A Reading List on Death and Dying

Its trappings are the same as those of virtually any other reading room--rows of musty, well-worn books, soft lighting, comfortable chairs, faint music wafting through the air.

But a quick glance at the nearly 200 titles resting on the shelves of this Burbank library reveals a most unusual collection: “The Disposal of the Dead,” “Why Did Grandpa Die?” “Good Grief” and “Living With Dying.”

Welcome to the Learning Resource Center at Valley Funeral Home, a seldom-seen archive where the merely curious and the deadly serious can explore such topics as death, grief, suicide, euthanasia, miscarriage and explaining death to children through books, brochures, films and videotapes.

Paul Hultquist, the center’s director and a man who has spent most of his 80-year life in the business of death, says that it is a subject regrettably few people are schooled in.

“I think it’s very important, but it’s a very difficult thing to admit,” said Hultquist. “People live like they’re immortal and they just don’t want to be totally conversant with [death]. They think it won’t happen to them until it does.”

It was common questions about death from clients that prompted the mortuary to open the library in 1978, said executive secretary Gail Walkey.

“We had so many inquiries about death and dying that we thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be a good idea?’ ” Walkey said.

Hultquist, a former funeral director, says most often people want reassurance that their feelings of grief, anger and remorse are not unusual. Quelling fear became a familiar topic for him. His late wife suffered from anxiety so powerful that she eventually became house-bound by her phobias.

Doug Manning, the Texas-based author of “Don’t Take My Grief Away From Me” and “Comforting Those Who Grieve,” said the Valley Funeral Home’s collection is one of the first of its kind in the United States.

“I know that they’re really committed to having as full a collection as possible,” he said.

As at a traditional library, visitors are allowed to check out books for two weeks, Walkey said; borrowers are not fined when they fail to return books on time.

At its busiest, the center receives only a few visitors a week, almost all of them students or health care workers who deal with the terminally ill. Hultquist said he used to speak frequently to children about death but that interest among local schools has waned.

“I guess teachers probably have enough problems on their hands,” he said.

To Hultquist, much of the reluctance to learn about death stems from the country’s relatively comfortable standard of living, a standard that does not exist in many countries where death and violence are more commonplace.

“In America, we’re pretty well shielded from [natural death],” he said. “People pretty much die in institutions; they’re in hospitals, they’re away from home.”

O. Duane Weeks, a funeral director in Washington state for 36 years (and the recent recipient of a doctorate in sociology with a specialty in death education) says that although he is encouraged by the existence of resource centers such as Valley’s, he believes few people will take advantage of them before death touches their lives.

“When you need it, it’s too late,” he said, explaining that people suffering intense grief after the death of a loved one are unlikely to pick up a book to help them understand their pain.

“You need to know it ahead of time.”

It is a notion for which few express enthusiasm.

“We’re still seeing death as something that happens to someone else,” Weeks said.