A ‘Tick Description’ of Death Announcement Notices

Farzad Salahshour

Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University

Abstract

As a universally recognized social practice, the discourse of the Death Announcement Notice (DAN) is

subject to macro-cultural and micro-contextual influences, hence various procedural strategies that

shape its schematic structure. The main aim of the present study was to study the making of the

schematic structure of DANs in Tabriz, a major city in north-west of Iran. A ‘thick description’ approach,

one which combined outsider theoretical models with insider experiential knowledge was adopted for

the analysis of a randomly compiled corpus of 50 DAN texts. A schematic pattern of eight moves was

discerned, which were then expounded on employing the insider knowledge of the socio-cultural norms

and values of the context of research.

Key words: Death Announcement Notice, Genre Analysis, Thick Description

Introduction

Death is an unpleasant but inevitable reality of human life. People die on daily basis and leave

survivors in a period of private grief and social mourning. Mourning as the more conscious and social

realization of grief, the subconscious and individual reaction to this kind of loss, is a social practice that

may vary in form and content from one community to another since like all social practices, mourning,

too, goes through socio-cultural filters in the course of history (Boor & Bloor, 2007)

The purpose of this study was to study the generic shaping of a discourse associated with

mourning, namely the Death Announcement Notice (DAN) commonly used in the researcher’s

hometown, Tabriz, a provincial capital and a major city in the northwest of Iran. The study involved

analysis of the macro schematic structure and the micro linguistic features through which these

structures are realized supplemented with explanations drawn from the socio-cultural values of the

context of the research.

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But before everything, a brief account of the culture and practice of mourning in the context of

Tabriz may be a necessary transition to the details of the study.

A socio-cultural background of the Death Announcement Notices

Tabriz, a major historical city in northwestern of Iran, the provincial capital of E. Azarbaijan

Province, with population near two million, was the context of the current research. An overwheeming

majority of its population are ethnically Azerbaijani Turks with Shiite Islam as their religion, thus all

social practices, e.g. ceremonies related to death or wedding are practiced according to the teachings

and interpretations of Shiite Islam. The official language used in writing is exclusively Farsi, but most

people use Azeri Turkish for oral communications, and in some restricted occasions for written

communications.

According to the Shiite beliefs, when somebody dies, the corpse should normally be buried no

later than one day after the passing away. The funeral ceremony starts in the morning with the washing

and shrouding the corpse, performing especial collective prayers led by a clergy for the dead, and

carrying the corpse to his/her resting place while chanting verses from the holy book, Quran. Right after

the burial, a forty day period of family mourning is observed during which three mourning ceremonies

are held: the ‘shame ghariban’ (roughly meaning: the first evening in the grave) ceremony held in the

evening after the burial in a mosque; the ‘majlese tarhim’ (roughly meaning: memorial ceremony), held

on the third day after the burial, and the ‘arbaeen’ (Arbaic), ‘chehelom’ (Farsi), or ‘girkh’ (Turkish), (all

meaning: the 40th day ceremony. These sequential ceremonies are followed by the last ceremony, called

‘salgard’ (Farsi), or ‘il’ (Turkish), (both meaning: annual anniversary). All these ceremonies are mostly

held in mosques designated and hired by the family of the deceased. They take place either in the

afternoon (3-5, or 3.30-5.30, or 4-6 pm), or evening (5-7, 5.30-7.30, 6-8 pm) sessions unless it is Friday in

which case the ceremony takes place usually in the morning before noon. All the ceremonies are

publically announced by putting up notices appropriate for each ceremony and informally by words of

mouth, telephone calls, and recently via various information technologies such as SMS messages, or

online social networks. Among these means, the death announcement notice is still the most socially

and formally accepted means of information passing.

The texts of these notices are usually written in Farsi (Turkish versions have started to appear

recently) and printed on A4 or occasionally A3 size white or black sheets of paper. Before the computer

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age, they had to be printed in printing offices, in which case permission from appropriate authorities had

to be obtained. Today, the job is quickly done by local coffee nets scattered throughout the city. The

information which these death notices have to announce are usually provided by the family of the

deceased or their representatives. The number of copies to be printed are usually between minimum

150 to maximum 1000 depending on the social rank and position of the deceased and his/her family, the

size of the relatives, friends and acquaintances. But, the most determining factor in the number of print

outs is the occasion, that is sham ghariban, majles tarhim, girkh, or il, in which case the Tarhim (the 3rd

day memorial ceremony) and girkh (the 40th day memorial ceremony) require more print outs.

After the print out, death announcement notices are put up on building walls, electricity poles,

shop windows, the workplace bulletin boards, as well as the gate doors of the houses of the deceased

and close relatives.

A model for description of DAN

One of the main concerns of studies of descriptive nature is the depth of analysis, whether to

examine only the surface linguistic product, i.e. the text; or also the underlying contextual processes, i.e.

the discourse, that bring about the surface text. This duality has been recognized widely in literature as

early as (Halliday, 1973, p.65), when he discerns two levels for the study of language: A micro-

sociolinguistic level in which meanings within a piece of text are seen and interpreted in terms of the

specific and immediate context which bring about that text, and a macro-sociological level in which a

text can be looked at as a means to “transmit the social structure, the values, the systems of

knowledge, and all the deepest and most pervasive patterns of culture” (ibid). Two associated terms

emerged in association with these two levels of description, namely the concepts of register and genre.

Register, a term first used by Reid (1956) to refer to variation in the linguistic behaviour of

individuals, was defined by Halliday as variation in language use according to situational variation

(Halliday et al, 1964, p.67). In other words, situational variation affects the choice of words and

structures and give the resulting texts their identities as different registers. As a powerful tool in 60s and

early 70s the concept of register was most useful in text linguistics for text typologies, and in language

education for designing curricula based on frequency counts of lexico-grammatical items. As for today, it

is still useful as it serves a point of departure in examination of textual products including the Death

Announcement Notice, which is the focus of the current study. For instance, a brief concordancing of

Death Announcement Notices would yield a considerable frequency of occurrence of some fixed lexical

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and structural items, which may be an essential means of distinguishing this type from other types of

texts, if that is the intention.

Despite being a useful descriptive notion, the concept of register falls short of an explanatory

component that could have revealed something of the underling processes overarching the textual

choices (Widdowson 1979, p. 55). Elsewhere, Widdowson (1983) states argues that register, of its very

nature, cannot “take us beyond itemization of notions and functions into larger schematic units upon

which procedural work can effectively operate” (p. 102). A similar view has been expressed by Swales

(1981, 1990, & 2011), who has called for a ‘thicker description’ in text analysis, one that is able to

account for the dialogic interplay of textual features at surface with macro-level conventional schemata

underlying the surface of discourse.

Out of this criticism emerged the concept of genre, which has been defined as a communicative

event with a distinctive underlying goal and schematic structure recognized by the expert members of

the community in which the event takes place (Swales 1990, p.58). These genres , or ‘social actions’

(Miller 1984, and Bazerman 1994) are social activities practiced on the basis of some shared

conventional norms via certain preferred stages and sequences (Halliday and Hasan 1989, and Martin

1992), called ‘moves’ (Swales 1990, and Bhatia 1993). A number of definitions has appeared in the

literature of genre for the concept of move. For Nwogu (1990) it is a bundle of semantic, syntactic and

pragmatic elements with a certain communicative goal within a broader genre text (p.114). It has also

been defined as a conventional strategy for accomplishing a discourse goal (Duszuak, 1994, p.299).

Elsewhere, Bhatia (1993, pp.30-31) defines it a cognitive structure which serve certain communicative

intentions and is subservient to the overall communicative goals of a given genre.

Within this theoretical framework a number of studies have examined the discourses associated

with death and death ceremonies. Eid (2000) studied Egyptian obituaries to see how gender identity was

constructed by culture constraints through the discourse of obituary. The study was concerned with the

schematic moves in the obituary whereby the issue of gender identity was most prevalent. Bonsu’s

(2002) work was a semiotic reading of obituaries to explore how and where in obituaries the

aspirational identities of the deceased was used in an advertising manner to promote the identity of the

deceased. Al-Ali’s (2005) work examined obituary texts from two Jordanian newspapers for their generic

structures and reports of finding nine recurrent patterns in the data. Askildson (2007) based on models

proposed by Johnstone (2002) and Swales (1990) report five moves in the genre of army obituaries in US

context. Ergin (2006) studied death announcements pubished in Turkish newspapers between 1970 and

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2006. The study was able to to extract strucutral and thematic variables from the data rather than

imposing such variables from outside the data. And finally, Afful (2012), adopting Swales’ (1990) model,

identified five obligatory and two optional moves in death announcements texts published in Ghanaian

newspapers. These studies share a number of similar features such as the genre (i.e. newspaper

obituaries), model of analysis (i.e. Swales’ CARS model), and findings (i.e. culture specific generic

moves). Ergin (2006), however, stands out for its special emphasis on the role of the researcher’s insider

experiential and cultural knowledge in providing explanatory interpretation of findings based on the

outsider theoretical models. All these studies provide a very insightful outlook to new research in the

domain of death related discourses. However, new enquiries need to be conducted particularly on less

investigated genres, such as the genre of Death Announcement Notice as used in totally socio-culturally

different context like Tabriz.

Method

One of the main concerns of discourse-based studies, particularly where the discourse in

question is studied in its socio-cultural milieu, has always been finding an appropriate model or

framework for the analysis of given data. I think the concern is deeper than just finding an appropriate

theoretical framework. It also lies in the nature of the problem or problems being addressed, and also in

the nature of the data to be examined (Titscher et al. 2000). But, I also see the role of the researcher

factor, i.e. the researcher’s background knowledge and experience determined by being either a

participant or non-participant, hence insider role or outsider role, in the process of the study.

I think the problem lies not in the existence of this binary epistemologies, but in seeing, or

rather imposing, a tension between them. That is to say, the so-called tension is the result of the

scientism attitude in ‘etic’ approach, according to which the local insider knowledge is considered not to

be valid because locals are too involved in what they are doing. On the contrary, the complementarity of

emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized by people working in

anthropological linguistics (Kottak, 2006, Ager 1996) especially in the areas of interest concerning the

research on cultural practices.

Given this latter outlook, the present research has tried to give equal weight to insider

experience (the local researcher perspective) and the outsider theories (as outlined earlier). That is to

say, instead of setting a fixed model of analysis right from the start and trying to look for categories in

the data subscribed by those theories, I would rather have an array of theoretical models at disposal, a

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knowledge I have earned in my profession as an applied linguist, as well as my insider experiential

knowledge I have earned throughout my life so far as a member of Tabriz community to be deployed

wherever and whenever comes handy in the course of description. This has the advantage of alleviating

the research from the danger of ‘pattern imposing’ and paves the ground for a more ‘pattern seeking’

direction. It also has the advantage of enriching, both in quantitative and qualitative ways, the

explanatory and interpretative aspects of analyzing data by using this insider knowledge, thus evading a

mere superficially structural description divorce of their social, cultural, and historical roots.

Given this epistemological stance, a mini-corpus of 50 (25 male and 25 female) death

announcement notices was compiled by taking photos from different public places in the city of Tabriz

where these notices had been put up. These notices were either for the third day or the fortieth day

ceremonies. Also only those notices issued by the first rank bereaves of the deceased were included in

the corpus.

As for the procedure of analysis, each notice was examined twice. The first time each the text

was carefully examined separately. A ‘rough and dirty’ (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) form/function

relationship was sought in each case. Wherever relevant chunks of the texts were highlighted and

observation tags or notes were attached for later use. In the second reviewing, the texts were checked

against each other to find the any emerging pattern both at macro and micro schematic levels. Emerging

structural patterns were highlighted with different color codes and tallies and notes were made on their

frequency and sequence of occurrence in the texts.

Results

To begin, a preliminary overview of the componential structure of the death notices in the

corpus has been presented in the following table, followed by a brief description of each move.

Table 1. Move structure and frequency of death announcement notices

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Function/s Order Tally and Frequency of moves in the corpus

Male data Female data Total %Move 1 Death as Truth 1 25 %100 24 %96 49 %99Move 2 Name of the event 2 25 %100 25 %100 50 %100Move 3 Elegy in verse 3 24 %96 25 %100 49 %99Move 4 Announcement of a death 4 25 %100 25 %100 50 %100Move 5 Public invitation (1) 5 25 %100 25 %100 50 %100Move 6 Listing the Bereaved families and

affiliated sympathizers6 25 %100 25 %100 50 %100

Move 7 Acknowledging Religious Authority 7 24 %96 20 %80 44 %88Move 8 Public Invitation (2) 8 25 %100 25 %100 50 %100

As shown, nine distinctive moves were discerned in the corpus all appearing in fix order. The

frequency of occurrence of each move in both male and female data was between 96 to 100

percent except in move 7, where the percentage for the female data dropped to 80 percent, the

only significant quantitative difference between the two groups of data, which will be examined

in due course. The names given to each move reflect the underlying subservient goal of the

genre. Other wordings to reflect the same underlying purpose were also possible. In the

following sections each move has been expounded in much detail.es

Move 1: Death as Truth

This initial move present in 49 out of 50 death announcement notices and textually realized by

short phrases from the holy Quran either in its original language Arabic, or translated version in Farsi, as

shown in the following table:

Table 2. The textual realization of Move 1 (Death as Truth)

Text Language Meaning Source N/50

الباقی Arabic هو Only He (Allah) will last (for

ever)

Quran 32

الحی Arabic هو Only He (Allah) will live (for

ever)

Quran 1

همه بازگشتاوست بسوی

Farsi We will all return to Him Quran 17

The first two of these are verses from the holy Quran, both meaning, though in different

wording, ‘only He (Allah) will last forever’. However, the first phrase was by far more frequent (N=32)

than the second (N = 1). One reason for this huge frequency difference between the two can be related

to the fact that the first choice is more intelligible for the general public as the main word in the phrase,

although being an Arabic word, is a loan word in Persian and can easily be understood by Iranians,

whereas the second makes sense only for those who have some knowledge of Arabic.

The third sentence is a translation into Farsi of part of yet another Quranic expression meaning

‘We are all from God and will return to Him’. Two points should be made here. First, the original verse is

very used in oral discourses on appropriate occasions, but based on a traditional belief that forbids the

use of the word ‘Allah’ in written form, its Farsi translation whereby the sacred word ‘Allah’ has been

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replaced by the pronoun ‘He’ has been used in seventeen cases in the data. The same reason justifies

breaking the Quranic verse, which is in compound form, into two and only use the second clause which

contains the pronoun ‘He’ rather than the antecedent ‘Allah’.

As for the functions of these forms in the opening space of DANs, they serve a theological

purpose of reminding the reader of the inevitability of death as a universal truth, the circular nature of

life and death and then life again, and God’s authority as the beginning and end of everything, thus

providing relief and peace to believers in facing the inevitable question of death. At the same time,

being associated with the concept of death, these statements have the double purpose of

communicating the death news of a public member in the sense that reading any one of these

statements at the beginning of a text signals to the reader of some death news.

Move 2: Signaling the announced event

This move, the shortest in terms of textual realization, serves the function of signaling to the

reader which of the four types (Sham Ghariban, i.e. the first evening after burial; Tarhim, i.e. the third

day after burial; Chehelom, i.e. the fortieth day after burial; or Salgard, i.e. the first anniversary) of

mourning ceremonies is being announced. From sociocultural point of view, these ceremonies do not

have equal status and do not call for equal degree of obligation from the public members. For instance,

Sham Ghariban ceremony, the first mourning ceremony right after the funeral, is of vital importance due

to the freshness of incidence and high expectations from the survivors of the deceased to be

accompanied and not left alone in their grief. However, due to the very time factor, a huge presence is

not usually expected. This, however, is different in Tarhim session, the second public ceremony, which

usually takes place on the third day after the funeral and which is publically considered the most form

ceremony of all, whereby due to availability of enough time for public announcement, public

participation is highly expected and usually highly met. The next two ceremonies are less important,

although due to religious belief the Girkh (the fortieth day) is usually taken seriously by many. It also

provides an opportunity for those who have not been able to participate in the two previous ceremonies

to come to the mosque and offer their condolences.

Given this underlying socio-cultural mutual expectation between the family of the deceased and

the public, the signaling of the event at this stage of DAN is an effective interactive and informative act

from the mourning family side to let the public know which stage of the mourning it is so that the public

could plan accordingly.

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Move 3: Elegy in verse

This move found in 49 out of 50 of the data texts consisted of short elegies in poetic form either

in Turkish, the ethnic language of all Tabrizi people, (21 cases), or Farsi, the official language of Iran (29

cases). These lamenting poems are meant to express the grief of the survivors of the deceased and bring

to the attention of the public the effect of the loss on the survived. Three distinctive types can be found

among these poems: poems lamenting the loss of the mother, father, or the sibilants of a family. No

evidence in the corpus was found where the loss of a spouse was lamented either by the male or female

partner, which is a reflection of a conservative social attitude towards public expressing of personal

feelings towards opposite sex even between a husband and a wife.

Move 4: Announcement of death

This move was the core schematic element in the corpus as it serves the most fundamental purpose of

the genre of DAN, i.e. announcing the death of a community member. It was realized by certain sub-

moves of announcing the name of the deceased (obligatory) and his/her social position (optional, only

when the deceased was a socially prominent figure), and the name of his/her next of keens (obligatory).

In announcing the name of the deceased religious and professional titles were commonly used both for

male and female groups, as shown in the following configurations from the corpus of the study:

Table 2. Information on the titles used for the deceased

Male Titles Female Titles

Titles M F/C N Titles M F/C N

Agha(yeh) Mr. h/s 5 Khanom/banoo Mrs. h/s 9

Haj(i) p/M h/r 1 Hajieh p/M h/r 17

Aghayeh Haj (i) h/s+r 15 Banoo Hajieh h/s+r 9

Karbaleei p/K h/r 0 Karbalaeei p/K h/r 0

Aghayeh Karbalaeei h/s+r 1 Banoo Karbalaeei h/s+r 0

Mashhadi p/Ma h/r 0 Mashahdi p/Ma h/r 0

Aghayeh Mashhadi h/s+r 1 Mashahdi Khanom h/r+s 0

Doktor Dr. h/s 0 Doktor Dr. h/s 0

Aghayeh Doktor h/s+s 1 Khanom Doktor h/s+s 0

Mohandes Engineer h/s 0 Mohandes Engineer h/s 0

Aghayeh Mohandes h/s+s 1 Khanom Mohandes h/s+s 0

9

F/C = function/connotation, h = honorific, M= Meaning, N = Number in the data,

p/K= pilgrim to Karbala, p/M = pilgrim to Mecca, p/Ma = pilgrim to Mashhad,

r = religious, s = secular

Move 5: Public invitation (1)

Mourning in Tabriz, as is the case in all cities in Iran, is a social event, whereby citizens from all

classes and professions get the opportunity to express their condolences to the bereaved families. This

opportunity is created in the death announcement genre by an explicit invitation for participation in the

ceremony. The move contains an expression of public invitation including the time and venue where the

mourning ceremony is going to be held. The venue is almost always a mosque reserved in advance. The

name of the mosque and its exact address is provided in the notice.

As for the time, it follows an unwritten strictly observed traditional rules. The first rule is that no

ceremony is held before noon except on Fridays. This is most likely due to the fact that people are at

work during the day time 6 days a week except Fridays. The other rule is each ceremony is given only

two hours by the mosque authority and there can be only two separate ceremonies each afternoon,

thus limiting the time either to 3-5 (alternatively 3.30-5.30), or 5—7 (alternatively 5.30-7.30). The

second time is usually more favorable and convenient both for the family of the deceased and the

public, hence making the mosque hiring costs higher.

One important point is worth mentioning here. On the face of it, it seems there is not difference

who (male or female) citizens are being addressed by DANs used in Tabriz. Of course, for being a public

notice, a DAN can indiscriminately be read by either male or female public members. But, the fact is,

DANS are traditionally male-oriented and written from male perspective. One evidence is that there is

usually a separate line of text (see move 8 below for more detail) addressing separately female

members of the public of the venue and time of the ceremony, which is either in a separate hall in the

same mosque, where male members gather, or occasionally in the house of the deceased or one of the

next of keens’.

Move 6: Listing the bereaved families

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This move is realized in form of two lists of names, one a short list comprising the full name of

the family members (often excluding the female members), and close relatives of the deceased which

appear in bigger and bolder fonts right after move 5 ends; and a second list, usually much longer than

the first, where only the family name of relatives, friends and acquaintances appear in order of

closeness to the family of the deceased or sometimes in alphabetical order.

These lists of names serve two functions: First, the names on the first list seem as if serving the

signatories of the notice that invite the public for participation in the mourning ceremony. The list may

also help some public members to recognize who the deceased is by reading the names of the family

members since it is likely that a public member may not know the deceased personally but may be

acquainted with one or more of his/her family members, in which case an obligation for participation is

created. Secondly, the lists may also occasionally serve the purpose of boosting the deceased and his

family’s position in the eyes of the public by putting the name of prominent heads of families as signaled

by honorifics or academic or professional titles as well as the number of family names listed. For

instance, the number of families listed in the current corpus varied from minimum 2 to maximum 90

names, signifying the size of the social network of families. Interestingly, a gender effect was also

detected in the size of the list of the affiliated families. That is, the means for the number of the families

listed in affiliation with the deceased family were 36 and 14 for the male and female deceased

respectively, which may, more than anything, be explained in terms of the attitudes of a male-dominant

society.

Move 7: Acknowledging Religious Authority

Like many social events and perhaps even more, affairs related to death have religious

connotation. This is universally true. Throughout the world mourning ceremonies for the dead are

normally held in churches, temples, synagogues and mosques. These affairs are administered by a board

of trustees and one or more clergy as the spiritual figure of these places. In some cultures, as is the case

in Tabriz, the clergy of the mosque delivers a speech for the last thirty minutes of the allocated two

hours to wrap up the ceremony. During this thirty minutes he usually talks about life after death, about

moral issues, and the life, deeds and sufferings of Islamic saints. He prays for the peace of the soul of the

deceased and thanks the audience on behalf of the family of the deceased for their participation. This

necessitates his name to be mentioned in the death announcement notices. However, the analysis

shows in %88 of the data this was the case, and there was a %12 absence of this move. Two main

reasons may be speculated for this absence. First, some families, due to financial or ideological reasons,

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may not be willing to hire a clergy in their ceremonies. Secondly, due to time pressure, specifically in the

third day ceremony, the name of the clergy may not be known or forgotten by the person in charge of

managing the errands of death announcement notices.

Move 8: Public Invitation (2)

This move was present in %100 cases. We see, in a sense, a partially cyclic occurrence of move

five. It is cyclic because it informs once again the reader of the place and time of the mourning

ceremony. It is partial because this information is provided for a specific sector of the public, namely

women, and because of this the information regarding the venue and time may be differently from that

provided for men. This has to be explained from insider knowledge point of view. According to Islamic

tradition men and women should stand be kept apart for daily prayers as well as other religious or social

ceremonies including death related ceremonies, hence allocation of separate space in mosques for

women. In practice, however, things were not as straightforward as beliefs. Two architectural factors

can be mentioned here. First, the majority of six hundred and seventy two mosques in Tabriz are so

small in size that even male members of the public have difficulty in participating in big numbers in

mourning ceremonies. A practice has emerged in years according to which, some participants leave the

mosque in certain implicitly signaled intervals to allow room for new enterers. Secondly, until recently

the majority of Tabriz population used to live in reasonably large independent houses, which made it

convenient for house owners to hold wedding and mourning ceremonies at home, specially where

females were concerned, to make up for space shortage in the mosques. The picture today is totally

different. As the result of population growth and immigration from villages and towns to big cities, and

the consequently dramatic rise of the price of land in bigger cities, many Tabrizis now live in small flats,

which makes them practically almost impossible to hold big ceremonies in. Moreover, modern spacious

mosques have been built with separate halls for women, and even old mosques have been refurbished

to be more inclusive.

Despite all this, DANs, today, still reserve a separate space towards the bottom of the notices for

providing the information regarding the venue and time of the mourning ceremonies for female

members of the public, the only difference with the past being that in all the cases in the corpus, the

venue designated for women was the mosque, whereas in most cases in the past the venue for female

mourning used to be the house of the deceased or near relatives.

Conclusion

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As a social genre, the Death Announcement Notice is the interplay of underlying socio-cultural and

surface level linguistic resources. To understand the nature of this interplay and what a DNA does and

why it does so, a ‘thick description’, i.e. a genre analytic model was applied to a corpus of 50 DNAs. Eight

conventional moves were discerned which were then expounded on employing insider knowledge of the

researcher as a local to Tabriz community. This type of description reveals how underlying social,

cultural and economic forces constrain the discourse of DAN and give to it its schematic shape.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Elham Vahedi for her assistance in the initial phase of the study. My

appreciation also goes to Mr. Saeed Karimi-Aghdam, a PhD research student at University of Jyväskylä,

Finland, who kindly sent to me a few articles on the subject of Death Announcement.

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