Almost everyone with a pulse fears death, but not everyone fears life. With crippling social anxiety, Richland Hills, Texas resident Pamela Skjolsvik feared both. But after an accidental call to a funeral home during Skjolsvik’s midlife crisis trip to graduate school, she reluctantly embarked on a journey to explore professions that dealt with death in order to come to terms with her own mortality. The result of this quirky trip is Death Becomes Us, a humorous memoir about what happens when a middle-aged, anxiety-filled, life-avoider attempts to investigate the last taboo of American culture. And lives.

What started as an overzealous Master of Fine Arts thesis ended with the discovery that awareness of death, the one thing that collectively scares people the most, is also the one thing that helped her to finally live. During Skjolsvik’s two years of research, she encountered an embalmer afraid of dying, a grieving emergency medical technician, an upbeat hospice counselor and a hopeful death row inmate. Emotionally, she went from grieving at a funeral for her cigarettes to crying over a dead man’s body just minutes after his execution. From avoidance and fear to eventual immersion and acceptance, she realized the importance of looking at death to fully realize the finite nature of life.

Sister Helen Prejean says Death Becomes Us is “An evocative and insightful exploration of the neglected reality of death in American Society. Gently humorous and heartfelt."

Skjolsvik is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Witness, Ten Spurs, The Dallas Morning News Death Penalty Blog and in the book, Silence Kills: Speaking out and Saving Lives, published by Southern Methodist University.

Death Becomes Us book launch will take place at 3 p.m. Nov. 1 (The Day of the Dead), at the Neptune Society, located at 4101 Airport Freeway, Fort Worth. There will be a reading, snacks, Q&A and door prizes.

Death Becomes Us will be available Nov. 13 though Amazon – Kindle Edition for $3.49.

Preorders for the book are currently available at http://tinyurl.com/nr5ecf9.

More information on Skjolsvik can be found at http://www.pamelaskjolsvik.net/ and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pjskjolsvik; Twitter: https://twitter.com/pamelaskjolsvik.