Remember Me: Constructing Immortality

Remember Me brings together contributors from around the world with unique insight on the ways in which one’s relationship with loved ones continues, endures, and perhaps even grows after death.

Much of the available literature speaks of healthy bereavement as letting go of the deceased and moving forward with life. This new text challenges that notion, discussing the meaning attributed to death and to the anticipation of death.

The living, as presented in these innovative chapters, construct social entities of those who have died, via the carrying out of wishes in the Will; pursuing legal claims; or simply attributing certain desires, emotions, or choices to the deceased reconstitutes them as active, even vital, voices even after biological death. Just as life itself, the end of life and death is an interdisciplinary matter. A clear psychological theme and focus ties together these perspectives under three conceptual areas: the anticipation of death; the social life of the deceased and the legal embodiment of the deceased.

Margaret Mitchell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia and Director of the Sellenger Centre for Research in Law, Justice and Policing. She first became interested in the social context of death while working with Strathclyde Police in Glasgow, Scotland on the aftermath of the Lockerbie Disaster in 1988 and studying its impact on emergency workers and the community.