| List of Illustrations | p. xv |
| Preface: A Matter of Life and Death | p. xvii |
| Acknowledgments | p. xxv |
| Arranging My Mourning: Five Meditations on the Psychology of Grief | |
| Death Opens | |
| All Souls' Day | p. 1 |
| A Door Opens | p. 5 |
| On the Threshold | p. 11 |
| Voices | p. 14 |
| Widow | |
| Phone Call | p. 19 |
| Keening/Kissing | p. 21 |
| Plath's Etymology | p. 25 |
| Sati | p. 28 |
| The Widower's Exequy | p. 30 |
| The Widow's Lament | p. 33 |
| The Widow's Desire | p. 36 |
| Mr. Lowell and the Spider | p. 38 |
| Yahrzeit | |
| Why Is This Day Different from Other Days? | p. 40 |
| Caring for the Dead | p. 43 |
| Gravestones | p. 45 |
| The Buried Life | p. 50 |
| The Buried Self | p. 55 |
| E-mail to the Dead | |
| The Hypothetical Life | p. 62 |
| Purgatories | p. 69 |
| Textual Resurrections | p. 71 |
| Psychic Research | p. 73 |
| Letters to the Virtual World | p. 79 |
| Allas the Deeth | p. 82 |
| Writing Wrong | |
| Keynote | p. 86 |
| Weep and Write | p. 88 |
| This Is the Curse. Write | p. 92 |
| You Must Be Wicked to Deserve Such Pain | p. 94 |
| A Hole in the Heart | p. 95 |
| Impossible to Tell | p. 96 |
| History Makes Death: How the Twentieth Century Reshaped Dying and Mourning | |
| Expiration/Termination | |
| "Modern Death" | p. 103 |
| "Expiration" vs. "Termination" | p. 106 |
| Ash Wednesday | p. 109 |
| Timor Mortis | p. 112 |
| Ghosts of Heaven | p. 121 |
| Nada | p. 124 |
| The Souls of Animals | p. 130 |
| Technologies of Death | |
| Extermination | p. 135 |
| Conditio Inhumana | p. 138 |
| Annihilation in History | p. 144 |
| The Great War and the City of Death | p. 147 |
| Hell on Earth | p. 152 |
| The German Requiem | p. 159 |
| Technologies of Dying | |
| In the Hospital Spaceship | p. 164 |
| Questions of Technology | p. 167 |
| The Inhospitable Hospital | p. 178 |
| The Doctor's Detachment | p. 189 |
| What Vivian Is Bearing | p. 196 |
| A Day in the Death of... | |
| Recording Death | p. 204 |
| Death Watching | p. 205 |
| Home Movies | p. 209 |
| Flashbulb Memories | p. 210 |
| The Celluloid Afterlife | p. 216 |
| Death and the Camera | p. 218 |
| Seeing and Believing | p. 222 |
| Mortality on Display | p. 224 |
| Haunting Photographs | p. 230 |
| Millennial Mourning | |
| A Prayer Flag | p. 242 |
| Mourning Becomes Electronic | p. 245 |
| The Embarrassment of the Comforter | p. 247 |
| The Shame of the Mourner | p. 255 |
| Mourning as Malarkey | p. 264 |
| Ritual Offerings | p. 275 |
| Monumental Particularities | p. 283 |
| The Handbook of Heartbreak: Contemporary Elegy and Lamentation | |
| On the Beach with Sylvia Plath | |
| Berck-Plage | p. 295 |
| "Berck-Plage" | p. 297 |
| This Is the Sea, Then, This Great Abeyance | p. 310 |
| Nobodaddy | p. 317 |
| It Is Given Up | p. 323 |
| Sylvia Plath and "Sylvia Plath" | p. 327 |
| Was the Nineteenth Century Different, and Luckier? | |
| The Death Book Stuff | p. 332 |
| "Not Poetry" | p. 335 |
| Whitman-and Mother Death and Father Earth | p. 340 |
| Dickinson-and Death and the Maiden | p. 347 |
| Grave, Tomb, and Battle Corpses | p. 359 |
| "Rats' Alley" and the Death of Pastoral | |
| The Army of the Dead | p. 366 |
| What Was "Pastoral"? | p. 371 |
| The Poetry Is in the Pity | p. 372 |
| Down Some Profound Dull Tunnel | p. 381 |
| I Think We Are in Rats' Alley / Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones | p. 384 |
| The Man Who Does Not Know This Has Not Understood Anything | p. 390 |
| Monsters of Elegy | |
| Ryoan-ji | p. 398 |
| Let the Lamp Affix Its Beam | p. 399 |
| How to Perform a Funeral | p. 406 |
| Documenting Death | p. 410 |
| Death Studies | p. 413 |
| Listening, Looking | p. 420 |
| Remembering | p. 429 |
| Imagining | p. 433 |
| Is There No Consolation? | p. 435 |
| Apocalypse Now (and Then) | |
| Y2K | p. 439 |
| The Unspeakable Emergency | p. 442 |
| Apo-kalypso | p. 448 |
| Ground Zero | p. 456 |
| Closure? | p. 459 |
| Endnotes | p. 464 |
| Bibliography | p. 525 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 554 |
| Index | p. 557 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
