Death’s Summer Coat

Non-Fiction

What Death and Dying Cal Tell Us about Life and Living: Death is something we all confront―it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances, that we've forgotten how to grieve.

About the Book

We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar? Conversation and community are as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present―and about ourselves.

Featured Reviews:

Kirkus

The New York Review

Publisher’s Weekly

New York Times

“Vivid, scholarly, enthralling, and surprisingly touching, Death’s Summer Coat is skillfully stitched together.”

— Rupert Callender, editor of THE NATURAL DEATH HANDBOOK

“Schillace examines rituals of bereavement across cultures and across time. She points toward the confusion that has emerged in a technological age when brain death, heart death and other definitions becloud our understanding of expiry itself. We don’t know what death means or even what it is.”

— Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review

“A lively, panoramic view of our approach to death and dying that asks essential questions, and offers important insights, into the inevitable.”

— Bess Lovejoy, author of REST IN PIECES