Dying the Good Death

Christopher Justice is Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Studies of Aging in Ontario.

"This book is about a fascinating topic. It is about the death retreats (bhavan) of Kashi where Hindu people go to die. It is also about the way in which individuals in the bhavan make sense of death within their social/cultural and religious environment. And it is about the relationship between an individual's understanding of the good death to that person's actual experience of dying and the interaction between the cultural and physiological processes of dying." — Dorothy Counts, University of Waterloo"This is a wonderful book in that it brings to life the experience of those pursuing a good death in Benares. Case studies of actual pilgrims and the response of their families allow the reader to gain a rare glimpse behind the scenes of media images of Hindu cremation ceremonies at the banks of the Ganges River."There is considerable interest in the experience of death cross-culturally. The book suggests lessons such studies can provide for the West which is currently experiencing considerable ambiguity with respect to the concept of a good death." — Mark Nichter, University of Arizona

• Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Transliteration 1. Perspectives on Death and Dying 2. Kashi and Studying Hinduism 3. The Historical Context of Dying in Kashi 4. The Kashi Labh Muktibhavan 5. Dying as Tradition 6. Dying in a Spiritual System 7. Dying and Morality 8. Physiological Dying 9. Good Death and the Dying Process Afterword Appendix: Survey Questionnaire and Compilation of Responses Glossary of Commonly Used Hindi Terms Notes References Index