In Death and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons: field notes from the Death Dialogues Project, Becky Aud-Jennison has adapted her fabulous podcast into a rich, engaging and life/death-affirming book.

Becky has always been a great communicator about the subject of death, after being immersed in it from a young age and growing into a health professional (having first trained as a nurse and then counsellor), but she still recognises - and wrangles with - the reality that we still (mostly) live in a death-averse culture and that death avoidance is born of fear. She encourages readers to expose themselves to their fears in order to learn they are still able to breathe and function in its presence.

Just as The Death Dialogues Project podcast is built on the sacred ground of story, so too are these field notes. Interspersing her own story with those of her podcast guests, Becky covers the vast terrain of illness, dying, death and near-death, bereavement and after-death communication.

In particular, I appreciated Becky's chapter on 'anticipatory grief', which helped me reframe my own thinking about what I'd simply labelled 'death anxiety'. In this chapter, she reveals how, even with her own life experience, nothing could have prepared her for the death of her beloved brother, shortly following by the death of her mother; it 'took me apart, dismantled me, and that now I'm put together differently' she writes. She experiences 'the beautiful-horrible-messiness' swirling inside her. Becky knows that trauma, death and grief changes you on a cellular level.

I highly recommend buying a hard copy of this book and dipping into episodes of her podcast as you read it (Becky helpfully provides an incredibly useful index of episodes, arranged by topic, at the back of the book).