death

But when she gets face to face with her "patients" for the first time, she's usually wearing several layers of protective clothing.

If you live in the ACT and leave your body to science, Ms Lewis may well be the person who prepares your cadaver for medical students to study and dissect.

From silk shrouds to delicate cotton coverings, her business — as a fashion designer and certified funeral celebrant — is to create outfits that mark and manifest the body's transition from living to dead.

Working with clients, who are either terminally ill or very forward-looking, she tailors funeral garments and rituals to suit individual needs.

"It's certainly not the career path I imagined I was going to be getting into," says Dr Interlandi, who completed her PhD project, [A]Dressing Death: Fashioning Garments for the Grave, at Melbourne's RMIT.

And it seems like a popular one — if the proliferation of increasingly specific painkillers and the popularity of movements like effective altruism is anything to go by.

We don't need to be neuroscientists to understand why: pain hurts.

But as Clemson philosophy Professor Todd May suggests, perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether we would genuinely like to be rid of certain sorts of pain.

It's a heartbreaking sentence to hear from a six-year-old.

When Tina was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer in 2010, five months after Lucas was born, she and her husband Aaron were devastated.

But after chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and hormone therapy, she was as doctors called her "a miracle" and well for another three years — until the cancer returned.

"We were married for almost 14 years," Aaron said.

"I was worried Tina would never hear Lucas say his first words, call her mum ... that she would die before he had fully developed that bond.

Ellis's manager, Emily Gerson Saines, confirmed the actor's death via an emailed statement on Saturday (local time).

The Hollywood Reporter, which was first to report Ellis's death, quoted her as saying the actor died from complications of heart failure, adding more information would come to light in coming days.

The majority of deaths on screen are violent, bloody, traumatic affairs, with few realistic portrayals of what a death from illness or so-called "natural causes" actually looks like.

Little wonder we have such a fear of death, and especially of being in the presence of it.

It's still a terrifying notion, because most of us have no idea what we will see.

My own curiosity about death led me to write a book on the topic.

In bringing together medical research and personal stories from those who've undergone near-death experiences, I learned a lot.

Wendy Davison, 50, died at home in Derby last month after a 10-year battle with cervical cancer.

Russell Davison, who has been left "heartbroken", said he did not want her body to go to a mortuary and he wanted to challenge attitudes towards dying.

It is legal to keep a body at home and Derbyshire Coroner's Court confirmed Mrs Davison's GP reported her death.

Mr Davison said: "Death seems to be such a taboo subject in our society, no-one seems to want to talk about it.

What even fewer people realize is that following his death in 1973, it took six years -- and $30 million -- to settle matters between seven heirs and deal with his legacy.

When an established artist dies, what happens to the art? Family squabbles and long legal battles, often spanning decades, can paint a picture of greed that puts soap operas to shame.

The causes include unsafe water, lack of sanitation, poor hygiene practices and indoor and outdoor pollution, as well as injuries.

The new numbers equate to these pollutants being the cause of one in four deaths of children 1 month to 5 years old.

One new report highlights that the most common causes of child death are preventable through interventions already available to the communities most affected. These causes are diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia, which can be prevented using insecticide-treated bed nets, clean cooking fuels and improved access to clean water.

On Tuesday (local time), Mr Monroy again escaped with his life, but for the first time there were bodies strewn about as he rushed to rescue his family from the scenes of carnage emerging from shattered stalls that had bustled with Christmas cheer moments earlier.

At least 32 people died and dozens were injured when the huge fireworks bazaar on the northern fringe of Mexico City exploded in a dazzling array of lethal pyrotechnics that razed the marketplace to a blasted plain of smoking rubble.