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In on Deaths and Endings: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, and New Beginnings, editors Willock, Bohm. and Curtis offer clinicians an embarrassment of riches. Many of the book's chapters tackle themes that are vastly undertheorized and underreported in the analytic literature. The 24 papers, gleaned from a symposium on the subject, range from intensely moving accounts of direct clinical work with dying patients to theoretical discussions of shifting understandings of the death instinct, metaphoric deadness of significant members of patients' families, and analyses of poetry, myth and film. Reviewing such a collection invariably involves considerable “deciding.” Such “deciding,” Foster Wallace (2008) points out, “reflects the reviewer's bias as much as the inherent value of any of the chapters in the book” (p. xiv). There's no way to give adequate or equal attention to all the chapters, and the choice that I am making is to focus on those which are about actual death, not metaphoric death. For, as Anna Aragno states at the start of her excellent essay,
It is, however, the personal encounter with death and its severance of a cherished relationship that hurtles us into an adaptive crisis from which we cannot emerge but transformed. The irrevocability of death makes this a loss like no other. Though we summon prior coping mechanisms nothing adequately prepares for this final separation. The intensity of pain and degree of psychosocial upheaval is such that we fear we will not survive. Yet we do … by laboring through a painful, lengthy process in a disorganized state gradually modulating affect, habituating to change and memorializing a relationship [p. 21].