" The death of a spouse rewrites the rules of a family in ways I never could have imagined"

Watching Them Watching Me

You see, as hard as it has been for my three sons to lose their mother — she died rather suddenly two months shy of our 25th — I learned that anniversary night that it has also been hard for them to watch me lose the love of my life.

As alone as I feel, I am not actually alone. I have three sons who can pinpoint with laserlike precision the gaping hole in my heart. It is an odd feeling as a father to be so transparent, so naked, in front of the children you still provide for. But the death of a spouse rewrites the rules of a family in ways I never could have imagined. Some decisions in life, it turns out, are made for you, leaving you an unwitting accomplice and spectator at once.
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When I look back to the morning my wife died, it is now clear to me that my sons were well down this road even then — that they recognized our family’s changed order and its consequences. As we were driving home from the hospice in exhausted silence, my oldest son, in the passenger seat where his mom had always sat, turned to me and then to his brothers.

“It is just the four of us now,” he said. “We’ll need to be here for each other.

Funeral Industry in Transition

What Remains: Conversations With America's Funeral Directors

The funeral industry is in the midst of a transition of titanic proportions. America is secularizing at a rapid pace, with almost 25% of the country describing itself as un-church. Americans, embracing a less religious view of the afterlife, are now asking for a "spiritual" funeral instead of a religious one.
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And so in the past twenty years, funeral directors have had to transform from presenters of a failed organism, where the sensation of closure is manifest in the presence of the deceased body, to the arbitrators of the meaning of a secular life that has just been reduced to ash.
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The industry is scrambling to find a way to add value-added cremation services to remain solvent.
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Cremation has been touted as the “green” way to depart this coil, and several biodegradable urn choices have become available, their sides ornamented with images of fire, water and earth. To compensate for the relative cheapness of cremation, funeral directors have begun adding a series of value-added services, from a string orchestra, to webcasting for distant family and friends, to a remembrance “rose-petal” ceremony for young attendees.
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The message attached to all these services seems to be: cremation is green, and if you choose something else, you're a polluter, even in death.
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There are also options for our furry loved ones. As it happened, just as I approached the pet-urn section, my sister texted me to let me know her boyfriend’s cat had just died. I resisted asking what her plans for the ashes were, but was just then passing the eco-friendly cat urns, made to look like a ball of yarn. There were dog-bone urns, too. The young couple that was selling the pet-urns looked like they might have just as easily been peddling artisanal cupcakes. They told me they were sorry about the cat.

Marrying a dead bride

This is the most bizarre, macabre wedding I've ever seen

Died and groom: Grief-stricken bridegroom marries DEAD girlfriend in grim Thai ceremony

Clad in what can only be described as a 'mourning' suit, a grief-stricken boyfriend married his dead girlfriend at her funeral and then posted their wedding snaps on his Facebook page.

TV producer Chadil Deffy (also known as Deff Yingyuen) wore a top hat and tuxedo as he slid the wedding ring onto 'bride' Ann Kamsuk's finger at the grim ceremony in Surin, Thailand.






The couple, who met as students at Eastern Asia university, had been together for ten years and had talked of marriage, according to Pattaya Daily News.  Tragically, Ann, 29, was killed in a car accident on January 3.

Chadil said they had postponed their wedding due to his studies and their busy schedules.

At the funeral-cum-wedding ceremony, wreaths were laid by friends and relatives, as well as by actors and singers.

The TV producer later told well-wishers on his Facebook account: 'In your eyes, our action might seem as a great love.
'But for us, it is the mistake which we could not go back in time to correct. Remember, life is short.

'Do what you desire, and take good care of the people you love, be they your parents, your siblings. You might never get that chance again.'

Kodak moments

Yesterday, a sad day because Kodak declared bankruptcy.  Gus Lubin at Business Insider explains how Kodak made photography popular.

Eastman Kodak sold more than a product. It sold a way of life.

Life was a series of Kodak Moments. According to one turn of the century ad: "Pictures are everywhere. Anybody can make them and everybody enjoys them. And the travel pictures are by no means the only ones that are worth while. There is a wealth of photographic subjects in and about every home."

He's posted some gorgeous vintage Kodak ads you've never seen before.

Mass burial of paupers in Chicago

Third world America: Workers stack caskets in pauper's grave outside of Chicago as tough economic times lead to more mass burial sites

It's a practice more closely associated with third world countries, but in bleak times in a Chicago-area suburb, 30 people were buried in a mass grave on Wednesday.

The pauper's burial section at Homewood Memorial Gardens was established for those who could not afford to pay for a burial plot.

And it is a problem that's sweeping America as tough economic times have led to an increase in the number of indigent burials the morgue must perform.
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Tony Cox, the legislative chairman and former president of the Illinois Coroners and Medical Examiners Association, earlier told the Chicago Sun Times other cities, including New York, follow similar mass burial procedures for those with limited options.

New York City Department of Corrections spokesman Stephen Morello referred to a burial site in Hart Island, New York, where 800,000 bodies lie.

Officials there, he said, follow the same procedure - stacking coffins with inmates' remains three deep.
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Mr Morello said stillborn babies and children are always buried in individual caskets. Those, too, are stacked on top of one another.

Frankly, I don't what else they can do.

Dead cert

That's what you call a dead cert! Gambler's family place tribute bets on day of his funeral... and they all win

The family of a prolific gambler who loved a flutter on the horses paid tribute to him by placing bets on the day of his funeral - and they ALL won.

Leonard Collacott, 83, made daily trips to his local bookies on his mobility scooter until his death last month.

So five of his closest family members bet on horses on the day of his funeral - and they all came in, including a 25-1 outsider called Divine Rule.

They netted £400 - which they spent on Champagne to toast Leonard’s life with his widow Dorothy, 82.

His funeral cortege was even directed past the bookies where he had spent so much of his time and money as a mark of respect.

Who's Your Favorite?

See what fun this father had in making a video of his baby girl Maddie.  Not only  a priceless family treasure, it's a worldwide hit on YouTube.

Mike Tippet, dad and interviewer, comments

'I shot this on the eve of my daughter Maddie’s first birthday. My wife had originally asked me to put together a photo montage of baby’s first year (yes, I’m ‘that guy’ in our family) but I settled on doing an interview instead.

'The original idea was to conduct one every birthday as a sort of year in review to have as a digital keepsake.

'I just hope she gets better at taking direction when she’s older.'

"We are much more fastidious, these days"

Bringing Death into the Light was Never Crazy, Elizabeth Scalia in First Things.

Hearing these stories in an age when death had been moved out of the parlor and into the funeral home, it was both spooky and exotic to consider that once upon a time people took care of their own dead; they washed the bodies and made them presentable, and then invited the neighbors in to toast him farewell, “everyone came,” my mother said. “See, they wanted to make sure he was dead, but even the mailman stepped in and tipped his hat and had a healthy dose to his memory.”

Death, for the people of that era, and every era before, was no stranger and brought no squeamishness. There was nothing mysterious about death beyond those questions we still ask—will we see them again in the next life, and why, so often, do the good die young while old bastards hold forth for far too long? A family mourned and drank, and fought and keened and then stumbled into church for the funeral; they buried their beloved and stumbled about some more, and life went on.

We are much more fastidious, these days. Our dead, even when they die at home after a long illness, are collected by authorities who certify them for the bureaucrats and then deliver them to the funeral homes, where trained people work wonders with fillers and cosmetics and open their “presenting room” doors to a family that has been prevented—some might say protected—from so much as straightening a tie knot or fastening a bow for their loved one.

“She put herself between the evil coming up the mountain”

A Murder at Paradise

The next time somebody mindlessly bashes a “federal bureaucrat,” as if the term itself were a parasitic disease, remember the bright young woman we said goodbye to here a few days ago: Margaret Anderson, a park ranger in a flag-draped casket.
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On that first day of this year, an Iraq war veteran named Benjamin C. Barnes was steaming toward Paradise after a night of gunfire and partying. He blew past an initial stop where drivers were told to put chains on their tires. No one knows for sure what his intentions were, but it’s not unreasonable to speculate, as many in law enforcement have, that he might have fired on people enjoying the snow at Paradise.

Anderson was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, 34 years old, a mother of two little girls. She was the kind of park ranger familiar, by necessity, with flora, fauna and firearms. Just below Paradise, Anderson set up a road block.

“She put herself between the evil coming up the mountain,” said her father, the Rev. Paul Kritsch, “and the people at the other end.” The gunman opened fire on the ranger. At least two shots, one to Anderson’s head, the other to her torso, were enough to kill her. Barnes plunged into waist-deep snow. The next day he was found, dead of exposure and drowning, in the icy creek that drops quickly into a waterfall, the subject of countless pictures.
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“Margaret Anderson is a hero not because she died,” said Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service, “but because of why she died.”

You could not help asking that question — the why — as the horse at the center of the funeral procession passed by on a winter day, boots reversed in the stirrups of an empty saddle, in the military tradition. On both sides of the street were cops and park rangers, hundreds of them from all over the West and Canada, uniforms crisp, faces downcast.

"'Definitely I’ve found a reconnection with him, it’s just incredible."

Because he was only one when his father was killed in a car crash, Adrian Ludley couldn't remember the sound of his father's voice.

But in 1970 his father had recorded an unknown French song with the lyrics: 'We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.' a version that was never released after the car crash.   

so singer Terry Jacks recorded it instead and got a 1974 hit, selling 10 million records.
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Now Adrian Ludley, 43, has finally found a copy of his dad’s studio recording, thanks to a local appeal - meaning he can finally hear his dad for the first time.

A BBC Inside Out documentary reveals Adrian's extraordinary search for the song and it’s remarkably poignant lyrics - of a son saying farewell to his father for the last time.

Viewers see Adrian break down in tears as he listened to his late father singing the ominous words 'Goodbye Papa, it’s hard to die'.

He said: 'Nothing could top this in my life, this is just amazing. It’s the best experience ever.

'Definitely I’ve found a reconnection with him, it’s just incredible. The perfect closure for my search.'

'Goodbye Papa, it's hard to die': How original recording of hit song allowed son to hear his father's voice for the first time

The power of voice.

The proposed deconstruction of President Eishenhower planned for the National Mall

The proposed Eisenhower Memorial is awful.  His grandchildren oppose it.

George Weigel writes about  Gehry's Ghastly Eisenhower Memorial

The present Eisenhower Memorial design, by postmodernist Frank Gehry, has virtually nothing to do with the Dwight David Eisenhower of history. Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. The Gehry conceit seems both obvious and entirely in tune with the postmodern deconstruction of history: There are no great men; there are no great virtues; there is no great striving; nor is there great accomplishment or great service to others. No one, visiting the Eisenhower Memorial as designed by Frank Gehry, would have the slightest reason to grasp the truth of the man himself, as Stephen Ambrose once described him:

As a soldier, he was, as George C. Marshall said at the end of the war, everything that the U.S. Army hoped for in its finest products — professionally competent, well versed in the history of war, decisive, well disciplined, courageous, dedicated, and popular with his men, his subordinates, and his superiors. His leadership qualities also included a high degree of intelligence, integrity, commitment to basic principles, dignity, organizational genius, tremendous energy, and diplomatic ability. As a man, he was good-looking, considerate of and concerned about others, loyal to friends and family, given to terrible rages (which he learned to control), ambitious, thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism, stubborn and inflexible about his habits, an avid sportsman and sports fan, modest (but never falsely so), almost embarrassingly unsophisticated in his musical, artistic, and literary tastes, intensely curious about people and places, often refreshingly naïve, fun-loving — in short, a wonderful man to know or be around. Nearly everyone who knew him liked him immensely, many — including some of the most powerful men in the world — to the point of adulation.

None of this is conveyed by the sculpture of a barefoot boy on the plains. None of it is conveyed by the other elements in the Gehry design: 80-foot-tall, nondescript cylindrical posts (they can’t even be properly described as pillars) holding up perforated metal “tapestries,” creating what Gehry himself once called a “theater for cars.” But what does a “theater for cars,” or any other kind of postmodernist knock-off of a Fifties drive-in, have to do with creating a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander who planned the invasion of Normandy, the president who ended the Korean War and who proposed “Open Skies” as a means to lower the temperature of the Cold War?

Knowing How Long You Will Live

Clues in DNA reveal how long you'll live - and they can be read when you're a baby

Life expectancy is written into our DNA and is there to be seen from the day we are born.

It all depends on the length of the telomeres, which are described as 'acting like the plastic ends on shoelaces' to protect chromosomes from wear and tear.

Telomeres are being studied extensively - and are thought to hold the key to ageing.  Put simply, the longer your telomeres, the longer you will live  - dependent, of course, on not dying accidentally, from disease or from lifestyle factors.
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The study – which used zebra finches, one of Australia’s most common bird species – is the first to  measure telomere lengths at regular intervals through an entire life. With people, it is usually only the elderly who are studied because of the timescales involved.  Blood cell samples were taken from 99 finches, starting when they were 25 days old.

The results exceeded even the researchers’ expectations. The birds with the shortest telomeres did tend to die first – from as early as seven months after the start of the trial.  But one bird in the group with the longest telomeres survived to almost nine years old.

Meanwhile in the New York Times, Interactive Tools to Assess the Likelihood of Death

To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left.
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Now, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have identified 16 assessment scales with “moderate” to “very good” abilities to determine the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations. Moreover, the authors have fashioned interactive tools of the most accurate and useful assessments.

On Tuesday, the researchers published a review of these assessments in The Journal of the American Medical Association and posted the interactive versions at a new Web site called ePrognosis.org, the first time such tools have been assembled for physicians in a single online location.
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The tools are available to anyone who checks a box saying he or she is a health care professional; there is no verification.

How Long Until the End, The New Old Age

Last spring, I wrote about a group of geriatricians and researchers assembling online a variety of geriatric indexes that do a reasonably good job of predicting mortality for those older than age 60. Since a number of tests and treatments ought to take life expectancy into account, they reasoned, physicians should have these validated tools in one handy online location.

Their question was whether the Web site they were putting together should be accessible to the public as well. Would non-professionals be apt to misinterpret the numbers? Or to decide that if they had plenty of life expectancy remaining, they might as well smoke? While the researchers were debating, I put this question to New Old Age blog readers: Do you want to be able to use the site, too?

The near-unanimity of your responses was startling. Roughly 75 people commented, and roughly 72 of you said (I’m paraphrasing), “Hell, yes.”

No way to go

Woman killed in stampede as 5,000 students make desperate rush to register at South African university

More than 20 people were seriously injured as well. 

Prof Rensburg identified the dead woman as the mother of a male prospective student who came to the university today to apply for a place to study.

He said: 'The situation was particularly tragic as the young man was inside the registration tent and had no idea that this had happened.

Man drowns himself in a vat of whisky at world famous Scottish distillery

He leapt into a vat of whiskey at  at the Glenfiddich Distillery where he had worked for 23 years, leaving behind a wife and two daughters in their twenties.

'When the doors opened she was blown away': Woman is killed after unwittingly riding the elevator to her death in highrise inferno

Fire Department Chief Joe Roccasalva said the fire started in an apartment and smoke poured out into the building as the front door was left open after the people who lived there escaped.

Roccasalva said firefighters found Miss McCoy on the 12th floor. The elevator doors were open and it appeared as though she was going to her apartment. She had been carrying her purse and take-out food.

He said: 'The door of the apartment that was on fire didn't close when they left and all the heat and gases and smoke poured into the hallway. When the elevator door opened up, she just got blasted.'

Dying woman sees husband shoot dead his son, her two sisters and himself after argument over what to feed her

A convicted murderer gunned down three members of his family before killing himself after an argument about what to feed his terminally-ill wife, police say

Paul Gilkey, 63, snapped while looking after his wife Darlene, 59, who is dying of cancer. Authorities say he wasn't getting along with his son Leroy or wife's two sisters Barbara S. Mohler and Dorothy M. Cherry, who had come over to help Darlene.
An argument broke out in the small Logan, Ohio, home after Darlene's sisters fed her tea and toast after Gilkey had peeled an orange for her.

Three hours after the fight began, Gilkey walked out of the living room, where his wife was staying in a hospital bed, and returned with a 9mm Browning handgun.
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All the while, bedridden Darlene Gilkey watched, unable to stop the violence.

Condolences to all their families and friends who must be devastated.

Main Street was the place to be

Respect for a fallen soldier

Army Private First Class Justin Whitmire, age 20, was laid to rest today. He was killed after only 11 days in Afghanistan, just 2 days after Christmas, as he and other medics were heading out on a volunteer mission. Their jeep ran over an IED. Before he deployed, he told his youth pastor that he wanted to be a soldier because soldiers help and serve.

The Westboro folks promised to come and disrupt the funeral. Within minutes, news sites and Facebook spread the dreaded news. I should thank them. Not for their hate but for the mobilization they caused.

Hundreds of the Patriot Guard rode shotgun. In addition,  the folks in the Upstate of South Carolina volunteered to line the way to the cemetery. This was not a counter protest. It was an honor guard. The crowd was amazing — and American. Dads with sons, senior citizens, families, single adults, moms with babies in strollers, Scout troops, young couples, and veterans.  The wardrobe was either red, white, and blue or black. Flags flew everywhere. Signs thanking Pfc Whitmire for his service and ultimate sacrifice were frequent.
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The cars in the procession all had people wiping their eyes. The soldiers looked stunned. As the cars went by, I wondered if they knew we were there — well, until I saw the first 25 phones filming the crowds. We nodded our support to them. They smiled their appreciation to us. Did the soldiers who were driving in the procession know we were standing there for them too?

The nation lost one of its finest. I weep for his parents. I am humbled by the response complete strangers showed to his passing. Today Main Street was the place to be.

Rick Santorum's baby

For some people, politics trumps all, even something as private as a family grieving the death of a two-hour baby before burying him.  What shriveled hardened hearts. 

Charles Lane on Rick Santorum’s baby--and mine.

The latest intra-pundit flap of Campaign 2012: a couple of my liberal colleagues have called Rick and Karen Santorum “crazy,” or “very weird” for wrapping and caressing the body of their baby, who died only two hours after emerging from 20 weeks in utero -- and taking it home for their children to see. These opinions provoked a conservative backlash.

Maybe it’s not too late for a teachable moment about neonatal death and stillbirth — and the special grief that these not-uncommon, but obviously insufficiently understood, tragedies inflict upon parents.

Nine years ago, my son Jonathan’s heart mysteriously stopped in utero — two hours prior to a scheduled c-section that would have brought him out after 33 weeks. Next came hours of induced labor so that my wife could produce a lifeless child. I cannot describe the anxiety, emotional pain, and physical horror.
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I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time. When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?” I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory -- too abstract. In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.
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Jonathan’s death was probably the hardest moment of my life. But actually touching his body was a source of comfort and the first step in going on with life. Not weird.

Jessica Heslam Our Bereavement is our own

A little while later, a nurse took her away and we never saw her again.

Those precious moments with my daughter — the only time I ever got to see and hold her — are cherished ones. That single memory of holding Grace brings me much peace.

Santorum lost a baby, too. His wife, Karen, went into premature labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant with their son and fourth child, Gabriel, in 1996. He had a fatal birth defect and died two hours after he was born.

The heartbroken couple brought their baby home. According to The Washington Post, the couple and their other children cuddled Gabriel, took pictures and sang him lullabies.

Santorum told CNN’s Piers Morgan in August that his wife, a neonatal intensive care nurse in Pittsburgh, had learned how important it was for siblings to see their lost brother or sister and include them in the family.

The Santorums’ actions are in line with American Pregnancy Association guidelines, which urge grieving parents to talk to and touch their stillborn babies — and for family members to spend time with them as well.

“It was a beautiful thing,” Santorum recalled. “It’s something that the older children do remember, and it did bring closure to them. Gabriel, even to this day, is still very much a part of our family.”
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I was sickened this week when liberal pundits mocked Santorum as “weird” and “crazy,” and tried to use the tragedy to highlight his extreme right-wing views.

Some may not agree with Santorum’s ideology, but to ridicule a grief-stricken father for grappling with one of life’s most agonizing tragedies is the dirtiest of politics.

Mark Steyn  Politics trumps Left's empathy

Lest you doubt that we're headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within 10 minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the "crazy things" he's said and done.

Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America's political class, but the "crazy thing" Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum's "taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home," whereupon he "played with it." My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is "not a little weird, he's really weird."
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Not many of us will ever know what it's like to have a child who lives only a few hours. That alone should occasion a certain modesty about presuming to know what are "weird" and unweird reactions to such an event.
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Santorum's respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell's employees seemed to find anything "weird" about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking 'em home and holding a funeral, right?

Beckham and tattoos

Well, this is one way you can create a Personal Legacy Archive of the best parts of your life.  Only problem is you can't pass it on.

A life in tattoos: David Beckham's strange obsession with exhibitionist body art and the meanings behind each design

Here's just one.

Left upper chest, Jesus and cherubs, Harper, 2011: David added a portrait of Jesus - styled to look like Beckham - being lifted from his tomb by cherubs, said to be representations of his three sons. And when daughter Harper Seven arrived, the proud dad had her name etched above it

Joan of Arc

The Enduring Power of Joan of Arc

JOAN OF ARC was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father’s flocks. But type her name into Amazon’s search engine and you get more than 6,000 results. France’s national archives include tens of thousands of volumes about her. She has been immortalized by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain, Shaw, Brecht, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Rubens; more recently, her life was fodder for the CBS television series “Joan of Arcadia.”

What is it about Joan of Arc? Why is her story of enduring interest more than a half a millennium after her birth?
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Illiterate and uncouth, Joan moved purposefully among nobles, bishops and royalty. So intent on vanquishing the enemy that she threatened her own men with violence, she herself recoiled at the idea of bloodshed. To avoid having to use her sword, she led her army carrying a 12-foot-long banner emblazoned with the words Party of the Kingdom of Heaven. Witnesses said she was luminous in battle, light not glinting off her armor so much as radiating from the girl within. Her enemies spoke of clouds of butterflies following in her wake, a curiously beatific report from men who said she was in league with the devil.

In the aftermath of combat she didn’t celebrate victory but mourned the casualties; her men remembered her on her knees weeping as she held the head of a dying enemy soldier, urging him to confess his sins. Her courage outstripped that of seasoned men at arms; her tears flowed as readily as any other teenage girl’s.

Wikipedia's short bio 

Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" (French: Jeanne d'Arc,[1] IPA: [ʒan daʁk]; ca. 1412[2] – 30 May 1431), is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the coronation of Charles VII. She was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, tried by an ecclesiastical court, and burned at the stake when she was 19 years old.  Twenty-five years after the execution, Pope Callixtus III examined the trial, pronounced her innocent and declared her a martyr.  Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920.[2] She is – along with St. Denis, St. Martin of Tours, St. Louis IX, and St. Theresa of Lisieux – one of the patron saints of France.

Joan asserted that she had visions from God that instructed her to recover her homeland from English domination late in the Hundred Years' War. The uncrowned King Charles VII sent her to the siege of Orléans as part of a relief mission. She gained prominence when she overcame the dismissive attitude of veteran commanders and lifted the siege in only nine days. Several more swift victories led to Charles VII's coronation at Reims and settled the disputed succession to the throne.

One of the great classics of silent film is The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Th Dreyer .  Many call it a masterpiece. 
A restored version was released in 1985.  The faces are extraordinary, the editing amazing and Maria Falconetti is luminous as Joan in what some call the "greatest performance in the history of film".

Not many know that Mark Twain was fascinated by Joan of Arc . He wrote, " She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced."

Under a pseudonym, he wrote Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte,

Twain  said "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none."  You can read it for free online.

But the character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, judged by all of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.

When we reflect that her century was the brutallest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest and fine and delicate when to be loud and course might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honourable in an age which had forgotten what honour was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true in an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both - she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and bestialities.

The courage of Chesshire

In a terrific obituary from the Telegraph on the amazing life of John Chesshire who demonstrated courage throughout his life.

In March 1944 Chesshire, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), was serving as Medical Officer to 1st Battalion The South Staffordshire Regiment (1 SSR), part of 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. In the middle of the month the Brigade blocked the railway at Henu, northern Burma. Faced with this threat to their supply lines, the Japanese attacked and, on March 17, the regimental aid post manned by Chesshire and a colleague, Captain Thorne, was overrun.

The two officers continued to operate and tend the wounded until a counter-attack repelled the enemy. Days of heavy shelling followed, but Chesshire carried on with his work even though it meant standing in the open while others were able to take shelter. During the first two weeks of the month-long battle, he was senior MO to the Brigade. OOn at least five occasions shells landed close to his operating theatre.

The citation for his MC estimated that 500 men had passed through his hands during the campaign. It paid tribute to his tireless energy under dreadful conditions, which had saved many lives and provided a great boost to morale.

handsome devil too
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Chesshire subsequently returned to Knighton and became a hill-farmer, rearing Welsh ewes and Hereford cattle. During the lambing season he converted a large wooden crate into a shepherd’s hut, had it taken to the top of Stowe Hill and camped with just a primus stove for warmth.

When the missionary in him emerged once more, he set off for Borneo. On one occasion, on a trip into the jungle to attend someone who was ill, he experienced severe stomach pains. A self-diagnosis confirmed his fears. He had acute appendicitis and he was the only medical practitioner for many miles.

He did, however, have a medical orderly with him whom he instructed to set up a primitive operating table with a mirror over it. Chesshire then gave himself a large dose of local anaesthetic and, with the aid of the mirror, proceeded to guide the orderly through an operation to remove the appendix.
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He retired from farming in the late 1970s but continued to practise medicine and enjoyed fishing into old age. An accomplished fly fisherman, when his legs were not strong enough to support him, he would tie himself to a tree to avoid falling into the water. Geology was another absorbing interest and he achieved some striking results using boot polish to make paintings of rock formations.

Synchronized sorrow UPDATED

'The people are crying tears of blood': Millions of wailing North Koreans line snow bound streets in display of state-controlled grief for Kim Jong Il's funeral

They wept, they wailed, they doubled over in apparent pain.  Not a bad show of mourning for a tyrant who subjected his country to 17 years of torture, repression and mass murder.

As the two-day funeral ceremony for ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il began yesterday, it was the signal for an all-ages orgy of synchronised sorrow meant to show how bereft the North Korean nation is without him.

The photographs of the funeral are amazing, worthy of an old-fashioned totalitarian state.

Here's the late Christopher Hitchens on North Korea, Worse Than 1984

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished…. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no “free-world” propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state.

UPDATE:  North Korea Is Sending Anyone Who Didn't Mourn For Kim Jong-II To A Labor-Training Camp 

North Korea is punishing citizens who didn't participate in the organized mourning period following Kim Jong-Il's death by sentencing them to six months in a labor-training camp, according to The Daily NK (via Msnbc.com).

The decision to ship North Koreans off to re-education camps follows a series of "criticism sessions" that began on Dec. 29.  A source from North Hamkyung Province told The Daily NK that officials are also punishing those "who did participate but didn’t cry and didn't seem genuine.

Killed by severed deer head

Elderly driver, 70, killed in car crash after severed deer head flies through her windshield

An elderly motorist was killed in a freak road accident after she was hit by the severed head of a deer that was hit by another car.
Rosemary Bower, 70, died after a deer's head plunged through her windshield, causing her car to careen off the road in rural Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania.

Police said the deer had become airborne after being hit by another car traveling in front of her.  The impact sent the deer hurtling over a car driven by Rocco Ford and Scott Elgoff.

It landed on her vehicle and the impact caused the deer to be cut in half with the head and shoulders hurtling through 70 year old Bower's windshield.




According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration there are about 1.5 million car accidents with deer each year that result in $1billion in vehicle damage.

Latest figures show that each year more than 100 people are killed with 10,000 injured after collisions with deer.

No fistfights at the funeral home

Funeral homes are not the place for family arguments or fistfights.

Woman attacks her sister at their mother's funeral in battle over family heirloom jewels

A 'catfight' between two sisters at their mother's funeral broke out Monday following a dispute over missing jewellery.

Funeral home staff looked on in horror as the two women exchanged blows during a private visitation in a Texas funeral home.

Kilgore Police said Kimberley Lynn Briggs grabbed her older sister Debra Gail Goff by the hair and punched her several times.
The 45-year-old also shoved her sister to the floor before staff at the Chapel of the Radar Funeral Home managed to pull them apart.

It is believed a dispute over the whereabouts of their mother's jewellery was at the centre of their fight.

"The strong voice of Great-Aunt Ada has completely converted me to family history"

Lisa Jardine, a professor of Renaissance Studies in London, tells how she became  A Convert to Family History.

For several years, my sister Judith has been researching the family history of the Flattos - my father's mother's family - inspired by the boxes of faded family photographs discovered among my parents' possessions, dating from the beginning of the 20th Century, and inscribed with locations ranging from Lodz in Poland to Kyverdale Road in London.

Her attempts to identify and connect the sitters in the photographs has led her deep into genealogy, and obliged her to learn about European history in the early decades of the 20th Century. She has journeyed intrepidly to the ends of the District and Metropolitan Tube lines, to Jewish cemeteries at East Ham, Rainham and Bushey, to read genealogical data off the family gravestones.

I confess that, as a professional historian, I did not always take her efforts seriously - in genealogy, so much depends on guesswork and surmise, so many of the documents defy interpretation. ..
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In one of our family boxes, for example, is a formal wedding photograph of my grandmother, Celie Flatto, barely in her 20s, with her new husband Abram Bronowski. Taken in 1906, it is stamped with the address of the photographer's studio: 436 Whitechapel Road, London.

But her eldest son, my father, was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1908. He did not arrive in London with his parents and two siblings until 1920. Nothing in the records explains why the couple were in London earlier nor why they had returned to Poland.
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Then, last summer, Judith telephoned me. She had discovered that two nieces of Grandma Celie were still alive and happy to meet us.

So in early October we went to tea with Ruth and Dorothy, sharp-as-mustard octogenarian daughters of Celie's much-younger sisters, Ada and Mary. Over biscuits and cups of tea they studied Judith's cache of photographs, casually identifying people she would never have been able to match to her family tree. "Oh look, that's me with my mother and Auntie Rose," and "There are my aunts, all dressed up to go out dancing."
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I study the period 1500-1800. All those who play a part in the stories I endeavour to reconstruct are long dead. What a thrill, then, to encounter the miracle of oral history - of having a person in front of you who was actually there.

And then, out of the blue, Ruth recalled that 30 years ago, when her mother Ada - born in 1895, so then in her 90s - was living with her, she had sat her down and recorded several hours of reminiscences about her family. Perhaps she might be able to locate the cassette tapes and we might be interested in hearing them?

So it was that I was able to listen to four hours of a voice from the past recounting, with absolute clarity and lucidity, events of more than 100 years ago. Daughter Ruth is there too, firmly steering her mother back to the point, whenever she tends to digress - a tour-de-force in gentle interviewing guidance.
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The strong voice of Great-Aunt Ada has completely converted me to family history. She has put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and given me a real sense of inhabiting my own history as British.

We did not wash up on England's shores by chance. In dangerous, prejudiced times, Britain welcomed my family not once but twice as economic migrants.

Like anyone else who has begun to explore their roots, I am, of course, determined to find out more. I will certainly never be disparaging about family history again.

What a treasure there was in those reminiscences recorded 30 years ago by a woman in her 90s.  I'm sure it was a pleasure for Great Aunt Ada to record her family stories, the real treasure was unearthed 30 years later. 

Santa killing 7 in Texas was likely an Islamic honor killing

About those terrible Christmas shootings where the father, Aziz Yazdanpanah dressed as Santa shot and killed seven, including his wife and children just after they opened their gifts.

Turns out it was probably an Islamic honor killing.  Santa was a Muslim who didn't like his daughter dating a non-Muslim.

Citing public records and interviews with friends and neighbors, media reports Monday identified Yazdanpanah and others who had died: his estranged 55-year-old wife, Fatemeh Rahmati, their 19-year-old daughter, Nona Narges Yazdanpanah, and 15-year-old son, Ali Yazdanpanah.

Friends of the family said Fatemeh Rahmati’s 58-year-old sister, Zohreh Rahmaty, and her husband, Hossein Zarei, 59, and daughter Sahra Zarei, a 22-year-old pre-med student at the University of Texas at Arlington, also were killed.
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Grapevine police also searched the Colleyville home where Aziz Yazdanpanah had been living since he separated from his wife last spring. Public records show that the couple had filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and that the property was in foreclosure....

Yazdanpanah said he bought a gun after expressing concern that his daughter’s boyfriend was stalking him. He also insisted on picking up his daughter from her job at a phone kiosk inside Sam’s Club in Grapevine because of concerns about the alleged stalker.
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But a more ominous portrait emerged of Yazdanpanah in interviews with some of his daughter’s other classmates.
“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”

Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.

“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said.

"There was this bright light above me"

Ben Breedlove, Teenager makes heartbreaking video about his near-death experiences - a week before he dies from heart attack

After cheating death three times, Ben Breedlove, 18, finally lost his life on Christmas night after suffering from a heart attack.
But not before he recorded videos of his life and near-death experiences and how at peace he felt when he believed he was leaving the world.

The Austin teenager had a life-threatening heart condition he fought every day as he was growing up.

He had a near death experience when he was four, fourteen and then less than a month ago.

In the video, he shares these experiences, including the bright light that brought him peace the first time around and the time he was wearing a suit and standing in a white room with his favourite rapper Kid Cudi.

Of this experience, he wrote: 'I then looked in the mirror, I was proud of myself of my entire life, everything I have done. It was the BEST feeling.'

This is a flash card video, so you can turn down the sound on the annoying music.

Final Tweets

It was bound to happen, someone collecting last tweets.  But who would have thought it would be the New York
Times in its annual The Lives They Lived feature?  None very interesting. 

#LastTweet

"Thousands of family pictures are useless when sitting, forgotten and disorganized, on a computer heading toward extinction"

Some very good advice

Oh Snap!: Stop Taking So Many Family Photos and Start Editing Them in More Interesting Ways

This holiday weekend, millions of family photos will be taken. Some images will make it onto Facebook or Picasa or even Flickr. Most, however, will sit on memory cards and computer hard drives for months, unviewed. 2011 was the year of too much picture-taking and too little picture-editing. When it comes to personal photos, I’m guilty of the same.

But it’s not too late. In fact, it’s the passage of time that often provides enough perspective to edit family photos in meaningful ways. I was reminded of this while looking through photographer Chris Verene’s book, Family.

Don't miss the slideshow of the images Verene made and the captions to them

Sometimes it’s the seemingly bland moment that makes what follows poignant. Often, images that seemed exciting in the moment get tossed, Verene says. Unable to let go on his own, after he'd pared 1,000 pictures of a subject down to 100 and then down to 2, he'd call over someone who had little familiarity with that story to see what spoke to them.

Digital photos have made us all excessively snap-happy. This makes editing harder. But as Verene demonstrates, taking the time pays off. Thousands of family pictures are useless when sitting, forgotten and disorganized, on a computer heading toward extinction. But when carefully—and honestly—selected, they can move even a total stranger.

Oh wow

I thought of a story told by a friend, whose grown son had died, at home, in a hospice. The family was ringed around his bed. As Robert breathed his last an infant in the room let out a great baby laugh as if he saw something joyous, wonderful, and gestured toward the area above Robert's head. The infant's mother, startled, moved to shush him but my friend, her mother, said no, maybe he's just reacting to . . . something only babies see.

Peggy Noonan on the best thing said in 2011, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow,"  Steve Jobs' last words.

"Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve's final words were: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'"

The caps are Simpson's, and if she meant to impart a sense of wonder and mystery she succeeded. "Oh wow" is not a bad way to express the bigness, power and force of life, and death. And of love, by which he was literally surrounded.

"She has a legacy now"

Jackie Oddo thought it was too late when she  learned of the death of her birth mother whom she never meet.  Still, she felt compelled to go to her wake. 

When Grief bears a gift of joy,

At the deathbed of Kateri Takawitha, the first American Indian saint

Ever since I learned about the Lily of the Mohawks, she has fascinated me.  I learned much more about  Kateri Takakwitha, daughter of a Mohawk war chief and a captured Christian Algonquin mother, in this article by Brian Fraga.

She will be the first American Indian saint.

During a Dec. 19 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Pope Benedict XVI signed the decree recognizing the miracle needed to canonize Blessed Kateri, whose intercession is credited with the miraculous healing of a Washington state boy who had been afflicted with a flesh-eating bacteria.

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The young future saint’s parents gave her the name Tekakwitha, which means “she who puts things in order” or “she who advances or opens the way before her.”
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In 1660, when Tekakwitha was 4 years old, smallpox, most likely originating from a nearby Dutch settlement, swept through the Mohawk settlement, killing many members of the tribe, who had never been exposed to the disease.

Tekakwitha’s father, mother and a young brother died in the epidemic. Tekakwitha also became deathly ill, but she was nursed back to health by the Mohawk matrons. However, the disease damaged her sight and scarred her face.
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“Her prayer life was so strong and very deep,” said Sister Kateri Mitchell. “She is definitely a model for us of what it means to be a follower of Christ. She radiated that. She lived out her strong convictions and her strong relationship with God to follow that sacred path one day at a time, despite her own weaknesses.”

Watercolor by Dorothy M. Speiser

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In time, she took vows as a woman religious.

However, a year later, she fell fatally ill. She died on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680. Her last words were Iesos konoronkwa (“Jesus, I love you.”).

Those gathered around her said her body suddenly took on a brilliant radiance. The mourners watched in astonishment as the scars disappeared from her face.

Jesuit Father Pierre Cholenec, a witness at her deathbed, later wrote that at the time of her death Kateri’s face, “so disfigured and so swarthy in life, suddenly changed about 15 minutes after her death, and in an instant became so beautiful and so fair that just as soon as I saw it (I was praying by her side) I let out a yell, I was so astonished....”

More on Father Pierre Cholenac's testimony

....and I sent for the priest who was working at the repository for the Holy Thursday service. At the news of this prodigy, he came running along with some people who were with him. We then had the time to contemplate this marvel right up to the time of her burial. I frankly admit that my first thought at the time was that Catherine could well have entered heaven at that moment and that she had -- as a preview -- already received in her virginal body a small indication of the glory of which her soul had taken possession in Heaven. Two Frenchmen from La Prairie de la Magdeleine came to the Sault on Thursday to be present at the service. They were passing by Catherine's cabin where, seing a woman lying on her mat and with such a beautiful and radiant face, they said to each other, Look at this young woman sleeping so peacefully and kept going. But, learning the next lminute that it was a dead body, and that of Catherine, they returned to the cabin and went down on their knees to recommend themselves to her prayers. After having satisfied their devotion for having seen such a wonderful scene, they wished to show their veneration for the dead girl by constructing then and there a coffin to hold such cherished remains