KATHY CHARMAZ is Professor and Chair and Faculty Writing Coordinator in the Sociology Department at Sonoma State University, USA. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1973 and joined the faculty at Sonoma State University at that time. She is Vice-President elect of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Professor Charmaz is the author of The Social Reality of Death and Good Days, Bad Days: the Self in Chronic Illness and Time. Good Days, Bad Days was awarded the 1992 Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Pacific Sociological Association and the 1992 Charles Horton Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. GLENNYS HOWARTH is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. She was formerly T. H. Marshall Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and is the author of Last Rites and editor (with Peter Jupp) of Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal and The Changing Face of Death. Dr Howarth is also founding editor (with Peter Jupp) of the journal Mortality, the first major international journal of death, dying and bereavement outside the Uniter States. ALLAN KELLEHAR is Professor and Head of Research Development at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, a non-government research and clinical services organisation affiliated with the University of Melbourne. Previously he was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at La Trobe University and Lecturer and Lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of Dying of Cancer: the Final Year of Life, The Unobtrusive Researcher: a Guide to Methods and Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. He is also co-editor (with Derek Colquhoun) of the two volume Health Research in Practice.