Microreview: A Kind Reminder

251107 kind reminder rectangle5
Salt water bowl, part of a grief ritual organized by Staci Bu Shea for the exhibition programme “The Sphinx’s Riddle” (Jan 2024 - March 2025) at Manifold Books in Amsterdam.
251107 kind reminder rectangle2
Excerpt of Dying Livingly
251107 kind reminder rectangle3
Excerpt of Dying Livingly
251107 kind reminder rectangle4
Excerpt of Dying Livingly
251107 kind reminder rectangle1
Cover of Dying Livingly
Date
2025 November
Subtitle
Moosje M. Goosen reviews Staci Bu Shea: Dying Livingly, Sternberg / Solution Series 305, January 2025.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Moosje M. Goosen for NewsLibrary
Guest Editor

Nienke Terpsma

Author Info

Moosje M Goosen is a writer, reader, researcher, artist, bookseller, and so on. She lives in Rotterdam, NL, where you can visit her reading studio/ bookshop by appointment.

@moshin + @and_so_on_books

Publication Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 72

@sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

Staci Bu Shea: Dying Livingly, Sternberg / Solution Series 305, January 2025. English, 11.2×17.8 cm, 144 pages, softcover, ISBN 978-1-915609-40-3, Design: Zak Group.

In the west, death is something that does not happen to ourselves—until it does. Death, for many people, is death in theory or the death of someone else. We prefer not to think about our own end. But, as Sallie Tisdale reminds us in her book on death and dying, Advice for Future Corpses, “the day will come when we cross the border between theory and fact.”

Death as a fact of life is what Staci Bu Shea, writer, deathworker, and curator, attends to in Dying Livingly, their collection of texts written between 2021 and 2023, when they were completing their end-of-life care training and starting their holistic deathcare practice. What does it mean to die livingly, or to live accepting that “this”—it, me—is going to end someday? Staci’s texts range from the personal to the common(s); from utopian visions of a future hospice to the practical matter of washing a dead body.

Contrary to what the title of this Sternberg Press book series suggests, Dying Livingly does not offer a solution to the difficult, painful fact of our death, but it is a kind reminder that, in the awareness of our own death and those of others, we can live our lives fully and responsibly, every day all over again.