Tom Mayo is director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He has expertise in ethical questions involving Medicare fraud and abuse, organ transplantation, tax-exempt status of health care organizations and, particularly, end-of-life decision-making and advance directives.

Sue Hopple of Monument, Colo., says she does shamanic soul retrievals in animals and humans to heal fragmented souls and promote wholeness. She says she also recovers lost animals.

Psychic medium Nicole Roberts of Minneapolis says she communicates with living and deceased animals.

Kate Solisti-Mattelon, an animal communicator based in Boulder, Colo., who wrote Conversations with Cat (Council Oaks, 2005), says the field is growing by leaps and bounds.

Tom Bruce is a psychologist, thanatologist and author who teaches a class in death and dying at Sacramento City College in California.

Cari Leversee is director of Thresholds Home Funerals. Founded in 2003, Thresholds is a non-embalming funeral establishment in San Diego, Calif. It has offered classes on “reclaiming death as a sacred event.”

Ronald Barrett is a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is an expert on African-American contemporary funeral practices.

Dave Burrell is a historian for Historical Insights who has studied American funeral practices and written four papers on the subject. He says one of the major shifts in American funerals and attitudes toward death are that the body is now seen as “symbolically empty.” He lives in the Denver area.

Corky Ra is the founder of Summum, a nonprofit organization in Salt Lake City that offers mummification services. The group bills itself as “the source of all spiritual progression.” The mummification process involves soaking the body in embalming fluid, wrapping it in gauze and covering it with polyurethane before installing it in a bronze casing that […]