My cat Barney died this Friday. I was very sad. My mother said we could have a funeral for him, and I should think of ten good things about Barney so I could tell them... But the small boy who loved Barney can only think of nine. Later, while talking with his father, he discovers the tenth -- and begins to understand.

When Photojournalist Nancy Borowick's parents--Howie and Laurel--were diagnosed with stage IV cancer and simultaneously underwent treatment, she did the only thing she knew how--she documented it. By turning the camera on her family's life during this most intimate time, Borowick learned a great deal about herself, family, and relationships in general. She discovered that her parents' marriage--while complex--was an intricate symbiosis of compassion. Their partnership and sense of family only deepened. And no matter the prognosis, there was always room for laughter. Today, Borowick, herself, is married. Her father passed away in 2013, and her mom followed suit, 364 days later. The lessons she garnered from Howie and Laurel were plentiful: always call when the airplane lands, never pass on blueberry pie--and most importantly, family is love and love is family.

When two old friends died unexpectedly, Rick Schatzberg spent the next two years photographing the remaining group of a dozen men. Now in their 67th year, they have been close since early childhood. Schatzberg collected vintage photos that tell the story of this shared history and uses them to introduce each individual as they are today. These are paired with large-format portraits which connect the boy to the man. Mixing in text with these images, Schatzberg depicts friendship, aging, loss, and memory as the group arrives at the threshold of old age. The Boys juxtaposes elements of place, personal history, and identity. The people and locale described are a specific product of the mid-20th-century suburban American landscape, but the book’s themes are radically universal.

What are the unconscious fantasies circulating in representations of disability? What role do these fantasies play in defining the condition of disability? What can these fantasies teach us about human vulnerability writ large? The Fantasy of Disability explores how popular culture texts, such as Degrassi: The Next Generation and Glee, fantasize about what life with a physical disability must be like, while at the same time exerting tremendous pressure on disabled individuals to conform their identity and behaviour to fit within the margins of these societally perpetuated archetypes. Rather than merely engaging with how disability is represented, though, this text investigates how representations of disability reveal their nondisabled producers to be perpetually anxious subjects, doomed to fear not just the disabled subject but the very reality of disability lurking within. Situated at the nexus of disability studies, media studies and psychology, this text presents an innovative way of analyzing representations of disability in popular culture, inverting the psychoanalytic gaze back upon the nondisabled to investigate how disability can become a lens through which to interrogate the normate subject.

Loss and consequent grief permeates nearly every life changing event, from death to health concerns to dislocation to relationship breakdown to betrayal to natural disaster to faith issues. Yet, while we know about particular events of loss independently, we know very little about a psychology of loss that draws many adversities together. This universal experience of loss as a concept in its own right sheds light on so much of the work we do in the care of others. This book develops a new overarching framework to understand loss and grief, taking into account both pathological and wellbeing approaches to the subject. Drawing on international and cross-disciplinary research, Judith Murray highlights nine common themes of loss, helping us to understand how it is experienced. These themes are then used to develop a practice framework for structuring assessment and intervention systematically. Throughout the book, this generic approach is highlighted through discussing its use in different loss events such as bereavement, trauma, chronic illness and with children or older people. Having been used in areas as diverse as child protection, palliative care and refugee care, the framework can be tailored to a range of needs and levels of care. Caring for people experiencing loss is an integral part of the work of helping professions, whether it is explicitly part of their work such as in counselling, or implicit as in social work, nursing, teaching, medicine and community work. This text is an important guide for anyone working in these areas.