was used to capture the experiences and understandings of participants' spirituality and spiritual care and a cross-sectional survey gave sample-based information about the study's questions. Across both studies the majority view held that spirituality is a useful, important, inclusive and broadly defined concept. NZ is a secular country, yet there is clear evidence that spirituality is important at the end of life. These findings add weight to the international trend for spirituality to be further investigated and attended to in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Right-to-die societies represent a new social movement driven by societal change. They reflect concerns about the impact of advances in medicine, about the quality of care available for people at the end of life and the consequences of demographic changes that lead to the prolongation of dying with high degrees of disability and distress. More generally, the growth of individualism and the obligation towards exercising personal autonomy leads to desires to control events near the end of life. This paper reports a survey of the membership of a UK right-to-die society Friends at the End (FATE). A questionnaire answered by 41% (162) of the members of this society provided insight into motives and experiences that had led to a decision to join. Members were more likely to be female, older and of higher social standing than the general population. A high proportion were religious and found no conflict between this and their membership, and a high proportion had backgrounds in health and social care. Motives for membership included the desire for practical assistance with dying, past involvement with deaths that involved high levels of dependency and distress, and commitment to ‘right’ to die ideology. The concerns of members about the distress of dying mirror what is known about the reasons why people approaching death request an assisted death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a wide variation in the ways in which the term personalisation is used in the funeral context, there are a number of common threads. For example, there is a broad consensus that a personalised funeral will feature references to the life and character of the deceased person and such a funeral will probably have been planned by the bereaved family, who may even participate in its conduct. However, academics working with the concept do not always use the term in precisely the same way. This paper suggests that while these ways of considering personalisation are useful, they do not include the complex processes by which a personalised funeral is planned and carried out. Using data from a study exploring Scottish funeral practices as illustration, the article proposes that the sociology ofpersonal life offers tools that may help to unpack the process of planning such a funeral. These tools are the concepts of memorialisation, biography, embeddedness and relationality. Together these concepts may help to explain the process by which a personalised funeral is planned, and the influences that impact upon the people doing the planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the reported experiences of bereaved Japanese people, this paper explores the continuing role of the ancestral tradition in contemporary responses to death and loss. In a culture that emphasises social conformity, it demonstrates the diverse and innovative ways individuals negotiated a shared tradition in a contemporary postmodern context in which a variety of cultural messages compete for attention. Traditional Buddhist mourning rituals that promote family and social solidarity now take their place alongside a medicalised system of dying, commercialised mourning, bereavement counselling and increasing emphasis on individualism and personal choice. Five categories of responses are identified to reflect the different ways the individuals concerned sought to reconcile social and familial obligations associated with traditional approaches with their need to find individual and personal meaning in their loss. Some participants felt obliged to conform to traditional forms from which they took little comfort, while others found them to be supportive and meaningful. Some took an improvisory approach, putting their own personal stamp on received wisdom. Others turned to alternative forms of support, either to supplement or replace traditional approaches. Their responses reflected the complex, dynamic, fluid and ambiguous relationship between the individual and their social and cultural resources, demonstrating the contribution of individuals to shaping culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]