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.

Hallucinations and peculiar memories of a dead spouse.

The sprouting of seeds and an uncle's connection to his niece.

A detective, a mysterious murder, an unexpected confrontation.

Dead bodies and small town sexual identity.

A couple deals with animal complications, unhappiness, and terminal illness.

Lessons for dating and dying.

Over a million people are buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island. Here are some of their stories.

A woman's dead father appears at a farmer's market.

A mysterious stone and the complexities of grief.

A story of blame.

A young girl uses unusual coping mechanisms after her father's death.