Notes on Sources 
The Caribbean American writer Audre Lorde wrote, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Writing this book was a six-year exercise in taking ideas from philosophers and historians, mixing them with my own experience working in death, and attempting to make them, somehow, felt.
Many of the texts that had a huge influence are only cited briefly in the final book. Please visit the original texts, especially those of Ernest Becker, Philippe Ariès, Joseph Campbell, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Viktor Frankl. It will do wonders to advance your relationship with death and mortality.
While working at the crematory I kept a secret blog called Salon of Souls, which caught me as I was in 2008, and didn’t allow me to revise history.
I was fortunate in having the full support of my coworkers at the crematory: Michael, Chris, and Bruce. Not only did they allow me to use their real names, they agreed to sit down for interviews and multiple follow-ups as the book was written. I hope my tremendous respect for these men and what they do comes across as you read.
Through the Order of the Good Death, I am lucky to know the best death academics and funeral professionals working today. Their access to resource libraries, real-world experience, and large pools of arcane and morbid knowledge has been invaluable.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.
Wales, Henry G. “Death Comes to Mata Hari.” International News Service, October 19, 1917.
SHAVING BYRON
Tennyson, Lord Alfred. In Memoriam: An Authoritative Text. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
PUPPY SURPRISE
Ball, Katharine. “Death Benefits.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 15, 1993.
Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter 5, no. 4 (1955): 49–52.
Iserson, Kenneth V. Death to Dust? What Happens to Dead Bodies. Galen Press, 1994.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” In The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Random House, 2012.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Suzuki, Hikaru. The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
THE THUD
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Doughty, Caitlin. “Children & Death.” Fortnight (2011), fortnightjournal.com/caitlin-doughty/262-children-death.html.
Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
May, Trevor. The Victorian Undertaker. Oxford, UK: Shire Publications Ltd, 1996.
TOOTHPICKS IN JELL-O
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Connolly, Ceci. “A Grisly but Essential Issue.” The Washington Post, June 9, 2006.
Dante. The Inferno. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Orent, Wendy. Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Stackhouse, John. “India’s Turtles Clean Up the Ganges.” Seattle Times, October 1, 1992.
PUSH THE BUTTON
Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Chronology of the Middle Paleolithic of the Levant.” In Neandertals and Modern Humans in Western Asia. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.
Chrisafis, Angelique. “French Judge Closes Body Worlds–style Exhibition of Corpses.” The Guardian, April 21, 2009.
Cioran, Emil. A Short History of Decay. Arcade Publishing, 1975.
Grainger, Hilary J. Death Redesigned: British Crematoria History, Architecture and Landscape. Spire Books, 2005.
Newberg, Andrew, and Eugene D’Aquili. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Random House, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Prothero, Stephen R. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
PINK COCKTAIL
Aoki, Shinmon. Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician. Buddhist Education Center, 2004.
Ash, Niema. Flight of the Wind Horse: A Journal into Tibet. London: Rider, 1992.
Beane Freeman, Laura, et al. “Mortality from lymphohematopoietic malignancies among workers in formaldehyde industries: The National Cancer Institute Cohort.” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101, no. 10(2009): 751–61.
Conklin, Beth A. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. University of Texas Press, 2001.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gilpin Faust, Drew. The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2009.
Habenstein, Robert W., and William M. Lamers. The History of American Funeral Directing. National Funeral Directors Association of the United States, 2007.
Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
O’Neill, John. Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
Taylor, John. Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
DEMON BABIES
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du mal]. Translated by Christopher Thompson. iUniverse, 2000.
Cohan, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers. Courier Dover Publications, 2012.
Paré, Ambroise. Des monstres et prodiges. Librairie Droz, 2003.
Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Sanger, Carol. “‘The Birth of Death’: Stillborn Birth Certificates and the Problem for Law.” California Law Review 100, no. 269 (2012): 269–312.
DIRECT DISPOSAL
Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter 5, no. 4 (1955): 49–52.
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death: Revisited. New York: Random House, 2011.
———. Interview with Christopher Hitchens. The New York Public Library, 1988.
Prothero, Stephen R. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Time. “The Necropolis: First Step Up to Heaven” Time, September 30, 1966.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2012.
UNNATURAL NATURAL
Snyder Sachs, Jessica. Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death. Da Capo Press, 2002.
ALAS, POOR YORICK
Asma, Stephen T. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Friend, Tad. “Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” The New Yorker, October 13, 2003.
Harrison, Ann Tukey, editor. The Danse Macabre of Women: Ms. Fr. 995 of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Akron, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
EROS AND THANATOS
Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid. Translated by H. B. Paull. Planet, 2012.
Brothers Grimm. The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Translated by Maria Tatar. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Doughty, Caitlin. “The Old & the Lonely.” Fortnight (2011), fortnightjournal.com/caitlin-doughty/276-the-old-the-lonely.html.
Lang, Andrew. The Red True Story Book. Longmans, Green, and Company, 1900.
Rank, Otto. Beyond Psychology. Courier Dover Publications, 2012.
Sachs, Adam. “Stranger than Paradise.” The New York Times Style Magazine, May 10, 2013.
BUBBLATING
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Campobasso, Carlo Pietro, Giancarlo Di Vella, and Francesco Introna. “Factors affecting decomposition and Diptera colonization.” Forensic Science International 120 nos. 1–2 (2001): 18–27.
Dickey, Colin. Afterlives of the Saints. Unbridled Books, 2012.
Eberwine, Donna. “Disaster Myths that Just Won’t Die.” Perspectives in Health —The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization 10, no. 1 (2005).
Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Kanda, Fusae. “Behind the Sensationalism: Images of a Decaying Corpse in Japanese Buddhist Art.” Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (2005).
Lindsay, Suzanne G. Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870. Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
Mirbeau, Octave. Torture Garden. Translated by Alvah Bessie. powerHouse Books, 2000.
Miller, William Ian The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Mongillo, John F., and Bibi Booth. Environmental Activists. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.
Noble, Thomas F. X., and Thomas Head. Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
GHUSL
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Zone Books, 1991.
Metcalf, Peter, and Richard Huntington. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Nelson, Walter. Buddha: His Life and His Teachings. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Quigley, Christine. The Corpse: A History. MacFarland, 2005.
THE REDWOODS
Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Heinrich, Bernd. Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Walther, Ingo F. Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903: The Primitive Sophisticate. Taschen, 1999.
Wilson, Horace Hayman. The Vish
u Puráa: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition. J. Murray, 1840.
DETH SKOOL
Collison, Tim. “Cosmetic Considerations for the Infant Death.” Dodge Magazine, Winter 2009.
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
THE ART OF DYING
Atkinson, David William. The English Ars Moriendi. Lang, 1992.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Colman, Penny. Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial. Boston: Macmillan, 1997.
Gawande, Atul. “The Way We Age Now.” The New Yorker, April 30, 2007.
Gollner, Adam Leith. “The Immortality Financiers: The Billionaires Who Want to Live Forever.” The Daily Beast, August 20, 2013.
Hanson, Rick. Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. New Harbinger Publications, 2009.
Jacoby, Susan. Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. New York: Random House, 2012.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. “Archetypal Experiences Surrounding Death.” Lecture, Panarion Conference, C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, 1978.
PRODIGAL DAUGHTER: AN EPILOGUE OF SORTS
Diggory, James C., and Doreen Z. Rothman. “Values Destroyed by Death.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63, no. 1(1961): 205–10.
Louis C.K. Chewed Up. Filmed at the Berklee Performance Center, Boston, October 2008.