Here Stands Loss: Lessons From Victorian Mourning Culture

Reader, he died. I’ve devoted my career to death. As a scholar of Victorian disease, I think about death nearly every day, but this did not protect me from the sucker punch of loss. Neither did his slow, prolonged decline, nor my slow, growing awareness of his coming end, like a roller coaster inching to the crest of a hurtling drop. It hit me as I cradled my dog’s dead body: I was 32, a…