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, combining our peculiar forces to inform the casually interested and morbidly curious alike about All Things Death: the bizarre, the banal, the batty and the beautiful, the recommended books and the videos worth a look.
What We Do
What We Don’t
Who We Are
What We Do
We aim to consolidate in one place the best the web and your local libraries have to offer on death and dying studies. Ambitious? Why, yes, yes it is. Are we there yet? Hardly, but more will be added over time, including:
- research guides of scholarly and general interest books, journals, articles, websites and more
- current events with links to and commentary on death topics and trends
- embedded and linked podcasts and videos
- the occasional original essay when we’re feeling ambitious
We are also a bona fide reference desk and cheerfully answer your death-related questions. Simply complete the online form. We will attempt to email your answer within a couple days, but please give us up to a week. Select, superb questions and answers will be posted publicly 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.
Posting your questions and our answers is part of the joy of Death Ref — sharing interesting, unique and unusual information, especially when it’s of the myth-busting or mind-shattering variety. Not all transactions will be posted (if it’s already been discussed, if it’s fairly common knowledge, and so forth). 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 — a natural but nonetheless disturbing human process — and we may have different ideas about and definitions of gratuitous gruesomeness. 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 the splashy double-murder suicides and disaster deaths. 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
