Never has there been anything so intimate yet so unknown as death. It is the dedicated spouse to life itself, unavoidable and inseparable. Often spoken of together as though they were one; Todd and Mary, Frank and Linda, Life and Death. They are a tempestuously passionate couple. With a civil and proper public face and darker private struggles, they are always discreetly at odds until their passion spills into the public eye and we see the power and intrusiveness of their relationship. We are their children, witness to their fights and their affections, all of us everywhere, regardless of culture and place. Yet each person, each tradition, handles the repercussions of troubled mortality differently. It is an affair of the stilled heart, loving, kind, brutal, or loveless, that unifies us. In the broadness of war and genocide and the closeness of still birth, as a species we are prevented from life everlasting only by the one singular certainty. With reverence, passion, and introspection 'An Affair of the Stilled Heart' explores death and dying and our relationship to death through formal and free verse across many cultural and religious traditions.