Passings: Death, Dying, and Unexplained Phenomena

From dream research and global belief systems to extraordinary occurrences such as near-death and out-of-body experiences, this fascinating study delves into every aspect of death. Taking a scientific and anthropological approach, this examination focuses on how other cultures deal with death, how diverse kinds of death are treated, and how belief systems set the tone for grieving. In addition to the use of science and anthropology, this work includes the author’s own personal experiences as well as other stories that illustrate the striking realities of passing. Beginning with the many losses that occurred during the author’s childhood, Passings moves into an up-close-and-personal look at the tragic three-and-a-half-year period during which she lost her daughter, father, husband, grandmother, and mother. By combining personalized accounts with the scientific and the uncanny, this intriguing overview offers up a comprehensive investigation into the end of life, exploring individual beliefs and encouraging a better understanding of how the human species copes with death and dying.

From dream research and global belief systems to extraordinary occurrences such as near-death and out-of-body experiences, this fascinating study delves into every aspect of death. Taking a scientific and anthropological approach, this examination focuses on how other cultures deal with death, how diverse kinds of death are treated, and how belief systems set the tone for grieving. In addition to the use of science and anthropology, this work includes the author’s own personal experiences as well as other stories that illustrate the striking realities of passing. Beginning with the many losses that occurred during the author’s childhood, Passings moves into an up-close-and-personal look at the tragic three-and-a-half-year period during which she lost her daughter, father, husband, grandmother, and mother. By combining personalized accounts with the scientific and the uncanny, this intriguing overview offers up a comprehensive investigation into the end of life, exploring individual beliefs and encouraging a better understanding of how the human species copes with death and dying.

Publishers Weekly

In the space of just three years, chef Travis-Henikoff (Dinner With a Cannibal) lost five family members: her husband to leukemia; her 80-year-old father to kidney failure; her grieving mother to suicide; her daughter, Kim, to blood clots; and her daughter-in-law to blood disease. Travis-Henikoff's struggle to accept these painful deaths was helped by a number of paranormal experiences, including Kim's premonitory dream (dying in a pool of ice water) and, three nights after her death, the appearance of Kim's spirit in "a thin crackling rod of shimmering white light." After Kim's death, Travis-Henikoff sought out others with stories of loss and the paranormal, finding people who "know, trust and love the sciences, yet fly gracefully through the cosmos of the metaphysical." Travis-Henikoff mines the family lore surrounding her great-grandmother, who held séances, and her own history (including a near-fatal childhood asthma attack), for evidence that she (and her daughter) may have inherited psychic powers; she also considers what she witnessed in the moment of her father and her husband's deaths. Whatever readers believe regarding death and the supernatural, Travis-Henikoff's tender, wise memoir of love, grief and truth-seeking will help them accept death as an affirmation of life's value.

Carole A. Travis-Henikoff is a businesswoman, a rancher, and an independent scholar specializing in the study of human origins. She is the author of Dinner with a Cannibal and Star Food Revisited. She lives in Chicago and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Dr. Garniss H. Curtis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and Founder of the Berkeley Geochronology Center. A colleague of the late Louis Leakey, in 1961 he determined the age (1.85 my) of the famous Zinjanthropus fossil which rocked the anthropological world. Over the next few decades Dr. Curtis has made many additional contributions to the chronology of human evolution. He lives in Berkeley, California.