Solution 305: Dying Livingly
A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death. Dying Livingly is part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann and designed by Zak Group, published by Sternberg Press (2025).
Photo by Ieva Maslinskaitė, courtesy of Page Not Found, June 2025
Praise for Dying Livingly
“Staci Bu Shea weaves together personal stories, art and death speak, and plain-truths to picture a perfectly round landscape of holistic death work.”
– Narinder Bazen, death midwife and creator of Nine Keys Death Arts School
“Dying Livingly is a memoir, manifesto, theory, and practice. Through the brief and varied sections within this book, Staci Bu Shea repositions how we inhabit the present–our current moment of living–in relation to an intimate and institutional history of caregiving, mourning, and determining death. Bu Shea’s work as both curator and death doula are present in her writing, not only through the book’s recounted experiences but through the sensitivity, wit, adaptability, and patience that shape her language. I read Dying Livingly in the weeks just before one of my dearest mentors passed away, the Barbara to my Staci, and I won’t say that reading this book made either acceptance or grief any easier. Rather, Bu Shea’s work prepared me to look directly into–rather than away from–the intensity of that loss, in order to rise to and to hold the intensity of the life and love we had shared.”
– Mia You, poet and author of the poetry collections Festival (2024), Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (2023), and I, Too, Dislike It (2016)
“In Dying Livingly, Staci Bu Shea sifts through some of the ancient rubble and arranges it in a new way. She curates the act of dying using tried and true formulae from the past combined with a twenty-first century razor sharp aesthetic. Having recently experienced the death of my mother I found that so many practices, traditions and rituals lay hollow on my non-traditional life. We make the act of dying pure torture for not only the dying but also the living. I watched and participated in an event that shifted from what should have been a pleasant, celebratory passage to a brutal culturally-inspired marathon. All the while I knew that we had the process all wrong. I wish that a copy of Dying Livingly were available to all of us in the family along with the caretakers and undertakers. We could have done things so differently. Thank you, Staci Bu Shea for accepting this role for your life. I know that these essays, thoughts and dreams will have a profound effect on those who experience this universal practice.”
– Jim Draper, artist and writer
“Our finality often brings up anxieties whereby we tend to look away. In this daring book, Staci Bu Shea opens ways to approach the enigma of death, to look at it with an open mind, not to fear but explore it.Bu Shea’s hand “holds” the reader so that they may discover an inner beauty about this process. This book is truly a beacon to help navigate life at the end of life.”
– Ansuya Blom, artist
“Dying Livingly is a beautifully written collection of insightful essays on death, death companionship and holistic deathcare work. Staci Bu Shea is trained as a death doula or death midwife. In the essays, they share their experiences from the first years of practicing death companionship in a profoundly moving and in depth, reflected way. Dying Livingly is no less than a gift to the readers, gently guiding us through a series of highlights, such as the wonderful story of the intensely lively death of wise queer elder, the artist Barbara Hammer, one of Staci’s mentors, and the death of Staci’s cat Satomi, lovingly imagined as experienced from Satomi’s more-than-human perspective. The essays provide a multifaceted understanding of holistic deathcare, and the importance of taking Death as a teacher rather than trying to avoid her as an enemy.”
– Nina Lykke, Professor Emerita of Gender Studies, poet-philosopher and author of Vibrant Death (2022)
About Dying Livingly
Part studious, part visceral, Dying Livingly is a collection of short essays written in the first few years of the author’s holistic deathcare research and practice. With a focus on the truth of impermanence and the material cultures of death and dying, the writing reaches toward a future of compassionate, community-centered deathcare.
Death has been outsourced, medicalized, and commodified for over a century. Existing at a threshold of innovation and transformation today, death is not a plight to master or transcend but a reality of insistent change requiring our humble surrender. Working in tandem with the possibilities and limits of medicine, the holistic deathcare movement aims to support people and their communities in death literacy and phobia. It stewards both ancient and new practices in deathcare and centers social, political, and ecological imperatives for how we die.
If death is an amplification of living, the attention here is on bearing witness to life in and around the dying and the potential to contribute to a more vibrant culture of care. Living a death-oriented life is not simply for those and their loved ones navigating a terminal diagnosis and finite amount of time to live; it is for all of us. Death awareness leads to a valuing of life, which is urgently needed for justice, healing, and our livability.
With fervor and deep reverence, this collection demonstrates that what is needed above all is a presence—simple but challenging—that refuses to look away as life slips from our grip. In this light, the writing details lessons in what it means to be prepared for death but also impossibly ready. Death is a horizon that inspires us to live fully, with the vulnerability necessary in the transformative process of giving and receiving care.