OVERVIEW

I am currently seeking a publisher for the book.  See the recording and powerpoint of a presentation I made on 3 December.  Contact me if you would like more details.

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To write of death is to write of language itself.  Each punctuation mark is a threshold: the full stop’s silence, the comma’s breath, the semicolon’s bridge, the colon’s consequence, the dash’s rupture, the parentheses’ shelter, the ellipsis’ ache, the exclamation’s cry, the question’s renewal.

The Punctuation of Loss is a wide-ranging exploration of how death, grief, and endings shape our lives – personal, social, political, and planetary – and how the familiar marks of punctuation offer a lexicon for understanding and navigating them.

What the book argues

Death and loss are universal, yet our ways of speaking about them are fragmented.  The book argues punctuation – so ordinary we barely notice it – offers a set of metaphors for how we end, pause, connect, break, separate, continue, surrender, or transform.  By reading loss “through punctuation” we gain new tools for reflection, navigation, and shared meaning-making.

How the book unfolds

The book moves from personal to planetary scales:

• Part I explores how individuals encounter loss – life cycles, fear, taboo, funerals, medicine, myth, philosophy, and the arts – while introducing punctuation as an interpretive lens.

• Part II expands outward to collective losses: political breakdown, economic precarity, ecological grief, demographic transition, and the lingering trauma of colonialism.  It also includes a case study on institutional loss within the United Nations.

• Part III gathers these reflections into a “Punctuation Tapestry”, distilled from core ideas summarized at the end of each chapter, and concludes with a set of guiding values for living with loss.

What readers gain

• A new conceptual framework for approaching and transforming perception around death, loss and endings

• Approaches to grief that apply across personal, social, and ecological domains

• Insight into political, economic and environmental crises through the metaphor of punctuation

• A mix of scholarship, lived experience, and creative interpretation.

Why this book now?

In an age with a deluge of losses on many fronts, we lack shared language for understanding them.  The Punctuation of Loss offers a fresh, unifying framework for making sense of endings at every scale, at a moment when clarity, courage and meaning have never felt more urgent.