Korean Funerary Portraits

There’s who you are, who you think you are and how you want to be remembered. For Koreans, funerary portraits, which honor the dead at funerals, symbolize all three.

This NY Times article sensitively addresses these portraits and gives a bit of background.  It also has a gallery of 20 such portraits.

Agnes Hwang, age 66, (by Juliana Sohn)

Shik Ja Hong, age 72. (by Juliana Sohn)

 

 

Coloring Your Way Through Grief

Deborah S. Derman, a professional grief counselor has suffered more than her fair share of grief. “The field of grief counseling sort of found me,” she said, “because I had such a long history of loss.”

Now, Dr. Derman has produced an intriguing new tool – an adult coloring book intended to help others “get through tough times.” Called “Colors of Loss and Healing,” the book consists of 35 pages of lavish illustrations to color, each relating to a word or phrase, like “one day at a time,” “bitter and sweet” and “resilience,” meant to evoke thoughts and feelings that can help to promote healing.

The book is meant to help people with losses of every kind, including illness, divorce, financial ruin, post-addiction — anything that might force people to redefine their identity.

Read Jane Broody’s excellent article in the March 17, 2016 NY Times: “Coloring Your Way Though Grief.”

Old Age: A Beginner's Guide (2016)

by Michael Kinsley

Shay Bintliff's Review on the Pathography Blog.

In Gratitude (2016)

by Jenny Diski

“In Gratitude,” is a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one; which is to say, it’s a book that pushes in five or six directions at once.

In part, it’s about her treatment and her onrushing frailties, and this material is plain-spoken, harrowing and invariably moving. It’s also the story of Ms. Diski’s youth and young adulthood, when she suffered from depression and withdrawal and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, “rattling from bin to bin,” as she puts it.

To be published, May 117, 2016.