This edited collection offers a distinctive contribution to death studies by foregrounding analytical autoethnographic narratives from researchers and practitioners actively engaged in the field. Unlike works centred on personal bereavement, it explores the emotional and psychological residue left by prolonged scholarly encounters with death, dying, and end-of-life phenomena. The project’s uniqueness lies in its multidisciplinary scope, international authorship, and integration of creative artifacts alongside textual analysis. It challenges conventional notions of subjectivity in qualitative research, reframing it as a vital, dialogic presence rather than bias. Contributors reflect on their own affective responses—grief, memory, sensory experience—while researching death spaces, death work, and the inheritance of death through ritual and conversation. The collection addresses a gap in scholarship by examining how researchers and practitioners are shaped by their fieldwork, offering therapeutic and introspective insights. Its organization around key thematic areas, and its cultural diversity, make it a valuable resource for scholars across disciplines, most notably death studies and (auto)ethnographic research, and anyone seeking to understand the complex interplay of emotion, memory, and research.

Khyati Tripathi is a postdoctoral researcher with the End of Life Care Research Group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Her work frames larger discussions on palliative and end of life care, bereavement, and funerary and post-funerary rituals.

Ian R Lamond is an honorary research fellow at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences at Leeuwarden, Netherlands. His interests encompass conceptualising event studies as a post-disciplinary attitude; creative dissent; deviant leisure, and death studies.