Being published in 2026 by Intermundia Libri

The book uses punctuation as a metaphor to explore loss, death, and transformation – showing how endings shape beginnings, and how individuals and societies can better navigate uncertainty, continuity, and change.

The Punctuation of Loss offers a fresh and imaginative framework to understand how we experience endings – and how we begin again.  Using the metaphor of punctuation, it explores how the marks that structure our sentences can also illuminate the ways we navigate loss, death, and transition.  The full stop, comma, ellipsis, colon, and semicolon become lenses through which to reflect on grief, ambiguity, rupture, and continuity, drawing on insights from literature, philosophy, psychology, medicine, and cultural traditions across time.

The first part of the book focuses on personal experience: how loss shapes our lives from the outset, and how stories, rituals, and language help us make sense of mortality.  It shows how we rehearse loss through narrative and imagination, and how different cultures have developed ways to live with uncertainty and paradox.

The second part expands this lens to the collective level.  Moving from death to the metaphor of divorce, it examines how societies and institutions manage transformation and shared loss.  It explores political systems under strain, economic models confronting limits, environmental crises rooted in historical injustice, and the evolving role of global institutions.  A case study of the United Nations – based on two decades of insider experience – illustrates how organizations struggle not only with contraction, but with acknowledging and adapting to loss itself.  The book also reflects on emotional and practical lessons from the punctuation of loving and punctuation of plumbing.

Blending personal reflection with institutional analysis, the book argues that loss is not merely something to endure, but something that can guide renewal.  By learning how to “punctuate” endings differently, we may find more humane, conscious ways to navigate change – from the intimate to the planetary.

See the recording and powerpoint of a presentation I made on 3 December 2025 based on my initial draft.  This blog post on using grief as a metaphor to understand UN contraction is drawn from the book.

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PROVISIONAL ENDORSEMENTS

A Profound Grammar for Living and Dying

David Sunderland has crafted something rare and necessary: a book that transforms how we think about endings, whether personal or planetary. The Punctuation of Loss moves with remarkable range—from the intimacy of individual grief to the crisis of global collapse—using punctuation as an elegant, surprising grammar for understanding transformation.

David's central metaphor is both simple and profound. The full stop, comma, semicolon, and question mark become lenses through which we examine medicine, myth, politics, economics, and ecology. This is not mere wordplay. By mapping how we punctuate death—how we pause, connect, interrupt, or close—David reveals the deep patterns that shape our responses to loss at every scale.

What makes this book essential is its synthesis. Drawing on philosophy, literature, anthropology, and his own two decades in the UN system, David weaves together voices from Derrida to Indigenous wisdom, from palliative care nurses to climate activists. He confronts mortality with unusual honesty—neither romanticizing death nor succumbing to despair—while offering practical guidance rooted in Quaker values of community, equality, and simplicity.

This is a book for anyone navigating personal loss, yes—but also for citizens facing democratic erosion, ecological grief, and institutional decay. David Sunderland writes as both witness and participant, blending scholarly rigor with intimate reflection. The result is a work of uncommon courage: a manual for learning to die well so we might live more fully, together, on a finite planet.

The Punctuation of Loss doesn't offer easy comfort. It offers something better: a vocabulary for facing what we've long denied, and a vision of transformation that honors both the period and the comma—both ending and continuity.

—For readers who believe the most urgent question isn't whether we will lose, but how we will learn.

Francisco Javier Burgos, Executive Director, Pendle Hill

For many of us affected by the HIV pandemic, the intensity of loss lingers.  Bereavement was accompanied by disbelief, rage and fear. Sunderland’s reflections, framed in metaphors of punctuation, provide a new approach to reconciling with grief as we mourn the loss of partners, loved ones and even institutions and values long held dear. Nowadays people are mostly living longer and their experience of loss multiplies and becomes prolonged.  That’s why open dialogue and debate about dignified death and dying deserve much more consideration — and The Punctuation of Loss provides that opportunity.

Dr. Natalia Kanem

CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy

Have you ever asked yourself the question “How do I prepare for the end of life?” The chances are if you live in a developed Western society that you haven’t, yet as David Sunderland writes in his book “A small amount of preparation for death and dying can make a big difference for both your peace of mind as well as those close to you.” Reading this book will help you prepare, but you will also find much more to fascinate and intrigue you around the wider question of loss. Whatever death and loss may be, they’re not boring.

Richard Smith, former editor, BMJ, and cochair of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death