Death's door : modern dying and the ways we grieve / Sandra M. Gilbert.

New York : W.W. Norton, 2007.

xxv, 580 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

"First published as a Norton paperback 2007."--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [525]-553) and index.

pt. 1. Arranging my mourning : five meditations on the psychology of grief -- 1. Death opens -- All Souls' Day -- A door opens -- On the threshold -- Voices -- 2. Widow -- Phone call -- Keening/kissing -- Plath's etymology -- Sati -- The widower's Exequy -- The widow's lament -- The widow's desire -- Mr. Lowell and the spider -- 3. Yahrzeit -- Why is this day different from other days? -- Caring for the dead -- Gravestones -- The buried life -- The buried self -- 4. E-mail to the dead -- The hypothetical life -- Purgatories -- Textual resurrections -- Psychic research -- Letters to the virtual world -- Allas the Deeth -- 5. Writing wrong -- Keynote -- Weep and write -- THIS is the curse. Write -- You must be wicked to deserve such pain -- A hole in the heart -- Impossible to tell --

pt. 2. History makes death : how the twentieth century reshaped dying and mourning -- 6. Expiration/termination -- "Modern death" -- "Expiration" vs. "termination" -- Ash Wednesday -- Timor mortis -- Ghosts of heaven -- Nada -- The souls of animals -- 7. Technologies of death -- Extermination -- Conditio inhumana -- Annihilation in history -- The great war and the city of death -- Hell on earth -- The German requiem -- 8. Technologies of dying -- In the hospital spaceship -- Questions of technology -- The inhospitable hospital -- The doctor's detachment -- What Vivian is bearing -- 9. A day in the death of... -- Chronology no. 1 : recording death -- Chronology no. 2 : death watching -- Chronology no. 3 : home movies -- Chronology no. 4 : flashbulb memories -- The celluloid afterlife -- Death and the camera -- Seeing and believing -- Mortality on display -- Haunting photographs -- 10. Millennial mourning -- A prayer flag -- Mourning becomes electronic -- The embarrassment of the comforter -- The shame of the mourner -- Mourning as malarkey -- Ritual offerings -- Monumental particularities --

pt. 3. The handbook of heartbreak : contemporary elegy and lamentation -- 11. On the beach with Sylvia Plath -- Berck-Plage -- "Berck-Plage" -- This is the sea, then, this great abeyance -- Nobodaddy -- It is given up -- Sylvia Plath and "Sylvia Plath" -- 12. Was the nineteenth century different, and luckier? -- The death book stuff -- "Not poetry" -- Whitman, and Mother Death and Father Earth -- Dickinson, and death and the maiden -- Grave, tomb, and battle corpses -- 13. "Rats' alley" and the death of pastoral -- The army of the dead -- What was "pastoral"? -- The poetry is in the pity -- Down some profound dull tunnel -- I think we are in rats' alley/where the dead men lost their bones -- The man who does not know this has not understood anything -- 14. Monsters of elegy -- Ryoan-ji -- Let the lamp affix its beam -- How to perform a funeral -- Documenting death -- Death studies -- Listening, looking -- Remembering -- Imagining -- Is there no consolation? -- 15. Apocalypse now (and then) -- Y2K -- The unspeakable emergency -- Apo-kalypso -- Ground Zero -- Closure?