When I was given Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s anthology to review, I was pleasantly surprised to dive into a subject so dear to me. As a card-carrying, fully-fledged, two-time member of the Dead Parent Club, I’m no stranger to the topic. Naturally, I thought I was ready. How quickly I was humbled.

Against Death: 35 Essays on Living is an upending and beautifully curated anthology of personal essays and poetry that focus on the bravery and grit needed to accept life and death. Throughout the collection, Gardiner showcases authors who encapsulate the unapologetic details of what it means to be near death—whether coming back from the other side, or in the throes of mourning and grief.

“To be against something can be to reject or refute it,” says Gardiner. “But to be against death can also mean to be in contact with, pressed up next to, to be intimately proximate with mortality.”

Whether we like it or not, the inevitability of death throws us into a deep companionship with the very thing that we may fear the most. How close we get, how we get there and when we reach the end is different for all of us. Against Death holds a vast and gut-wrenching instrumental truth to this uniqueness.

Enveloped in the collection is a husband whose loss of his partner and the mother of his children forces him to pick up where she left off. In the midst of such a loss, he puts on a brave face for his children, learns new habits and endures painful reminders while adjusting to life without his partner. There are stories from the kin of doctors, raised by parents who normalized the prominence of death and suffering. Dispatches from hospice caregivers merge with accounts of grief and death through the eyes of an 87-year-old widow. Unspeakable traumas—from suicide to living with AIDS, to a reality-bending car accident—are bound together in one book spine.

Through this collection, the reader must confront their own biases around stigmatized topics, as well as the denial of death. For many, the sheer thought of dying is impossible, inevitable and intimate all at once. When we are challenged to face our own mortality head on through our own experiences or through the lens of others’, most of us refuse to look it in the eye. Even saying the word “dead” is met with great hesitation. Euphemisms such as “passing”, “gone”, “succumb” or “asleep” are the preferred verbal stand-ins, showing the depth of our avoidance.

Within that initial discomfort and emotional smörgåsbord can lie an important assignment for all of us: the distinct correlation between life and death itself. An appreciation to live may consciously or subconsciously exist in our daily lives— be it a quenched thirst, a rewarding day at work, a solitary wander down the street, a night spent with close friends. Until we are faced with the threat of losing them, perhaps we don’t truly appreciate the beauty in these mundane experiences.

If you’re someone who hasn’t experienced death or suffering in any extreme, Gardiner’s gripping anthology welcomes the challenge of taking you there. This humble collection will encourage readers to set aside personal neurosis in order to differentiate empathy from sympathy, luck from adversity—all while highlighting the resilience of humans facing devastation. We are able to successfully push through hardship and, more often than not, thrive when we reach the finish line. We wander farther and longer, we not only spend a night with our friends but tell them we want them around more often. We quit our jobs. We live our lives. And that’s what each writer in Against Death has recommended for us in the wake of their brazened strength. They ask us not to look the other way, not to turn a blind eye to the human experience—but to be fully present in their storytelling and our lives.

SAD Online

Against Death: 35 Essays on Living brings us close to what we fear most