Resources

Books

On Death and Dying — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Kübler-Ross sat with dying patients and listened to how they coped with their own approaching death, and what she learned became the five stages of grief we still talk about today.

Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience — Barbara Karnes, RN

This book is known as "The Hospice Blue Book." It’s short, but is one of the most widely used family-education tools in hospice care anywhere, explaining the normal, natural physical and behavioral stages a person goes through when dying. Its intention is to educate so there is no fear or mystery in the dying process.

Final Gifts — Maggie Callanan & Patricia Kelley

Written by two hospice nurses, this book is a genuine classic in the field. It covers what to actually expect physically and emotionally in the final months and weeks, and it's especially known for its chapters on "nearing death awareness," the unusual things dying people often say or seem to perceive in their final days.

Being Mortal: Medicine & What Matters in the End — Atul Gawande

A book about how modern medicine handles aging, dying and end-of-life care. Atul Gawande is a surgeon who says what a lot of doctors won't—that medicine gets so focused on fighting death, it forgets to ask what someone actually wants their life to look like at the end.

Tuesdays with Morrie — Mitch Albom

A former student visits his dying professor, Morrie Schwartz, every Tuesday and writes down what he learns—about love, regret, and how to actually live once you know you're dying. My childhood therapist gave this book to me when I was a teenager, and it touched me so deeply that I still find myself re-reading it every few years.

Anam Cara — John O'Donohue

A gorgeous meditation on friendship and the soul, written by Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue and rooted in Celtic tradition, where thresholds are treated as sacred ground. Death shows up throughout, but so does everything else worth being alive for.

No Death, No Fear — Thich Nhat Hanh

Written by the Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. This book's central idea is that we're not separate selves who appear and then vanish—we're more like a cloud that becomes rain, then a river, then the ocean. Nothing is lost, it just changes form. Through Zen parables and guided meditations, he loosens the grip of our fear of death by showing us what it's actually made of.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death — Irvin D. Yalom

A psychiatrist spends a career helping people face their fear of death head-on, and this book is what he learned from it. What he found: death anxiety often gets triggered by an "awakening experience," a loss, an illness, a close call, and what helps most isn't philosophy alone, but real human connection.

Die Wise — Stephen Jenkinson

Jenkinson argues that dying well is a skill, not something that just happens to you, and that we owe it to the people who come after us. He's not trying to comfort you in this book. He rejects the idea that dying should be made easier, and the idea that everyone's death is uniquely their own. Most of us, he says, just die the way we've seen other people die. He also thinks our culture is genuinely terrified of death, and he wants us to stop treating it like a failure. Dying well isn't optional to him—it's a right and a responsibility, a moral, political, and spiritual obligation we owe our lineage. It's a really powerful book, if you can get through it. I've listened to the audiobook, narrated by Jenkinson himself, and actually prefer it. I find his lyrical voice comforting.

The Five Invitations — Frank Ostaseski

Ostaseski cofounded the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and sat with over a thousand dying people. This book is what he distilled from the experience. He came up with five simple principles: don't wait, welcome everything, bring your whole self, find rest in the middle of things, cultivate not-knowing. I love this book. It's filled with so much wisdom that can be applied to any challenging transition in life, not just death.

A Year to Live — Stephen Levine

A yearlong practice built on one question: if you knew this was your last year, how would you actually spend it? Levine who spent decades counseling the dying alongside his wife, Ondrea, guides readers through a month-by-month series of meditations and practices: facing fear, examining regret, practicing forgiveness, doing a life review. It's a book that teaches you how to live.

Who Dies? — Stephen & Ondrea Levine

Meditations and reflections on fear, grief, and letting go, from two people who spent their lives helping others do it consciously. First published in 1982, it became one of the foundational texts of the conscious dying movement, less a book about death itself than about what it means to finally stop fighting against it.

Being with Dying — Joan Halifax

A Zen teacher's guide to sitting with death, your own or someone else's, without flinching from it.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow — Francis Weller

Weller argues that grief was never meant to be carried alone, and that our culture has forgotten how to grieve together. He's a psychotherapist, who trained extensively with the West African elder and teacher Malidoma Somé. The book centers on what he calls the Five Gates of Grief: not just personal loss, but the grief of unmet needs, the sorrows of the world, and the grief we inherit from our ancestors before us. It reframes grief not as something to fix, but as a doorway back into aliveness.

Final Rights — Joshua Slocum & Lisa Carlson

The book to hand anyone who wants to understand their actual legal rights around funerals, state by state, before an industry that doesn't always have their best interest at heart gets involved. Slocum runs the Funeral Consumers Alliance and Carlson runs the Funeral Ethics Organization, they're the two most prominent consumer-rights advocates in the death industry. They wrote this to tell people exactly what funeral homes are and aren't allowed to do.

Living Into Dying — Nancy Jewel Poer

One of the founding texts of the modern home funeral movement, full of real stories from families who cared for their own dead. Poer is considered the grandmother of the home death movement in the U.S., and helped found threshold groups across the country. This book grew directly out of that work: how to sit vigil, how to build a casket, what it actually means spiritually to care for someone after they've died.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — Sogyal Rinpoche

The book that brought Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death to the West in a way lay readers could actually use, and it's still the one most people reach for first. But the author, Sogyal Rinpoche, was later the subject of substantiated abuse allegations. I include the book here for its impact on the field, not as an endorsement of the man.

Preparing to Die — Andrew Holecek

Practical and spiritual guidance from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, covering everything from meditation practices to advance directives. This book covers the spiritual side and the practical side at once: the meditation and bardo teachings on one hand, the legal paperwork, hospice care, pain management, even a checklist for the body afterward on the other. Nothing gets skipped.

In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

A Buddhist monk leaves his monastery, nearly dies from food poisoning on the road, and comes back with a completely different relationship to fear and dying. At the time, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wasn't a novice—he was already the respected abbot of three monasteries and a master of two major Tibetan lineages. He'd spent a lifetime teaching people how to face death. Then he nearly died, and found out what that actually feels like.

Ritual: Power, Healing and Community — Malidoma Patrice Somé

Somé brings the death rituals of his native Dagara culture to a Western audience and makes a strong case for what we lose when we let go of ritual altogether. He was a shaman, an initiated diviner and medicine man of the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, and his community actually chose him to teach Westerners what ritual is really for.

I also love his memoir, Of Water and the Spirit, the story of his kidnapping as a child by missionaries, and the harrowing initiation he went through to find his way back to his own people and into his life as a healer.

Erasing Death — Sam Parnia

A critical-care doctor looks at the science of resuscitation and near-death experience, and makes the case that the line between life and death isn't as fixed as we think. Parnia directs a major study on awareness during resuscitation, and he's spent his career treating people in cardiac arrest. He argues that death is a process rather than a single moment, one that can sometimes be interrupted and reversed, a claim that comes from the operating room and not from speculation.

Life After Life — Dr. Raymond Moody

Moody is a psychiatrist and philosopher who, back in 1975, gave us the term "near-death experience." He gathered accounts from over a hundred people who'd been clinically dead, and noticed the same things kept showing up: leaving the body, moving toward a light, an overwhelming sense of peace, sometimes meeting people who'd already died. That pattern shows up in pretty much every near-death account since. It's sold more than 13 million copies.

Articles

"My Own Life" — Oliver Sacks, The New York Times, 2015

Oliver Sacks wrote this essay days after learning his cancer had spread. What strikes me every time I read it is that there is no fear in it, only clarity, and a kind of deep gratitude for having lived the life he lived. For anyone facing a terminal diagnosis, or sitting with someone who is, this is one of the most honest and beautiful things I've ever read about knowing you’re dying.

"Before I Go" — Paul Kalanithi, Stanford Medicine, 2015

Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at 36, just weeks before his daughter was born. This essay is about time, what it means to live inside it when the future has suddenly become uncertain. He died shortly after it was published. If you read only one thing on this list, read this. His memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, grew from it.

"How Long Have I Got Left?" — Paul Kalanithi, The New York Times, 2014

This is the earlier piece—rawer, more immediate, written closer to his diagnosis. Kalanithi is still inside the shock of it, wrestling with how to plan, how to hope, how to keep living when the future has suddenly become unknowable. Read this one first, then "Before I Go." Together, they're some of the most powerful writing about dying I've ever read.

"Love Letter From The Afterlife" — Andrea Gibson, Substack, 2023

Andrea Gibson was Colorado's Poet Laureate and lived with cancer with more grace and openness than almost anyone I've encountered. They died in 2025. This piece is written as a letter from after death to the people left behind. It's about grief and love, and the idea that dying isn't leaving at all, that whoever you've lost is still around, and closer than you think. Read it slowly.

"You May Want to Marry My Husband" — Amy Krouse Rosenthal, The New York Times, 2017

Amy Krouse Rosenthal wrote this ten days before she died of ovarian cancer, what she called a "general profile" of her husband, Jason, so that whoever read it might someday find him. It's part love letter, part personal ad, and it made me laugh more than I expected. It's still one of the most-read Modern Love columns the Times has ever run.

"The Good Short Life" — Dudley Clendinen, The New York Times, 2011

Clendinen was a journalist diagnosed with ALS. This essay is about his decision to end his life on his own terms before the disease took that choice away. It's genuinely funny in places, which you wouldn’t expect. Most of what's on this list is about accepting death as it comes, this article is about choosing when to go.

"The Doulas Who Help Us Die" — Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 2026

Schwartz spent months shadowing end-of-life doulas. She follows Virginia Chang, who has a ritual she does before every patient visit—closing her eyes on the sidewalk, hands at her sides, chanting a mantra while delivery guys and kids on scooters pass her. This is the piece to read if you want to understand what this work actually looks like day to day, not just what it means. "I'm not fixing what's happening, at all," one doula says. "But I'm not turning away."