"Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice — pull down your pants, and slide on the ice." -
Dr. Sidney Freedman, M*A*S*H. Allan Arbus, actor, photographer, and amateur clarinetist,
passed away last Friday. He was 95.
[more inside]
posted by heyho
on Apr 25, 2013 -
47 comments
Going through my parents' stuff didn't make me suddenly miss them, but I became more intrigued by them every day. I wanted to know more and more about them, to solve their mysteries. At the same time, I felt a corresponding, if conflicting, urge to speak, or write, about what many people seemed to think was unspeakable: my ever-present lack of grief. So I decided to combine these seemingly divergent impulses into an Tumblr blog called My Dead Parents, which I kept anonymous both out of respect for my family and because, after years of writing fiction, I wasn't sure if I could handle revealing so much about myself in writing.
Anya Yurchyshyn
writes about rediscovering her parents through their letters, after their deaths.
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Apr 20, 2013 -
12 comments
"If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away." American ballerina
Maria Tallchief died Thursday.
[more inside]
posted by mynameisluka
on Apr 13, 2013 -
18 comments
Greg Fleniken was a decent, honorable, smart, and successful man whom people liked. The sort of man nobody would murder—yet somebody had. But why? And how had
The Body in Room 348 received its internal injuries?
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 11, 2013 -
35 comments
Death Of A Pig, E.B. White.
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Feb 26, 2013 -
32 comments
NSFWCORP presents
This Is How You Healthcare: American Death in London by
Sarah Bee:
The main things that keep me sane are the airy beauty and peacefulness of the hospital building, messages from friends and family far away on earth, the mundane magnificence of the staff: and the knowledge that all of this is free and taken care of and I do not have to fill in a single fuckforsaken form or bust one precious braincell worrying about how I might have to find money to pay for the futile care of my dying deadbeat dad.
[more inside]
posted by fight or flight
on Feb 19, 2013 -
84 comments
Since March 21, 1994, when the first regular obituary segment was dropped into an Academy Awards show, a spot on the yearly scroll of recently deceased movie luminaries has become one of the evening’s most hotly contested honors. And as in most Oscar races it is the focus of sometimes
ferocious campaigning.
posted by Chrysostom
on Feb 9, 2013 -
16 comments
In 1974, Leon Leyson was one of a group of Jews who greeted Oskar Schindler when he visited Los Angeles. It was the first time the two had seen each other since the war. He began to introduce himself, but Schindler interrupted: "I know who you are," Schindler said, grinning at the middle-aged man before him. "You're Little Leyson."
On Sunday, the youngest name on Schindler's List passed away at the age of 83. "The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust," he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. "I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jan 14, 2013 -
35 comments
I understand your great grandfather was a grave robber?
My family is Greek and they lived in Alexandria back when it was a Greek town. At that point there was a trade in mummy dust, which they called mummia, which was thought to be a cure all. Louis XIV actually used to carry mummia in a pouch and snort little bits of it. The problem was that by the late 19th century they didn’t have a bunch of old Egyptian mummies to dig up anymore. Instead, when criminals were executed, people would steal their bodies and take them to the middle of the Sahara and cover them in tar. They’d come back a year later, dig them up and sell them to apothecaries, where they’d get ground up. This was a burgeoning trade.
A Q&A with
author,
photographer, and
ossuary expert
Paul Koudounaris.
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Dec 30, 2012 -
17 comments
The Toronto Star has recently published a three-part story (
1,
2,
3) on the life and death of toddler Stella Joy, who was diagnosed with
diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIP
G) at age 2. As this disease is considered 100% fatal, Stella's
mothers (link to blog) chose not to have Stella undergo radiation treatment in order to preserve as much quality of life as possible. The love of Stella's family and community as they support her and each other through her death is truly inspiring.
[more inside]
posted by fiercecupcake
on Dec 17, 2012 -
13 comments
What started as a glorious powder day ended in a desperate fight for survival after three skiers were buried by a
killer avalanche in the backcountry of Stevens Pass, in Washington's Cascades. Megan Michelson lived to tell about it, but she can't shake off a haunting question: How did a group of expert skiers make such a deadly mistake?
posted by Chrysostom
on Dec 7, 2012 -
16 comments
Heaven is Real: A Doctor's Experience of the Afterlife. As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences...In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
posted by shivohum
on Oct 12, 2012 -
196 comments
T. Boone Pickens and other wealthy, elderly Oklahoma State alums decided to participate in a scheme named "Call of a Lifetime", where they would allow the university to take out $10 million life insurance policies on them.
What could go wrong?
posted by reenum
on Oct 7, 2012 -
66 comments
In May 1876, Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm died, leaving his worldy goods to
Theosophical Society president
H.S. Olcott with the request that his body be disposed of “in a fashion that would illustrate the Eastern notions of death and immortality." And so, after what the press called a "Pagan Funeral" in New York and with the help of Pennsylvania doctor
Francis LeMoyne, his became the
first modern cremation in the United States. The New York
Times of 1876 covered both
funeral and
cremation.
(That is, if you can stand to read grainy pdf scans of old newsprint.) In Winter 2009, a theosophist
telling of events was published in the American society's quarterly,
Quest magazine. Olcott himself devoted several chapters to De Palm's story in his
Old Diary Leaves.
posted by Lorin
on Oct 4, 2012 -
10 comments
"A blue cloud of smoke wafted over the Famous Five statue that sits just east of the Senate doors. No one seemed to be going insane or looking like they were about to personally invade the United States. There were people of all colours in the crowd, but if any of them were members of The Ring, they hid it well. The peaceful demonstrators were, however, breaking the law, smoking a banned substance that could in theory have landed any one of them in prison."
Emily Murphy’s legacy lives on in more ways than most care to remember.
posted by mannequito
on Oct 1, 2012 -
14 comments
A fellow tried to impress his friends by fitting a billiard ball in his mouth -
he died. A young woman laced her corset too tightly -
she died. A woman fell down the stairs, which caused one of her hairpins to penetrate her skull -
she died. And, of course, many people had horrible encounters with mill and farm machinery.
Predictably, they died. (warning-occasionally graphic descriptions of death and dismemberment, mostly from the late 19th century).
[more inside]
posted by cilantro
on Sep 21, 2012 -
59 comments
