Staci Bu Shea: Solution 305: Dying Livingly

Sternberg Press, 2025, softcover, 144 pages, 11.2 × 17.8 cm

A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic and poetic experience of living life led by death.

Part studious, part visceral, Dying Livingly is a collection of short essays and lyrical prose written in the first few years of the author’s holistic death care practice. With a focus on the material cultures and sociality of end-of-life spaces, the writing reaches toward a future of compassionate, community-centered death care.

Death has been outsourced, medicalized, and commodified for over a century. Existing at a threshold of innovation and transformation today, death is not a plight to master or transcend but a reality of insistent change requiring our humble surrender. Working in tandem with the possibilities and limits of medicine, the holistic death care movement aims to support people and their communities in death literacy and phobia. It stewards both ancient and new practices in death care and centers social, political, and ecological imperatives for how we die