Coming in 2026

The ways that we punctuate our written texts, and respond to loss, vary considerably from person to person.  This book suggests the metaphor of punctuation, manifest broadly, may help us to better appreciate and cope with loss and death – and also understand and manage transformation and beginnings.

The first part of the book explores:

• how multiple metaphors, stories and frameworks help us make sense of loss and life – and allow us to sit with paradox and ambiguity.

• the central metaphor of punctuation, and how it offers a practical and imaginative lens to understand different kinds of endings and transitions, including how loss shapes human lives from birth onward.

• how specific punctuation marks – e.g. the full stop, comma, ellipses, exclamation mark and colon, parentheses, and semi colon – can be used to reflect upon loss, transformation and death.

• multiple perspectives such as anthropology, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, myth, religion.

The book shows how attitudes have shifted over time based on technological interventions and growing medicalization.  Cultures have related to death throughout the history of humanity, using stories and liminal (‘in-between’) spaces to address the unknown: performance, belief, and ideology frame our collective understanding of mortality.  Our traditions and writing have helped us to conceptualize and “rehearse” loss; characters such as villains and ghosts, and genres such as science fiction and biography, and above all stories help us face the inevitable.

The second part of the book widens the scope from the individual to the institutional, the personal to the planetary, from our own transitions to societal transformations.  Divorce rather than death becomes the underlying fulcrum driving understanding of loss – and how we keep going.  It considers how:

• political systems handle collective loss, inequality, and differing valuations of life; democracy is in crisis but what many perceive as weakness is in fact its fundamental strength: a way to perpetually reinvent, navigate shared endings and changes with some fragmentation but ultimately continuity.

• economic forces play a key role in societal loss (growth paradigms, scarcity, limits); terms such as sustainability and resilience have lost meaning, and consider alternatives such as Universal Basic Income that challenge “business as usual”. 

• environmental crises can be informed by the (enduring) colonial legacy; many of us increasingly mourn extinctions and ecocide extinction now, but there are parallels with centuries of history of colonialism and accompanying genocide, civilizational destruction and continuing ‘necropolitics’ – the ‘end of the world’ has already happened for many, multiple times.

• the United Nations has been undergoing a period of institutional decline, and I provide a case study based on my 20 years’ of experience in the multilateral system – a lament but also with hope.

See the recording and powerpoint of a presentation I made on 3 December based on my initial draft. 

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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