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Heartspace: Real Life Stories on Death and Dying
Real Life Stories on Death and Dying is an anthology of personal stories about grief, loss and love in death and dying. Stories include tending to the loss of a child, a spouse, a parent, a friend and a beloved. These accounts demonstrate the strength of community, the importance of ritual, and the resilience of the human spirit. Heartspace challenges us to shift the paradigm of death and dying in our culture by being vulnerable in telling our stories and sitting in witness.All proceeds benefit heart2heart's programs and services for living in the dying time. heart2heart is a non-profit operating within Abundance NC #20-4327530.
166 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 8, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 3, 2022
Heartspace is a collection of works of prose and poetry that describe people experiencing the death of their loved ones. These stories are a departure from the more medicalized/academic narratives I've been used to reading (i.e. Rana Awdish, Atul Gawande, Audre Lorde, etc) but they were valuable in their own right. Something that was pretty wild for me was the setting of these stories -- most of them take place in neighboring Chatham County, NC and most of the contributors are local (including an ex-poet laureate of Carrboro -- where I live -- which I didn't even know we had).
I do think that just like a medicalized death narrative is its own brand, these stories are also their own brand and I'm just not sure how to describe it. Some (maybe half) of these stories center alternative therapies or neo-pagan philosophies in a way that certainly caught me off guard. Mentions of things like an ancestral knowledge to anoint bodies with oil or polarization therapy or linguistic workshops to find compassion strike me as a bit odd in this context. Indeed some of these notions seem a bit appropriative but, at the same time, these narratives are of a sort that seems to resist critique.
I think my reading of this collection was greatly affected by what I'm going to call 'ivory tower' bias in the sense that the patient narratives that I have read thus far tended to be more academic and reflective. Although as I write this, I realize a distinction between these two types of stories: we don't get to hear from the actual patient in this collection. We're not hearing the experience of the dying person, it's the experience of those living through the death obliquely. So maybe for me that was just a new style of story I'm not used to and it struck me as surprising. I think, having had the privilege of not experiencing a lot of death, these stories didn't resonate with me in the same way they would with other people. In general, collections like these are important because anecdotes are the way we interpret the world. Without stories besides our own, our worldview would become inherently limited. All that is to say this book is valuable, but there were certainly some mumbo-jumbo-y moments that kind of clouded the reading experience for me.
I do think that just like a medicalized death narrative is its own brand, these stories are also their own brand and I'm just not sure how to describe it. Some (maybe half) of these stories center alternative therapies or neo-pagan philosophies in a way that certainly caught me off guard. Mentions of things like an ancestral knowledge to anoint bodies with oil or polarization therapy or linguistic workshops to find compassion strike me as a bit odd in this context. Indeed some of these notions seem a bit appropriative but, at the same time, these narratives are of a sort that seems to resist critique.
I think my reading of this collection was greatly affected by what I'm going to call 'ivory tower' bias in the sense that the patient narratives that I have read thus far tended to be more academic and reflective. Although as I write this, I realize a distinction between these two types of stories: we don't get to hear from the actual patient in this collection. We're not hearing the experience of the dying person, it's the experience of those living through the death obliquely. So maybe for me that was just a new style of story I'm not used to and it struck me as surprising. I think, having had the privilege of not experiencing a lot of death, these stories didn't resonate with me in the same way they would with other people. In general, collections like these are important because anecdotes are the way we interpret the world. Without stories besides our own, our worldview would become inherently limited. All that is to say this book is valuable, but there were certainly some mumbo-jumbo-y moments that kind of clouded the reading experience for me.
January 9, 2020
In 1919, when my grandmother went into labor with her first child, the doctor put down his bag and asked her to remove her panties. Horrified, she crossed her legs, pulled up her night shirt, and pointed to her protruding naval. “What do you want with my panties? The baby is coming out here,” she said.
100 years ago, we knew more about how to lay out our loved ones than we knew about giving birth. Now we’ve got it the other way around.
Death is one of those things, perhaps the only one, we will all do and only once. It is final, and solitary, and something we don’t talk about.
Heartspace tackles this problem head-on with honest and true tales of death as told by the survivors. It is a quilt woven from many perspectives. Here is the mother and daughter at vigil in a hand-built cabin, here the father — ninety and counting — in denial, and here the tragic death of a first-born son.
I was a death virgin when death came to my neighborhood. Many of us were, and we were blindsided. We helped each through the process and eventually came to terms with death. My story, along with many others, are in this book.
If you think you might die one day, or know anyone who plans on dying, this book is for you. We owe it to ourselves to get comfortable with the inevitable. Let Heartspace show you the way.
100 years ago, we knew more about how to lay out our loved ones than we knew about giving birth. Now we’ve got it the other way around.
Death is one of those things, perhaps the only one, we will all do and only once. It is final, and solitary, and something we don’t talk about.
Heartspace tackles this problem head-on with honest and true tales of death as told by the survivors. It is a quilt woven from many perspectives. Here is the mother and daughter at vigil in a hand-built cabin, here the father — ninety and counting — in denial, and here the tragic death of a first-born son.
I was a death virgin when death came to my neighborhood. Many of us were, and we were blindsided. We helped each through the process and eventually came to terms with death. My story, along with many others, are in this book.
If you think you might die one day, or know anyone who plans on dying, this book is for you. We owe it to ourselves to get comfortable with the inevitable. Let Heartspace show you the way.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews