"Like birth, death is a part of a magnificent cycle that is unavoidable in the physical world.  Experiencing the death of family members, friends and people important to us is something we all eventually share.   Paradoxically, how each of us deals with this inevitability is ultimately unique and intensely private.  In today's climate of self-improvement; replete with prescriptions for optimal living, you are expected to "get over it" in a specified amount of time and navigate the stages of mourning in a precise order.  If you don't if you get "stuck" in a specified externally imposed "phase" or, even worse, if you don't experience any of these stages, you feel that something is wrong with you which compounds your feelings of despair and intensifies your sense of being abjectly alone and misunderstood."

 

 

 

 

 

Excerpt
"Put her underwear on first so we can remove the sheet," the tall middle-aged woman said.
It was my first time dressing a dead body, and I expected it to be cold and hard. Instead it was room temperature and felt llike my childhood doll made of stockings.
My friend Irene is from South Africa, where bathing and dressing the dead is a family ritual. So when her twenty-three year old daughter Lisa died, she invited six women, her closest family and friends, to help her prepare Lisa for her funeral. I was one of those chosen for this strange honor.
As she lay in her living room dying of cancer, Lisa had planned her own memorial service. "I want to be buried in my wedding gown," she said. She had been married six months earlier.