Maybe you think you have answers, but no one really knows for sure. There’s something about being in the presence of an actual dead body though that fills me with existential horror - What happened to the life I knew in that frame? Does everything just cease? I’m no stranger to death and dying, or at least conceptually. I find these fascinating, and I always have. I collect skulls and medical books, love forensics and crime books, and even have a few coffee table books hidden away with black and white photos of death scenes and mourning photography from the Thanatos Archive, including the coroner’s detailed notes from the 1920s. With medication, I still find death fascinating, just not obsessively so. I live with dysthymia, meaning my existential dread rules my life without proper medication. An important book because it makes us uncomfortable.Īs a goth, I myself am a bit death-obsessed. But it still made me think differently about the death industry here in the United States and how woefully unprepared we modern people are to deal baldly with death.

As a long-standing follower of her YouTube channel Ask a Mortician and backer of The Order of the Good Death’s mission to raise death awareness in our youth-obsessed culture, I knew what I was getting into. It’s a book I’ve been eyeing for a long time.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty is sometimes off-putting but always honest.

Beyond the Dark Veil by Sue Henger