About
Welcome to the Death Reference Desk! Geographically dispersed but unified with dark inside, we are two librarians and one professor of death and dying practices. Here we combine our expertise to inform the casually interested and morbidly curious alike about All Things Death: the bizarre, the batty and the beautiful, from interesting blogs and recommended books to commentary and analysis of death in the news.
What We Do
What We Don’t
Who We Are
What We Do
We scour the web and beyond for death: Good death. Bad death. Interesting, bizarre, nuanced death. Culturally and politically charged death. Scientific death and the ideas over time that have gripped the human heart and mind regarding what it is and what happens thereafter. See the categories and tags at the right for insight into our interests and scope.
Death Ref includes:
- current events with links to and commentary on death topics and trends
- shoutouts for death-related lectures, art shows, conferences, etc.
- research guides of scholarly and general interest books, journals, articles, websites and more
- original essays when we’re feeling ambitious
We are also a bona fide reference desk. Have a death-related question? Simply complete the online form. The librarians will try to answer within a couple days, but please give us up to a week. Answering questions is a collaborative effort, and select, superb Q&A’s will be posted on the site. We include your first name or alias only (so make something up if you want), and we’ll never reveal your email address. We also won’t post something that’s clearly a private matter.
Please note we are not doctors or lawyers and cannot give medical or legal advice. We also reserve the right to refuse to post or answer any question for any reason whatsoever, so don’t be surprised if you’re rude and we ignore you.
What We Don’t
We don’t take your money. As such, and as we tend to suffer full-time jobs and part-time lives, we cannot tackle your in-depth death research, nor will we track down obituaries or death dates for Gramma and Gramps. Your local library is the best place for that.
We also don’t aim to shock-and-ugh with content nor muck in excessive gore and brutality. Gross. That said, we are dealing with death, and we may have different ideas about what’s gruesome and gratuitous. While we aim for respectful, scholarly treatments of death and dying topics, please be advised that some of the content here or linked from here may offend you (full disclaimer).
With our focus on death in the news, we seldom include stories of random, natural deaths or sensationalistic splashy double-murder cannibal suicides. Dying happens all the time, and we’re less interested in individual instances of death than what it means — socially, culturally, politically, economically, and so forth.
Lastly, we don’t apologize for our dry and often morbid senses of humor. Sorry.
Who We Are
