The lives of a mortician mother and a wayward veteran stepfather.

A profile.

A few Silicon Valley executives are experimenting with mortality. “I don’t want death to be such a downer,” says one.

A father's death, the nature of stories.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

Hauntings in the aftermath of an animal attack.

When loved ones die, what do we do with the digital reminders they’ve left behind?

With upheaval looming, a college tennis player considers his love, his training, and his own agency.

How contemporary medicine is testing us to death.

A 13-year-old girl was declared brain-dead, but her family disagreed. Her case challenges the very nature of existence.

A step-by-step account.

In postwar Japan, a single-minded focus on rapid economic growth helped erode family ties. Now, a generation of elderly Japanese are dying alone.

One woman’s final days with her family.

The author didn’t plan to write about that 2014 trip through the Grand Canyon. Then he died.

The next big thing in the death business.

Two friends reside in the home of a deceased writer.

A soldier attempts to deliver a death notice.

The planning of Muhammad Ali’s funeral.

What former NBA coach Monty Williams learned in the wake of losing his wife.

There is no script for losing a spouse in your 30s.

A day in the life of Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, in the wake of the sudden death of his wife when their daughter was four months old.

Reflections on two seasons of loss.

A palliative-care doctor and triple amputee has built a new kind of hospice in San Francisco.

A longtime Harper’s contributor considers America as he dies: “When I died, I died of many things: the failing systems; the weakening of age; the exhaustion of the long war against dying. Finally, I succumbed to the lack of ethics in a California hospital, killed by filth and neglect.”

A brief history of churchyards, cemeteries, and the ghosts that haunt them.