Memory Boxes

She made memory boxes for her two young sons containing keepsakes like a bottle of her perfume and a recorded song and letters telling them how they should behave like avoiding "negative moaning, consider other people's feeling and not to be afraid to make mistakes.

Now, Sandra Carey-Boggins has died of breast cancer.

She was informed the disease had spread to such an extent that it was beyond treatment. But after being told the news, she embarked on a journey to fulfill as many of her lifetime ambitions as possible.

A month after being told her condition was terminal, she married Tom, her partner of four years. She also took part in kayaking, power-boating, quad-biking, hot air ballooning and a holiday to New Zealand.

Her mother, Mavis Wise, said: 'She passed away very peacefully.'

Red tassels are the only remains of Cardinal Newman

Red tassels are the only remains of saintly cardinal

The bones of the Victorian cardinal who is in line to become Britain’s first saint for almost 40 years have disintegrated, hampering plans to turn his final resting place into a centre of Christian pilgrimage.

Church officials exhuming the body of Cardinal John Henry Newman were surprised to discover that his grave was almost empty when it was opened on Thursday. All that remained were a brass plate and handles from Newman’s coffin, along with a few red tassels from his cardinal’s hat.

The discovery will not affect Newman’s case for sainthood. But officials have had to abandon plans to transfer his bones from a rural cemetery in Rednal, Worcestershire, to a marble sarcophagus at Birmingham Oratory, which Newman founded after converting to Catholicism from the Church of England.
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“I have been visiting that grave since I was a very young boy,” said Peter Jennings, a spokesman for the Oratory. “I will never forget how I felt, standing there last Thursday, looking at this deep hole which had been dug out. This was the greatest churchman of the 19th century and there was nothing there, only dust.”

There is no conspiracy theory over what has become of Newman’s remains: experts believe that damp conditions led to their complete decomposition.

A Sacred Level of Attention is Necessary

Dr. Diane Meier, 55, won a genius award from the  MacArthur Foundation for her work as a geriatrician improving treatment for critically-ill patients.

Her goal is to make palliative care "part of the genome of American medicine" writes Jane Gross in the New Old Age blog at the New York Times  A Time When Listening is 'Sacred"

Dr. Meier, 56, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and professor of geriatrics and medical ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, parted ways a decade ago with an outspoken group of physicians nationwide who sought the legalization of assisted suicide.
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Her argument then — and even more vociferously now — is that the American health care system reimburses doctors for doing procedures, not spending hours plumbing the souls of their patients. Thus no physician has time for the discussion, reflection and explanation necessary to conclude, knowledgeably and honorably, that helping a patient die is a reasonable and ethical choice
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Her research has shown that virtually nobody actually wants to die if given access to adequate pain control, emotional and spiritual support for themselves and their family, and what Dr. Meier calls the “sacred level” of attention necessary to “validate their suffering.” As with hospice care, but without the requirement of a terminal diagnosis, palliative care physicians spend most of their time talking to patients and caregivers.

Millionaire banker beaten to death

A millionaire banker was beaten to death just 200 yards from a police station after intervening to save a couple being assaulted by a mob.

Frank McGarahan, 45, was out with relatives the night before his niece's christening when he saw the pair being attacked near a taxi rank.

The area is close to Norwich's main police station and the area is surrounded by CCTV cameras.
But as he shouted at the gang of ten men to stop, they turned on him. In the fracas, he suffered a serious head injury.

The father-of-two was the chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, the bespoke finance arm which caters for the bank's richest customers, and managed their combined assets of £133billion.

On Saturday evening the family went out for dinner in Norwich city centre. His wife Alison and their two children, aged seven and four months, returned to their hotel but Mr McGarahan stayed out for another drink with two male relatives.

They were waiting for a taxi home when the attack happened.

McGarahan only wanted to stop the beating.  He certainly didn't know it would be the last thing he would ever do.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13

Ledger family gives everything to Mathilda

It's rare to read in the news about a family that does the right thing and avoids all litigation

Heath Ledger's family give his millions to his two-year-old daughter

Every penny of Heath Ledger's fortune will go to his daughter, Matilda Rose, the dead star's father has revealed.

In Ledger's will, which has been probated behind closed doors at the Australian Supreme Court in Perth, the 28-year-old actor left everything to his parents and three sisters. But the will was signed by the actor on April 12, 2003 - two years before Matilda was born

It was expected that Ledger's former partner, Michelle Williams, would lodge a claim on the will on behalf of their daughter. But Ledger's father, Kim, instead told Australia's Herald Sun that the family had decided to give everything to Matilda.

Death by chili sauce

Aspiring chef dies hours after making ultra-hot sauce for chili-eating contest.

Andrew Lee, 33, had used a bag of home-grown red chillies to make a super-hot sauce.

The forklift truck driver, who had recently passed a medical at work, dared his girlfriend's brother to eat a spoonful - then ate a plateful himself. Shortly after he had a heart attack and died.

"Fancy a drink, Sir Thomas"

In the time of King Henry IV who, after deposing Richard II, spent much of his reign putting  down rebellions.  One of them involved was Sir Thomas Blount. 

Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor's death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount's execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. 'No, for I do not know where I should put it', he replied.

via Samizdata

Paul Newman

When I heard about Paul Newman's death, I was away for the weekend for my high school reunion so I didn't have a chance to what others had written, but then I already knew he was a remarkable man. I had already  written about the legacies he was creating.  Paul Newman's Legacies

  "If I leave a legacy, it will be the camps," Newman says.

Breitbart obit
Paul Newman, known for his piercing blue eyes, boyish good looks and stellar performances in scores of hit Hollywood movies, has died, his foundation said Saturday. He was 83.
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"Paul Newman's craft was acting. His passion was racing. His love was his family and friends. And his heart and soul were dedicated to helping make the world a better place for all," Foundation Vice-Chairman Robert Forrester said.

Newman played youthful rebels, charming rogues, golden-hearted drunks and amoral opportunists in a career that encompassed more than 50 movies. He was one of the most popular and consistently bankable Hollywood stars in the second half of the 20th century.  Two of his most popular movies included "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "The Sting" (1973), in which he co-starred with an equally popular and handsome actor, Robert Redford.

Newman was also a philanthropist, a health food mogul -- he once quipped that his salad dressing was making more money than his movies -- a race car enthusiast and a leftist political activist.

New York Times, Paul Newman, a Magnetic Titan of Hollywood

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.

Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.
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he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing children a camp at which to play.

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Daily Mail online

Newman's own departure was long and gentle, until cancer took hold. By choice, he faded from films gradually, taking fewer and fewer major roles - a diminuendo that was all the more striking when compared with Redford's sustained career as an actor-director.

In truth, though he had major roles in more than 50 motion pictures Newman preferred his private life to the feverish fakery of Hollywood.

The Boston Globe Blue-eyed idol put an indelible stamp on movies, philanthropy

Burial plans are unknown, although Newman expressed a desire to have his ashes strewn across the lake where he built the first Hole in the Wall Camp.

"I always admired the fish," he said.

Neoneocon didn't need to remind me of how sexy he was and how he aged awfully well.  She found the YouTube videos, only one of which I borrowed 

He was a Man of Natural Virtue.

Gerard Vanderleun in A Life and a Love Less Ordinary pays tribute to the Newmans' marriage

I watch this montage and I think of the old 60s poem that ends, "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world." And I also think that sometimes, if you are careful and keep your vows, love can endure. All in all, it would seem that Newman's life and love and marriage were, in the end, his greatest achievement. His films were merely the means.

An appreciation in the New York Times,
Paul Newman wore his fame lightly, his beauty too.

My favorite may be Dahlia Lithwick's piece on Slate

One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"

Paul Newman left a Great Legacy of how to be a great man even if a movie star.  Thankfully, we'll always have his movies and by buying his salad dressings, his lemonade and his popcorn, we can support his legacy.

When Consciousness Continues

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain

What Happens When We Die?

What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?

Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than 10 years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing.

Not on a Saturday

Family barred from burying their dead stepfather on a Saturday...because he isn't a Muslim

Harold 'Charlie' Lemaire died last week from pneumonia and his family wanted the burial service to be held on Saturday to make it easier for relatives living across the country to attend.

But plans for a memorial service followed by a burial in the City Road cemetery in Sheffield had to be changed because the local authority has a policy only to allow Muslim and Jewish funerals at weekends and bank holidays.
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the 'two-tier' system has been slammed as discriminatory and Islamic groups have also backed calls for all faiths to be treated in the same way.

Jim Adams 'lost his battle...primarily as a result of being stubborn'.

I think I would have liked Jim Adams a lot, but he died earlier this month in Wyoming.

His obituary from the Casper Star-Tribune

Jim, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other's courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he lost his battle. It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor's orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.
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He was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date. True to his personal style, he spent his final hours joking with medical personnel, cussing and begging for narcotics and bargaining with God to look over his loving dog, Biscuit, and his family.

He would like to thank all "his ladies" for putting up with him the last 30 years.

During his life, he excelled at anything he put his mind to. He loved to hear and tell jokes and spin tales of grand adventures he may or may not have had.

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In lieu of flowers, he asks that you make a sizeable purchase at your favorite watering hole, get rip roaring drunk and tell the stories he no longer can.

Family Secret Revealed:Suicide by Author of Anne of Green Gables

Kate MacDonald Butler reveals a long-held secret about her grandmother, one of Canada's most beloved authors, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, is still a bestseller after 100 years. In addition to Anne, my grandmother wrote 19 other novels, personal journals and hundreds of short stories and poems. As well, she has been the subject of several biographical studies.

Despite her great success, it is known that she suffered from depression, that she was isolated, sad and filled with worry and dread for much of her life. But our family has never spoken publicly about the extent of her illness.

What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life at the age of 67 through a drug overdose.

Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband's mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman's wife and mother in an era when women's roles were highly defined.

Dead 'for some time' in ER before anyone noticed

He died in the waiting area of an emergency room in a Canadian hospital and no one noticed him for 34 hours. 

Man dead 'for some time' in Winnipeg ER before staff alerted say officials

"There's lots of people in an emergency department at HSC at any given time who aren't only the patients waiting. But how this person could be there for 34 hours and go sort of undetected is really surprising to us and is the focus of our investigation," Wright said.

Unbelievable.

Surviving without God

Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.

In the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg writes about living and dying Without God.

The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of odds and ends about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation

On consciousness
The problem is how to integrate the conscious mind with the physical brain—how to reveal a unity beneath this apparent diversity. That problem is very hard, and I do not believe anyone has any good ideas about how to solve it.
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I want just to offer a few opinions, on the basis of no expertise whatever, for those who have already lost their religious beliefs, or who may be losing them, or fear that they will lose their beliefs, about how it is possible to live without God.

Warnings for those who want to try it.
First, a warning: we had better beware of substitutes. It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes—Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China—that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its worst: infallible leaders, sacred writings, mass rituals, the execution of apostates, and a sense of community that justified exterminating those outside the community.
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Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

To survive without God or a god-substitute, he recommends
Humor, the ordinary pleasures of life and the high arts
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He admits the loss of great consolation
The more we reflect on the pleasures of life, the more we miss the greatest consolation that used to be provided by religious belief: the promise that our lives will continue after death, and that in the afterlife we will meet the people we have loved. As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing. This is the thing that makes cowards of us all.

"Grief hauled about, and nowhere to put it down"

AND then came the outpouring: for weeks after, people I barely knew would come into my office, gently shut the door and burst into tears. I heard stories of single and serial miscarriages, pregnancies carried nearly to full term, stillbirths — all the lost, lost children. Grief hauled about, and nowhere to put it down. Some said they had never told anyone; who would understand?

Knowing My Stillborn Son

Anger that kills

Road rage woman burned to death by ramming rival motorist and revving her engine until her car went up in flames.

The victim was so overcome with anger she refused to get out of her burning car and even threatened a would-be rescuer who tried to persuade her.

Don't pick wild mushrooms in the botanical garden

If you do, at least know what the Death Cap toadstool - amanita phalloides - looks like.

One woman in her 40s just died and her relative is seriously ill after eating wild mushrooms picked in botanical gardens on the Isle of Wight

Here's another photo of a more mature death cap.

"Accept death at hour chosen by God"

Pope Benedict in his Mass for the sick at Lourdes.

Benedict administered the sacrament of the sick to pilgrims in wheelchairs and on gurneys, many bundled in quilts against the chill.

In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find "the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God."

The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.

"At his Mass with thousands of sick people Sept. 15... [the Pope] thanked Catholics at Lourdes and all over the world who volunteer their time and effort to help the infirm.

"That highlighted a key theme of Benedict's pontificate, one he has underlined in encyclicals but which is sometimes overlooked: that personal charity -- love in action -- is the ultimate expression of faith in Jesus Christ."

Funeral for a Saintly Man

2000 people packed the pews for the funeral of Thomas S. Vander Woude, the Father who died saving his son  

Among the attendees were his wife of 43 years, Mary Ellen, more than 70 priests, including the bishop of Arlington, and the friends accrued over decades who came to pay respects to a man who inspired them, right up until his final breath.

If Vander Woude saw the throng, he'd say, "Are you kidding me? . . . Don't waste your gas," said one of his sons, Steve Vander Woude of Nokesville, after the service. But "this guy did something saintly, and they wanted to come be a part of it."

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Another of Thomas S. Vander Woude's sons, Tom Vander Woude, pastor at Queen of Apostles Catholic Church in Alexandria, gave the homily. In it, he likened his father to Saint Joseph, a man who patiently and quietly supported his family, did odd jobs for those in need and was content to worship God and not seek the limelight, Tom Vander Woude said.

At a reception at Seton School in Manassas, where six of Thomas S. Vander Woude's sons went to school, friends and neighbors traded stories about how Vander Woude had gone out of his way to help them. Fittingly, Tom Vander Woude observed, they were standing on the gym floor that his father had installed.
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His dying act was, "truly saintly" and "the crown of a whole life of self-giving," Bishop Paul S. Loverde said at the Mass. "May we find in his life inspiration and strength."

He was one of the unknown saints among us.

Dryer fire

Dryer Fire kills Lexington mother

A deadly fire that smoldered for hours while Gena Brown and her two daughters slept Friday night probably started in a dryer vent, according to state fire officials. The blaze killed Brown shortly before dawn after she shouted a warning to her girls to flee.
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State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said dryer fires are not uncommon in Massachusetts. In 2006, there were 87 such fires, 72 of which occurred in homes. Altogether the fires caused $500,000 in damage, he said.

While many were caused by mechanical malfunctions, about 20 percent occurred because people failed to clean the dryer lint screen. In addition to cleaning the lint screen, Coan said, state officials recommend cleaning the vent pipe that channels hot air from the dryer outside at least twice a year.

Lint is extremely flammable, Coan said. Brown is the second person to die in recent years as the result of a dryer fire, although the other death occurred under bizarre circumstances.

Coan said in that case, an alleged burglar who had broken into a laundromat got stuck in a vent where he died when a fire erupted

AWARE

The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study began this week , the world's largest ever study of near-death experiences.

World's Largest-ever Study of Near-Death Experiences

The University of Southampton is launching the world's largest-ever study of near-death experiences this week... by the Human Consciousness Project of the University of Southampton - an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the human brain, consciousness and clinical death.

The study is led by Dr Sam Parnia, an expert in the field of consciousness during clinical death, together with Dr Peter Fenwick and Professors Stephen Holgate and Robert Peveler of the University of Southampton. Following a successful 18-month pilot phase at selected hospitals in the UK, the study is now being expanded to include other centres within the UK, mainland Europe and North America.

"Contrary to popular perception," Dr Parnia explains, "death is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning - a medical condition termed cardiac arrest, which from a biological viewpoint is synonymous with clinical death.

"During a cardiac arrest, all three criteria of death are present. There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds to an hour or more, in which emergency medical efforts may succeed in restarting the heart and reversing the dying process. What people experience during this period of cardiac arrest provides a unique window of understanding into what we are all likely to experience during the dying process."

Father Died Saving Son

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Mummolo writes that the Father Who Died Saving Son Known for Sacrifice

If you ever ran into Nokesville dad Thomas S. Vander Woude, chances are you would also see his son Joseph. Whether Vander Woude was volunteering at church, coaching basketball or working on his farm, Joseph was often right there with him, pitching in with a smile, friends and neighbors said yesterday.

When Joseph, 20, who has Down syndrome, fell into a septic tank Monday in his back yard, Vander Woude jumped in after him. He saved him. And he died where he spent so much time living: at his son's side.

"That's how he lived," Vander Woude's daughter-in-law and neighbor, Maryan Vander Woude, said yesterday. "He lived sacrificing his life, everything, for his family."

Vander Woude, 66, had gone to Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Gainesville on Monday, just as he did every day, and then worked in the yard with Joseph, the youngest of his seven sons, affectionately known as Josie. Joseph apparently fell through a piece of metal that covered a 2-by-2-foot opening in the septic tank, according to Prince William County police and family members.

Vander Woude rushed to the tank; a workman at the house saw what was happening and told Vander Woude's wife, Mary Ellen, police said. They called 911 about 12 p.m. and tried to help the father and son in the meantime.

At some point, Vander Woude jumped in the tank, submerging himself in sewage so he could push his son up from below and keep his head above the muck, while Joseph's mom and the workman pulled from above.

For those who knew him, Vander Woude's sacrifice was in keeping with a lifetime of giving.

"He's the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back," said neighbor Lee DeBrish. "And if he didn't have one, he'd buy one for you."

Vander Woude was a pilot in Vietnam, a daughter-in-law said. After the war, he worked as a commercial airline pilot and in the early 1980s moved his family to Prince William from Georgia. In the years to come, he would wear many hats: farmer, athletic director, volunteer coach, parishioner, handy neighbor, grandfather of 24, husband for 43 years.

What a remarkable man.  May he rest in peace.

Who was the Falling Man?

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

The Falling Man by Tom Junod, Esquire, Sept 2003

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

Missing Corpse on American Airlines

HORROR: American Airlines Sued Over Missing Body

It was Miguel Olaya's worst nightmare.

Not only had his wife of 26 years died of cancer, but he says American Airlines lost her body when it was time to bury her in their native Ecuador.

Olaya is a proud man. But when we was asked what he told his 16-year-old daughter, Laura, about how for several days American Airlines apparently could not tell them what happened to his wife Teresa's body while they waited to bury her in Ecuador, after flying in from New York, well, he struggled to maintain his composure. He didn't want to break down in front of a camera, but clearly he was torn up inside.

He managed to get out "Que estamos sufriendo. Translation: "We are suffering."
His wife of 26 years died of cancer, and after a viewing at De Riso funeral home in Brooklyn, the funeral home arranged with American Airlines to fly the body to Ecuador.
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Attorney Christopher Robles: "It appears from what we know about the state of the body when it arrives in Ecuador, that the body was not refrigerated. It was not kept the way a body would need to be kept."

When Mourning was a Solemn Duty

From Roman Christendom Mourning: to comfort the bereaved and to pray for the dead.

Praying for the dead is, for those who have forgotten it, a grave duty for all Catholic Christians and one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy.  The purpose is to deliver one's loved ones out of the painful, suffering process of purgation that all but the most perfect must endure after death before they are sufficiently pure and holy to be ushered into the presence of Almighty God who is all love. No taint of self-love must remain to those who come before God.

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Now this duty is easily forgotten in a busy world and so we wear mourning to remind us to pray regularly throughout the day and night for our dead.
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The length of mourning depended on your relationship to the deceased. The different periods of mourning dictated by society were expected to reflect your natural period of grief.
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for a widow 2 to 2 and a half years and a widow did not enter society for a year (although she could re-marry after 1 year and 1 day if financially necessary);
for a widower 2 years;
for a parent 2 years;
for children (if above ten years old) 2 years;
for children below that age 3 to 6 months;
for an infant 6 weeks and upward;
for siblings 6 to 8 months;
for grandparents 6 months;
for uncles and aunts 3 to 6 months;
for cousins, great aunts and uncles, or aunts and uncles related by marriage from 6 weeks to 3 months;
for more distant relatives or friends from 3 weeks upward.

Uneven Shares

THE day will come, or may have already, when your children think of your money as theirs.

Learning to Share

Putting off discussion and then springing an unwelcome surprise in a will can poison the reservoir of family joy that parents want to bequeath to the next generation, resurrecting or exacerbating sibling rivalries, especially in blended families created through divorce or remarriage after the death of a spouse.

Succession is a natural progression, as old as the concept of private property, yet many parents never bother to tell their children about plans for their estate.

David Cay Johnston in the New York Times lays out the costs of not telling your children about uneven shares in your will.

Mitchell Gans, a law professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., who has helped develop some of the most complex estate plans in the country, recommends that in such cases you should prepare the will and then notify “the kids that you are cutting out — or who are getting less than the others.”

“If you have the courage to do that,” Professor Gans said, “you cut down significantly the chance of litigation after death.”

Obituary of a Frontier Woman

From Camille Paglia comes this remarkable 1905 obituary from Toronto's Globe and Mail

Abigail Becker

Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

World's most bizarre deaths

World's most bizarre deaths

Oh, nuts!

Willie Murphy was more than a bit shell-shocked when an avalanche of peanuts buried him at a processing plant in Georgia, USA, in 1993. He never made it out alive.

Oh, chute!

Experienced skydiver Ivan McGuire went plane crazy one day in 1988 when he decided to film his 3,000m jump above North Carolina – he remembered his camera but forgot his parachute!

Water way to go

Things didn’t go swimmingly at all for a 59-year-old Californian when he sat on a pool’s badly covered drain. With a sucking power of 300lbs per square inch, he never really stood a chance. He died when his small intestine was sucked clean out.