A funeral is something we perform for the dead, certainly. But perhaps it is also something we do with them. We accompany them.

Across cultures, death is more than a biological event. From Maya cave burials and Balinese cremation to Chinchorro mummification, Zoroastrian exposure, Berawan secondary burial, and apotropaic graves in Poland, funeral practices reveal how humans understand the body, personhood, and the dead. What happens after the body dies—and when does a person finish dying? Explore the anthropology of mortuary and funerary practices around the world.

The Hero's Journey provides a narrative structure through which the profound disorientation of loss can be understood not as failure, but as the difficult process of learning to inhabit a life whose old map no longer describes the territory.

Exploration of death themes in diverse world myths.

Latin for “remember you must die,” memento mori is not a threat, not a warning shouted from the shadows, but a quiet companion that walks beside us, placing a gentle hand on the shoulder and asking us to really notice the fragile, fleeting fact of being alive. It is a philosophical and artistic tradition that does something rather radical in a culture like ours: it insists that mortality awareness does not have to arrive wrapped in panic. Memento Mori, "To This Favour" 1879 W

What happens to us physically and mentally when death becomes real