Legacy Matters
I found this striking image at the Crescat, Prince of Orange, René de Chalons, died in battle in 1544, at age 25. His widow commissioned the sculptor Ligier Richier to represent him offering his heart to God, set against the painted splendour of his former worldly estate. Church of Saint-Étienne, Bar-le-Duc.
She is one of those Morbid Catholics and declares
Catholicism is the punk rock of religions. The Church is fearless in Her embrace of death. We love our relics, cherish our martyrs, talk to the dead and pray for a happy death!
Momento Mori is the Latin phrase translated as 'Remember you must die'. It also names an entire genre of art most often found in cemeteries that reminds people of their own mortality and short time here on earth. There is a subgenre called Vanitas to describe a still life featuring symbols of mortality and often including a skull. Below is Vanitas by Phillipe de Champaigne symbolizing Life, Death and Time.
"Remember you must die", momento mori is one of those universal spiritual truths that we all know and too often forget. "Keep death daily before you," urges the Rule of St. Benedict. In the HBO series Six Feet Under, Nate Fisher runs the family funeral home with his brother after his father is killed by a bus. Nate, who never wanted to go into the family business, is asked by a grief-stricken woman whose aunt , the only person who truly loved her, died in a freak accident, "Why do people have to die?" Nate is silent than says poignantly., "To make life important."
The key to living life intensely is to keep the awareness before us as much as we can. You can even have a momento mori on your iPhone. It's called Vanitas and I have it.
Daniel Kalder reviews the new CD Johnny Cash-American VI: Ain't No Grave
Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna get up out of the ground
The song mixes defiance with a joyful declaration that death is not the end. And it is this bedrock of faith, of an elemental Christianity that liberates Cash from fear and informs the rest of the album. This is the sound of a man at peace with himself, with his life, who is ready to meet his Redeemer. Indeed, he’s so at peace he can take a Sheryl Crow song, Redemption Song and make you forget about her musings on toilet paper and suspect for the first time that she might actually be a talented songwriter. Then he takes Kristofferson’s For the Good Times- basically a song in which a horny goat tries to emotionally blackmail his ex into giving him some pity sex- and turns it into a moving reflection on a long life nearly at its end. The fourth track, 1 Corinthians 15:55 is the last song Cash ever wrote and begins with the lines from scripture:
Oh Death where is thy sting?
Oh grave where is thy victory?
Before Cash continues with a plea to God for shelter, guidance, forgiveness and mercy; but it’s a plea given in the certainty that God is merciful, delivered over a cheerful waltz. Cash knows that if he asks, he shall receive.
Many of the best Celtic artifacts have been found in water. For ancient Celts, water was a powerful manifestation of the supernatural, the boundary between worlds.
They made sacred offerings and "deposits" in lakes, pools and rivers across Britain and Ireland. When the dying King Arthur was taken across the lake to Avalon, his sword, Excalibur, was cast into the water.
Maybe that ancient idea was behind the number of treasures cast into the River Wear in Dunham by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey who died in 1988.
The objects, some solid gold, have been discovered by amateur divers Trevor Bankhead, 40, and his brother Gary, 44, a fire service watch officer, over the past two and a half years.
Their first find was an ornate silver trowel presented to the Archbishop for laying the foundation stone of an Indian church in 1961.
The brothers have since retrieved over 30 other items linked to Ramsey, along with hundreds of medieval and Saxon artefacts.
Among them are gold, silver and bronze medals struck to commemorate the second Vatican council, which must have been presented to Ramsey, who was the most senior cleric in the Church of England from 1961 to 1974, when he met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1966.
From American Digest PUDDY: The Gift
You can take lots of rides in this life, but a full sled careening down a hill of fresh snow is the closest to a ride of pure joy as you can get. You'll find it near the top of my list of "Best Moments in This Life." It's probably on yours too. If you've never done it, move it to the top of the Bucket List now.
The man buried here died in his 45th year: R. Scott Puddy
On the morning of June 18, 2002, Scott perished doing what he loved: practicing aerobatics in a Yak-52, in the mountains of Brentwood, Calif.
He was survived by his parents, his sisters, and his daughter.
The dark secret fear lurking inside you when you are a parent is that your children will die before you do. That fear came true for this family. All parents can imagine their grief, but all choose not to do so. But they did not choose, as so many do, to be utterly undone by grief. Instead they chose to balance grief with joy, "For Joy and sorrow are inseparable," and place upon this grave a bronze symbol of all that is best in this life and in this world.
It's a gift to their son, R. Scott Puddy, and a gift to any in the world who chance upon his grave. It's a gift outright.
Via Abbey Roads comes word of this portrait of Father Damian which will be presented to Pope Benedict XVI on the occasion of Father Damien's canonization on Sunday, Oct 11.
The story of the artist and how the painting was accomplished is quite extraordinary.
Fr. Damien, a hero to Hawaiians, ministered to a major leper colony on Molokai where he contracted and eventually succumbed to leprosy in the late nineteenth century.
The late artist Peggy Chun had created the artwork with the help of schoolchildren at Holy Trinity School in Honolulu. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) had affected her to the point where she could only move her eyes.
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Despite her crippling symptoms, which led to her death on Nov. 19, 2008, Peggy used an ERICA eye response computer to communicate. She also used a device that would read her brainwaves.
“She was the first brainwave artist on the planet,” said Shelly Mecum, an art teacher and friend of Peggy.
Peggy painted her portrait of Fr. Damien, titled “The Damien,” by directing others. She trained her apprentices in her brushstroke “just like Renaissance artists.” The work is part painting and part mosaic.
She spent 18 months giving directions week by week to paint the 50,000 quarter-inch squares that would be used in the eight-foot by four-foot painting.
She was assisted by 142 children from Holy Trinity school over a period of 18 months. The students, who ranged in age from 5 to 13, understood themselves as “Peggy’s hands.”
“Peggy completely composed this painting,” Mecum explained, saying she chose the posture of the saint based upon photographs. He is in a posture of blessing and is depicted half in shadow to represent the “darkness” of faith.
When students wondered what would happen to the painting after it was done, another fellow art teacher Christine Matsukawa said "out of the blue" that it should be given to the Pope.
Mecum then went to Peggy with the idea.
“Peggy, would you like the painting to be given to the Pope?” she asked.
After a long pause, Peggy started to cry. This caused Mecum to wonder if she did not want to give the painting away.
Then Peggy spelled out in reply the phrase: “That would be the greatest honor of my life – Yes!”
The provincial of Fr. Damien’s order said he thought there could be no more magnificent and appropriate gift.
Artist Brian Dettmer uses dead media in the form of old cassette tapes to create amazing skeletons.
More here.
Sarah Capewell encountered the NIS and its respect for a human life in the form of a premature baby and it was devastating.
As her contractions continued, a chaplain arrived at her bedside to discuss bereavement and planning a funeral, she claims.
She said: 'I was sitting there, reading this leaflet about planning a funeral and thinking, this is my baby, he isn't even born yet, let alone dead.'
After his death she even had to argue with hospital officials for her right to receive birth and death certificates, which meant she could give her son a proper funeral.
"Doctors told me it was against the rules to save my premature baby"
Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
This is the future, sliding in all directions. I am reminded of Leonard Cohen, the modern day prophet, singer and songwriter who sings The Future in this Youtube video here
From the lyrics
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
London Unveils Memorial to July 7 Victims
British officials unveiled a memorial of 52 steel pillars in a London park Tuesday - one for each victim of the July 7, 2005, attacks on the city's transit system.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, London Mayor Boris Johnson and the Prince of Wales and his wife the Duchess of Cornwall attended the memorial service along with families of the victims. The stainless steel columns stand 11.5 feet tall in central London's Hyde Park.
Former Mayor Ken Livingstone, who was in office at the time of the attacks by four suicide bombers on three subway trains and a bus, praised the design of the memorial.
"I think it's just exactly right. Often, it's very difficult to do something like this and get it right," he said.
The daughter of a woman who died in the bomb attacks on London's transit system says a memorial to the victims is "truly incredible."
The July 7 memorial says what words cannot
We have become exceptionally good at revering our heroes and this latest effort is as utterly right as the Cenotaph, says Simon Heffer.
The dignity and appropriateness of the memorial in Hyde Park to the 52 people murdered in the London Tube and bus bombings four years ago speak for themselves. The concept of 52 tall, strong bars of steel towering above those who visit the memorial to pay their respects makes a statement about the indestructibility of the human spirit; it also proclaims a resilience against those who would, in one way or another, remove our freedoms.
Yet what the memorial also reflects is a tactful evolution of taste, and an appropriateness not merely to the suffering of the dead and bereaved, but to the spirit of the age. It can often be dangerous, in contemporary art, to strive not to be literal; it risks lack of comprehension on the part of the viewer and, in this case, displaying a lack of respect.
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As a people, we are exceptionally good at memorials. Even before the wars and destructions of the last 100 years, we had perfected the art of the epitaph, with its combination of honesty and wit: they are to be found in almost every parish church in England. They accept death as a frequent visitor to the parish; but they accept, too, that life goes on.
--
It is here that one first notices the contrast between the British way of dealing with such a holocaust and that of other people. Understatement is almost always the key
Lutyens's cenotaph in Whitehall is the ultimate incarnation of this outlook. Like the July 7 monument it was, in its time, devastatingly modern; yet piercing in its simplicity. Erected in wood for the first Armistice Day in 1919, the form proved so instantly popular that the architect was commissioned to have one built in stone for 1920. It reminds us that the grief provoked by nearly a million dead from Britain and the Empire was so immense that no extravagance of words, or sculpted gesture, could even begin to convey it, or the pointlessness of the sacrifice. The gently sloping lines and plainness of the stone have for 90 years embodied the scale of the loss. And three words were all that were needed to convey the nation's reverence for its heroes: "The Glorious Dead".
--
It is what seems to me to be the direct link in tone and expression between the Cenotaph and the July 7 monument that seals in my mind the utter rightness of the latter. The expression is of the eternal values of liberty, democracy and justice and their ultimate triumph over their enemies
Romain Blanquart's photographic essay The Bride Was Beautiful is heart-breaking and beautiful.
Young Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, fought off cancer long enough so she could marry her childhood sweetheart. She died five days later, a married woman. Roman recounts her story in a few words and masterful photographs.
From the AP, Mexico destroys 'Death Saint' revered by criminals
Officials in Nuevo Laredo have destroyed more than 35 statues dedicated to a "Death Saint" popular with drug traffickers.
The statues, most depicting a robe-covered skeleton resembling the Grim Reaper, lined highways and roads in and around the Mexican city on the border with Texas. One of the statues was located at the base of an international bridge linking Mexico and the U.S.
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The Death Saint is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, but has become popular among organized crime figures in Mexico.
Time magazine on Santa Muerte: The New God in Town
Now appearing in New York, Houston and Los Angeles: Santa Muerte. The personage is Mexico's idolatrous form of the Grim Reaper: a skeleton — sometimes male, sometimes female — covered in a white, black or red cape, carrying a scythe, or a globe. For decades, thousands in some of Mexico's poorest neighborhoods have prayed to Santa Muerte for life-saving miracles. Or death to enemies. Mexican authorities have linked Santa Muerte's devotees to prostitution, drugs, kidnappings and homicides. The country's Catholic church has deemed Santa Muerte's followers devil-worshiping cultists.
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees , wit half a date dangling after and a question mark.
My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, lie a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.
I loved this book set in Ireland and the beautiful, lyrical prose of its author who was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2008.
Sebastian Barry writes about the beautiful Roseanne Cleary McNulty, a 100-year-old woman in a mental asylum for far more than fifty years who is secretly writing the story of her early life (the Secret Scripture of the title) and hiding it under the floorboards in her room.
Dr. Grene, a psychiatrist in charge of deciding what is to happen to each of the patients when the asylum closes- and so Roseanne's fate- becomes fascinated by Roseanne's resilience and lack of bitterness and soon begins to uncover the truth of why she was sent to the asylum in the first place.
"The Secret Scripture" (Sebastian Barry)
Here's another few snippets:
It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in life, you had better put down the markets for happiness while you can.
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We are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.
I wrote about Taking Chance Home back in 2004. I was immensely moved then and again when I watched Taking Chance last month on HBO. I meant to write about it, but I got distracted and didn't. What is most impressive is the respect, even reverence, the Army takes every step of the way and the manner in which Americans meet that respect with their own.
But I must say I was surprised at the size of the audience. Today in the Wall St Journal on 'Taking Chance'.
It's been widely observed that movies about the Iraq war have tended to bomb at the box office. One newspaper report speculated that films like "Home of the Brave" and "Stop-Loss" failed because "the audience might prefer a longer interval before viewing events as troubling as war."
"Taking Chance" refutes this notion. When it debuted February 21 on HBO, it became the network's most-watched original movie in five years, drawing two million viewers -- especially impressive given that it aired on Saturday, traditionally not a big TV-watching night. An HBO spokesman estimates that another 5.5 million have watched subsequent airings of the film, and that doesn't count DVR viewers.
What makes "Taking Chance" different from the other Iraq movies is that it is all realism and no cynicism. It dramatizes the 2004 journey of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, played by Kevin Bacon, as he escorts the remains of a 19-year-old Marine private, Chance Phelps, from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps's Wyoming hometown, where Strobl meets the family and attends the funeral.
"Taking Chance" does not glorify the war. It takes no discernable position on whether America should be in Iraq, although a few people Colonel Strobl meets along the way express their view, pro and con. But almost without exception, the Americans he encounters are respectful, patriotic, grateful for his service and for Private Phelps's. If Hollywood wants to make war movies that appeal to a broad audience, it could do worse than to take in "Taking Chance." The Americans who show Colonel Strobl such reverence as he makes his way west are the very audience Hollywood wishes it could reach.
Funeral Blues
by WH Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut of the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one:
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods:
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
A poem by Mary Oliver
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
To buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
When death comes
Like the measles-pox;
When death comes
Like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
The Roman Elvis was chiselled 1800 years ago, a marble arcoterion to decorate the corners of a sarcophagus, a stone tomb or burial chamber and will go on sale in October in London by the British auction house Bonhams.
What in the name of all that is holy was the Louvre thinking with this exhibit of a "chaotic pile of tombstones" in the same room with John Paul Rubens series on the Life of Marie de Medicis?
The Brussels Journal finds at least one professor of art calls it The Vampirization of the Louvre
Contemporary art, which is not art, seeks to give itself artistic legitimacy through a forced confrontation with the greatest masterpieces. It vampirizes them in order to affirm itself as true art. The Jan Fabre exhibit in the Louvre adds nothing to Van Eyck, Memling, Rembrandt or Rubens. It does however bring to Jan Fabre the illusion of conversing on an equal footing with them, the illusion, therefore, of being a great artist. [...]
Life Before Death, photographs by Walter Schels, interviews by Beate Lakotta
Before her death Eldegard Clavey, 67, said
"Death is a test of one’s maturity. Everyone has got to get through it on their own. I want very much to die. I want to become part of that vast extraordinary light. But dying is hard work. Death is in control of the process, I cannot influence its course. All I can do is wait. I was given my life, I had to live it, and now I am giving it back"
In the Guardian Joanna Moorhead writes about German photographer who was terrified of death, but felt compelled to take these extraordinary series of portraits of people before and on the day they died. She writes
Nothing, it is said, teaches us more about living than dying. But if so, isn't it odd how little we face up to death? And isn't it odd that modern societies, which appear so keen to find meaning in the business of living, push death to the periphery, minimising our contact with it and sanitising its impact?
A German photographer captures the dying
"What I was used to," says Schels, who has taken hundreds of portraits during his career, "was people who smiled for the camera. It's usually an automatic response. But these people never smiled. They were incredibly serious; and more than that, they weren't pretending anything any more. People are almost always pretending something, but these people had lost that need. I felt it enabled me as a photographer to get as close as it's possible to get to the core of a person; when you're facing the end, everything that's not real is stripped away. You're the most real you'll ever be, more real than you've ever been before"
one thing you never get used to is the feel of a dead person - it's always shocking," she says. "It's like cement - that cold, that hard, and that heavy."--
horrifying though photographing the bodies was, more shocking still for Schels and Lakotta was the sense of loneliness and isolation they discovered in their subjects during the before-death shoots. "Of course we got to know these people because we visited them in the hospices and we talked about our project, and they talked to us about their lives and about how they felt about dying," explains Lakotta. "And what we realised was how alone they almost always were. They had friends and relatives, but those friends and relatives were increasingly distant from them because they were refusing to engage with the reality of the situation. So they'd come in and visit, but they'd talk about how their loved one would soon be feeling better, or how they'd be home soon, or how they'd be back at work in no time. And the dying people were saying to us that this made them feel not only isolated, but also hurt. They felt they were unconnected to the people they most wanted to feel close to, because these people refused to acknowledge the fact that they were dying, and that the end was near."
That last bit about how lonely they dying, isolated, even hurt, because people they most wanted to feel close to, refused to acknowledge they were dying just pierced my heart.
In a small town in Hungary, a Dominican church was being restored when workers came upon a secret crypt that been bricked up for over 200 years.
Inside the crypt were 265 hand painted coffins, the corpses perfectly mummified.
Painted Death from Curious Expeditions.
Everything from the rosaries to the handmade stockings on their feet were equally intact, offering a gold mine for ethnographers on the funerary customs and everyday life of 18th century Hungarian villages. There was something there for doctors as well; traces of ancient tuberculosis. An Australian surgeon, Dr. Mark Spigelman, has devoted the past 6 years to studying the bacteria found in one mummy in particular, and the information gleaned from this ancient DNA could provide information that will help fight tuberculosis.
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Each coffin had been lovingly hand-painted with crucifixes, flowers, quotations, bible verses, angles, skull and crossbones, hourglasses, and Memento Mori inscriptions. No coffin is a repeat of another; the variety of color, decoration, motif and even language (some in German, some Hungarian, some Latin) is simply incredible. These coffins seem to be painted with an almost joyous hand, as a celebration of the life, not a mourning of the death. One coffin, belonging to a miner, is painted with bones, skulls and a miner’s pick and shovel. Each coffin had been personalized with great thought and care.
Many thanks to Miss Kelly.
A tiny little game called Passage, developed by a 30-year-old Jason Rohrer allows plays to experience an entire simulated lifetime, that the developer calls a "memento mori game"
Aaron Rutkoff of the Wall St Journal who apparently scouts out time wasters calls this a "pixilated metaphor" in his column The Game of Life.
It won't make much sense unless you download it for free here and play the 5 minute game.
As in real life -- it should be clear by now that "Passage" is in the metaphor-for-life business -- marriage comes with pluses and minuses. Becoming attached (literally) to your spouse means you can't easily navigate a maze full of narrow passages, which is located south of the starting point. That's where you'll find the treasure, a stand-in for success and wealth, which boosts your score. But treasure isn't the only way to gain points: Making progress from left to right also builds your score -- and traveling as a family doubles these points.
The game is interesting once if only to see the avatar age, becoming gray, then stoop-shouldered. The music, said to be an homage to early Atari, I found dreadful.
What's so surprising is the emotional response from so many gamers.
gamers confess that they've been moved to tears. "I'll be a man and admit this game made me cry when explaining it to my wife," wrote blogger Josh Farkas.
"There have been a number of people who have written stuff about this being the first videogame to make them cry," says Mr. Rohrer. "That's definitely what I was trying to evoke."
Shelley Fishkin, a professor of English at Stanford, was going through the Mark Twain's archives, when she happened upon an old manuscript of a play that made her laugh out loud.
“I hadn’t had that much fun reading a manuscript in a long time,” she recalled recently. “And I’d never been as surprised. It was a whole, finished play. He had even managed, and this was not necessarily his strong suit, a plot, with memorable characters and hilarious scenes. I thought it held great promise.”
Last week, the play Is He Dead? finally reached Broadway, in a version adapted by the playwright David Ives.
Mr. Ives was unspooked by the assignment. “I know I’ve delighted people in my time,” he said, “so what the hell? Don’t forget that writers are just guys like you, and that they’re all trying to make something good. Twain understood that. I think if he had pulled ‘Is He Dead?’ out of the drawer, he would have slapped himself on the forehead and said, ‘What was I thinking?,’ then revised it and put it onstage. He knew that theater is a totally expedient art.
“Plus, he’s dead.”
Enchanted by the beauty of the corpse and her enigmatic smile, a morgue worker made a cast of her face and copies were soon all over Paris.
She became "became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s" and inspired a remarkable number of literary works.
Inconnue de la Seine
via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kirscher Society
What struck me was that the Paris morgue had thousands of visitors every day as the identification of anonymous corpses became
a spectacle […] – in the French double sense of theater and grand display"
Father Henry Garnet heard the confessions of the Catholic plotters determined to kill King James I and to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the infamous Gunpowder plot of 1605. He admonished them to give up their plot.
Guy Fawkes was discovered in the basement of the Parliament buildings holding a lit torch, guarding a bunch of faggots( which was what small sticks or branches bound together for firewood were called) several feet away from tons of dynamite.
Each year on November 5, bonfires are still lit in England.
'Facebook' bound in priest's skin for sale
Can there be anything sadder than parents who have anticipated heir baby's birth for months, to have the baby born so sick that it soon dies?
When such sorrow replaces joy, who knows what it takes to heal? Yes, parents have to go on, but they also have to remember.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep is a foundation and a network of professional photographers who will come to a hospital or hospice and take professional portraits of the tiny baby so their parents and family will remember them. Once the baby dies and is unhooked from tubes and machines, it may be the first and only time the parents have to hold the little one that they loved so much.
Thanks so much to Hootsbuddy who alerted me of this site and wrote a wonderful post, Remarkable Photo Ministry.
That's just what these photographers do, minister like angels, at the saddest times parents can experience.
Remembrance photography began in the Victorian era when a photo of a deceased loved one was treasured, especially if no other photographs existed.
Said one woman,
“What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes.”
If you are collecting information about your family origins, you must see The Peopling of the World to see how far back your ancestors go.
Kudos to the Bradshaw Foundation for the presentation created by Stephen Oppenehimer that shows the world migrations of the human species based on the latest genetic research based on a synthesis of recent mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology, climatology and fossil study.
They call it an "iLecture" ( information lecture), a fact-driven documentary film presenting the latest theories using experts from around the world and plan a new one each month, harnessing technology to open up the ancient past.
Fine foundation work and a hat tip to Maggie's Farm.
Long before CSI, , a New England socialite and heiress, dedicated her life to the advancement of forensic science. Frances Glesser Lee also helped establish the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University.
She also became a captain in the New Hampshire State Police, the first woman ever to hold such a position in the United States. She had a most inventive way to teach her students about scientific crime detection. Using her passion for dolls and dollhouses, she created eighteen miniature crime scene dioramas packed with tiny but detectable clues for her students to analyze. She called them Nutshell studies of Unexplained Death.
Some of these Visible Proofs are now on exhibit at the National Library of Medicine along with other forensic views of the body.
Said Earl Stanley Gardner, a close friend who wrote the Perry Mason mysteries, "A person studying these models can learn more about circumstantial evidence in an hour than he could learn in months of abstract study."
Scribal Terror has more about Death in a Nutshell
I'm only surprised that this started in Germany.
Good mourning, you're watching Death TV
For the German media entrepreneur Wolf-Tilmann Schneider, though, it was a normal working day – and the perfect moment to set out his plans for Death television. The Grim Reaper, it seems, will soon be exposed to the full glare of the studio lights.
Etos-TV will be Europe’s first channel devoted to death: documentaries on beautiful cemeteries, round-table discussions about the appropriate means of burial and on-screen obituaries that can be distributed later to friends and family on the internet.
The Good Mourning channel, as it has been mockingly dubbed by some, acknowledges that the population of Germany is ageing rapidly, that older people are often well-off and that the old taboos about discussing death are beginning to melt away. “Some 830,000 people die a year,” said Mr Schneider, “and there are two million elderly in care.” As a result there was a big demand for information about death, inheritance law and insurance policies.
The satellite channel is being backed by an undertakers’ association representing 3,000 funeral parlours across Germany. Its programmes will be sponsored by residential homes and stair-lift companies.
“This is not primarily an advertising channel,” Kerstin Gernig, for the undertakers, said. “It is about passing on information. Every person has left his mark, raised children, paid taxes, done something. We would like them to be shown respect.” On offer, too, will be an obituary service. For about €2,000 (£1,400), a photograph of a dead friend or relative will be shown on the screen, along with a spoken tribute. The 90-second obituary will be repeated ten times and then be available for distribution on the internet. For a higher fee, a short film can be made recording highlights from the life of the deceased.
Terry Nelson writes in I see dead people...kinda that today we deny death while saints often contemplate death.
Saint Jerome by Carravagio
Memento mori, remember death, is a traditional maxim of the Church.
This tapestry from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels was woven in Belgium using Egyptian cotton and digital files from the artist.
What's so lovely about the tapestry is that recognized, canonized saints are side by side with some unknown saints, ordinary people.
At Whispers in the Loggia, Rocco Palmo writes To Be a Saint
More than just sometimes, you'll hear of folks -- even of the not-normally-emotional type -- who've wept at the sight of the simple figures, shown walking together toward the altar.
And why the tears? Most common answer: something along the lines of "they look normal... they look like us."
...because "us" is what they are, and they're what we're called to be.
More about the tapestries
The artist John Nava who was commissioned to make the Communion of Saints said
the message of the image and the message of the Church "is a message of hope, redemption and meaning." Nava believes these are ideas that have been frequently dismissed in conventional modern art.
After the horrors of the 20th century - the World Wars, the atomic bomb and the Holocaust - humanity has routinely been seen pessimistically as "diseased and decadent," Nava explains. The best figurative painters of our time have made great works, but they often have been of a tragic and hopeless image of humans, if not a critical or cynical one.
The Communion of Saints, however, is exactly the opposite, Nava believes. Its theme is one of hope. He would like people viewing the tapestries "to see the humanity of these figures and feel a sense of connection to themselves."
Photographer Bobby Neel Adams uses photo-montage, not photoshop, to create his extraordinary photographs that show's time's arrow.
Below from the series called age-maps.
This photo-montage from the series Family Tree show how the "visual DNA" is passed on.
Even more disconcerting are his montages of couples - two partners as one figure as the image of their commitment.
Music based on a near-death experience
Beth McCoy's Illumination Suite performed in a concert along with Brahms and Debussy
“The first movement is about the scurry of life, and then bang, something happens,” McCoy said. “The second movement is called ‘Through the Tunnel.’ Everything is in the numbers of three, as in the trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost. The third movement is about coming back from a near death experience and I called it ‘Returned, Transformed.’ It’s about coming back with a new sense of life.”
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However, her near death experience isn’t exactly what prompted her to compose the piece.
“It was when I read Don Piper’s ‘90 Minutes in Heaven’ and read that he said that he would give up everything, even leave his family, to go back to heaven to hear the music,” McCoy said. “It was the music that he heard in heaven that made him feel that way.”
A new art exhibit opens at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eternal Ancestors, Art of the Central African Reliquary.
Holland Cotter calls it a "gorgeous, morally and spiritually vibrant" in his New York Times review, Keeping Watch Over the Dead.
Anyone familiar with Western religious art, particularly art before the modern era, will recognize its basic theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in materials and images, coddling, counseling and chiding us every step of the way.
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It is intended, as far as is ever possible in a Western museum, especially one as staid as the Met, to offer a view of traditional African art as it might have been seen through African eyes.
China's First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi searched obsessively for eternal life writes John Wilson in the New Statesman, Mortal Combat.
He prepared to rule in a parallel universe underground with 7000 soldiers and press-ganged some 750,000 workers to build his his burial chambers.
Somewhere deep beneath my feet, in a vast subterranean palace, lies the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. According to legend, he is interred in a gold casket sitting in a lake of liquid mercury. Snaking out across the 80-metre-long floor are streams of mercury that map the routes of those great waterways, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The 15-metre-high ceiling is encrusted with pearls depicting the starry constellations. Antechambers reportedly contain the bodies of wives, concubines and advisers (not that their deaths coincided naturally; when it was Qin Shi Huangdi's time to go, friends and family were forced to follow him into the earth).
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, who is here in the name of cultural diplomacy. His mission is to secure the biggest ever loan of treasures from the tomb of the First Emperor, including members of the fabled, 7,000-strong Terracotta Army, guardians of the imperial afterlife.
"The First Emperor was able to dream on a scale that no one else has ever dreamt," he says with a boyish breathlessness. "No one else in history has tried to create a life-sized parallel universe in which he will rule for ever. So much of what modern China is can be seen as a direct consequence of what that man did. There are very few historical figures who changed the world in such a way that we are still living with the consequences."
"For the Love of God, what are you going to do next?" asked Damian Hirst's exasperated mother and that become the title of his latest art piece
Whether her comment came before or after she saw her son's life-size platinum skull encrusted with 8601 fine diamonds, I don't know. Maybe it was after she saw the $100 million price tag or the investment group who bought the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or as William Shaw writes in the New York Times, "the most outrageous piece of bling."
Hirst is "very pleased with the end result. I think it's ethereal and timeless."
Hirst, famous pickler of sharks and bovine bisector, all his art is about death. This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”
Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.
Blake Gopnik writes in the Washington Post
What could be a better time to make this piece than now, and who a better artist for it than Hirst? More than anyone, Hirst knows that we have reached a new level of absurd consumption -- in the art market, clearly, but also elsewhere on this carbon-laden world.
No one claims that this is even close to being a major moment in the making of art. Everyone knows it is the greatest moment in the selling of it.
Huggable Urns, I kid you not, are Teddy Bears with pouches for ashes, "something soft and cozy for your loved ones or precious pets final resting place." Their tag line is "Hold Me When You Think of Me." Cocoa Teddy or Snow Teddy are also available with detachable wings.
via American Digest
Artist Nadine Jarvis's project Post Mortem has several proposals for "alternative treatment for our deceased"
Carbon copies - 240 pencils can be made from a carton of human remains.
Bird feeder - a bird feeder made from bird food and human ash. A person is reincarnated through the bird.
Rest in pieces - like a pinata, a ceramic urn crashes to the ground in 1-3 years after the thread that holds the urn in the air disintegrates.
Personally, I prefer the diamonds.
Available only at funeral homes, beginning on opening day, for only $699, official major league baseball funerary urns.
Each urn sits upon a home plate-shaped base and comes with a baseball which can be replaced by a special ball from your own collection.
Caskets coming soon.
The firm designing brand name funerary products: Eternal Image
The full story at Book of Joe.
Today is the feast day of St. Joseph, carpenter and foster-father of Jesus. He is the patron saint of the happy death Terry informs me is because he died in the company of Jesus and Mary.
Update. Here's more on St. Joseph's Day traditions
Update. My mother Mary had a great devotion to St. Joseph and prayed to him daily for a happy and speedy death," wrote another viewer. "She was 94 and in good health, still living independently in her little apartment near her family.
"On March 19, 2002 at one a.m. she suffered a massive heart attack. She made it to the hospital, received the Last Rites, and with all of her children, and most of her grandchildren, around her, died peacefully at three p.m. that same day, the feast of St Joseph. Her prayers were answered!"
A new movie starring Sally Field and Ben Chaplin called Two Weeks, now in limited release, tells the story about what happens to a family when the one person who holds it together can't hold on anymore.
Writer/Director Steve Stockman has a blog describing how he came to write the movie which was inspired by his own experience of being with his siblings as his mother lay dying. What he found at various screenings was people want to tell their stories.
After one screening in Seattle, I heard about the woman who didn't really know her brother until she spent his last 7 days by his bedside, when he was dying of aids. The woman whose sisters-in-law descended on her mother's house while she was dying and made off with the antiques. The man whose mother refused to talk to him about the fact that she was dying-but knew, and left him 15 pages of notes on how to live. Some funny stories, some sad, some with lessons, some horrifyingly pointless. But all of them very personal and fascinating.
At the Hamptons Film Festival last month, a woman in the audience said that she had never talked about what happened when her brother died, and she was amazed at how similar “Two Weeks” was to what happened to her. Others in the audience agreed.
It turns out that end of life is something that happens to everyone. And lots of people want to talk about it—but it’s such a private and scary subject, they think they’re the only ones.
It’s been great for me to find out that we’ve created a film about an experience common to many, many people. And it’s been great, I think, for people who’ve been through it to realize they’re not alone.
From PostSecret where people mail in their secrets on a homemade postcard.
via Scribal Terror comes this Romanian gravestone
Burn in Hell you damned Taxi
That came from Sibiu
As large as Romania is
You couldn’t find any other place to stop
Only in front of my house
To kill me?"
She got it from The Spirit of Romania featuring the Merry Cemetery
The Merry Cemetery, an original folkloric art museum was founded in 1935 by a craftsman named Ioan Stan Patras and owes its fame to the vivid colors of the headboards on which are naively painted scenes narrating the biography of the deceased. The accompanying simple-rhyming stanzas are sometimes lyrical, sometimes ironic, but always sincere and never indulgent. The cemetery has become a chronicle of the local community.
....as a reward for its unicity and originality, Sapanta was declared the second memorial monument of the world, right after the Egyptian Valley Of The Kings.
Funeral Home uses dead critters to cheer guests
A stuffed squirrel clutching a fishing rod. A dead badger hefting a football for a winning pass. Other ex-rodents enjoying a carousel ride.
Welcome to the world of Sam Sanfillippo, a funeral director who has amassed a large collection of stuffed animals in unconventional scenarios to cheer up guests mourning their loved ones -- and created a mini-tourism attraction.
If you're headed to Madison, Wisconsin, it's at the Cress Funeral Home.
In an earlier post, Art Honoring Life, I noted the emerging funerary arts movement.
First a show, now a gallery with the opening this week in Sonoma County that's dedicated to crematory urns and other "personal memorial art"
The gallery, christened Art Honors Life, will showcase the work of some 40 artists and craftspeople who are collectively pioneering a new aesthetic of death — creating sophisticated vessels of burnished terracotta, redwood burl, black glass, even biodegradable paper mixed with ashes from ancient oaks that, in terms of sheer artistic ambitiousness, hark back to the ancient Egyptians.
“Art and beauty can assuage anxiety,” said Maureen Lomasney, the 56-year-old artist and gallery owner, who started the concept with a Web site called Funeria, and sponsored a juried exhibition in Philadelphia last fall called “Ashes to Art,” a kind of Venice Biennale for the urn set. “Our goal is to take away fear.”
Seems to work for Laura Clauson whose mother now reduced to ashes lie in an
artist-designed ceramic prayer wheel etched with stenciled leaves. Having her mother’s remains close by ---— is comforting to Ms. Clauson, a 50-year-old transportation planner. “I’ll walk by and give mom a spin,” she said of the vessel, which is attached to a turntable. “Her presence is here.”
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“As our understanding of death changes over time, the forms we use to mourn also change,” said Robin Jaffe Frank, senior associate curator at the Yale University Art Gallery and the author of “Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures” ... “We’re all object-oriented, and we need tangible forms to express our relationship to a person no longer here. Mourning art responds to a deeply felt need.”
Artist Gunter Demning has installed more than 10,000 stopersteine - stumble stones, into the sidewalks of 202 German cities and stones.
They are meant to trip memory.
Each is a brass plaque measuring about 4 by 4 inches and hand-engraved by artist Gunter Demnig with the name and a few terse details of someone lost to the Holocaust. Each stumble stone is set permanently into the sidewalk outside the place where the individual lived, laughed, and loved -- usually a house or apartment building and sometimes a shop or office.
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"Here lived
Berta Spiegel
Born "Scheuer"
[In the] Year 1879
Deported to Theresienstadt
Dead 16-2-1942"
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"Stumble stones are on streets where everyone walks. The names cry out from the sidewalks of everyday life."
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"This is my life's work. I will continue for as long as I'm able," Demnig said. "Giving names back to the dead is a way of keeping them alive."
In Germany, singular remembrances.
Daniela Edberg, creates some very witty photographs that make light of secret binges by women. Here is Death by Oreos
Death by M&Ms,
Death by Slimfast
Death by Cotton Candy
Death by Lifesavers
See all the photographs in the series, Drop Dead Gorgeous and read the interview by Nicole Pasulka.
Created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, sent aloft with Apollo 15 and installed by astronaut David Scott along with a plaque honoring 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who died in service.
Called "famine coffin", it's not a coffin, but a sculpture by Steven O'Loughlin to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the great Irish potato famine that killed a million and forced the emigration of a million and a half more out of a total population of 8 million.
The artist explains
Each panel the coffin has various scenes dealing with the famine. The outside deals with immigration and the inside has the famine scenes. On the cover is a celtic cross with figures and spiral patterns. At the base of the cross two sad figures cradle a withered potato plant. Each cross arm has people praying for relief. The top section has a resurrection scene symbolizing their rebirth to their struggle of life in America. The right side shows immigrants boarding ships bound for America. The top side has a group of immigrants enduring the rugged Atlantic crossing. The faces for this panel were taken from photos and paintings of the famine period. The left side shows the immigrants arriving in America where they begin to assimilate into the bustling city.
Many of the scenes on the coffin were taken from newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts of the famine.
Steve lives in Los Angeles and says of his art
The multi-cultural tone of the art is meant to symbolise the mix of cultures we live in. Mexican, Celtic, Asian, and African styles are combined with freeways, airplanes and cityscapes. It is the intention of my work to show the universal patterns symbolized in these ancient art forms at work in our modern world. Certainly Celtic art is one of my dominate influences.
I love his work which is very post modern and witty what with subjects like alien abduction, rodeos, freeway traffic, angels and airplanes all in his very distinctive style.
Funeria, an arts agency, is leading the emerging funerary arts movement.
Funeria offers a portfolio of some 70 designs, of hand-made, museum-quality, artist-made funerary vessels.
It's certainly time for more thought and beauty for the urns, vessels and reliquaries for cremated remains. As one wag said, "You've urned it!"
If you are an artist, you may be interested in their call for entries 2006 in the Ashes to Art collection.
The deadline is August 19, 2006. The Ashes to Art exhibition will be in Philadelphia in October.
