Legacy MattersPensioner dies after pricking finger on rose bush
A pensioner has died after pricking his finger on a rose bush while gardening at home.
George Emmerson, 73, didn't realise a thorn from the plant he was pruning back had become embedded into his finger and developed blood poisoning.
His arm had to be amputated and he died a week after the apparently trivial incident.
Mr Emmerson was married with three children and three grandchildren, who have been stunned by the freak gardening tragedy.
A single engine plane from Orlando was flying up the coast when it began experiencing engine trouble. After oil began to leak on the windshield blocking the view of the pilot and a propeller fell off, the pilot decided to make an emergency landing on the beach near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa.
Then it hit and killed a jogger running on the beach.
U.S. jogger killed after plane crash-lands on top of him as he runs on the beach
His name was not released.
UPDATE. Robert Gary Jones, a 38-year-old father of two was jogging and listening to his iPod when he was hit from behind and killed by the small plane which glided to an emergency landing on the beach.
What a tragedy. Condolences to his poor family
I'll never forget my mother sitting at home on our couch (as she did until two days before she died -- through a Catholic home hospice) with the computerized morphine drip that gave her steady, always insufficient doses of the stuff, as the tumor quietly thrived -- a tumor she'd earned over decades through the Marlboro "Lungs for Clothing" trade-in program. (Which is really neat, by the way: You send them little pieces of your lungs, and they ship you t-shirts and jackets with their logo. Mom had quite a collection by the end.) Having spent the better part of 20 years at bingo and high-stakes poker games in church basements all through the Diocese of Brooklyn, and slightly addled by the opiates, my mother became convinced that the numbers on the morphine drip were part of a lottery -- and if her number came up, she would "win" and get back her health. In her smoke-stained fingers she clutched the sterile medical plastic, squinting at the numbers on the readout. "Come on seven," is the last phrase of hers that I can remember
Just an amazing, horrific, inspiring story by Matt Labash called Love Among the Ruins about the amazing Father Rick Frechette in Haiti.
Every Thursday—since long before the earthquake—Frechette and a band of Haitian volunteers trek to the city morgue and claim the nameless dead, who lie naked in bloated heaps on a blood-streaked concrete floor. “You’ve heard of Tuesdays with Morrie,” Frechette smiles, “this is Thursdays with the Krokmo” (a Creole pejorative term for undertaker. It translates as the “death hook,” meaning the show is over). The place is jammed and the dead often piled seven or eight high. The workers there are so inured to the stench and spectacle, that Frechette has seen a morgue attendant slaloming on roller blades around the bodies and workers eating their lunch while sitting on stacks of cadavers as though on breaktime in the office kitchenette.
In Haiti, even before the quake, dead bodies were nothing more than background music—as commonplace as they are unnoticed. If they didn’t end up in the stark death-cave that is the general hospital morgue, they were burned in the streets on the spot where they died (a pragmatic hygiene concern). The decency and sentimentality that a better-developed society affords are luxuries here. Father Rick and his men gather the bodies themselves, packing them into makeshift coffins fashioned from supermarket cardboard boxes. They then truck them outside the city, up a sun-bleached highway that runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, to the rolling wastelands of Titanyen, which translates from Creole as the “fields of less than nothing.” A New Orleans-style Haitian jazz-funeral band—all horns and drums—plays graveside. Father Rick, an irreverent sort, calls them “The Grateful Dead.” Then he and his men plant the cardboard coffins in large holes dug by their own gravediggers, endowing their cargo in death with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded them in life.
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He’s been doing the morgue runs for 15 years, but has never gotten used to the smell. It makes him so sick, he brings along rum and cigarettes. “People ask me if I smoke,” he says. “Only on Thursdays.” The Haitians avail themselves of the goods, but for Frechette, they’re not optional. Without the spirit’s fumes and cigarette smoke chasing the smell of the dead out of his nostrils, he vomits, which his Haitian colleagues find amusing.
When he returned to Haiti right after the earthquake, there was an overflow crowd at the morgue, literally thousands of dead laid out in the street in front of it. “They were picking them up with backhoes and bucket-loaders, dumping them into trucks,” says Frechette, adding that the machines crunched the bodies against the walls in order to be able to scoop them. “They were hanging out the sides like crabs in a bucket. Really, really terrible. It was so shocking, so disgusting, I yelled, ‘Give me a cigarette!’ ”
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When I ask him how he could head back into the jaws of Haiti just a day after burying his mom, he tells me of her death. She knew it was happening, and she had time to prepare, had the best care, had lived a full life, and died with her family surrounding her. When he asked his mother why she wasn’t afraid, knowing she’d die, she told him that she “believes in God, and if she looks at the whole trajectory of her life, life has been very good, why start mistrusting it?” “I think the fuller your life is, the less death is a threat to you,” says Father Rick. “Empty people are scared to death to die.”
You would think there is no safer place than your home where ensconced on your couch you watch TV. Not always.
British couple killed watching TV after Spanish villa's roof collapses on them after 60 days of rain
A British couple were crushed to death when the roof of a farmhouse collapsed on them following a mudslide.
Expats Christopher Martin, 63, and his wife Christine, 64, were visiting friends at the remote country home in southern Spain.
They were buried under 6ft of rubble while sitting on a sofa watching television at the whitewashed farmhouse in the Andalusian village of Rubite.
Is that a good death, no way to go or a fitting death? I say no way to go.
A BEEKEEPER had a shock when he woke up in a COFFIN after he was knocked out by a sting.
Dimwit medics pronounced 76-year-old Jozef Guzy DEAD when he fell unconscious after he was stung by a bee in southern Poland.
And un-bee-lievably Jozef was packed into a coffin and driven to his local undertakers.
is wife Ludmila said: "I could not believe it when they said he was dead and the doctor put a white sheet over him and three hours later local undertakers pulled up and put him in a coffin and closed the lid."
Lucklily the mistake was noticed when a panicked Jozef woke up and started shouting.
Undertaker Darius Charon said: "He was shouting and banging on the coffin - he made enough noise to raise the dead so we couldn't miss him."
He said: "He had a lucky escape - there is not a lot of air in those coffins. And he did need medical attention."
Polish Ambulance Service spokesman Jerzy Wisniewski said the emergency doctor involved had apologised.
He added that the medic had not taken the cold weather into account, saying: "The patient was not apparently breathing and the body had cooled - the usual characteristics of death."
Mr Guzy said: "The undertaker saved my life. The first thing I did when I got out of hospital was take him a pot of honey."
In Born Toward Dying Richard John Neuhaus writes about his first experience of dying. Worth reading and rereading
A measure of reticence and silence is in order. There is a time simply to be present to death—whether one's own or that of others—without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it. The Preacher had it right: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance." The time of mourning should be given its due. One may be permitted to wonder about the wisdom of contemporary funeral rites that hurry to the dancing, displacing sorrow with the determined affirmation of resurrection hope, supplying a ready answer to a question that has not been given time to understand itself. One may even long for the Dies Irae, the sequence at the old Requiem Mass. Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla: "Day of wrath and terror looming / Heaven and earth to ash consuming / Seer's and Psalmist's true foredooming."
The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it. Traditions of wisdom encourage us to stay with death a while. Among observant Jews, for instance, those closest to the deceased observe shiva for seven days following the death. During shiva one does not work, bathe, put on shoes, engage in intercourse, read Torah, or have his hair cut. The mourners are to behave as though they themselves had died. The first response to death is to give inconsolable grief its due. Such grief is assimilated during the seven days of shiva, and then tempered by a month of more moderate mourning. After a year all mourning is set aside, except for the praying of kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on the anniversary of the death.
In The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries calls us to "the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners' bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship—all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity." From the pity we may hope that wisdom has been distilled, a wisdom from which we can benefit when we take our place on the mourners' bench.
A woman who was completely prepared to die, finds the unexpected in Guide to a good life.
Every summer but for three since 1953, Lella has returned to the three-storey towering white clapboard house by a brook in Judique, a rural community hugging the western coast of the island. She was born in the house with windows of wavy glass, walls of Douglas fir and a wood stove burning in June out of necessity. For three months of the year, they would open the kitchen door and serve their friends tea in the afternoon and something stronger in the evening and host ice cream picnics.
Michael, along with daughter Melissa, made the 13-hour drive for his parents. Lella's husband, Bob Dubuque, a retired Walpole police officer, had a serious stroke 10 years ago.
They arrived in July. Lella's brother had opened the house. A cousin had scattered vases of wildflowers, Lella's favourite, about the rooms. Her twin brothers flew in from Windsor, Ont. Her son, Mark, came from Kentucky.
Over the course of a week, more than 100 people came to see her in what has been described as a living wake. They exchanged old stories and brought her rosary beads, prayer cards, holy oil, even blessed salt. Lella assured anyone who asked about her illness that she was "looking forward to the journey" and to being with her relatives in Heaven.
Dying to look good: French king's mistress killed by drinking gold elixir of youth
Miracle beauty products may be a staple on women's dressing tables today, but they're not a recent invention.
The mistress of the 16th-century French king, Henry II, drank gold in an effort to preserve her youth, according to a study published in the British medical journal.
Unfortunately the remedy eventually killed her.
When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers last year, they found high levels of gold in her hair.
Since she was not a queen and did not wear a crown, scientists said it was hard to see how jewellery could have contaminated her hair and body.
Experts now say she probably consumed drinkable gold, believed at the time to preserve youth and treat a host of other ailments.
The French court believed gold harnessed the power of the Sun, which would be transferred to the drinker. Alchemists often acted as apothecaries and prescribed solutions made up of gold chloride and diethyl ether. These were popular at the French Court.
I don't know why the British papers are so much better about gruesome death, but they are.
On vacation in Spain, two sisters went missing and couldn't be found anywhere around their resort in Benidorm.
They should have looked under the bed.
Elderly holiday sisters killed after being entombed under collapsed bed for FOUR days
Back at home, a fifty-five-year grandfather going home from a Christmas party had a heart attack. He was found
frozen to death, trapped under the ice of the city center fountain after falling in.
And one poor innocent teaching assistant was stabbed to death by a chef 'because he was in a bad mood'.
They don't let up on the National Health Service either.
80-year old man dying of PSP (progressive supranuclear palsy) is denied care at home as health chiefs say he's not ill enough to qualify. They'll leave it to his frail 77-year-old wife is frail on crutches to provide complete care.
A quite remarkable article by a very wise woman.
Dying the last great act of living by Margaret Somerville
Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, a world-wide organization that provides a refuge and life-long home for intellectually disabled people. In their latest exchange of letters Brown asked Vanier, "Are you fearful of death?" Vanier replied, "No, I cannot say I am".
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Traditionally, as Jean Vanier's writings show is still true for him, we have dealt with the mystery of death, through religion or spirituality. But, now, many of us are not religious.
Mystery always involves uncertainty, which makes us feel we don't have control and, in the case of death, that causes intense fear and free floating anxiety. One way to deal with that fear is to try to take control by converting the mystery of death to the problem of death and seeking a technological solution. Euthanasia can be seen as such a response: death is viewed as a problem, not a mystery, and the proposed solution to that problem is a lethal injection.
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We must accept old or dying people's gifts, especially those gifts that are of the essence of themselves, recognizing that they and the person who gives them are unique and precious, as are their lives or last days on earth. In confirming the worth of these gifts we confirm the worth of the giver, and the old or dying person needs that confirmation. But often we refuse and for same reason that we reject disabled persons' gifts. We are frightened: This person is not me and could not be me -- that is, dis-identification is the way we deal with our fear. It seems that all of us have a deep fear of dying alone. Might that be, in part, because, then, there is no one to receive our gifts and affirm the worth of our contribution to life?
And might we be able to deal with old age and death with greater equanimity, if we can experience a sense of gratitude for life and might the gifts we can leave help us to feel that? Another way to experience such gratitude is captured by one of my close friends, who talks about "saving up beautiful memories for when you are dying". I think that's a "gratitude in practice" response.
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The challenge is to maintain death as the last great act of human life, a final human act through which we can still find meaning and, I suggest most importantly, pass meaning on to others.
In other words, in our dying, we need to be given the opportunity to leave a legacy of meaning. We are meaning seeking beings -- that seeking is of the essence of our humanness. Euthanasia is a predictable response to a loss of meaning in relation to death and its practice would augment that loss. Even if we believe that doesn't matter, we should be concerned, because our capacity to find meaning in life may well depend on our being able to find meaning in death.
Some years ago, when a beloved mentor of mine was terminally ill, I asked him what it was like to prepare for death. He told me it was lonely.
I was surprised by his response because he was always surrounded by family, friends and former students. When I asked him about his loneliness, he told me that the dying process is so unique that few could understand it. He said that his only source of consolation was his faith in Jesus Christ.
Five aspects of Christian death and dying by Father Jeffrey Kirby, the first column in a series on dying he wrote for The Catholic Miscellany in South Carolina. He is now in Rome studying moral theology.
If we place our trust in the Lord Jesus, then we see that death has lost its sting and starkness. We unmask the lies surrounding death, and hope destroys fear. In Christ, we are able to see the full reality of human existence, during and after this life.
By our identity in Christ, we see that life is a journey, and death is a process. And while death and dying may be difficult, the Lord Jesus can remove our anxieties. Death does not need to be an ultimate end or final good-bye.
If we allow him, the Lord will claim us as his own, and by the power of his resurrection, death becomes a transition that only initiates a new phase of life that leads us from glory unto glory.
The dying process: In life and death, we are the Lord's
Obviously, the dying process is our most extreme time of transition. We move from one well-known stage of life to a veiled, mysterious one. It is a time of understandable difficulty, of questions to our faith, sometimes of great pain, and a suffering of the heart as earthly farewells have to be given.
In the midst of this internal wrestling, we are reminded of our identity in Jesus Christ.
St. Paul teaches us that in life and in death, we are the Lord’s.
In the dying process, our Christian discipleship receives an abundance of grace, and Mary draws close, as we have prayed throughout our lives: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
Our discipleship, with all its triumphs and failures throughout our lives, does not end in the dying process, but is empowered and intensified.
A fascinating glimpse into the mind and work of a German expert in near-death research, Bernard Jakoby
What happens when a person dies?
One of Jakoby's goals is to disseminate the already-existing knowledge of the dying process, death, and the continued existence of consciousness.
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According to Jakoby, the problem in our present-day society is our unwillingness to be open to these things. Once man accepts the observable processes and pays attention to the many existing reports, then consequently, he would also acknowledge the existence of life after death, the existence of a loving deity, and his responsibility for everything, including himself.
That’s exactly what the dying process actually reflects—we will be confronted with all of the unresolved issues in our lives, and that is something people would rather not hear,” Jakoby said.
“At the moment of death, people are like an open book. The time to waffle has passed, as has the time to blame others for our shortcomings. We are completely left to ourselves, and that is also the reason why some people die easily, and others with difficulty. The more unresolved issues pile up, the harder the process of dying. Presently, one of the biggest taboos is for people in their eighties to deal with unresolved issues from World War II that surface at the time of their deaths,” he continued.
On unresolved issues and forgiveness
Jakoby considers it a grave issue that despite the existing, well-documented knowledge about the death process, so many people don't translate it into their daily lives. For example, he believes that the preparation for death should not begin when a husband is already hospitalized, but much sooner. However, most of his seminar attendees come only after having witnessed death, or once they are overwhelmed by an event and can no longer deal with it.
In particular, Jakoby finds the huge number of reported after-death contacts between the departed and the living family members as an alarming sign of our times, as most of these contacts have to do with unresolved issues.
“As long as we harbor ill thoughts toward a deceased, or have negative thoughts about anyone, we are not free. That’s why forgiveness is so important, and that’s why so many dying people long for reconciliation during their last days."
A cannibal who killed and ate parts of his mother had his sentence reduced by a judge who said 'he needed to eat'.
Sergey Gavrilov secured reduced time in jail after confessing: 'I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was so hungry, I had to eat it.'
The 27-year-old was given a lenient prison sentence because the judge said he was starving and needed to eat after spending all his money on vodka and gambling machines.
There are no words.
In the worst act of terror since 9/11, a "radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!")" killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others at Ft Hood, Texas. I agree with Ralph Peters who says
This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it's an act of terror. Period.
When the terrorist posts anti-American hate speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit -- well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist.
I've read a great deal about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, but little, as yet, about his victims. I've cobbled together what I've been able to learn this morning on the Web about the people killed, the lives disrupted, the families shattered.
With deep condolences to all the families and friends of those killed and wounded.
Russell Seager
Capt. Russell Seager, 51, of Racine, Wisconsin, joined the army a few years ago because he was a psychiatrist who wanted to help soldiers returning from war adapt to civilian life again.
His uncle said, “He just wanted to help the soldiers because they helped us,...“And then he got shot by a psychiatrist.”
Amy Krueger
Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Kiel Wisconsin joined the Army shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, vowing to take on Osama bin Laden. She was part of Captain Seager’s unit, which was headed to Afghanistan.
Her high school principal said "I know she was proud to serve and proud to share her experience. She took pride that she was able to serve her country."
John Gaffney
Capt. John Gaffaney, 56, of the Serra Mesa area of San Diego, who had worked with mentally disabled adults in San Diego, was a psychiatric nurse who arrived at Ft. Hood the day before the shooting to prepare for a deployment to Iraq. His close friend d and co-worker Stephanie Powell said, "He wanted to help the boys in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the trauma of what they were seeing, He was an honorable man. He just wanted to serve in any way he can." He leaves a wife and son.
Michael Pearson
Pfc. Michael Pearson, 21, of Bolingbrook, Ill., joined the Army a year ago, was training to deactivate bombs and was known for his nimble fingers on his Fender Stratocaster guitar. His mother said "He was the best son in the whole world,
Jason Hunt
Specialist Jason D. Hunt, 22, joined the military three years ago because, he told his grandmother, in Frederick, Okla., “it was time to grow up.” And when his two-year commitment was finished, he re-enlisted, right in the middle of the Iraq desert on his 21st birthday. He got married just two months ago.
Francheska Velez
Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago, was just return ing home from Iraq where she disarmed bombs. She was three months pregnant and scheduled to begin maternity leave in December. Ms. Velez had joined the Army three years ago to fulfill her father’s dream of serving the country and enlisted for another three.
“She knew I always wanted to be in the Army,” Mr. Velez, a Columbian citizen, said in Spanish. He learned Thursday of her death. “I didn’t expect it to happen here and not in Iraq. The worst thing was it wasn’t a terrorist. It was an American soldier.”
Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, who grew up in Pittsburgh, also joined the military like her father and grandfather, her sister, Margaret Yaggie, said in a telephone interview. Lt. Col. Warman was a physician’s assistant who was also a member of one of the Army medical reserve units. She leaves behind a husband, two daughters and six grandchildren.
Kham Xiong
Kham Xiong, 23, of St. Paul, Minnesota, was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and was standing in line for a physical at the center and was responding to a text message from his wife, urging him to come home for lunch when he was killed. Hs sister Mee Xiong said the family would have been able to understand if Kham would have died in battle. But the death on U.S. soil just didn't make sense. "He didn't get to go overseas and do what he's supposed to do, and he's dead ... killed by our own people," Mee Xiong said.
He leaves his wife and three children, ages 4, 2, and 10 months.
Michael Grant Cahill
Michael Grant Cahill , 62 from Cameron, Texas, suffered a heart attack two weeks ago and returned to work at the base as a civilian employee after taking just one week off for recovery, said his daughter Keely Vanacker.
"He survived that. He was getting back on track, and he gets killed by a gunman," Vanacker said, her words bare with shock and disbelief.
Cahill, a physician's assistant helped treat soldiers returning from tours of duty or preparing for deployment. He had been married for 37 years to his wife Joleen
Aaron Thomas Nemelka
Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, of the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah, chose to join the Army instead of going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his uncle Christopher Nemelka said.
"As a person, Aaron was as soft and kind and as gentle as they come, a sweetheart," his uncle said. "What I loved about the kid was his independence of thought."
Aaron Nemelka, the youngest of four children, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan in January,
Noor Almaleki is the 20-year-old woman in Arizona who was run over by her father in a Jeep because she had become 'too Westernized'.
Aasiya Hassan of Buffalo was decapitated by her husband who did the deed in his TV studios he set up to promote Muslims as peace-loving people. His motivation? money concerns or upset about the order of protection had taken out against him a week earlier by his wife who was seeking a divorce after bouts of domestic violence.
An aunt and her three nieces were found dead in a submerged car at the bottom of Rideau Canal north of Kingston, Ontario. The parents of the three young girls tearfully explained it was a driving lesson gone wrong. Now they and their son have been charged have been charged with first degree murder . The aunt wanted a divorce and one of the girls was seeing a Pakastani boyfriend, both against the wishes of the father, the patriarch.
Mark Steyn
Noor Almaleki, whom I wrote about over the weekend, has died, the latest Western victim of a Muslim honor killing. If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the "climate of hate" in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn't give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it's merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.
The sad story becomes clearer. For some seeking rebirth, sweat lodge was end.
Midway through a two-hour sweat lodge ceremony intended to be a rebirthing experience, participants say, some people began to fall desperately ill from the heat, even as their leader, James Arthur Ray, a nationally known New Age guru, urged them to press on.
“There were people throwing up everywhere,” said Dr. Beverley Bunn, 43, an orthodontist from Texas, who said she struggled to remain conscious in the sweat lodge, a makeshift structure covered with blankets and plastic and heated with fiery rocks.
Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray told the more than 50 people jammed into the small structure — people who had just completed a 36-hour “vision quest” in which they fasted alone in the desert — that vomiting “was good for you, that you are purging what your body doesn’t want, what it doesn’t need.” But by the end of the ordeal on Oct. 8, emergency crews had taken 21 people to hospitals.
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About 90 minutes into the ceremony, Dr. Bunn said, someone yelled in the darkness that a woman had passed out just after Mr. Ray closed the tent door between rounds. Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray replied, “We will deal with that after the next round.”
By the end of the ceremony, two people, James Shore, 40, who Dr. Bunn said had dragged an ill woman out of the lodge and then returned, and Kirby Brown, 38, were near death; they died that evening. A third participant, Liz Neuman, 49, fell into a coma and died on Oct. 17.
Two victims, Kirby Brown, 38, and Liz Neumann, 49
Given the accounts of the survivors who said that Ray was intimidating and discouraged people from leaving, I hope that criminal charges are brought against him, if not manslaughter, at least criminally negligent homicide.
I suppose it is to be expected that many will continue to support Ray, but this is shocking.
On a conference call Mr. Ray held last week for sweat lodge participants, Dr. Bunn was shocked to hear one recount the comments of a self-described “channeler” who visited Angel Valley after the retreat. Claiming to have communicated with the dead, the channeler said they had left their bodies in the sweat lodge and chosen not to come back because “they were having so much fun.”
More from the Daily Mail - Sweat lodge survivor tells how guru 'caused three deaths'
People were vomiting in the stifling heat, gasping for air, and lying lifeless on the sand and gravel floor beneath them, according to participant Beverley Bunn.
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By the time people started collapsing, Bunn had already crawled to a spot near the opening of the sweat lodge, praying for the door to stay open as long as possible between rounds so that she could breathe in fresh air.
At one point, someone lifted up the back of the tent, allowing light into the otherwise pitch-black tent. Ray demanded to know where the light was coming from and who committed the 'sacrilegious act,' she explained.
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As it neared the end, Bunn said some participants found themselves physically and mentally unable to tend to those around them.
After the eighth round, Ray instructed them to exit the sweat lodge just has they had entered - going clockwise, a movement meant to symbolize being inside a mother's womb.
What followed was a triage situation with people laid out on tarps and water being thrown on them to bring down body temperatures.
Some people weren't breathing and had bloodshot eyes. One woman unknowingly walked toward the fire before someone grabbed her, Bunn said.
Shouts of 'we need water, we need water,' rang out. 'They couldn't fill up the buckets fast enough,' Bunn said.
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Ray was standing about 10 feet away, watching, Bunn said.
'He didn't do anything, he didn't participate in helping. He did nothing. He just stood there.'
The New York Times has a slide show about Monica Miller, a photographer who captures the humanity of aborted fetuses.
Behind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains
James Pouillon, the anti-abortion protestor was carrying a sign displaying one of Miller's photographs when he was shot dead outside a high school.
In the NYT companion piece, Abortion Foes Tell of Their Journey to the Streets.
But as the personal stories of Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Brewer and Ms. Anderson suggest, the motivations of many protesters are more complicated. They see themselves as righteous curbside critics, prophets warning the world with what they describe as the horrific truth no one wants to see. They have endured insults, threats and even estrangement from their families because they have found what nearly every activist craves: conviction, camaraderie and conflict.
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Ms. Anderson smiled. “I can’t tell you how many babies have been saved because of abortion protesters outside the abortion mills,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
Brain Waves Surge Moments Before Death
Doctors at George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates recorded brain activity of people dying from critical illnesses, such as cancer or heart attacks.
Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.
Writing in the October issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the doctors theorize that the brain surges may be tied to widely reported near-death experiences which typically involve spiritual or religious attributes.
Clearly, the physical evidence of something momentous.
A year ago, several hours after he'd gone to bed, their apparently healthy teenage son George was dead - killed by an undiagnosed tumour that had taken only a few weeks to grow.
It had been a great day and George was in high spirits. A gifted sportsman, he'd spent the afternoon playing football and later enjoyed a meal at the family home in Romsey, Hants, with his parents and younger brother Harry, then 14.At 10.30 pm, George gave his mother, Jane, a goodnight kiss and headed for bed.
Three hours later, she was woken by George calling out that he couldn't breathe. They were his last words. As she rushed in to his room, George was sitting up in bed, clearly disorientated, his lips and face a sinister purply blue. Jane, now 51, ran to call an ambulance and was back in his room with the phone within seconds, only to see George collapse backwards and fall out of bed. As she went to him, she could see that he had stopped breathing.
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George, a chorister at Romsey Abbey since the age of seven, had a deep religious faith. A chaplain prayed over George as the machines were switched off. 'Then, as she anointed him, the most extraordinary thing happened,' says Joe.
'The machine stopped bleeping and as he died a visible wave of peace came over George. His body relaxed, his head returned to its normal size and George was George again. The doctors were at a loss as to how that had happened to someone who had undergone such trauma.'
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George's funeral, at the beautiful abbey where he had spent many years singing, was attended by nearly 600 people.
At the Manchester Royal Infirmary in England, a Woman bleeds to death after doctor accidentally punctures jugular while inserting a drip - and no blood is available for transfusion.
Just off the Greek holiday town of Koroni, a British millionaire was found dead next to his luxury yacht after going for a lunchtime swim.
NM man falls to his death while re-enacting a move from the "Ultimate Fighting Championship."
While in Illinois, a woman died on the surgery table after being severely burned in a flash fire. Apparently this is a rare but continuing problem in operating rooms. About 550-600 flash fires during surgery occur each year but only one or two die,
Surgical flash fires are most often sparked by electric surgical tools when oxygen builds up under surgical drapes.
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But worries have mounted in recent years with increased use of electrosurgical devices and the replacement of cloth hospital drapes with those made of more-flammable, disposable synthetic fabric.
The quote in the title is from the Greek playwright Euripides
While I am glad that more attention is being paid to end-of-life discussions and care, I don't think I would title an article in a national magazine The Case of Killing Granny.
Peter Kreeft , The Ecliipse of the Permanent Things
Death was God's severe mercy, the tourniquet around the wound of sin, to limit sin to 80 years or so. Remove the tourniquet, and history would bleed to death. Imagine the Roman Empire forever. Imagine the Third Reich forever. Imagine America forever. Lewis speaks of our "nightmare civilizations" whirling around themselves in never-ending gyrations of selfishness and despair (in Miracles), and (elsewhere, in Mere Christianity) of eggs that never hatched (by death) and so went rotten. "You can't just be a good egg forever; you must hatch or go bad." Death lets us hatch; artificial immortality would make us go bad forever. Hell incarnate would reign on earth. That would have to be the end of the world. And most geneticists estimate we will have it in 2-300 years (according to Osborn Seagerberg in The Immortality Factor).
Man killed in church after stone altar falls on him.
Gunther Link, a devout Catholic, prayed to be saved after he was trapped in a lift – but was killed when he went to church to give thanks and the stone altar fell on him.
Link, 45, died instantly as he was crushed under the ancient 860lb monument in the Weinhaus Church in Vienna, Austria.
Roman Hahslinger, a police spokesman, said: "He was a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release.
"A short while later he was pulled out of the elevator and he went straight to the church to thank God.
"He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly.
It makes you think when your time has come, it's come, although I am glad he died instantly and in a good place, far better than an elevator .
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
Months to Live - At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Caring
Most doctors do not excel at delivering bad news, decades of studies show, if only because it goes against their training to save lives, not end them. But Dr. O’Mahony, who works at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, belongs to a class of doctors, known as palliative care specialists, who have made death their life’s work. They study how to deliver bad news, and they do it again and again. They know secrets like who, as a rule, takes it better. They know who is more likely to suffer silently, and when is the best time to suggest a do-not-resuscitate order.
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They are tour guides on the road to death, the equivalent of the ferryman in Greek myth who accompanied people across the river Styx to the underworld. They argue that a frank acknowledgment of the inevitability of death allows patients to concentrate on improving the quality of their lives, rather than lengthening them, to put their affairs in order and to say goodbye before it is too late.
From the U.K. leading doctors alarmed that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely.
Sentenced to death on the NHS.
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.
But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.
As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care,
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“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."
The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.
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The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.
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It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.
Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.
They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.
However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.
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He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.
He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.
“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.
Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.
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“Guidelines like the LCP can be very helpful but healthcare professionals always need to keep in mind the individual needs of patients.
“There is no one size fits all approach.”
The stories told by some of the commenters - like dragon are truly horrifying. Another commenter, Andrew Straughan wrote this:
'Whilst sitting through the night in Scarborough by my dying sister's hospital bed six years ago I witnessed a dying, desparately fragile old lady lying prone in a cot, begging for water repeatedly in a faint anguished little cry. This continued for hours. The night staff were a few yards from her bed reading newspapers, playing cards or chatting about trivia. Not one went to this poor soul's bed to touch her hand or speak a word of comfort to her. My sister slept throughout the night as I sat there listening. The memory of such inhuman indifference is etched on one's mind. "
Jack Fowler remembers Karen Laub-Novak, wife of Michael Novak who died earlier today
And then, a few weeks before the cruise, a memo circulated among friends: Karen’s cancer had spread widely. “Incurable” short of a miracle. I e-mailed Karen’s daughter Jana Miller: Did this mean they weren’t coming? No, just the opposite — the trip was of great importance, as it would allow the family to spend time together. So on July 8, the guests that boarded the Noordam included Karen Novak. Pushed along in a wheelchair, with a broad smile that never vanished, welcoming all into her aura of happiness, Karen was enjoying every second of her life, and enjoying everyone who was about, whether family member or friend or new acquaintance.
She had one major cruiserly objective: visiting Ephesus. It is the site of the house of Mary, but of greater importance to Karen was its 6th-century Basilica of St. John, the evangelist who was a particular inspiration to her as an artist. We did not arrive there until the end of the day — a very long day, some of it spent crossing terrain that did not seem intended for anyone less than a mountain climber. But here we were, finally, and it was — beautiful. Simply beautiful, as if arranged by the Higher-Ups. And in the midst of it, having communed, sat a woman weathered by her disease but absolutely satisfied, surrounded by her loving husband, children, grandchildren, and in-laws, all of whom were immersed in her overwhelming happiness.
R.I.P.
Grieving father finds 'dead' baby son ALIVE in coffin
A premature baby declared dead by doctors was found to be alive hours later when he was taken home for a funeral wake.
The baby's father, Jose Alvarenga, was told by doctors that his son had died shortly after birth.
Staff from the state-run hospital in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, delivered the infant's body to Mr Alvarenga's home fours hours later.
Shortly afterwards, the grieving father opened the baby's coffin to bid an emotional farewell to his son.
"I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing," Mr Alvarenga said. "I began to cry."
He rushed back to the hospital with his unnamed baby in his arms and nurses placed the infant in an oxygen chamber.
He is now reported to be in a stable condition.
"This is a very unusual case," said Ernesto Weber, head of paediatric intensive care at the hospital.
No kidding.
In Brazil, the pursuit of ratings goes too far.
A TV crime show host faces jail after allegedly ordering MURDERS in a bid to boost ratings
Wallace Souza is accused of arranging crimes and then broadcasting exclusive footage of the scenes.
His show built up a huge audience by showing dramatic film of police raids and arrests, with presenters often shown following police chases in a helicopter.
But police chief Thomas Augusto Correa said: "Investigations indicate they created scenes themselves. They determined which crimes would be committed in order to generate news for the programme."
Ex-cop Moacir Jorge da Costa claimed he had carried out at least one hit on behalf of the presenter.
Your body wasn't built to last: a lesson in human mortality rates
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years
From TehranBureau
Photos and brief bios of some of the people who died in the post-fraudulent election showdown in Iran
This is the grave of Neda Agha Soltan shot on the street by a sniper, when all she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted.
Her death, captured on camera and shown around the world, showed the true face of the current regime and inspired some Iranian artists and poets.
A fugitive couple who stole a yacht apparently starved to death after it was damaged in a storm.
The story of their slow, agonising death was detailed in a vivid diary found on board.
Sharon Arthurs-Chegini, 46, wrote: 'The lights are going out in my heart.
We have not eaten for four weeks. I dream of my mum's steak and kidney pie, roast dinner and sausage and mash.'
An inquest in Truro, Cornwall, was told that the former interior designer and her lover Peter Clarke, 49, had enjoyed a 'champagne and cocaine' lifestyle beyond their means.
They stole the yacht, the Skipper VII, while they were on the run in Portugal after skipping bail for a previous boat theft from Mylor harbour in Cornwall.
Months later, the Skipper was found adrift off the coast of Senegal, West Africa, with their bodies on board.
A model of a woman that we all should know about
Camouflage Angel’ Spends Last Moments With U.S. Combat Casualties
The emergency-room trauma call and the medical staff's immediate action upon his arrival is only a memory to her now; sitting quietly at the bedside of her brother-in-arms, she carefully takes his hand, thanking him for his service and promising she will not leave his side.
He is a critically injured combat casualty, and she is Army Sgt. Jennifer Watson of the Casualty Liaison Team here.
Although a somber scene, it is not an uncommon one for the Peru, Ind., native, who in addition to her primary duties throughout the last 14 months, has taken it upon herself to ensure no U.S. casualty passes away alone. Holding each of their hands, she sits with them until the end, no matter the day or the hour.
"It's unfortunate that their families can't be here," said Watson, who is deployed here from Fort Campbell, Ky. "So I took it upon myself to step up and be that family while they are here. No one asked me to do it; I just did what I felt was right in my heart. I want them to know they are heroes.
"I feel just because they are passing away does not mean they cannot hear and feel someone around them," she continued. "I talk to them, thanking them for what they have done, telling them they are a hero, they will never be forgotten, and I explain my job to them to help them be at ease knowing the family will be told the truth."
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"Angel" and "hero" are only two of the many titles Watson has been given since arriving at JBB; although she is appreciative of the kind words, she remains humble.
"I am far from an angel," said the sergeant with a smile. "I just do what is in my heart. I guess for me, I think about the family and the closure of knowing the Soldier did not pass away alone. To say I'm a hero ... no. The heroes are my guys who come in [through Hero's Highway]."
Reflecting on her time here, Watson said she is extremely thankful for the opportunity she has had to work side-by-side with the Air Force.
"The staff of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group has done an amazing job since I have been here," she said. "They are incredible. They have done procedures and saved the lives of the most critically injured Soldiers, and have been some of the most professional people I have ever worked with.
Horrific murder of parents of 12 children (10 adopted) captured on film.
Byrd and Melanie Billings had a growing brood of adopted children with autism, Down syndrome, and other disabilities, and took care to make their nine-bedroom house a safe place for them, wiring it with surveillance cameras in every room.
It was those cameras that captured images of the masked men who shot the wealthy couple to death in a break-in executed with chilling precision.
Authorities made three arrests over the weekend, but the mystery around town only deepened yesterday, when Sheriff David Morgan said that as many as eight people in all may have been involved and that the crime appeared to have “numerous motives,’’ though robbery was the only one he would mention.
“Mr. Billings was well-to-do. He was an entrepreneur and he opened his home to the community. You are asking me to speculate on a motive. That could have been one reason,’’ Morgan said, likening the killings to the 1959 slayings of a Kansas farm family that were chronicled by Truman Capote in the book “In Cold Blood.’’
The video from Thursday showed three armed, masked men arriving in a red van, entering through the front of the house, and then returning to the vehicle. Others dressed in what the sheriff called “ninja garb’’ went in through an unlocked utility door in the back. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
Police were last night investigating the death of a man who fell into a vat of melted chocolate.
Factory worker Vincent Smith II toppled into the mix as he was filling the eight-foot deep tank with hot chocolate.
Detectives said the 29-year-old was dumping giant chunks of chocolate over the side when he was hit by a mixing blade, causing a fatal blow.
Three co-workers at Cocoa Services in Camden, New Jersey, rushed to turn off the machine. But by the time they could get to the unconscious man it was too late.
He had been in the chocolate – which was at a temperature of about 120 degrees – for about ten minutes by the time emergency crews managed to pull him out.
My condolences to the family who must hard to deal with the jokes about the manner of his death that was really horrible
With Faith and Friends, Convent Offers Model for End of Life
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”
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“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
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Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.
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Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”
Several priests have moved into this Mother House like Father Shannon.
He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.
“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”
Relatives of Soldier Killed in Afghanistan Decry Lack of Coverage Amid Jackson Spectacle
The aunt of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan on the same day Jackson died asked why her nephew's death went virtually unnoticed while the King of Pop got memorial shrines across the country.
"Mr. Jackson received days of wall-to-wall coverage in the media," Martha Gillis wrote to the Washington Post. "Where was the coverage of my nephew or the other soldiers who died that week?"
Gillis' nephew, Lt. Brian Bradshaw, 24, died in Kheyl, Afganistan, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
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He was one of at least 13 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan since Jackson's death on June 25.
Bradshaw's mother, Mary, said she agreed with Gillis, saying the nonstop coverage of Jackson's death has become "totally ridiculous" and laughable.
"I can watch the news many nights and there's no mention of what's going on in Afghanistan or Iraq and there's boys dying over there,
"He had old-fashioned values and believed that military service was patriotic and that actions counted more than talk," Gillis wrote. "He wasn't much for talking, although he could communicate volumes with a raised eyebrow."
This photo and his eyes are heart-breaking. This death stopped me cold. His aunt is exactly right.
I don't understand the lack of coverage of so many like Lt Bradshaw and others who die in the service of our country. It is a wonder so many still volunteer and want to risk their lives and, if need be, sacrifice them for love of country and of us Americans. These are the men whose brave actions go unheralded and whose deaths are unmourned save for those who knew him.
May you rest in peace, Lt Brian Bradshaw. Condolences to his family
Continuing on my Michael Jackson-free theme, here's some oddities you may have missed.
Two Mexican Midget Wrestlers Killed by Fake Prostitutes
Mexican authorities say two professional wrestlers found dead in a low-rent hotel in the capital may have been drugged to death by female robbers.
Autopsies are being performed on the two midget wrestlers, one of whom went by the name "La Parkita" — or "Little Death" — and wore a skeleton costume in the ring. The other was known as "Espectrito Jr."
Authorities say two women were seen leaving the men's hotel room before the bodies were discovered.
Prosecutor Miguel Angel Mancera said Wednesday that gangs of female robbers are experienced at using drugs to knock men out and rob them, but they may have used too strong a dose.
That may have been because of the wrestlers' small stature, although larger men have also died in similar crimes.
via Gateway Pundit
Woman lay dead in her flat for 5 years before anyone noticed.
It is thought nobody noticed Miss Purves was missing as her pension was paid directly into a bank account and bills were paid by direct debit.
Funeral descends into violence as family members brawl with snooker cues in row over dead man's property
Only hours earlier they had stood alongside one other at the local church to pay their respects.
But no sooner had Harry Gaughan, 69, been cremated than his relatives began fighting over who owned what.
It ended in a brawl involving a snooker cue as one family member attempted to measure the size of the back garden.
German cemetery nixes sexualized tombstone for sex worker/advocate's grave.
The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...
The coverage of and reaction to Michael Jackson's death has been so over the top, I feel no need and have no desire to add to it. Clearly a very troubled man and a tortured soul, he had a tragic life. May he rest in peace. I'm going to keep mine and leave the whole celebrity and media circus alone
I wonder along with David Warren
I found myself close-up with a lady of early middle-age, who was distraught at Jackson’s passing. I thought at first she was dressed as a clown (as were many who turned out at the UCLA Medical Center), but no, she was costumed as a bicycle courier. Her grief appeared genuine: I was glad not to have made the flip remark then in my mind. The sufferings of other people are real, and the fact we ourselves put little value on what they have lost does not change their suffering.
Notwithstanding, how can anyone — a grown woman in this case — possibly have allowed herself to become so emotionally engaged with a screen image, as the crowds do now, as the crowds did for Diana?
The answer can only be that the image has power. Among people deprived of the sheet-anchor of religious faith, such images have an extraordinary power. And at the root, that power is self-destructive.
The Anchoress sets you straight on why Jackson was an IDOL, not an ICON. An icon is a religious artifact; an idol can be anything. Don't be dumb and confuse the two
What chutzpah
Iran charges slain man's family $3,000 for bullets that killed him
The family of an Iranian man killed in a demonstration against the country's contested presidential election has been ordered to pay the equivalent of $3,000 for the bullets that took his life, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Kaveh Alipour, 19, was shot in the head in downtown Tehran on Saturday during one of the most violent clashes between protesters and security forces since the riots began last week.
Iranian authorities later told the family they would not turn over the slain man's body for burial until they received compensation for the bullets security forces used to shoot him.
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All mosques in Tehran have been prohibited from holding memorials or publicly mourning the deaths of the riot victims, it emerged on Monday. According to official count in Tehran, 17 people have been killed in more than a week of demonstrations.
Nevertheless, Iran's defeated moderate candidate Mehdi Karoubi has called on Iranians to hold mourning ceremonies on Thursday for killed protesters, an aide told Reuters on Tuesday.
Michael Leeden reprints an email from a medical student in Iran.
I am a medical student. There was chaos last night at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don’t even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they’ve asked everyone to stay and help—I’m sure it will even be worst tonight.
What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?
This issue is not about cheating(election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflicted on the people.
The musician Lenny Kravitz never got on well with his father, but when his father came down with leukemia, Lenny took care of him.
photo Jesse Frohman
Chris Heath from the London Telegraph interviews Lenny in Eleuthera in the Bahamas prior to his tour in Britain.
My mother taught me to respect my father and to love and take care of him, regardless of what he’d done. She’d always quote the Bible: it says, “Honour thy mother and thy father.” And it doesn’t say “unless…”, “except…”, or “if…”. That’s what it says and that’s what your job is to do. And I had a hard time with it, but I did it.’
Eventually, his father had to go to hospital. That’s where it happened.
'It sounds like…’ Kravitz begins, and then says, 'It’s going to sound like whatever it sounds like, but this is what it was. I mean, spiritually hospitals are very intense places. It’s like death’s doorstep. And he was in his bed one night and he looked at me, and he wasn’t on drugs, and he said to me, “There are these things flying around my bed, and these things crawling on the floor.” I said, “What are you talking about?” This is from my dad. He doesn’t do with any kind of spiritual thing. No heebie-jeebie kind of thing. And he’s, “There’s black-winged things and they’re flying around my bed… the things that are crawling on the ground, they look like they’re rats and they’re not… I see them.” I didn’t quite know how to take it. And he then began having this revelation and he accepted Christ – this is a non-religious Jewish man – and somehow the spirit world opened up to him. Almost like he had spiritually been bound his whole life and now this thing was released.’
After this spiritual experience, his father started answering some of the questions Kravitz would never get answers for. When Kravitz asked him before, “Why did you do what you did? Why did you do this to Mom?”, his father would stonewall. 'That’s just the way it is,’ he would say. But a couple of nights after the experience, sitting in hospital with Lenny and his two half-sisters, Sy started talking. 'He apologised to us in the most sincere, heartfelt manner. “I am sorry for what I’ve done, how I’ve been, how I’ve treated you, and I love you.” Real. And it was shocking… And what he said to me is that he always wanted to change his life, and he felt there was this thing on his back and he couldn’t get it off. His whole life, he knew inside himself that he wanted to change. But, he said, “I couldn’t.” ’
There would be one further unexpected moment: 'As he got closer to his death, another night in the hospital, he was really tired and he looked over at me and he goes, “There’s angels all around the room. Because of Jesus.” And that was it. He turned and looked away. If you knew my dad – it was the furthest thing from him.’
These were the last words Sy Kravitz would say of this kind. But for the son, something real happened in those hospital days that changed everything. 'The last three weeks of his life was the best relationship I had with him. And it cancelled out the 40 years before.’
An extraordinary story Oxford graduate dies after sister injects her with the family firm's 'anti-age' drug
An Oxford University graduate died after being injected with an experimental anti-ageing drug by her sister, a GP.
Yolanda Cox, 22, suffered a massive allergic reaction after being given three times the normal dose as part of a test of the unlicensed drug invented by their mother.
Mrs Cox had been married for just nine months when she agreed to be a guinea pig for the drug, which the family also believed to be effective against cancer and diabetes.
The Italian woman who arrived too late to board the doomed Air France Flight 447, managed to get a flight the next day from Rio. She and her husband were driving in Austria when it crashed into an oncoming truck and she was killed, her husband gravely injured.
Woman who missed Flight 447 is killed in car crash
It reminded me straightaway of Appointment in Samarra. Wikipedia provides the summary
The title is a reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an old story, which appears as an epigraph for the novel:
A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
Originally from Uganda, the eminent hematologist Dr. Salim Vergee was dropped off at the golf club by his two sons who then began an impromptu driving lesson that would change the rest of their lives.
Father dies after learner driver son crushes him with Mercedes at prestigious golf club.
The car lurched towards him as it pulled away, crushing Dr Verjee's leg. As golfers ran to his aid, Dr Verjee suffered a cardiac arrest but although paramedics were able to restart his heart using a defibrillator, the father-of-two died later in hospital.
It is understood the car was being driven by Dr Verjee's eldest son, Zoolfikar, 33, who was being taught at the wheel by his younger brother Ash, a 30-year-old musician and composer.
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'After he was dropped off, one of the sons, who was learning to drive, was being given a lesson by his sibling,’ he said.
'Unfortunately the car lurched into the elderly father and knocked him down.
'The boys were distraught after they saw what had happened. They went in a separate ambulance from their father.'
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During his medical career he has written a number of medical journals on haematology, and specialised in blood stem cell harvest work.
Yvonne Milward, practice manager at Kennington Health Centre, said her former colleague was a 'superb GP'. She added: 'He was loved by colleagues, patients and friends alike.
'He was a true gentleman in every way, with a unique sense of humour.'
My heart goes to the two sons who have not only lost their father, but must come to grips with such a tragedy, a mighty burden they will carry for the rest of their lives.
Melrose priest's terminal cancer brings new life to his calling
The Rev. James A. Field has spent years helping others cope with death and dying. He has anointed the sick, buried the dead, and comforted the bereaved.
But now he is confronting his own mortality, much earlier than he had expected. He is 58 years old and he has pancreatic cancer, an incurable and fast-moving disease that he knows he can't survive. And, in a step that has rallied the Parish of the Incarnation of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ around its pastor, Field is bringing the congregation along on his uncommonly public final journey, preaching and writing about each up and down. "This is what I got, and this is how I deal with it," he says. "I'm a teacher, and this is a teachable moment."
More from the priest who knows he is dying as well as a short video on the Boston Globe site at the link.
"This is a time when you have to figure out - do you believe this or not," he says. "You've been saying this your whole life. Is this really the truth or not? And, so far, it feels like the truth."
For the first time in his life, he has insomnia, and that, he says, gives him more time to think.
"When you're awake at 2 in the morning, your alternatives are to watch "Bridezillas," or the vacuum cleaner ads, or to pray," he says. "Sometimes I just go through my life and look at the blessings, the goodness. Honestly, before I was sick, I didn't have time to do that. You take a long lens and look at your life."
'You send your daughter away to study and she doesn't come back. We will never, ever get over it.'
A quite spectacular murder trial is underway in Italy. British student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her apartment in the Umbrian town of Perugia, her throat cut. She shared the apartment with an American girl from Seattle with an 'angel face', Amanda Knox, who is charged with the murder along with her former lover, Raffaele Solllecito. Another man, Rudy Guede, described as an "Ivory-coast drifter," was charged in the murder as well and is now serving a 30-year sentence.
Details of the murder can be found in a Wikipedia entry.
Kecher's family released a music video starring the murdered British student that's quite eerie. Haunting I would call it.
He said: 'It was made by a group of Meredith's friends sometime during 2007 - I think she knows the lead singer.
'The people on the video are friends of hers who were at Leeds University and it is unreal to see her in the video and to know that a few months later she was murdered.
'It was a very emotional experience for them to come and give evidence but they coped very well.
'They just wanted the court to know what a special and much loved person Meredith was not just to her family but all her friends as well.'
In the opening sequence, Meredith is seen walking down a flight of stairs and makes several other appearances including a haunting scene where she walks through a set of doors and looks straight at the camera.
In another shot, she again looks directly at the camera before glancing at the singer, as snow appears to be falling around.
When anyone dies under suspicious circumstances that look a lot like suicide, shocked family members and friends think back to see whether the deceased showed any signs of depression and whether they could have done anything.
In David Carradine's case where the actor was found deed in a luxury hotel room in Bangkok, the consensus seems to be absolutely not. Famous actors or anyone in public life do not enjoy the same privacy and lack of scrutiny that most of us have. So the question had to be asked What was in doing in a closet with a rope around his head and 'another part of his body'?
Now just what the circumstances of his death were are being speculated about all over the world, to his shame.
I remember his character as the half-Chinese, half American Shaolin monk who traveled through the American wild west, like a Chinese Gary Cooper, armed only with his skill in martial arts,in search of his lost half-brother. The 1970s television series Kung Fu may have been the first to introduce some Asian philosophy into the mainstream of American culture in the form of childhood flashbacks to the sayings and teachings of his old master. More recently his career enjoyed a resurgence with his role as Bill in Quentin Taratino's widely popular Kill Bill vol 1 and 2.
His obituaries, published around the world, will have to include some mention of the suspicious circumstances of his death. How far will they go?
I suspect we'll read more than we ever wanted to know about his five wives and his drinking and drugging.
London Telegraph David Carradine found dead in wardrobe in suspected sex game gone wrong
The London Times keeps its focus on his career and many achievements in David Carradine: The Times obituary
The New York Times skirts around the circumstances in its obituary
John Nolte at Big Hollywood is not interested in hearing the story or passing it on, instead prefers to appreciate his Carradine's skill as an actor especially his performance as Woodie Guthrie in the Harold Wexler's film, Bound for Glory.
Thanks to a real screen presence and a quiet, understated performance, Carradine carries the film all on his own thin, angular frame. He inhabits most every scene and quickly makes you forget all that “Grasshopper” stuff. His Woody Guthrie is mostly silent but always fascinating; conflicted by ambitions and a loathing for what it takes to fulfill them, he’s willing to risk death in order to rouse the working man to stand up for himself, but can’t summon the everyday decency to remain faithful to his own wife. And that’s Carradine singing the songs and playing the guitar, but not one note is impersonation, just pure performance.
It's a shame all around, the way he died, the attention that is paid to how he died, our knowledge of how he died, and the shame his widow and children must feel that can only compound their grief.
Professor Margaret Somerville continues her exploration of euthanasia and how it muffles our proper emotional response to a person's passing.
research shows that dying people who request euthanasia do so far more frequently because of fear of social isolation and of being a burden on others, than pain.
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But surely the answer to loneliness and grief is not to help the person commit suicide? As I once suggested to a Dutch physician who had carried out euthanasia on an old woman in similar circumstances . . . "Did you think of buying her a
cat?"
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Legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide causes death to lose its moral context and us to lose our proper emotional response to it, a loss which recent research shows detrimentally affects our ethical judgment.
It delivers a "better off dead" message that treats dying humans as disposable products. As one Australian politician expressed this: "When you are past your 'use by' or 'best before' date, you should be checked out as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible."
Now that they have found a debris trail, we are beginning to learn what happened to Air France 447. France is sending a research ship equipped with two mini-subs but the chances of retrieving the "black box" in the vast deep ocean remain slim.
But whether lightening and heavy turbulence , an electrical failure or a bomb took it down remains to be seen or may never be known.
A past flight may offer clues that a computer system may have gone rogue.
"It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible," passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. "The worst experience of my life." Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. "She crashed headfirst into the roof above us," he told a reporter. "People were screaming," said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. "We saw our own deaths," said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son's wedding. "We decided to die together and embraced each other."
After seemingly an eternity — in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds — the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer and made an emergency landing at a remote military and mining airstrip 650 miles short of Perth.
Neo writes about the initial emotional impact on the families.
This tragedy, already almost unbearable for the loved ones of those who died, contains the added painful possibility that the bodies of the lost may never be recovered. And all of this happened in an instant; families and friends were waiting at the Paris airport for an ordinary happy arrival, and then they received the dreadful news that will change their lives forever.
Now are learning about the 228 people lost . Among the victims on Air France Flight, Doctors, Dancers and Royalty.
They were dancers and doctors, engineers and executives, and even royalty. Many were parents, and eight were children.
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The airline said victims included 2 Americans, an Argentine, an Austrian, a Belgian, 58 Brazilians, 5 Britons, a Canadian, 9 Chinese, a Croatian, a Dane, a Dutch citizen, an Estonian, a Filipino, 61 French citizens, a Gambian, 26 Germans, 4 Hungarians, 3 Irish, an Icelander, 10 Italians, 5 Lebanese, 2 Moroccans, 3 Norwegians, 2 Poles, a Romanian, a Russian, 3 Slovakians, 2 Spaniards, a Swede, 6 Swiss and a Turk.
So sad.
Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arch, a organization that provides a life-long home for intellectually disabled people. In an exchange of letters with Ian Brown, a writer for the Globe and Mail, who has a disabled son, they explore the profound issues posed by death and all that leads to it.
Dying: The last great act of living by Margaret Somerville
Vanier's writings gently show that among the many gifts disabled people can offer us are lessons in hope, optimism, kindness, empathy, compassion, generosity and hospitality, a sense of humour (balance), trust and courage. But, as he recognizes, to do that they must be treated justly; given every person's right to the freedom to be themselves; and respected as members of our community. That requires us to accept the suffering, weakness and fragility we see in them, which means, as Vanier emphasizes, we must first accept those realities in relation to ourselves. Most of us find that an enormous challenge and flee.
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Even terminally ill people can have hope -- what we can call "mini-hopes" -- for instance, to stay alive long enough to see a grandchild born, to attend a daughter's wedding, to see an old friend the next day or to see the sun rise and hear the birds' dawn chorus.
Like hope, leaving a legacy also connects us to the future, one we will not see. Palliative care professionals try to help people to identify their legacy, their gifts to those who remain, because they know that can help them to die more peacefully. But those gifts must be accepted and valued by the receiver.
We must accept old or dying people's gifts, especially those gifts that are of the essence of themselves, recognizing that they and the person who gives them are unique and precious, as are their lives or last days on earth. In confirming the worth of these gifts we confirm the worth of the giver, and the old or dying person needs that confirmation.
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And might we be able to deal with old age and death with greater equanimity, if we can experience a sense of gratitude for life and might the gifts we can leave help us to feel that?
The challenge is to maintain death as the last great act of human life, a final human act through which we can still find meaning and, I suggest most importantly, pass meaning on to others.
In other words, in our dying, we need to be given the opportunity to leave a legacy of meaning. We are meaning seeking beings -- that seeking is of the essence of our humanness. Euthanasia is a predictable response to a loss of meaning in relation to death and its practice would augment that loss. Even if we believe that doesn't matter, we should be concerned, because our capacity to find meaning in life may well depend on our being able to find meaning in death.
Peter Lawler quotes the distinguished humanist Leon Kass in Kass the Dissenting Scientist.
Kass adds that he "hated the autopsy room, not out of fear of death, but because the post mortem exam could never answer my question: What happened to my patient?" The medical explanation of the cause of death "was utterly incommensurable with the awesome massive fact" he could see with his own eyes. Death is "the extinction of this never-to-be repeated human being, for whom I had cared and for whom his survivors now grieve." Science is incapable of wondering properly about both the reality of and the utter disappearance of the unique and irreplaceable person. Our desire to know is not properly animated without some assistance from personal care and grief.
Suppose you went to the doctor and after a few tests, you learn that you have lung cancer that has metastasized.
You go online and learn that the vast majority of people with your diagnosis do not survive two years.
Would you begin thinking of an aggressive fight to forestall death or would you begin to think of hospice?
And who would you talk to about it?
Only about half of the 1,517 patients with metastasized lung cancer who were surveyed had discussed hospice care with their physician or healthcare provider within four to seven months of their diagnosis.
The vast majority of such patients do not survive two years.
Hospice care - which can be delivered in a home, hospital, or other facility - focuses on managing a patient's pain and emotional and spiritual needs, rather than trying to cure the terminal illness.
For some ethnicities and races, the likelihood of a discussion about hospice was even lower. About 49 percent of African-Americans and 43 percent of Hispanics had a conversation with their physicians, the study found, compared with 53 percent of whites and 57 percent of Asians.
It may be that some do not understand their prognosis.
Huskamp theorizes that patients who said they had not discussed or considered hospice may not have fully understood their prognosis, or may be choosing to believe a rosier outcome. She also said that, in general, physicians are not well-trained to handle such delicate conversations.
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"You have a lot of doctors out there who weren't trained in these conversations about end of life or breaking any kind of bad news, whether it's a prognosis or difficult treatment," she said.
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How many tests and treatments are you willing to undergo when you're 80 or so?
Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States on intensive treatments for older patients in the last six months of their lives, according to the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.
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Some studies have recently concluded that hospice care can substantially lower costs for many terminal illnesses, and may often be more in line with what patients want.
How do you want to spend your last months? Undergoing chemotherapy or just being outside in the sun?
"As baby boomers get older and see how their parents are dying, they don't want that type of death," said Rigney Cunningham, executive director of the Hospice & Palliative Care Federation of Massachusetts, and a member of the state panel.
"I don't think anymore that death is a taboo conversation with these consumers," she said. "I think people are just struggling with how to start the conversation."
Two days after Rodrigo Roseburg made this video in Guatemala City, while riding his bike, he was shot and died on the street.
Guatemala in uproar after lawyer predicts his own murder.
"If you are hearing this message," Rosenberg begins, "unfortunately, it is because I have been murdered by the president's private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala's president and first lady].
"I do not want to be a hero," Rosenberg says at one point during the sensational video that was distributed at his funeral on Monday, but he has now become a martyr in a nation weary of drug running, money laundering and corruption, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Rosenberg explains that he was a lawyer who would have preferred to continue quietly practising his profession, but it was the murder of two clients in April that led directly to his own death.
Maureen Callahan says The final frontier in reality television has been crossed with the broadcast Friday of "Farrah's Story"
But amid this week's non-stop media coverage of the special, replete with a red-carpet premiere and interviews with her on-again paramour Ryan O'Neal - who, ever the gentleman, referred to Fawcett in the past tense - one question has yet to be asked: Is this weird? Or is this just the natural progression of things, the logical next step in a culture where the pace of oversharing and electronic communications are perfectly, symbiotically matched?
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Fawcett herself, as she has throughout her career, comes off as extremely likeable and well-intentioned, if - like most celebrities of her era - a bit unhooked from the actual world. She rails against the lack of funding for research into cancers such as hers, and bemoans the lack of experimental treatments in the US. Yet it does not register with her that her wealth and fame, which afford her private jets to Germany and an international team of doctors, are unavailable to the vast majority of cancer sufferers, and that, if not for her station in life, she would not have had extra time. She does not seem to wrestle, at all, with the notion that there may be some experiences best kept private, that the unintended consequences of oversharing can be a cheapening and coarsening of the most meaningful moments.
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Fawcett's story, of course, is real, and it will be interesting to see how many Americans watched, and if the nation's attitudes towards death - really the last taboo - begin to change. Maybe death will be discussed more openly, or maybe most people will decide that it's too ghoulish, too voyeuristic, to watch a deathbed goodbye, to watch an American icon of youth and beauty waste away.
I didn't see it, but I don't think I would have watched. I know these people have lived all their lives before a camera, but to me making such private moments public lacks dignity. Watching someone die is a profound and deep moment. Making a private video for family members is one thing, making a public show about it is another.
You're the director of a non-profit that operates an alternative school and runs programs for people with developmental disabilities when you get a call from someone you never met who says he plans to leave your organization his entire estate. Of course, you'll meet with him and together you set a date.
But there's a death in your family and you have to leave town. You tried to cancel and reschedule but you couldn't reach him. The caller comes by anyway and leaves a large white envelope for you. Scrawled on the bank in large capital letters are the words:
WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR FROM THE CORONER" (PLEASE DON'T CALL EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT).
When you get back, did you open the envelope?
Of course you do. Annie Green did.
Inside she found the last will and testament of John Francis Beech and yes, indeed Beech left Laradon Hall, the non-profit in question, all his estate. Beech also left the keys to his house, instructions and $100,000 check, post-dated for two weeks, for Laradon Hall.
John Beech and his mother
If you couldn't surmise from the writing outside the envelope that this man was contemplating suicide, surely you could by what was inside.
What would you do?
Annie Green put the check into a safe until she could deposit it.
Where would you take a $100,000 check that is also a suicide note - to the cops or the bank?
Beech had a mother, three sisters and a brother. The news of his death left them and other relatives reeling in shock and bewilderment. Jack, as he was known to his younger siblings, had always been the family's pillar of strength — the oldest, the most confident, the one who was the life of the party. He collected beautiful cars and performed magic tricks in bars; he had money, globe-trotting adventures and lots of girlfriends. He'd never shown signs of depression and, as far as they knew, had never been treated for mental illness. He'd never talked about suicide around them — except to express outrage when an old friend took his own life in 2007. Why, Jack had seethed, didn't the guy come to him for help? But Jack was also an extremely private person. He'd disappear for weeks on a trip or something, then abruptly resurface. The family knew there were parts of his life he simply didn't share with them, and maybe not with anyone. "If you needed help, he'd give you the shirt off his back," says his brother, David Beech, a news director for a television station in Reno, Nevada. "But if you tried to help him with anything, he'd refuse. He was like a father; he was our father.
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Now the family is suing on pubic policy grounds so that the non-profit can not benefit from its failure to take action to prevent the suicide.
But Malonson's attorney, Susan Harris, says the message Beech left for Green was unmistakable. "The only people he revealed his suicide plan to was Laradon Hall," she says. "There's no note that says, 'I'm going to commit suicide,' but there's a lot of indications. Who gives their house keys and financial information to a perfect stranger? He writes about the coroner, about where to find his car titles — and here's a postdated check for $100,000. One of the classic signs of impending suicide is the property giveaway.
"Laradon Hall deals with the mental-health issues of the clients it serves," Harris continues. "They have psychologists on board, all kinds of mental-health professionals. They do assessment; they do treatment. But they never tried to save him. They didn't contact him. They didn't call a hotline. They didn't talk to one of their own psychologists. They stuck the check in their safe."
A fascinating story by Allan Prendergast, you have to read.
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.
"I want my son's sperm to live," Carmen Moreno, Quintana's 56-year-old mother, said through sobs as she testified.
Judge allows mother to harvest her dead son's sperm for the son's finance.
The race against time really began at 3:30 a.m. Thursday when Quintana, a seemingly healthy, 31-year-old concierge and auto mechanic, collapsed and died while watching an episode of NBC's "The Chopping Block" on a computer with his brother.
Through her tears, Marrero remembered their last talk about the future and immediately asked Jacobi if it would be possible to remove and preserve Quintana's sperm.
Under law, it takes a court order.
So while Quintana's body was placed in a cooling room and an ice bag was placed on his testicles to preserve his potential progeny, Marrero set about preparing a funeral - and building a legal argument.
Much of Thursday was spent frantically calling sperm banks, lawyers and arranging for an emergency hearing before Sherman.
I find this story quite off putting. Rather than grieve over the sudden death of her 31-year-old son, the mother and finance spent their time frantically calling sperm banks, hiring lawyers and arranging for emergency hearings before a judge so they could get what they wanted.
Death on a Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus
Such was the curious bond between Jesus and Mary, in the cradle and on the cross. As a baby he first awoke to the Absolute—to “God”—in the loving presence of a mother who was for him the reassuring field of reality. She was the secure field of all being in which he received unqualified permission to be. The alternative to her was not to be, and that alternative was unimagined and unimaginable because she was. Only later, and with difficulty, does the child learn to distinguish between the love of God and the primordial love of the parent. For most of us the distinction is never absolute, and perhaps is not meant to be.
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Her heart would break before she fully understood, with a shudder of fear and wonder, what it was that she had been telling him when she whispered to the baby, “You will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. And of your kingdom there will be no end.” Perhaps, she was at times tempted to think, it was a mistake to tell him. But she finally had no choice except to follow, step by step, the way of the strange glory to which she had said yes. She was the instrument, she was the mediator, of the secret into which he would grow. And now his “hour” had come, and it had come to this, here at Golgotha.
The head of the Dignitas Euthanasia Clinic in Switzerland thinks suicide on demand for the healthy is a peachy keen idea, one that could save money for the National Health Service.
" A marvellous possibility for all," says Dignitas boss.
The head of the Dignitas euthanasia clinic in Switzerland declared yesterday that he believed assisted suicide should be available 'on demand'.
Ludwig Minelli, whose organisation has supervised the deaths of 100 Britons, said suicide was not just for those already dying but 'a marvellous possibility given to a human being'.
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Anti-euthanasia campaigners said Mr Minelli's willingness to kill anyone who requested it bore out fears that legalising assisted suicide for the dying rapidly leads to euthanasia for anyone.
Just a few months ago, a forme worker at the Dignitas clinic said it's a "profit center killing machine."
Nurse Soraya Vernili who believes in assisted suicide was appalled at the way people were treated and the contemptuous behavior of her boss who was cashing in on despair.
Nominated for the Prize of Courage by a Swiss newspaper in 2007 - she garnered praise for her efforts in exposing what she claims is a 'production line of death concerned only with profits' - Mrs Wernli has embarked on writing a book.
It has the title The Business With The Deadly Cocktails, and she promises an in- depth expose of a 'principled and necessary organisation gone bad'.
He made them sign over all their possessions and sold their personal effects to pawn and second-hand shops rather than return them to their families.
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'Mr Crew arrived in the morning and was dead just hours later,' she says. 'This was another of my many clashes with Minelli. I argued that it wasn't right that people land at the airport, are ferried to his office, have their requisite half-an-hour with a doctor, get the barbiturates they need and are then sent off to die.
'This is the biggest step anyone will ever take. They should at least be allowed to stay overnight, to think about what they are doing. But Minelli would have none of it. He once said to me that if he had his way, he would have vending machines where people could buy barbiturates to end their lives as easily as if they were buying a soft drink or a bar of chocolate. I support assisted suicide - but not the way he went about it.'
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'And Minelli has the cheek to call his practice Dignitas, when dignity is the last thing afforded to these poor people.'
This is a horrifying example of the culture of death. There has to be legal prohibition against euthanasia otherwise those dying are easy prey for others who seem them only as an opportunity to make money or save money.
For months now, the British press has documented the dying of Jade Goody, sometimes excessively
If you want an example, take a look at this page in the London Telegraph.
Jennifer Weiner in the Huffington Post
Jade fascinated me. While I was overseas, I devoured every newspaper story, every photograph and diary entry and detail about Jade's wedding (she got hitched to her twenty-one-year-old ex-con boyfriend a few weeks before her death) to her and her boys' christening (conducted, with cameras present, at the hospital chapel) to her eventual journey home to die.
The analogy most frequently applied to Goody's life was from The Truman Show, the movie in which Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, doesn't realize he's living on a giant sound stage under constant scrutiny: that he has been, in fact, created for public consumption.
That, it seems, gets it exactly wrong. Poor Truman had no idea there were people watching. Jade never forgot. In courting, and keeping, the fickle public's gaze for an astonishing length of time, Jade proved herself a master at real-time reinvention, crafting a character -- the girl you hate, the girl you love to hate, the girl you hate again and, finally, the martyred young mother, bald from chemotherapy, dying on camera -- that viewers would eagerly consume, pacing her scenes and delivered her lines and photos ops with an expert sense of timing.
Andrew Ian Dodge summarized her Pop Life and Meaningful Death
Goody was outspoken. That was part of her charm and part of her downfall. She was a loose cannon. The tabloids and their readers followed Goody, waiting to see what mess she would find herself in next. Goody was the personification of the “human car wreck” — a British Britney Spears if you will. People couldn’t help but rubberneck.
After apologizing for her in 2007, Brown praised Goody’s public fight after her death, speaking of her efforts to raise awareness about the disease, the need for screening, and the fact that cervical cancer can hit a woman at any age. He said: She was a courageous woman both in life and death, and the whole country has admired her determination to provide a bright future for her children.
Her funeral will be this coming Saturday and even Michael Jackson will be there.
Man Confessed Murder on "Deathbed", then Got Better
Then was charged with murder.
James Brewer could now face the death penalty over the unsolved killing in Tennessee 32 years ago, according to US reports.
Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted shooting dead 20-year-old neighbour Jimmy Carroll.
Mr Brewer had reportedly moved to Oklahoma from Tennessee after jumping bail after he was originally arrested and charged with Mr Carroll's murder in 1977.
The former factory worker changed his name to Michael Anderson and settled down with his wife, Dorothy, in the town of Shawnee.
The couple became active members of the local church, where Mrs Brewer established a Bible study group, reports say.
After suffering a stroke, Mr Brewer called police to his hospital bedside earlier this month, where he reportedly made the confession.
Detectives said Mr Brewer had admitted killing Mr Carroll, who he believed had been trying to seduce his wife.
On a dream round the world voyage, Malcolm and Linda Robertson anchored their yacht off the coast of Thailand when, in the early hours of the morning, they were awakened by a commotion.
Malcolm went to check when he was beaten to death with a hammer and thrown overboard by three Burmese migrant workers.
They took Linda out of the cabin in which she was sleeping and tied her up in ropes below deck. They sailed the yacht through the night until the next morning when they loaded up a small dinghy with their loot
Linda managed to wriggle free of the ropes, outrunning the pirates and sailed to a nearby fishing vessel for help. The fishermen contacted the police who captured the three men still in the small dingy.
British man battered to death by Burmese teenage pirates
The sad news that Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, committed suicide 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
The effects of suicide ripple out
Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh. Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February morning.
Six years later Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered four-year-old Shura in the process.
and down through the generations.
....but his life had also moved on. A family friend said last night: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.”
It appears Dr. Hughes was battling depression. I would not be at all surprised if, in his depression, he thought the only way out was the way shown by his mother and the woman who succeeded her.
Aokigahara Forest is known for two things in Japan: breathtaking views of Mount Fuji and suicides. Also called the Sea of Trees, this destination for the desperate is a place where the suicidal disappear, often never to be found in the dense forest.
Japan's Aokigahara Forest is known as the "suicide forest" because people often go there to take their own lives.
Taro, a 46-year-old man fired from his job at an iron manufacturing company, hoped to fade into the blackness. "My will to live disappeared," said Taro. "I'd lost my identity, so I didn't want to live on this earth. That's why I went there."
Taro, who did not want to be identified fully, was swimming in debt and had been evicted from his company apartment.
He lost financial control, which he believes to be the foundation of any stable life, he said. "You need money to survive. If you have a girlfriend, you need money. If you want to get married, you need it for your life. Money is always necessary for your life." Watch Taro describe why he wanted to die in "suicide forest" »
Taro bought a one-way ticket to the forest, west of Tokyo, Japan. When he got there, he slashed his wrists, though the cut wasn't enough to kill him quickly.
He started to wander, he said. He collapsed after days and lay in the bushes, nearly dead from dehydration, starvation and frostbite. He would lose his toes on his right foot from the frostbite. But he didn't lose his life, because a hiker stumbled upon his nearly dead body and raised the alarm.
Taro's story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the "suicide forest." The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.
Japan's suicide rate, already one of the world's highest, has increased with the recent economic downturn.
Desperate Japanese head to 'suicide forest'
Life can change in an instant .
Natasha Richardson was excited about learning to ski on the beginner's slope at Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec when she lost her balance and fell down. She didn't hit anyone or anything, nor did she show any signs of injury. An hour later, she complained of a headache and was taken taken to a hospital near the ski resort, then to a Montreal hospital. After she was declared brain dead, she was kept on life support and flown to New York City where her family gathered at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City to say goodbye before she was taken off life support.
A family spokesman said: 'Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha.
'They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time.'
New York Times obit
She was a blond, beautiful English actress, he was her ruggedly handsome Irish co-star, and the two were thought to be courting right on stage, during a New York production.
Ms. Richardson was an intense and absorbing actress who was unafraid of taking on demanding and emotionally raw roles. Classically trained, she was admired on both sides of the Atlantic for upholding the traditions of one of the great acting families of the modern age.
Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave, one of England’s finest tragedians. He passed his gifts, if not always his affection, to his daughters, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, and his son, Corin Redgrave. The night Vanessa was born, her father was playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Ms. Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the film director Tony Richardson, known for “Tom Jones” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Married in the early 1960s, they were divorced in 1967. He died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 63.
She seemed to be a lovely woman who survived a difficult childhood and adolescence in her famous family of actors and activists to make a successful career and marriage. What a terrible loss.
From the Body Farm to mystery writer to celebrity, Bill Blass will give you facts you'll never forget like: “It takes longer to burn a 90-pound individual than a 300-pound individual,. The increased amount of fat on the larger individual accelerates the cremation process.”
The Cult of Forensic Expert Dr. Bill Blass
Such is the extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting, appeal of forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass. His straight talk about pulverizing bones and rotting cadavers has found a dedicated audience that cuts across age, gender, socioeconomic, education, and even international boundaries. He’s always been popular with students at UT, where he founded the Forensic Anthropology Center, also known as the Body Farm, and retired 14 years ago. He’s long been deeply appreciated by academician colleagues, scientists, and the law enforcement agencies that benefit from his detective work.
But now Bass has another fan base: mystery readers. Since 2006, he’s collaborated with Jon Jefferson to produce four Body Farm forensic detective novels as “Jefferson Bass.” Half a million Jefferson Bass books have been printed as of 2008, the first in 14 languages, and two have already become New York Times bestsellers. The main character in all is one Dr. Bill Brockton, who works as a forensic anthropologist at UT’s Body Farm and consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
The latest addition, Bones of Betrayal, came out Feb. 3, a couple weeks after the packed house speech at the UT Center. The sign in front of Hargreaves Booksellers for two weeks before said simply, “Dr. Bass book signing,” and the date.
At an age—81—when most are quietly contemplating a round of golf or what’s for lunch, Bass is once again half of a book tour celebrity team.
How does he deal with dead bodies?
Both of Bass’ first two wives died of cancer. “My first wife and I met in the service,” he says. “I was in the infantry, and then transferred to the Medical Corps. When we first came to University of Tennessee in 1971, she taught Home Ec, and I taught anthropology. She died of colon cancer in 1993. My second wife, Annette, and I were married less than three years when she died of lung cancer—she never smoked a day in her life, but her first husband did.
“I hate funerals. I hate death. I hate mourning. I don’t like that scene at all.
“I never see a forensic case as a dead body. I see it as a challenge to see if I can figure out who that individual was and what happened to them. It is interesting what your mind can do. I think that you will find quite a few people in the forensic area who are like that, who shift that thing to something that is science and not emotion.”
For many, this would seem counter-intuitive unless one concludes that they believe that life is sacred and have more hope; but there's no excuse for not having legal documents in place
Religious dying patients more likely to get aggressive care
Patients who rely heavily on their religious faith to cope with terminal cancer are more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging measures in their last week of life, Boston researchers reported yesterday.
In a study at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and five other sites, 345 people with advanced cancer were interviewed about the importance of religion in dealing with their illness, and their preferences for care. Most of them were Christian.
About 80 percent of the patients said they used religion to some extent to cope with their illness and more than half said they prayed, meditated, or engaged in religious study daily. More than 30 percent said their faith was the most important thing that kept them going.
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The patients who leaned the most heavily on their faith were nearly three times more likely to choose and receive more aggressive care near death, such as ventilators or cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They were less likely to have advanced care planning in place, such as do-not-resuscitate orders, living wills, and healthcare proxies.
"Death is very likely the single-best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new" Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.
CEOs show how cheating death can change your life
Last June, management consultant Grant Thornton surveyed 250 CEOs of companies with revenue of $50 million or more. Twenty-two percent said they have had an experience when they believed they would die and, of those, 61% said it changed their long-term perspective on life or career. Forty-one percent said it made them more compassionate leaders; 16% said it made them more ambitious; 14% said it made them less ambitious.
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People who recount pure NDEs sometimes say they are accompanied by out-of-body experiences and trips toward a light. NDEs are described as both pleasurable and not. A Gallup Poll found that about 8 million Americans have had a near-death experience. That number is surely on the rise, because victims of cardiac arrest — which kills 1,000 people a day in the USA, according to Cardiac Science — are increasingly being saved with automated external defibrillators.
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Of the 250 CEOs surveyed by Grant Thornton, 3% said they have been brought back to life after having died. Another 3% said they did not want to respond to the question.
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Ned Dougherty, once a millionaire real estate broker who owned popular discos in New York and Florida, went into cardiac arrest two different times in 1984 but did not go fully public with his near death experiences until 2001 in his book Fast Lane to Heaven. He says he met deceased loved ones and was enveloped by the light of God. A casual drug user and an alcoholic who always had his first drink before noon, Dougherty said he was suddenly cured of addiction.
Dougherty says those who ditched into the Hudson River have had a spiritual experience that they will have to come to terms with over time. He says he has lost all interest in business and money. Where he once was angry at God for "ruining the party," he now considers his two trips into death a blessing. Like most who have NDEs, he says he no longer fears death.
Pinned to the metal grating of an MBtA escalator that clenched her scarf and hair, 82 year old Helen Jackson lay dying while many commuters walked past her to the exit.
Watching helplessly as a life slips away
commuters walked past her toward the exit, either unaware of the dire circumstances or unwilling to get involved.
A few good Samaritans intervened. One slammed the button that stopped the rising escalator. Another pleaded for any sort of help - scissors or even nail clippers to cut her free. Amid the muted chaos, a municipal security officer just outside the station radioed an emergency, then waited by his car for paramedics to arrive.
Moments mattered, and in the end, as one middle-aged man crouched at the top of the escalator, holding Jackson's hand while urging her to keep breathing, her grip loosened, her hand fell away, and she died. She was pinned so tightly to the escalator grating that the man couldn't fit his fingers between her scarf and her neck.
Condolences to her family. "She didn't have to go like that"
Miss Kelly points to this quite Beautiful Deathbed Story
Death can be beautiful, they say. Here's a quite moving story by British expat writer Michael Wright, who stayed with a frail widow friend for her last few hours on earth, in a hospital room, holding her hand, talking and singing hymns.
He had never been close to anyone dying.
I have never been close to anyone dying. Not physically, anyway, if we discount sheep and chickens. But now comes a phone call to say that our friend Laura – a frail widow who, at 56, is Jolibois' poshest and longest-serving English resident – has collapsed into unconsciousness. At the hospital in Limoges, the doctors barely expect her to last the night.
"You must go," says Alice, who is breastfeeding our newborn baby. "I can't bear to think of her all alone there, surrounded by foreign voices." Laura's parents, siblings and husband are all dead. Her only surviving close relative is her son, who is in prison.
Muzzammil Hassan set up Bridges TV in 2004 to counter anti-Islam stereotypes following 9/11. In 2009, he beheaded his wife Aasiya Hassan in the TV studio.
She had recently filed for divorce and had obtained an order of protection barring her husband from the family home.
"He was worried about the station's future," said a family friend.
Headless body in gutless press is Mark Steyn's headline
Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don't remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death, the bubonic plague killed 30-60% of the population of Europe.
How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold and covered with a little earth.
Boccaccio
Nobody knew what caused it or what to do. It is unimaginable today the horror of so many dying so quickly. It must have seemed like the end of the world.
Now that new technology now allows the plague to be identified even in ancient human remains, we learn how medieval nuns sacrificed their own lives to provide medical care for the poor victims in Renaissance France.
I can't image the grief this mother must be going through
The perfect baby who died five days after she was born - poisoned by her mother's milk.
Natasha's pregnancy had been normal, and the birth itself was straightforward. It was with huge happiness that she and Ava went home the day after the birth.
But already in those idyllic first hours a terrible story was unfolding.
Ava had been born with a genetic condition called methylmalonic acidaemia (MMA). This meant her body didn't produce an enzyme to break down protein.
In the womb, Natasha, 33, had been breaking the protein down for her.
But on her own, Ava's tiny body was unable to cope with any protein and even her own mother's milk was highly poisonous, leading to a build up of toxic substances, methylmalonic acid and ammonia. Untreated, it can lead to a coma, brain damage and death.
In America, newborns are routinely tested for this condition. There are no such tests in the UK and Natasha and her husband Grant, 37, were unaware of Ava's condition.
Santiago Meza Lopez, known as El Pozolero (the Stew Maker), says he stuffed bodies into barrels of lye for drug cartels. He may be a good source of information about missing loved ones.
Families want answers from man who says he dissolved 300 people.
Santiago Meza Lopez, a stocky 45-year-old taken into custody after a raid near Ensenada, was identified as the pozolero who liquefied the bodies of victims for lieutenants of the Arellano Felix drug cartel. Authorities say he laid claim to stuffing 300 bodies into barrels of lye, then dumping some of the liquefied remains in a pit in a hillside compound in eastern Tijuana.
His capture riveted Mexico with sickening details behind drug violence that has left more than 8,000 dead in two years. For the families of the disappeared, however, it was a chance to revive cases that seemed long forgotten.
Boy, 12, dies from asthma attack caused by excitement of opening his birthday presents
A boy of 12 collapsed and died after suffering an asthma attack triggered by the excitement of opening his birthday presents.
Martin Glazier-Macrae collapsed as he was about to unwrap a large Lego set his father Duncan had bought him.
The asthma attack in turn triggered a heart attack and the boy died in his dad's arms.
The tragedy occurred just moments after Martin had got out of bed on his 12th birthday and rushed downstairs to see if he had got any presents.
It is thought his father, an HGV driver and the lad's aunt and clubbed together to buy the lad the giant Lego set after he asked for it.
Martin initially complained about being faint after getting out of bed but then appeared to recover.
He was about to open his presents and cards when he suffered a further attack and collapsed.
Catholic author and blogger Michael Dubriel collapsed at a gym and could not be revived. The suddenness sent shock waves throughout the Catholic blogosphere. But nothing compared to shock his widow and young children felt.
In announcing his death his wife Amy wrote simply
We are devastated and beg your prayers.
In response to an outpouring of prayers and notes, Amy wrote
Many thanks for all of the prayers and notes. It is overwhelming. Many have asked what they can do of a material or concrete nature. All I can say is to simply buy his books. Not from me, because I am in no position to fill orders, but from anywhere else. He long ago promised God that he would give all the royalties of The How To Book of the Mass to the children’s college funds, which he did faithfully. It is in good shape because of that. Buy them, read them, and give them away to others. Spread the Word. That is what he was all about.
On the night before he died he wrote his last column which deserves reading in full.
The “big lie,” Father Benedict said, (and I’m paraphrasing him at this point), is to think that if we say all the right prayers and live correctly, then nothing bad will ever happen to us. Sadly, there are many good people who have lost their faith by believing such a lie, and that makes it a big one indeed!
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What is the opposite of the “big lie”? Trust.
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None of us knows what the future holds, but hopefully we can embrace what is inscribed in our coinage, “In God we Trust.”
Imagine that, his last written words, "In God we Trust."
May he rest in peace.
Me, I'm going to order some books.
Abbot Joseph of Mt. Tabor Monastery in California is called to a Mop Up Ministry via Jennifer's Links
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way many people are going to be saved is if they are rescued at the last minute as they are departing this world. In a sense, I’m being spiritually placed in the last hours of souls. When all else fails, I’ll come in to mop up the mess with abundant prayers and offerings of the Divine Liturgy to save the souls who have slipped through everyone else’s fingers.
So, without further ado, I hereby inaugurate the “Abbot Joseph Final-hour Mop-up Ministry.” Now I say this in a somewhat light-hearted manner, but in fact I’m dead serious.
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Here’s what’s in it for you. Are there any incorrigible teenagers, irascible old folks, lapsed Catholics, ardent unbelievers, or heedless profligates among your family or friends? Or do you know someone who is dying without faith or repentance or the sacraments? Well, just send their names to me at john1fourteen@inbox.com. I will keep a list of these “hard cases” and will pray for them (including them also in the divine mercy chaplets I pray especially for this intention), and I will also regularly offer the Divine Liturgy for their salvation.
Imagining this priest saying prayers every day for those about to die gives me comfort and reminds me of what The Anchoress once wrote
Dame Laurentia McClachlen of Stanbrook Abbey, Sussex once said “a monastery is like a powerhouse; you do not lock up a powerhouse to restrain the power, but to keep anyone from coming in and gumming up the works. A monastery is a powerhouse of prayer, meant to give light to the whole world.”
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Prayer is a force, and it has power.
There are things seen and unseen. Things corporeal and things spiritual. Things natural and supernatural. A society bent on utilitarianism serves only the seen, the corporeal, the natural, and neglects the things unseen - at great risk.
Two years ago, Virginia Tech was the site of the worst school massacre in history. Last week, a foreign student from China Xin Yang was having coffee at Au Bon Pain when another Chinese foreign student Zhu Haiyang walked up to her and cut off her head with a kitchen knife.
Chinese student decapitated at Virginia Tech.
According to officials, witnesses said Zhu, 25, attacked Yang with a knife.
"There were seven witnesses in the cafe. There had been no argument, no shouting" when the young woman was attacked,
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the officer said that when she arrived at the scene she found Zhu holding Yang's head in his hand.
Mariana Bridi da Costa was a model on her way to becoming Brazil's entrant to the Miss World contest when she began feeling ill just a month ago.
At first, it was thought kidney stones, then a urinary infection. Whatever infection she had, it soon developed into septicemia that causes insufficient blood flow to the organs and limbs. Necrosis followed. Doctors amputated her hands and feet to no avail, she died yesterday.
A doctor who recently published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on the disease, told CNN that little was known about the illness, although it is the tenth leading cause of deaths in the United States.
"We know a lot about what happens once a patient contracts the illness but we know very little about what causes it," said Dr. Greg Martin of Emory University in Atlanta.
"It is a leading health threat in this country, killing at least 800,000 people a year," he said.
Martin said sepsis is a "response" to an infection that can cause the immune system to lose its balance.
"Basically, the immune system goes haywire after contracting an infection and begins to overreact," he said.
Last text of British student who froze to death in river as she walked home from party at Val d'Isere ski resort.
A British student sent a text message reading ‘I’m lost’ seconds before plunging to her death in an Alpine river.
Rachel Ward, a 20-year-old undergraduate from Durham University, was on her way to her apartment from a party in the upmarket French ski resort of Val d’Isere when the tragedy happened late on Monday night.
She had been taking part in ‘On The Piste’ - annual celebrations filled with alcohol, parties and skiing involving hundreds of British university students.
The message sent to friends was received just after 1am, some half-an-hour after she had left the gathering of fellow students, all of whom had been drinking heavily.
Detectives fear that she slipped on ice and fell into the river, before dying of hypothermia. She had been walking in the wrong direction.
An investigating detective in Val d‘Isere said: ‘The young woman had been enjoying herself with friends when she decided to set off home alone.
‘It was dark, of course, and temperatures were extremely low.
Her mum would have loved her so much: Tearful words of man whose baby was born two days after wife died.
Two days after Jayne Soliman was declared brain-dead, her grieving husband saw her life-support machine turned off.
In a moment of unbelievable poignancy, he was then given their baby daughter to hold for the first time.
Doctors had kept 41-year-old Mrs Soliman's heart beating after she suffered a brain haemorrhage.
For 48 hours they pumped large doses of steroids into her body to help the baby's lungs develop.
Then they delivered baby Aya Jayne by caesarean section. At 26 weeks, she weighed just 2lb 11/2oz.
The tiny infant was placed on her mother's shoulder for a moment before being handed to her father, Mahmoud Soliman.
Jayne Soliman was a professional ice skater who collapsed in her bedroom after complaining of a headache.
Doctors told Mr Soliman and Mr Phillips that Mrs Soliman had suffered from a haemorrhage caused by an aggressive tumour that had hit a major blood vessel.
Mr Phillips said: “Jayne and I had both been at the ice rink in Bracknell that day and she was absolutely fine – nothing seemed wrong.
“She was as happy as she could be because she was pregnant – it was her dream.”
David Brooks on Richard Neuhaus In Defense of Death
Neuhaus was no stranger to death. As a young minister, he worked in the death ward at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a giant room with 50 to 100 dying people in it, where he would accompany two or three to their deaths each day. One sufferer noticed an expression on Neuhaus’s face and said, “Oh, oh, don’t be afraid,” and then sagged back and expired.
Much later, Neuhaus endured his own near-death experience.
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While most people might use the science of life to demystify death, Neuhaus used death to mystify life.
When he wrote about his experience later, his great theme was the way death has a backward influence back onto life: “We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way.”
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In his final column for First Things, he wrote again about his mortality.
“Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”
This awareness of death, and of the intermingling of life and death, gave Neuhaus’s writing an extra dimension — like a metaphysician who has been writing about nature within earth’s atmosphere and suddenly discovers space.
The Drawn-Out Indignities of the American Way of Death by Craig Bowron in the Washington Post
I'm a physician in a large hospital in Minneapolis, where I help care for patients struggling through the winter of their lives.
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But taking care of the threadworn elderly, those facing an eternal winter with no green in sight, is definitely the most difficult thing I do.
That's because never before in history has it been so hard to fulfill our final earthly task: dying. It used to be that people were "visited" by death. With nothing to fight it, we simply accepted it and grieved. Today, thanks to myriad medications and interventions that have been created to improve our health and prolong our lives, dying has become a difficult and often excruciatingly slow process.
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Nothing in my medical training qualifies me to judge what kind of life is satisfying or worth living. Many would say that if we were to become paralyzed in an accident, just let us die. But many quadriplegics, once they've gone through an initial period of adjustment, find their lives very satisfying. Patients can and do make enormous efforts and fight precipitous odds to get back to life as they knew it, or even just to go on living. But the difference for many elderly is that what's waiting for them at the end of this illness is just another illness, and another struggle.
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To be clear: Everyone dies. There are no life-saving medications, only life-prolonging ones. To say that anyone chooses to die is, in most situations, a misstatement of the facts. But medical advances have created at least the facade of choice. It appears as if death has made a counter-offer and that the responsibility is now ours.
In today's world, an elderly person or their family must "choose," for example, between dialysis and death, or a feeding tube and death. Those can be very simple choices when you're 40 and critically ill; they can be agonizing when you're 80 and the bad days outnumber the good days two to one.
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This isn't about euthanasia. It's not about spiraling health care costs. It's about the gift of life -- and death. It is about living life and death with dignity, and letting go.
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At some point in life, the only thing worse than dying is being kept alive.
Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things, has died.
This is what he had to say about death when he came very close to the gates seven years ago.
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word "good" should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.
Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.
Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take." Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.
My apologies for not posing over the holidays and my best wishes to all my readers for a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
Now catching up on grave matters, the North East Lincolnshire Council bans mourners from laying artificial flowers on graves because of the health and safety risk.
While the $10M lottery ticket Donald Peters bought just hours before he suffered a fatal heart attack and died stunned his widow who only found she won when she took tickets that had been pinned to a calendar for two months after his death to the local convenience store before throwing them out.
"It's just such a shock," Peters, who has three children and two grandchildren, said. "I still don't believe it. In 20 years, we've won two, maybe three dollars - but never more than that."
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"There's nothing that I really and truly want," Peters said, adding that she already saved up enough to replace her car. "I have a mobile [home] that I love, so I doubt I'll be moving."
Instead of dwelling on what to buy, Charlotte Peters said her thoughts have been on her husband and how grateful she is she decided not to toss his final gift to her. "I had just never handled the lottery tickets," she said. "I'm still surprised that I bothered to have them checked."
The 2008 Darwin awards are out and so far The Balloon Priest is the people's choice, a double Darwin.
In the Gaza Strip, Hamas operated rocket launchers from a cemetery to shoot missles into Israel were destroyed by the IDF. The small bodies of the children of a Hamas leader, a mentor of suicide bombers, one of the top five decision makers in Hamas were paraded around the streets of Gaza to incite 'painful' revenge, in a ghoulish display far worse than waving the bloody shirt.
Nizar Rayan, his four wives and 10 of his children were all killed by in an Israeli air strike on his home after he ignored warnings they should go into hiding.
In grisly scenes, mourners held up the bloodied bodies of the children to the cameras in a clear attempt to blacken Israel's name and highlight its brutality.
There's more Hamas propaganda using obviously fake photos as documented in The Breath of the Beast that appears to have gulled PBS and 3 year old videos dupe many in the liberal blogosphere.
The Anchoress eulogizes her "birth" brother who died yesterday after A sad painful life.
I don’t blame him for not having faith. I can’t think of any example of love he ever encountered that did not - ultimately - get distorted or misrepresented or prove itself to be wholly untrustworthy, not to be counted on, not to be believed.
I loved him, but I was much younger than he, and of a completely different nature. I doubt he believed it, that I loved him. He had no tools to believe it.
How tragically sad is that?
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I say to hell with that. He was loved into being; he was baptized and sealed. The people who were supposed to teach him the way in which to go spun him madly, incessantly - then allowed him to get dizzy and lost. He lived a sad, tortured life the best way he knew how - quite imperfectly, but then his tools were also very insufficient and his trust was non-existent. I cannot claim to know anything, but I do not believe that a loving God would look upon this much-sinned against man and reject him once again, as he was rejected all his life.
For one thing, none of us know what happens in those infinitesimal moments between life and death, if mercy is offered one more time, and accepted.
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Tonight, I am believing that my brother John is finally in the presence of the all-encompassing and unconditional love in which he can finally trust, finally surrender to…or that he has glimpsed enough of it to want more, however long it takes to become fit for it.
Dominic Mallary, a 24-year-old lead singer of an emerging rock band that just landed a record contract had a signature move,
howling into his microphone as he coiled the wire tighter and tighter around his neck.
But this time, the edgy flourish proved deadly. The pressure caused a clot in his jugular vein, later cutting off the flow of oxygen to his brain, according to his mother, band members, and friends. Mallary, an Emerson College graduate who counseled the homeless, died Friday afternoon at Boston Medical Center.
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Mallary appeared fine during and immediately after the show, but about an hour later complained of dizziness and a lack of sensation in his legs. But even as he was taken by ambulance to Boston Medical Center, he remained conscious and called his girlfriend to let her know what had happened.
"I figured he was going to be all right," said Murphy, a 21-year-old who lives in Douglas. "We didn't think it had anything to do with our performance."
But when Mallary arrived at the hospital shortly after 11, he suffered a seizure and lost consciousness, Murphy said. He later fell into an irreversible coma and was pronounced dead Friday.
Death of singer, 24, tied to stage stunt.
Condolences to his family and friends.
The terror in Mumbai has been horrific, both in the numbers of people killed and the failure of the Indian police to fight back, thereby causing more deaths of innocents
Sebastian D'Souza, the Mumbai photographer who captured a photo of the "baby terrorist" caught alive and now pleading for his life, said, "I wish I'd a gun, not a camera. ...
...what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."
Just a few of the victims:
A selfless young couple, Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivka left Brooklyn to open a Jewish outreach center in Mumbai as part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Chabad.org says of them,
For five years, they ran a synagogue and Torah classes, and helped people dealing with drug addiction and poverty,
Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched. We will continue the work they started.
They were sought out, tortured and killed.
Firing grenades and automatic weapons, the men took the Holtzbergs and at least six other people hostage, according to friends of the Holtzbergs. The cook, who was also a nanny, managed to escape with Moshe about 12 hours into the siege, the friends said. The boy’s pants were soaked in blood when he emerged.
Rabbi Kotlarsky said that Rabbi Holtzberg had called the Israeli Embassy from inside Nariman House and was describing the situation when the line went dead. His last words before being cut off were “Lo tov,” Rabbi Kotlarsky added, which means “not good” in Hebrew.
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“This is a tragic loss for the Lubavitch community, and for our entire city,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “That their son survived is a miracle, and our entire city is grateful for his nanny’s heroic act. During a time of terrible sadness, her courage reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil.”
Yaacov Ben Moshe at Breath of the Beast writes
They were neither Missionaries nor ultra-Orthodox zealots they were, simple, devoted and loving people serving a very high purpose.
They were murdered by zealots for purely political and bloody purposes.
Zealots indeed. Doctors were shocked at the torture of the hostages
this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said....Another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words,"
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"Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,"
Other victim The Fearless Brit
Andreas Liveras, a self-made businessman went out for a quiet meal with three members of his staff.
After the initial attack on the hotel, Mr Liveras, a father of four and grandfather of eight, phoned his family to say that he had survived Wednesday evening’s assault – and he had also spoken to the BBC to describe the scene in the hotel.
“We knew that he had been taken from the restaurant, through the kitchen and to the basement – and then on to another room. There were a lot of people milling about.
“Typically, my father remained calm throughout his ordeal. He was fearless man – he had flown round the world in his own plane, he had travelled around the world in his own boat. He had done things that most people would be afraid to do.
“Eventually, however, the gunmen got into the room where my father was and sprayed bullets. He was fatally injured and died from multiple wounds."
The family suspect that Mr Liveras’s courage may have contributed to his death. “He would put the safety of his staff before his own. He would not bow down, or crawl and hide, in the face of these people [the terrorists]. I think that is why he got it [the bullets] first,” said his son.
May they all rest in peace and may their memories be a blessing to all who knew them.
Condolences to David Warren on the death of his father.
He writes about another whose response in losing his father was to attend Catholic masses in the old, Latin rite.
Went to hear, and inevitably, went to think, while the words of the Mass were sung for him, from the invocation of the Kyrie, a text old as the Psalms if not older: "Lord have mercy."
From one Mass, he was drawn curiously to another, until in due course his diverse thoughts organized themselves into a single thought. And that thought was: "This is the only thing that is equal to my father's death."
I learned of this when my own father died, the Sunday before last.
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How not to conduct a funeral mass for a priest.
Father Harry Meyer tried to imagine God’s reaction when St. Susanna pastor Dan Schuh appeared in heaven.
Probably, he said, it was the same as the teenaged skier who witnessed the 50-something priest tumble head over skis down the slopes one winter night at Perfect North Slopes.
"Awesome, dude!" Meyer told the 1,500-plus parishioners and priests who gathered for Schuh’s funeral Mass Wednesday morning.
Father Z comments sadly:
We can’t avoid death. We cannot control death. We don’t understand death and we fear what we don’t understand. Fear, at its root, is a result of the Fall. Death and fear are inseparable, as cause to its effect.
This is why, I think, so many funerals today are as described above.
Death’s mystery is supremely confronted in Holy Mass, and in its deepest way during the Requiem. Perhaps this is why funerals tend to reveal the worst of our tendencies toward illicit liturgical creativity and bad taste. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Holy Mass must be celebrated in such a way that it leads us into the mystery of Christ’s death, and our death. Mass is therefore like the Cross. It is a mystery. It thus will allure and repel, reveal that things are hidden and demand faith in what is unseen, or rather seen only darkly as if through a glass.
We mustn’t dodge the reality of death. We shove death aside, or paint it over with bright colors and candy music, at our peril. So many funerals are arrange so that people can get through another hour or so without having confronted anything either frightening or meaningful. We avert our gaze from what Christ did for us and from what we must yet experience.
If Holy Mass is reduced to the banal it becomes merely another worldly distraction. It becomes a show.
But Mass is a sacrament, in the sense of its being a mystery. It prepares us for death, Christ’s and our own.
Jules Crittenden reports that researchers using ground-penetrating radar have found what they believe is a lost USMC graveyard on Tarawa and he has lots of photos.
Some 139 graves already located could lead to the largest single identification of remains in U.S. history.
One man, Mark Noah, raised the money to find these unmarked graves by selling vintage military aircraft rides at air shows. MSNBC tells the tale.
Sixty-five years ago, Nov 20-23, 1943, some 1687 Americans were killed and 2296 were wounded while 4836 Japanese and Koreans were killed and 146 taken alive in the bloody battle of Tarawa.
I had to turn to Wikipedia to learn just what was so important about this atoll in the Pacific. I was left as always awed by the ingenuity of the planners and the courage of the soldiers and humbled by the thought of so many lives lost in pursuit of victory.
Devastated schoolboy, eight, hanged himself after deaths of his mother and grandfather
An eight-year-old boy devastated after the deaths of his mother and grandfather hanged himself with his school tie in his bedroom.
In a case the coroner described as 'the saddest story I have ever come across' in a 20-year career, the inquest heard how Joshua Aldred was heartbroken after losing both his mother and grandfather to cancer within a year.
Joshua was still struggling with the death of his grandfather, John, when his mother Sarah, 42, died in March after battling breast cancer, the inquest also heard.
His father Jason, 41, who has lost his father, wife and only child within ten months, said he thought Joshua had been adjusting.
In a statement, Mr Aldred said he last saw his son alive before he left for work that morning. He said: ‘I know he missed his mum’s hugs and he had done a drawing of her in his Manchester United notebook which was put next to his bed.
He added: ‘I didn’t notice any change after Sarah had died. He was just a normal, happy, well-adjusted little boy.’
I imagine father, grandmother and son all beset by grief and each trying to act as normal for the others.
Blackpool coroner Anne Hind recorded a verdict of misadventure, saying 'it was an intended act with unintended consequences.'
She said: 'He did intend to hang himself, but in law he did not in fact for a minute intend the consequences of his actions, not for a minute.
'This is a terrible, terrible tragedy. I cannot tell you how my heart has gone out to you and how I have prayed for you.'
They all need prayers.
This is so gruesome, I debated about posting it, but then I couldn't stop wondering about what went through that man's mind.
Husband 'left wife's body hanging for eight weeks after backing out of suicide pact'
"It's an unusual and shocking business and it is almost beyond belief to think he may have had to pass her body on a daily basis."
The First Five Minutes After Death - A three year study will explore the nature of death and consciousness
After countless accounts of near-death experiences, dating as far back as ancient Greece, science is now taking serious steps forward to explore the nature of the phenomenon. A new project aims to determine whether the experience is a physiological event or evidence that the human consciousness is far more complicated than we ever believed.
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the near-death experience could be another state of consciousness with a different set of rules than what we currently understand, and beyond the limits of what current scientific methods can explain.
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During the time that people report the feeling of detachment from their physical body, or an out-of-body-experience, they report a perception of floating above their body, or floating near the ceiling in the room where the experience occurs. This aspect of the experience plays an important role in the study.
Some speculate that St. Paul had a near-death experience that may have influenced the New Testament.
When folks have near-death experiences, they often return with a completely different view of the world, and their role in it.
Almost to a person, they become more spiritual. Their accent becomes love. They look at everyday worries -- in the light of eternity -- as trivial.
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That question (and it is only a question) arises because of the famous line in 2 Corinthians 12:4, whereby the great disciple, Paul (once Saul), wrote, "I know this man -- whether in or outside his body I do not know, God knows -- was snatched up to Paradise to hear words, which cannot be uttered, words which no man may speak."
Scientists create new life from a mouse that had been frozen for 16 years
Scientists have created clones of a mouse that had been dead and frozen for 16 years.
It is the first time they have been able to clone a frozen animal.
The Japanese researchers say their work will benefit mankind - and could be used to bring back extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth or sabre tooth tiger.
But ethical watchdogs branded the experiment disturbing.
Critics say it brings the world closer to the day when people try to clone long- dead relatives stored in cryopreservation clinics.
It could even lead to a macabre new industry - in which people leave behind 'relics' of their bodies in freezers in the hope that they could one day be cloned.
The Homily on All Souls Day from the Preacher to the Papal Household, Father Raniero Cantalamessa
Faith doesn't free believers from the anguish of having to die, but it soothes us with hope. A preface of the Mass (for All Souls' Day) says: "If the certainty of having to die saddens us, the hope of future immortality consoles us." In this sense, there is a moving testimony that also comes from Russia. In 1972, in a clandestine magazine a prayer was published that had been found in the jacket pocket of a soldier, Aleksander Zacepa, composed just before the World War II battle in which he would die.
It says:
Hear me, oh God! In my lifetime, I have not spoken with you even once, but today I have the desire to celebrate. Since I was little, they have always told me that you don't exist. And I, like an idiot, believed it.
I have never contemplated your works, but tonight I have seen from the crater of a grenade the sky full of stars, and I have been fascinated by their splendor. In that instant I have understood how terrible is the deception. I don't know, oh God, if you will give me your hand, but I say to you that you understand me …
Is it not strange that in the middle of a frightful hell, light has appeared to me, and I have discovered you?
I have nothing more to tell you. I feel happy, because I have known you. At midnight, we have to attack, but I am not afraid. You see us.
They have given the signal. I have to go. How good it was to be with you! I want to tell you, and you know, that the battle will be difficult: Perhaps this night, I will go to knock on your door. And if up to now, I have not been your friend, when I go, will you allow me to enter?
But, what's happening to me? I cry? My God, look at what has happened to me. Only now, I have begun to see with clarity. My God, I go. It will be difficult to return. How strange, now, death does not make me afraid.
Bowler Dies Moments After First 300 Game
Don Doane belonged to the same team at a Ravenna bowling alley for 45 years.
Just moments after rolling the first perfect 300 game of his life, Doane collapsed onto the floor while high-fiving his Nutt Farm teammates.
The 62-year-old Ravenna resident was taken to a local hospital but couldn't be saved. A medical examiner determined that a heart attack killed Doane.
UPDATE from his teammates
The teammates say he was giving a high-five minutes before. They tried to revive him but Doane never spoke another word. He died of what was apparently a massive heart attack "He looked fine, reached across the table and gave me a high-five and he fell over," says Place.
"I think he died by the time he hit the floor." Don Doane was a member of the "Nutt Farm" bowling team at Ravenna Bowl for 45 years. His teammates says its strange not to see him on league nights.
"It was like a book, a final chapter," says Place. "He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face." "Don will be a legend," says Nutt. 'It's something that will never be forgotten as long as people bowl here." Ravenna Bowl is planning a memorial ceremony for Doan's' wife Linda and son Chad.
Hospice Chaplains Take Up Bedside Counseling
The encounter with a chaplain can be profound and spiritual, and sometimes religious in a traditional way. More and more, though, ministering to the terminally ill in hospice care is likely to be nonsectarian, or even secular.
In the quarter-century since Medicare and some private insurers began picking up the bill for hospice care, it has become a common recourse for the terminally ill. With doctors, nurses, social workers and ample supplies of pain medication dispatched to their homes or nursing facilities in the final weeks and months, about 1.3 million Americans died last year in hospice care.
Spiritual counseling has always been an optional part of the service. But recently, the proportion of patients choosing to receive it, and the number of new chaplains entering the field to meet the need, have risen sharply.
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In the hospice idiom, the job of the chaplain is to make dying easier. In a way that perhaps only Americans would understand, some chaplains refer to what they do as fostering a more “successful” experience — by whatever definition of success can be negotiated in the final hours between a dying person and a compassionate stranger.
Health care and religion experts cite several reasons for the new pastoral model: a growing consensus in the medical world that spiritual care comforts terminal patients; the shortage of clergy, especially priests; a decline in traditional worship; and the apparently unchanged need most people have near the end of life to make sense of existence.
As four generations of the family say their goodbyes, a woman they have just met sits in a corner, playing her harp. Over the past three years, Jennifer Hollis has been accompanist to hundreds of these intimate gatherings at Lahey Clinic. Hollis, 35, is trained as a music thanatologist and plays her harp and sings to dying patients and their loved ones.
Playing music for the dying is an ancient ritual that Hollis - the only practicing music thanatologist in a Massachusetts hospital, according to Lahey officials - and others are helping to revive. Music thanatologists point to studies suggesting that music can ease pain and breathing difficulties, as well as soothe agitated patients and help them sleep.
As life ebbs, healing music flows.
"Many times families will not expect to have the emotions that they have," said Collins, who encourages patients' relatives to stay in the room when Hollis plays. "They just start to weep. Or people will touch each other. Normally, in the hospital, with the bars up, it's not that easy to make that connection. There's something so healing about it."
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"I do see a lot of suffering," Hollis said. "I see people who have to say goodbye to each other, who are coming to terms with what it means to leave this world, or this life that they've known. But what I also get to see is people being incredibly beautiful and loving and tender with each other, patients saying wonderful things to their families, families saying wonderful things to them. For me, it's a real education in what it means to be human."
And at the End, All the Comforts of the Carlyle
Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.
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So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.
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It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.
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Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.
Sister Emmanuelle, France's "Mother Teresa," dies aged 99.
Sister Emmanuelle, France's answer to Mother Teresa, who has died aged 99 was an unorthodox nun who spent 20 years helping the poor in a Cairo slum before returning to France to defend the homeless.
The diminutive Roman Catholic nun, whose real name was Madeleine Cinquin, was best known in France for her frequent appearances on television to campaign passionately for the poor and homeless.
She came to media attention with her work with some of the world's poorest people, the residents of the Ezbet El-Nakhl slum in Cairo who eke out their living by scavenging in the garbage produced in the giant city.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sister Emmanuelle was a woman who "touched our hearts," a "woman of action for whom charity meant concrete actions of solidarity and fraternity."
The Vatican said her work, like that of Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa, "showed how Christian charity was able to go beyond differences of nationality, race, religion."
Rocco Palmo writes about her funeral in "Life Does Not End For Those Who Know to Love"
Sent off by her expressed request from the small-town convent where she spent her last years, Paris came to a halt yesterday to commemorate Soeur Emmanuelle -- the "French Mother Teresa" who died Monday at 99.
Following her private funeral liturgy and burial at Callian in the country's southeast, the capital's Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois celebrated a nationally-televised memorial Mass in Notre-Dame, its high-watt congregation led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor Jacques Chirac and -- in a tribute to the two decades the self-described "rag woman with the rag pickers" spent working among the poor in Cairo -- Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, as a crowd of thousands packed the square outside.
She left a message with her publishers.
"When you hear this message, I will no longer be there. In telling of my life -- all of my life -- I wanted to bear witness that love is more powerful than death," she said, according to the text.
"I have confessed everything, the good and the less good, and I can tell you about it. Where I am now, life does not end for those who know how to love."...
Gerard Vanderleun on Hitchhiking in the Land of the Dead
It seems strange that a day for the contemplation of mortality has been turned into a carnival of corruption in this country, but perhaps not all that strange. I'd suggest that, as the country becomes more secular; as it ceases to believe in anything other than the here and now, the moment in the meat, it becomes increasingly terrified of the extinction of the self by death. It is one thing to profess a belief in the Great Nothingness, it is quite another to have to face it. The only weak weapon that can be raised up against it is its denial.
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What the empty among us are compelled to do when confronted by death is a bit of mass-culture symbolic magic. We dress as what we fear most, and we deck our halls with symbols of death and decay. We pretend that shaking these shibboleths and feathered fetishes against the dark will protect us much as hiding under the covers kept us safe from the monster under the bed. It's a child's response to fear and it is not at all surprising that, as the worship of the Great Nothingness grows and festers among us, the ever escalating morbid gestures of Halloween do nothing to fill the Great Nothingness that roils the souls of many of our fellow citizens. It's a bit like the ceaseless urge to "keep ourselves in shape" that obsesses so many.
Alas, it will not avail us. You can drape yourself with the rubber raiments of Zombies all you want, the world will always, in time, eat your flesh down to dust. And without faith, that's the hard-core horror of existence as mere meat. Without faith, more and more of us find ourselves hitchhiking on the cold plains with no chance of being picked up. Without faith, the vehicles that pass us on the high road just aren't going our way.
Jesse Bering in Scientific American writes Never Say Die. Why We Can't Imagine Death
yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead.
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So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
Yet we can imagine the time before our parents were born. What's the difference?
After handling repeated demands that her dead son appear before local magistrates, Ann Thompson just wanted them to stop.
It was almost a year later when the first letter from the DVLA dropped on the mat at the family home in Salkeld, near Penrith, claiming he had not logged details with them about a vehicle he apparently owned.
'The letter included the registration of the vehicle but there was no indication whether it was a car, a bike or anything else,' said Mrs Strange. 'But Paul did not own any vehicle when he died.
'I rang the DVLA to tell them that and that he was dead. I then wrote to them enclosing a copy of his death certificate. Another letter followed and I rang them. Then another letter came and I rang again. When another letter came I just ignored it.
Finally, feeling she had no alternative, the Grieving mother brought her son's ashes to court after the DVLA insisted on prosecuting him two years after he died
When the usher called for Paul Richard Strange, she stepped forward and said: 'He's here.'
The court fell silent as the 43-year-old housewife, her arms outstretched, asked: 'Do you want to see him?'
To make sure they could still collect Grandma's social security check after she died, this mother and son cremated the 84-year-old grandmother in a backyard barbecue pit they had used weeks earlier to cook the family's Thanksgiving dinner.
Known best today for his elegant, edgy and often erotic black and white drawings that seem the essence of a decadent age and a new style called Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley began his career as a musical child prodigy only turning to drawing and illustration in the last five years of his young life.
Infected with tuberculosis since he was six, Beardsley became a famous fop, living life hard if languidly.
Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Beardsley was meticulous about his attire: dove-grey suits, hats, ties; yellow gloves. He would appear at his publisher's in a morning coat and patent leather pumps.
He became part of the
homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and the English aesthetes, Beardsley was basically heterosexual--though perhaps his only female partner had been his adored elder sister, Mabel (who may also have borne his miscarried child). Some biographers suggest that Wilde's celebrated downfall and the public revulsion that followed it may have precipitated Beardsley's final illness.
He was only twenty-three when he turned to God
In March, 1897, after converting to Roman Catholicism, he and his mother traveled to Paris. Doctors advised against spending the winter in the city, so in November they went to southern France. There, ravaged by chills and weakness, Beardsley took to bed and never left his room after a bad lung hemorrhage on Jan. 26. Thoughts of religion and guilt about the frank eroticism of his past work haunted him, and he spent hours reading about the lives of Roman Catholic saints
Nine days before his death,
he scribbled a note to his London publisher with the heading "Jesus is our Lord & Judge." The note read: "I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata. . . . By all that is holy--all obscene drawings." ..... Early in the morning on Mar. 16, when his mother and Mabel were out of the room, the artist apparently tried to draw, for when Ellen Beardsley returned, her son was dead and his favorite gold pen--either thrown or dropped on the floor--was standing upright like an arrow
Daniel Mitsui at The Lion and the Cardinal notes that the final request written by Beardsley "in my death agony" was ignored.
But the letter leaves an enduring testimony to the sincerity of its author's conversion. The world of arts and letters has no shortage of insincere converts; men for whom religion is simply another element in the creation of an interesting public personality. But in the dying Aubrey Beardsley is seen the will to mortification and the shame for notoriety that mark a true penitent
More evidence that what you intuited is true.
Talking about death eases end of life for patients, loved ones.
Researchers led by Dr. Alexi Wright of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of the American Association on interviews with 332 terminally ill cancer patients recruited at seven outpatient clinics. Patients who said they did not have end-of-life conversations got significantly more aggressive care in their final week of life, which was linked to lower quality of life near death. Their caregivers also suffered, feeling regret, poor quality of life, and a higher risk of developing depression.
Patients who said they did have end-of-life discussions were more likely to have a better quality of life in their last days, less likely to get aggressive care, and more likely to receive hospice services. Their loved ones said they felt less regret, and better quality of life, during their bereavement.
"Our results suggest that end-of-life discussions may have cascading benefits for patients and their caregivers," the authors wrote.
Via Jason Kottke comes the filmmaker Pes who came across this tombstone in Woodlawn cemetery.
Intrigued he did more research and found this article in the New York Times in 1909 about poor George Millett who was "stabbed to death in an office frolic".
The girls only tried to kiss him for this birthday but George fended the girls, reeled and fell over as he did pierced in the heart by a blade for scraping ink that was in his breast pocket.
A FEARSOME mutant fish has started killing people after feeding on human corpses, scientists fear.
They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals.
Locals have believed for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to snatching unwary bathers who venture into the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border.
The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV documentary to be shown on Five.
He said: “The locals have told me of a theory that this monster has grown extra large on a diet of partially burnt corpses. It has perhaps got this taste for flesh by feasting on remains of funeral pyres. There will be a few freak individuals that grow bigger than the other ones and if you throw in extra food, they will grow even bigger.”
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He caught one which tipped the scales at 161lb and was nearly 6ft long – a world record weight and far bigger than any landed before.
He said: “If that got hold of you, there’d be no getting away.
An 18-year-old Nepali disappeared in the river last year, dragged down by something described as like an “elongated pig”.
Dr. Diane Meier, 55, won a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation for her work as a geriatrician improving treatment for critically-ill patients.
Her goal is to make palliative care "part of the genome of American medicine" writes Jane Gross in the New Old Age blog at the New York Times A Time When Listening is 'Sacred"
Dr. Meier, 56, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and professor of geriatrics and medical ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, parted ways a decade ago with an outspoken group of physicians nationwide who sought the legalization of assisted suicide.
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Her argument then — and even more vociferously now — is that the American health care system reimburses doctors for doing procedures, not spending hours plumbing the souls of their patients. Thus no physician has time for the discussion, reflection and explanation necessary to conclude, knowledgeably and honorably, that helping a patient die is a reasonable and ethical choice
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Her research has shown that virtually nobody actually wants to die if given access to adequate pain control, emotional and spiritual support for themselves and their family, and what Dr. Meier calls the “sacred level” of attention necessary to “validate their suffering.” As with hospice care, but without the requirement of a terminal diagnosis, palliative care physicians spend most of their time talking to patients and caregivers.
A millionaire banker was beaten to death just 200 yards from a police station after intervening to save a couple being assaulted by a mob.
Frank McGarahan, 45, was out with relatives the night before his niece's christening when he saw the pair being attacked near a taxi rank.
The area is close to Norwich's main police station and the area is surrounded by CCTV cameras.
But as he shouted at the gang of ten men to stop, they turned on him. In the fracas, he suffered a serious head injury.
The father-of-two was the chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, the bespoke finance arm which caters for the bank's richest customers, and managed their combined assets of £133billion.
On Saturday evening the family went out for dinner in Norwich city centre. His wife Alison and their two children, aged seven and four months, returned to their hotel but Mr McGarahan stayed out for another drink with two male relatives.
They were waiting for a taxi home when the attack happened.
McGarahan only wanted to stop the beating. He certainly didn't know it would be the last thing he would ever do.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13
Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, is still a bestseller after 100 years. In addition to Anne, my grandmother wrote 19 other novels, personal journals and hundreds of short stories and poems. As well, she has been the subject of several biographical studies.
Despite her great success, it is known that she suffered from depression, that she was isolated, sad and filled with worry and dread for much of her life. But our family has never spoken publicly about the extent of her illness.
What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life at the age of 67 through a drug overdose.
Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband's mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman's wife and mother in an era when women's roles were highly defined.
He died in the waiting area of an emergency room in a Canadian hospital and no one noticed him for 34 hours.
Man dead 'for some time' in Winnipeg ER before staff alerted say officials
"There's lots of people in an emergency department at HSC at any given time who aren't only the patients waiting. But how this person could be there for 34 hours and go sort of undetected is really surprising to us and is the focus of our investigation," Wright said.
Unbelievable.
Pope Benedict in his Mass for the sick at Lourdes.
Benedict administered the sacrament of the sick to pilgrims in wheelchairs and on gurneys, many bundled in quilts against the chill.
In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find "the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God."
The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.
"At his Mass with thousands of sick people Sept. 15... [the Pope] thanked Catholics at Lourdes and all over the world who volunteer their time and effort to help the infirm.
"That highlighted a key theme of Benedict's pontificate, one he has underlined in encyclicals but which is sometimes overlooked: that personal charity -- love in action -- is the ultimate expression of faith in Jesus Christ."
World's most bizarre deaths
Oh, nuts!
Willie Murphy was more than a bit shell-shocked when an avalanche of peanuts buried him at a processing plant in Georgia, USA, in 1993. He never made it out alive.
Oh, chute!
Experienced skydiver Ivan McGuire went plane crazy one day in 1988 when he decided to film his 3,000m jump above North Carolina – he remembered his camera but forgot his parachute!
Water way to go
Things didn’t go swimmingly at all for a 59-year-old Californian when he sat on a pool’s badly covered drain. With a sucking power of 300lbs per square inch, he never really stood a chance. He died when his small intestine was sucked clean out.
Michael Dirda on 'Nothing to be Frightened Of'
"Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (Julian Barnes)
Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers an extended meditation on human mortality, but one that is neither clinical nor falsely consoling.
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"For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?"
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While Julian examines various attitudes toward death and admits to envying those with religious faith, he himself is agnostic. As he says, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." ("Soppy," says his atheist brother.) He then goes on to discuss what the French call "le réveil mortel" -- the wake-up call to the reality of death, that recognition of personal mortality that marks the end of childhood. He also reviews what Montaigne called "the death of youth, which often takes place unnoticed. . .
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While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness: "A few hours before dying in a Naples hospital," the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller "said (presumably in Italian) to a male nurse who was cranking up his bed, 'You have beautiful hands.' " Barnes calls this "a last, admirable catching at a moment of pleasure in observing the world, even as you are leaving it." Similarly, the poet and classicist "A.E. Housman's last words were to the doctor giving him a final -- and perhaps knowingly sufficient -- morphine injection: 'Beautifully done.' "
Bell-ringer falls to his death after church wedding.
A bell-ringer plunged 30ft to his death seconds after a bride and groom tied the knot in a romantic church wedding ceremony.
The bride and groom, and their assembled guests were walking out of the church when 80-year-old bell-ringer Jack Sturgeon fell 30ft down a church tower, moments after ringing the bells for the happy occasion.
His devastated wife Beryl, 81, was in church at the time.
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After ringing the bells, he is believed to have climbed a second set of stairs to inspect the clock when he suddenly fell at St Mary's Church in Mildenhall, Suffolk, about 2.15pm on Saturday.
Mr Sturgeon, a bell-ringer of 40 years, suffered a suspected heart attack, however it is still unclear if it caused him to slip off the stairs, or whether the fall triggered the condition.
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Reverend Hodges said Mr Sturgeon was a '100 per cent reliable' bell-ringer.
'All we can say is that at least he died doing what he loved best in our church, a place he loved.'
She said the newlyweds, Mr Keane and Miss Brown, had also been shattered by the tragedy.
'They're local people and they've been left devastated. 'They'll never ever forget what happened on what should have been the happiest day of their lives.'
Swami Laxmananda Saraswat was a senior leader in the VHP, a movement organized in 1964 to organize and preserve the Hindu world from Communism, Islam and Christianity. In 1992 they demolished the Babri Mosque. Muslim mobs rioted and over 900 people were killed across the country. In 2002 there were more riots and some 2000 were killed in what came to be called the Gujarat violence. Mobs attacked Christians in December 2007, burning shops and churches forcing 700 Indian Christians to flee.
On August 23, the Swami and four associates were found murdered in their monastery. The police suspected the Communists Maoists who later took responsibility for the murder.
In a horrifying display of week-long violence in Orissa, believing the Christians were to blame mobs went on a horrifying rampage of murder and arson, a "religious cleansing" as it were.
26 people killed in week-long violence in Orissa although the real death toll may be as close to 100 as more butchered bodies are found. Some 4000 Christian homes, churches and convents were burned by Hindu fanatics. One twenty-year old Christian girl Rajini escaped from the flames only to be tied up and thrown back in the fire.
One pregnant woman who refused to denounce her faith in Christ was cut into pieces before her husband and other Christians.
A Catholic nun was burnt alive and another nun was gang-raped by Hindu fundamentalists.
One priest who escaped describes his ordeal
They had poured kerosene on my head, and one held a matchbox in his hands to light the fire. But thanks to divine providence, in the end, they did not do that. Otherwise, I would not have been there to tell this horror,"
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"They vandalized everything and set it on fire. It has been reduced to ashes," he added.
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"They began our crucifixion parade," said Father Chellen. The gang of about 50 armed Hindus "beat us up and led us like culprits along the road" to the burned pastoral center.
"There they tore my shirt and started pulling off the clothes of the nun. When I protested, they beat me hard with iron rods. Later, they took the sister inside (and) raped her while they went on kicking and teasing me, forcing (me) to say vulgar words," said the priest who has cuts, bruises and swollen tissue all over his body and stitches on his face.
"Later both of us, half-naked, were taken to the street, and they ordered me to have sex with the nun in public, saying nuns and priests do it. As I refused, they went on beating me and dragged us to the nearby government office. Sadly, a dozen policemen were watching all this," he said.
Angry at his plea to the police for help, the mob beat the bleeding priest again.
Today, there is an almost complete collapse of the police force and the Orissa violence forces 60,000 Christians to take refuge in the forests.
The blog Orissa Burning is keeping witness to the ongoing torture and murder of Christians in Orissa and doing a fine job of keeping us informed.
What is at the bottom of all this outrage against Christians? An Indian archbishop says the Christians' offense is fighting against slavery -
the work that Christians in Orissa are carrying out on behalf of the tribals and the Dalits, at the very bottom of the caste system:
"Before, they were like slaves. Now, some of them study in our schools, start businesses in the villages, demand their rights. And those who – even in the India of the economic boom – want to keep intact the old division into castes are afraid that they will gain too much power. Orissa today is a laboratory. What is at stake is the future of millions of Dalits and tribals living all over the country."
Dave Freeman, ad executive who co-wrote "100 Things to Do Before You Die," died at 47 after falling and hitting his head at home in Venice.
Published in 1999, "100 Things" was one of the first contemporary books to create a travel agenda based on 100 sites and then market it with a title that reminded mortal readers that time was limited.
The "100 Things" approach later swept the publishing industry, said Neil Teplica, who wrote the book with Freeman.
The title meant "you should live every day like it would be your last, and there's not that many people who do," Teplica told The Times. "It's a credit to Dave -- he didn't have enough days, but he lived them like he should have."
From the Associated Press
This life is a short journey,” the book says. “How can you make sure you fill it with the most fun and that you visit all the coolest places on earth before you pack those bags for the very last time?”
Mr. Freeman’s relatives said that he had visited about half the places on his list, and that either he or Mr. Teplica had been to nearly all of them.
What a headline!
Mark Twain once said, “Rumors of my demise of been greatly exaggerated,” but local attorney Michael C. Howard is living these words. And the emphasis must be placed on “living.”
A rumor that Howard died has been circulating throughout Columbia County — and beyond — for the past few days.
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The Howard family was celebrating one of their three son’s 9th birthday with a party Saturday afternoon, so there were a lot of cars in the driveway, which certainly didn’t help matters.
“People thought it was an impromptu wake,” Howard said and stopped by to offer condolences to his family.
It’s one thing to get the phone calls, but “it’s a little freaky when they show up,” he said. When one person stopped by during the party and asked what they can do to help, he was told he could help by “flipping some burgers.”
Puerto Rico corpse kept upright for 3-day wake.
A Puerto Rican man has been granted his wish to remain standing — even in death.
A funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the corpse of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina standing upright for his three-day wake.
Dressed in a Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses, Pantoja was mourned by relatives while propped upright in his mother's living room.
His brother Carlos told the El Nuevo Dia newspaper the victim had long said he wanted to be upright for his own wake: "He wanted to be happy, standing."
The owner of the Marin Funeral Home, Damaris Marin, told The Associated Press the mother asked him to fulfill her dead son's last wish.
Pantoja was found dead Friday underneath a bridge in San Juan and buried Monday. Police are investigating.
Despite the biggest search in America's history for the lost plane of Steve Fossett, it's not been found.
The London Telegraph reports
The lead investigator
Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol has said Fossett, whose body or plane was never found, could still be alive.
She said: "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found.
"It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do.
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Robert Davis, the lead investigator for Lloyd's of London which is facing a
£25 million payout said
"I discovered that there is absolutely no proof that Steve Fossett is actually dead. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a man who deals in facts, and I don't really care if he is alive or dead, it make no difference to me.
"What I am interested in is the truth - and a proper criminal investigation of this man's disappearance was never undertaken by law enforcement or officials in the state of Nevada."
Can you imagine the shock of this poor woman who could only look on helplessly as her husband and three children fell 1500 ft to their deaths in the Italian Alps.
Dying Boy 8 'marries' school sweetheart in last wish before telling mother: "I can go now."
An eight-year-old boy who had battled cancer for half of his life 'married' his school sweetheart - before telling his mother 'I can go now' and dying just hours later.
Reece Fleming refused to give in to leukaemia until he had fulfilled his wish of a mock wedding to his special friend Elleanor Pursglove.
The two children, who had been friends for years, had taken part in an emotional ceremony in Reece's front room in which he handed his 'bride' a red rose.
Coming back from the weekend, I was shocked to hear that Tony Snow had died. Of course, I knew he had colon cancer, but death, especially sudden death, is always shocking. He was a good and decent man who became great by force of his character. He will be missed by many but no one will miss him more than his wife and three children. To them, the deepest condolences.
There are a score and many more personal recollections online about the force of his character.
Yuval Levin writes about his "deep and intensely cheerful curiosity."
Bill Kristol marvels at his calm courage and cheerful optimism
His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance to give him an upbeat world view. Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?
President Bush said
It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day,” the president said in a statement from Camp David, where he is spending the weekend. “He brought wit, grace and a great love of country to his work. His colleagues will cherish memories of his energetic personality and relentless good humor.”
Gaghdad Bob says
The essence of his soul comes through quite vividly -- his decency, his passion, his generosity, his desire to help lift mankind. ....
I don't know why there aren't more people who are able to convey the joy, excitement, creativity, expansiveness, optimism, hope, compassion, decency, humor, spirituality, and love that animate conservatism. Maybe they just don't get it the way Snow did, and connect all the dots, both horizontal and vertical.
Mark Steyn on his grace, affability and generous advice.
An NRO symposium on Tony Snow, Happy Warrior
Susan Estrich says Tony Snow was a Gem
Tony had a sweetness about him, a sweetness that, in the mean world that Washington and the media can be, sometimes led him to believe that everyone operated from the same place he did...
He was so earnest, so dear, he liked everyone and assumed the same about everyone else; he was honorable and honest, and assumed it about others.
Kurtz wrote an appreciation of Snow called As Good as His Words.
Here's a David Gregory interview with Snow talking about living and working with cancer. Kathryn Jean Lopez says it's impossible not to cry to hear Snow talk about his family and the 'depth of happiness' that cancer made possible in his life.
New York Times obituary
Mr. Snow’s death was announced by the White House. When a recurrence of the cancer interrupted his tenure there, he chose to talk about it openly, saying he wanted to offer hope to other patients. His message to them, he said, was: “Don’t think about dying. Think about living.”
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His snappy sound bites made Mr. Snow an instant hit among Republicans. “It’s like Mick Jagger at a rock concert,” Karl Rove, the president’s former political strategist, once said.
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He also had a musical flair; he grew up playing the flute, taught himself the acoustic guitar and played in an amateur rock ’n’ roll band, Beats Workin’. When they performed at the White House Congressional picnic, Mr. Bush jokingly called them “a bunch of, well, mediocre musicians.”
Washington Post obituary
In his brief tenure as Bush's public advocate, Snow became perhaps the best-known face of the administration after the president, vice president and secretary of state. Parlaying skills honed during years at Fox News, he offered a daily televised defense of the embattled president that was robust and at times even combative while repairing strained relations with a press corps frustrated by years of rote talking points.
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ABC News correspondent Ann Compton, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said yesterday that Snow was "the first press secretary who chose to use the podium as a way to argue the president's case -- not just in the president's words, but in his own."
There is a new, disturbing and completely uncivil tendency for some to make partisan remarks, often quite vile, when a person dies. Ben Johnson describes some of them in "Goebbels With Better Hair." No one is above criticism, but people who make crude and hateful remarks about someone who has just died should be shunned says Howard Kurtz. Amen to that. Fortunately, they are a tiny minority, but shunned they should be.
Better than any words about him are his own and none are better than his commencement address last year to the graduates of Catholic University. If you read nothing else, read his address, "Reason, Faith, Vocation."
"I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been."
"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God? God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."
"Work at being a humble person."
The above quotes are from John Templeton who died yesterday in Nassau, the Bahamas, at 95.
Boston Globe/New York Times obit
John M. Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune as a pioneer in global mutual funds, then gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding of what he called "spiritual realities,"
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In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality, and promoted a search for answers to what he called the "Big Questions" in the realms of science, faith, God, and the purpose of humanity.
Along the way, he became one of the world's richest men, gave up American citizenship, moved to the Bahamas, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor, and an array of prominent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.
Telegraph obit
Templeton boasted one of the longest and most successful track records on Wall Street. From its foundation in 1954, his Templeton Growth Fund grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 16 per cent a year until Templeton’s retirement in 1992, making it the top performing growth fund in the second half of the 20th century
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The Templeton formula was simple in theory, though not easily achieved in practice.
He looked for bargains — shares selling well below their asset values due to temporary circumstances — and would usually hold on to them for five years or more until they reached what he considered to be their true worth.
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He was one of the first to invest in post-war Japan, and one of the first to sell Japanese stocks in the mid-1980s before the bear market set in.
Templeton once described his speculative activities as a “ministry”, and saw the workings of the money market as part of God’s plan for His creation.
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In 1973 he inaugurated the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, an annual award to remedy the Nobel Foundation’s omission of religion from its prizes.
A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel, and arranged for the Duke of Edinburgh to present the award at Buckingham Palace, thus ensuring full press coverage.
A newly ordained priest in a ghastly accident was among 10 bodies in a morgue when an attendant spotted him making the sign of the cross.
I resurrected from death after four days in the morgue
Top ten scientists killed or injured by their experiments
10. Karl Scheele died from tasting his discoveries
9. Jean-Francois De Rozier was the first victim of an air crash
8. Sir David Brewster was nearly blinded
7. Elizabeth Ascheim was killed by X-rays
6. Alexander Bogdanov killed himself with blood
5. Robert Bunsen blinded himself in one eye
4. Sir Humphrey Davy was a catalog of disasters
3. Michael Faradat suffered chronic poisoning
2. Marie Curie died of radiation exposure
1. Galileo Galilei blinded himself
5.
We've crossed a certain line when the Oregon Health Plan will cover comfort and care and doctor-assisted suicide but not a cancer drug that would slow cancer growth and extend the life of a patient.
“Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan,” said the unsigned letter Wagner received from LIPA, the Eugene company that administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County.
The patient, Barbara Wagner, said
“To say to someone, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel,” she said. “I get angry. Who do they think they are?”
The drug company Genetech stepped in and said it would cover the cost of the drug. With this Gift of Treatment,
Wagner said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did both.
“I am just so thrilled,” she said. “I am so relieved and so happy.”
Dr. Bob writes about Crossing That Dark River.
it was only a matter of time before our pragmatism trumped our principles. Once the absolute that physicians should be healers not hangmen was heaved overboard, it was inevitable that the relentless march of relativism would reach its logical port of call.
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Death, after all, is expensive — the most expensive thing in life. It was not always so. In remote pasts, it was the very currency of life, short and brutal, with man’s primitive intellect sufficient solely to deal out death, not to defer it. There followed upon this time some glimmer of light and hope, wherein death’s timetable remained unfettered, but its stranglehold and certainty were tempered by a new hope and vision of humanity. We became in that time something more than mortal creatures, something extraordinary, an unspeakable treasure entombed within a fragile and decomposing frame. We became, something more than our mortal bodies; we became, something greater than our pain; we became, something whose beauty shown through even the ghastly horrors of the hour of our demise. Our prophets — then heeded — triumphantly thrust their swords through the dark heart of death: “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” We became, in that moment, something more than the physical, something greater than our short and brutish mortality. We became, indeed, truly human, for the very first time.
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We will, no doubt, congratulate ourselves on the wealth we save. We will no doubt develop ever more ingenious and efficient means to facilitate our self-immolation while comforting ourselves with our vast knowledge and perceived compassion. Those who treasure life at its end, who find in and through its suffering and debilitation the joy of relationships, and meaning, and mercy, and grace, will become our enemies, for they will siphon off mammon much needed to mitigate the consequences of our madness.
George Carlin, 71, died of hear failure in Los Angeles shortly after being admitted for chest pains.
His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species.
"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."
He's the only comedian whose case, the "Seven Words" went to the Supreme Court which upheld the right of the government to sanction radio stations for broadcasting offensive words when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
New York Times, George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71
By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his irreverent jests about religion and politics, he openly talked about the use of drugs, including acid and peyote, and said that he kicked cocaine not for moral or legal reasons but after he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.” But the edgier, more biting comedy he developed during this period, along with his candid admission of drug use, cemented his reputation as the “comic voice of the counterculture.”
His best loved routine was Stuff.
My favorite is baseball and football
Like everyone who was familiar with him on television, I was shocked at the sudden death of Tim Russert and then surprised at the outpouring of affection for him. But I shouldn't have been surprised, I loved him and everyone who knew him and millions who didn't loved him too. He was fair, tough, passionate and ebullient.
Tom Brokaw broke the news.
My friend and colleague collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work at NBC News...
Tim loved his family, his faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees, and the Washington Nationals.
Tributes pour in from people in the media, collected at MediaBistro's TV Newser.
New York Times
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of “Meet the Press” nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
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Mr. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had just returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy, where his family had celebrated the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College. When stricken, he was recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program.
With his plain-spoken explanations and hard-hitting questions, Mr. Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — “Florida, Florida, Florida,” he had scribbled in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.
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Behind the scenes, Mr. Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understandable and compelling.
“He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.
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He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America,” said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal
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In the Boston Globe, Mike Barnicle said
"Tim was uniquely without a mean bone in his body," Barnicle said last night. "He had a joy about him that was nearly unmatched. At the end of the day or the end of the week, there was a part of him that would pinch himself: 'Can you believe I'm allowed to do this show?' "
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Russert was shaped by his own father, known as "Big Russ," and by his childhood in Buffalo. The city remained his emotional touchstone for his entire life. "He's better able than anybody I know to live in two worlds," Brokaw told the Globe in 1997. "He has a house in a tony neighborhood in Washington, and his heart's in Buffalo." Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, yesterday ordered all flags at city buildings lowered to half-staff in Russert's honor.
Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post
Russert wore many hats -- onetime Democratic operative, Washington insider, NBC bureau chief, MSNBC commentator, sports fanatic, committed Roman Catholic, biographer of his father, dubbed "Big Russ" -- but his greatest legacy was his sustained style of interrogation. Grounded in prodigious research, Russert would press his guests on past statements and contradictions, often for a full hour, spawning legions of imitators.
Friends were stunned by the news. "I just loved him," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation." "When I scooped old Tim, I felt like I'd hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league."
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Despite his eventual wealth and house on Nantucket, Russert never seemed to forget the summers he spent emptying pails of spoiled food into a garbage truck. His patter was filled with average-Joe lingo and constant references to his beloved the Buffalo Bills. Russert viewed himself as a translator who made politics accessible to the average voter.
Russert wrote two best-selling books, "Big Russ & Me" and "Wisdom of Our Fathers," which brought fame to his working-class dad and enshrined Russert's reputation as a man of modest western New York roots.
Joe Klein in Time
Back when he was just starting in television — and ever since but particularly back then — Tim Russert was astounded by the joys of the job. Early on, he helped arrange an interview with the Pope for the Today Show — and Tim did it up right: He brought along red NBC News baseball caps for the Cardinals and a white one for the Holy Father. "He put it on!" Tim told me when he came home. "We have pictures!" Then he said, more quietly, "But, you know, it was really something being in his presence. You felt something holy. It was almost as if the air was different." And that was Tim — exuberant, irreverent, brilliant and devout, a thrilling jolt of humanity.
He will be missed. Condolences to all his family and friends
Her first assignment was with an elderly man with Alzheimer's disease. "I began to realize how much difference you can make in the patient's life, and in the family's life," Peden says. "At the moment of death, I was able to comfort him. I held his hand and told him, 'I'm here with you.'
Don Aucoin reports For hospices, an infusion of youth
At Charlestown-based Beacon Hospice, the largest hospice organization in New England, the number of volunteers in their teens or 20s has increased by nearly 80 percent in the past year...Nationally, "The age and demographics for hospice volunteers is widening as hospices serve more and more families,"
The Chinese earthquake in Sichuan province was so huge in its impact, in the numbers of dead, in the tragedy of the schoolchildren crushed in their schools, in the grief of parents losing the one child they were allowed, that I've been unable to get my mind around it.
"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic, " Joseph Stalin said. What can we make of the latest statistics from the Chinese government.
62,664 dead
23,775 missing
358,816 injured
638,305 rescued and evacuated
Or these
5 million were left homeless
Floods now threaten the 700,000 survivors
69 dams are now in danger of bursting.
When I saw this photo of family members searching for their missing, I began to feel for the agony of numbers beyond measure.
Many victims were buried quickly in mass burial pits and China's Rush to Dispose of Dead Compounds Agony.
They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.
This photo broke my heart. Tiny Bodies in a Morgue
Yesterday was designated World Day of Prayer for China by the Pope who composed a prayer for Our Lady of Sheshan.
The newspaper carrier called her as the "Prayer lady" because she would leave him tips in letters to which she often appended a prayer.
`I've been praying for you at night whenever the weather's bad, realizing you're out in it delivering our papers,'"
He knew something was wrong when the newspapers piled up outside her door.
"That wonderful, small voice inside me said, `This isn't right.'"
After his route early Sunday, Pitts went home, napped briefly and, with his wife, returned to Blanche and Fred Roberts' home, just outside Marion, Ill.
They repeatedly rang the doorbells but got no answer. Pitts then eased open an unlocked side door and saw the couple about two feet inside, 84-year-old Blanche Roberts helpless looking right back at Pitts.
Her right leg was pinned beneath the body of her 77-year-old husband Fred, who apparently had died last Wednesday evening of a heart attack after mowing the lawn.
"The good Lord was with her. She was not scared, wasn't panicking," Pitts said during a telephone interview. "She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."
Newspaper carrier finds woman pinned by husband's dead body.
What are your odds of dying? 1 in 1.
What you will die from is a totally different story. Mother Pie tipped me to this wonderful graphic in a post
exploring for the first time the idea of the Singularity.
I've written about the singularity in The Curve of Change, Digital Immortality or The Rapture for Nerds, and How We Are Going to Die,
It's no surprise that some, bedazzled at our technological progress, believe that the same progress can be made with biotechnology. There is a human inchoate yearning for immortality that believers say points to heaven. But to that age-old question Quo vadis or Where are we going, the singularians answer We ain't going nowhere, we're staying.
They fail to recognize the very humanness of our nature, especially our susceptibility to boredom. Even William Buckley, by all accounts a prodigious lover of life, confessed to Charlie Rose near the end of hhis life confessed that he was tired of life. The time will come, no matter how long we live, when the will to live is lost and death soon follows.
This soaring photo is the last one known of the Roman Catholic priest who wanted to raise money to build a worship center for truckers by breaking the 19-hour world record for flying with balloons.
An experienced skydiver, Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off under a column of a thousand helium-filled balloons. He was equipped with a bouyant chair, a thermal suit, a parachute, a satellite phone and a GPS device.
He disappeared when winds blew him over the ocean. Fishing boats and rescue workers in helicopters found bits of balloons along the coast. A week after his disappearance, the Brazilian navy called off the search
Siobhan Kilfeather was a beautiful professor of English and Irish Literature at Queen's University, Belfast and happily married with two very young children when she was diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer melanoma. Nine months later, x-rays showed that the cancer had reached her lungs.
She decided to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and her mother-in-law jumped at the chance to go with her.
Siobhán's "miracle" happened one bitterly cold day in the French Pyrenees in February 2000. There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.
With hands outstretched and eyes full of fire, she beseeched the statue. "Holy Mary," she prayed aloud, "you know better than anyone on earth the love a mother has for her children. Surely you won't deprive my babies of their mother. "They need me. I beg you; find it in your heart to give me more time. Let me see them grow up a bit first - then I'll be ready."
Siobhán was begging not for survival, but merely time to see her children grow to an age where they would know and remember her. Constance and Oscar, then aged four and two, and back home in England, were too young to know about the cancer which was already ravaging their mother's body.
--
Although she was tired after our flight from London, by evening Siobhán declared she was well enough to walk in a candlelight procession with thousands of other pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Our Lady. Before her illness Siobhán had been a vibrant, energetic young woman. Now she walked painfully slowly and her breathing was laboured.
She took my arm as we struggled to keep up with the procession. Suddenly she turned to me and with complete conviction declared: "I felt a shift inside my body today. I believe the cancer has left me. Mary has answered my prayer. She says I'm to be allowed more time with my children."
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Siobhán certainly never doubted that she had been spared by the grace of God. She never ceased giving grateful thanks for her reprieve and returned to the faith of her childhood with a renewed fervour.
When you have been so close and stared death in the face, life becomes more precious than ever. >Siobhán set about completing all the things she thought would be denied to her for ever.
Her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson tells her story in a soon-to-be published book previewed in the Daily Mail,
An atheist until two years ago, Jennifer visits a funeral home for the first time since her conversion to Catholicism
Yesterday I found myself alone in a room with the body of a deceased person.
What surprised me about that was that it didn't feel all that different from the last time I went to a viewing before a funeral, back when I was a teenager. Not that I expected a chorus of angels or to hear the voice of God or anything, but I guess I thought it would feel noticeably different to see death face-to-face now that I'm aware of God's existence. But it didn't. It didn't feel different because seeing death so close up, then as now, stripped away any high-minded theories or explanations I might try to invoke and left me only with a certain unmistakable feeling, a feeling that came from some primordial part of my mind.
Yesterday, I was able to put my finger on just what that feeling was. I realized in that moment, standing next to a body in an open coffin in a silent room, that I was aware of something at the very deepest level of my consciousness. It was something simultaneously obvious yet easy to ignore, like the fact that there was a ceiling above my head and a floor beneath my feet. It was something I'd felt before, when I looked at my grandmother in her coffin as an atheist teenager so many years ago:
This is only a body. The soul lives on
The persistence of cellular memory after an organ has been transplanted from one donor to another has never been explained.
There's the woman whose personality changed after receiving a kidney transplant; she started to read Jane Austen and Dostoevsky instead of celebrity trash. The woman who was terrified of heights who became a climber. The lumberjack who received a female kidney and developed a passion for housework and knitting. The very health conscious dancer who received a heart and lung transplant and became aggressive and impetuous with a passion for Kentucky fried chicken. Or the little 8 year old girl who received a heart transplant from a murdered 10-year-old girl. The recipient's dreams of being murdered were so traumatic she was sent to a psychiatrist who became convinced she was describing the actual circumstances of the murder. When the details were given to the police, the killer was easily identified and arrested,
Is this another case of the persistence of cellular memory?
Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.
That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.
Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.
"I felt like I had known her for years," Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I just stared."
In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications in Hilton Head.
From their previous marriages, the couple had six children and six grandchildren scattered across South Carolina and Georgia.
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.
The last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a “Mine is shorter than yours”: you want a death that is painless and quick. Even here there are choices. What is “quick”? You might prefer something instantaneous, like walking down Fifth Avenue and being hit by a flower pot that falls off an upper-story windowsill. Or, if you’re the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion. Take a couple of months, pain-free but weakening in some vague nineteenth-century way. You can use the time to make your farewells, plan your funeral, cut people out of your will, finish that fat nineteenth-century novel that you’ve been lugging around since the twentieth century, and generally tidy up.
Mine is longer than yours, Michael Kingsley reflects in The New Yorker.
She was critically injured in a highway crash that killed five others and mourned as dead until the stunning identity mix-up became apparent.
Crash survivor in ID mix-up writes book.
Breast-surgery complications kill West Boca High cheerleader
Stephanie Kuleba had a charmed life: captain of the varsity cheerleading squad at West Boca High, a nearly perfect grade-point average, good looks and a ticket to the University of Florida, where she would start her journey toward becoming a medical doctor.
Her friends said she was "perfect," so when Kuleba died Saturday of complications from breast augmentation surgery, none of them could understand how the girl whose success in life "was a sure thing" could perish in such a strange and devastating fashion.
Condolences to her family.
Flemming Rose reports that one of the 12 Danish cartoonists who contributed to the infamous Muhammed cartoons in 2005, Erik Abild Soerensen, has died at age 89.
When he got the inevitable death threats, Danish police came to his apartment to give him some advice about security.
"I have passed the age of 85, I am sick and I have just lost my wife. Can it get worse? I don’t think so.”
Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die
The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.
In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."
It added: "Offenders will be severely punished."
He had spent more than 6 years in jail after being convicted of shooting a Boston police officer when DNA evidence freed him. Awarded a total of $3.7 million for his wrongful conviction, Stephan Cowans was
the happiest man in the world," said his grandmother, Laura Lenard, who spent her savings trying to free him from prison. "But it didn't stay that way, and the money didn't help."
A year later he was shot to death in his new home in Randolph
which he bought several months before in an effort to escape the increasingly consuming fear he felt in Boston. Authorities have yet to find the killer.
Relatives, friends, and lawyers who represented Cowans say the money took a toll, and some blame his sudden wealth for his death.
Near the end of his life, Cowans was telling them he wished he never received the money.
A future reclaimed, a windfall, a life lost.
When a doctor hastens a death in order to harvest the organs, he faces criminal charges.
Dr. Hootan Roozrokh is the Surgeon Accused of Speeding a Death to Get Organs.
He faces 8 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Much as I am in favor of organ donations willingly made, I am inalterably opposed to hastening any death to harvest organs. In law school, it's called a "bright line" - one step over the line and that's it. I don't care how sympathetic a case can be made for the doctor. He went over the line and should be punished. Let his experience of being charged and maybe his conviction stand as a warning to other doctors.
His lawyer argues that the doctor did nothing to adversely affect the quality or length of his patient's life.
We can not know that because we do not know what is in the mind of a dying person.
"Adversely affecting the quality or length" of life is such a slippery standard. Who is to say what the 'quality of life' is? Yet everyone can understand what 'hastening death' is.
What the doctor did is see his patient as an object not a subject, a life to be shortened for his convenience. By so doing, he denied his patient the dignity we owe every person. We don't have to kill people to get their organs.
His mother got it right.
“He didn’t deserve to be like that, to go that way,” she said. “He died without dignity and sympathy and without respect.”
The chief executioner of the Khmer Rouge wept when he returned to the place where thousands died on his orders.
Around 15,000 people are believed to have been taken from the S-21 torture centre in Phnom Penh, where Duch was commandant, to Choeung Ek just outside the city, known as the killing fields.
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Duch, 65, a born-again Christian whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, wept and prayed before the tree on which his subordinates dashed out the brains of babies and small children.
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More than 1.7 million people are thought to have been executed or died as a result of torture, disease, starvation and overwork during the Maoist regime of the Khmer Rouge, which lasted from 1975 to 1979.
The five most senior surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are now in custody, waiting trail. Duch, a former maths teacher, was arrested in 1999 after being tracked down by Nic Dunlop, the Irish journalist and photographer.
Khmer Rouge killer weeps over victims' graves.
So spoke Pope Benedict XVI when he received participants at an international congress entitled: "Close by the Incurable Sick Person and the Dying: Scientific and Ethical Aspects."
In keeping with the teaching of the Church for centuries, the Pope Strongly Condemned all Forms of Euthanasia.
Death", said the Pope, "concludes the experience of earthly life, but through death there opens for each of us, beyond time, the full and definitive life. ... For the community of believers, this encounter between the dying person and the Source of Life and Love represents a gift that has a universal value, that enriches the communion of the faithful". In this context, he highlighted how all the community should participate alongside close relatives in the last moments of a person's life. "No believer", he said, "should die alone and abandoned".
The Holy Father called for time off so that relatives could care for the terminally ill.
"A greater respect for individual human life inevitably comes through the concrete solidarity of each and all, and constitutes one of the most pressing challenges of our times".
--
"The synergetic efforts of civil society and of the community of believers must ensure not only that everyone is able to live in a dignified and responsible way, but also that they can face moments of trial and of death in the finest condition of fraternity and solidarity, even where death comes in a poor family or a hospital bed".
Does the promise of eternal life deny the reality of death and help us escape from grief? Is faith an evasion, a psycho-social narcotic developed to avoid the pain of loss?
The Tears of Abraham by R.R. Reno in First Things .
If we turn to the Bible, then we will be surprised to discover that, in the primal history of humanity, death seems to evoke no strong emotional responses.
But something odd happens. With Abraham comes the promise: land, prosperity, and the immortality of countless descendants. ...for the very first time in the Bible, we find a scene of mourning. Abraham enters her tent and weeps over his dead wife (Gen. 23:2).
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Thus the psychological paradox of faith: a belief in God’s promises heightens rather than softens the existential pain of death.
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Faith blocks this easy deliverance from the afflictions of loss. But with hope comes more than heightened affliction; it also stiffens our resistance to the power of death. Abraham does not weep forever. The pain of loss has brought him low, but he “rose up from before his dead” (23:3). Stricken by the power of death—what could be more powerful we often wonder?—he straightens and prepares himself for action. He goes to the local chieftains. He wants a burial place for Sarah, a place to put her “out of my sight” (23:4)
--
“Out of my sight!” It is a shocking thing to say about the body of a loved one, but it is a sentiment repeated in the Bible. Jesus chastises one who would follow him but wishes to delay on order to bury his father. “Let the dead bury their dead,” he says (Matt. 8:22, KJV). The principle is not general, as if Christ came to abolish the law (both natural and revealed) that compels children to mourn for, bury, and remember their parents. Rather, like Abraham who rises from his distress, those who follow Christ must recognize that even as death continues to crush life, it cannot control the future. “O death, where is thy victory?” asks St. Paul with haughty confidence in the power of life. “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55).
From a Buddhist hospice, the Signs of Dying with Suggested Cares as well as After Death Care
A simple practice for the dead that is appropriate for Christians, Buddhists or a person of any spiritually, is to visualize God, Buddha (or who ever) on the top of the head of the deceased and while saying out loud or silently to the deceased "Now you have died and will leave your body, your work here is finished, there is nothing you can take with you, let go of everything including all regrets and be your true self, a being of light and love for all those you have known and not known. Now you can learn everything you need, generate supreme faith and devotion to your refuge and the wish to be unified with your (divine source, your God, your spiritual master, the Dharmakaya, or Amitabha Buddha).
A South Florida man pronounced dead from a massive heart attack and then brought back to life. His doctor says the man was raised from the dead by a simple prayer.
Man starves himself to death in a treehouse.
A man in Germany has committed suicide by hiding deep in a forest and starving himself to death.
The man, who has not been named, kept a diary as his life ebbed away...in which he wrote of his pain at the break-up of his marriage, his estrangement from his daughter and his long-term unemployment.
A sad story and ending.
Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.
From This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University.
Mortality defines the human condition. "We all have our dead — we all have our Graves," a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consolation." Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though "we all have our dead," and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War's rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II.
--
In the Civil War the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a "harvest of death." By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, "nearly every household mourns some loved one lost." Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death's threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war's experiences. As a Confederate soldier observed, death "reigned with universal sway," ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response
--
The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
It is work to deal with the dead as well, to remove them in the literal sense of disposing of their bodies, and it is also work to remove them in a more figurative sense. The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.
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The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
The mother of three didn't know that she had bowel cancer probably for years. Not until she was four months pregnant with her fourth child did she learn that she had cancer, it had spread to her liver and doctors gave her little hope for recovery.
She refused to terminate her pregnancy and delayed her chemotherapy to give her baby the best chance of life.
Mom makes ultimate sacrifice for her new baby
She told her husband: "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live."
Mrs Allard, of St Olaves, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, spent just two months with her son before losing her fight for life eight days ago.
Her husband Martyn, an oil field technician, yesterday paid tribute to her as the "best wife and mum in the world".
"Lorraine was so brave. I can't begin to describe how brave she was," 34-year-old Mr Allard said.
"She knew all too well she didn't have long to live. So she put little Liam's life before her own."
Immediately after Liam was born, she began chemotherapy but to no avail. Her husband was with her when she died.
On the day Lorraine died, she hadn't eaten for two weeks and couldn't drink.
"I laid beside her and she was gripping my hand quite tight.
"We were like that for about half an hour. I could feel against my chest that her heart was slowing down. She just slipped away after that. It was very peaceful.
"When Liam is old enough, I won't tell him that Lorraine gave her life for him, but I will say she made sure he had a good chance of life.
"She told me she didn't want him to feel bad about it."
A remarkable woman.
He was a speeding motorist who killed a teenage cyclist is now suing the boy's parents over damage to his luxury car.
Iriondo's parents were shocked.
"It's the final straw, a stab in the back," Iriondo's mother, Rosa Trinidad said, according to El Pais. "Before the lawsuit we thought the poor guy would find it hard to live the rest of his life with the thought of having caused our son's death.
Need I say they were bureaucrats?
Sailor back from the dead.
A Polish sailor who came back from a fishing trip to find he'd been declared dead has failed to convince bureaucrats he's still alive.
Piotr Kucy, 37, said: "I stood there in front of them and said look, I'm alive, but they wouldn't accept it."
Kucy left his home in the port town of Swinoujscie for a two week fishing trip - but when he came back he found local authorities had declared him dead after wrongly identifying a body washed up-ashore.
He said since then local authorities have refused to recognise him as being still alive.
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"But now I'm alive the authorities don't seem to want to do anything. I have contacted the prosecution in Swinoujscie asking them to bring me back. Five months have passed since then and nothing. No response. I have to work, insure myself, but I can't because I'm still dead!"
The news that Heath Ledger was dead at 28 shocked everyone who knew him personally and those who knew him only through his acting. HIs great fame came with particularly in Brokeback Mountain. He was very good at seeming sadly troubled. He said of his character Ennis
"The challenge was to capture the stillness of him. I have kind of semi-frantic, nervous energy. Harnassing that was something I thought I'd have to work out. Shooting in the wilderness, the stillness became like this innate quality
Of course, being a celebrity death, we learn every small detail of how his dead body was discovered in Soho by the housekeeper and a masseuse. Were pills strewn all around? Was it suicide? Was he troubled or happy? Distraught over the breakup of his relationship with Michelle Williams? Despairing over his separation from their 2-year-old daughter Matilda Rose? Most likely it was the mixing of prescription drugs for sleeping and anxiety that lead to the accidental overdose.
All these questions and more will be endlessly asked and debated as our culture's celebrity maw likes nothing better than the sudden death of a talented young star.
But first of all, he was somebody's father, lover, son, brother and friend and for them this is a great tragedy and to them condolences.
Said his grieving father in Perth,
He was a down-to-earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving and unselfish individual who was an inspiration to many.
It's very sad to see a young life of such promise cut short.
Bridgend in South Wales is a small town that's been rocked to its core with the copycat suicides of seven young people.
Although they did not know each other, all are linked in a 'suicide chain' on the social networking site Bebo.
Melanie Davies, whose son Thomas killed himself in February following the deaths of his friends Dale and David said: "It's like a craze – a stupid sort of fad.
"They all seem to be copying each other by wanting to die.
Natasha Rando was a wild child who surfed her way to suicide and 'virtual immortality'.
Burglar finds corpse, calls police
When he stumbled upon a corpse, he felt compelled to call the police.
Man wakes up in coffin at his own wake.
His body felt limp and cold so his family, convinced that his hour had come, called the funeral home. They dressed him in his best suit and then gathered round to bid him a final farewell.
"I couldn't believe it. I thought I must be mistaken and I shut my eyes," Mr Carrasco's nephew Pedro told the Ultimas Noticias newspaper.
"When I opened them again, my uncle was looking at me. I started to cry and ran to get something to open up the coffin to get him out."
The man who "rose from the dead" said he was not in any pain and only asked for a glass of water.
Good thing the funeral home did not embalm him.
Wei Wenhua, a Chinese blogger, happened upon a confrontation between city inspectors and villagers who were protesting over the dumping of waste near their homes in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
When Wei took out his cell phone to record the protest, more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him brutally for more than 5 minutes.
He was dead on arrival at the Tianmen hospital reported CNN.
A national outcry followed with thousands posting internet messages calling for the abolishment of the Chengguan, the Chinese municipal inspectors, a para military force used by local officials as trouble-shooters.
One official was sacked and more than 100 people are under investigation in the murder reports the BBC
When Jon Katz and his fie-year-old Border collie Izzy became hospice volunteers, he didn't expect that he would be such a natural.
My dog's amazing gift with hospice patients
He approaches people in pain, people in comas, with dementia and paralysis, disfigured and frightened, always softly, carefully, and lovingly. He threads his way around IVs and oxygen tanks. I've never had a dog that could do this kind of work, nor could I begin to imagine how to train a dog to do it.
--
Izzy was watching carefully. When she put her right hand on her knee, he made his move, slithering toward her and placing his nose beneath her hand.
She froze, as if shocked, and her eyes widened. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. I saw her hand close over Izzy's slender nose as he sat stock-still. A slight smile came over her worried face, and she calmed, visibly. "Oh," she said, softly, with pleasure. "Oh. It's a dog."
Izzy didn't move for at least 10 minutes. Neither did Etta. She moaned still, but more softly.
One of the aides came in on her rounds and looked shocked. "My God," she said, "that's the first time I've ever seen her smile."
One Rose Bowl Parade float will carry 24 people whose lives were saved and renewed by organ, eye, tissue and blood donors sponsored by OneLegacy, a nonprofit organ and tissue recovery agency in Los Angeles.
Also on the float entitled Life Takes Flight will be 4 hot air balloons adorned with 40 "floragraphs" of donors like Christopher Field who died at 16 but whose organs have been given greater life to others.
Christopher's corneas have given two people sight. His bones have been used to prepare 39 bone grafts, with two transplanted already and the remainder released for hospital use in procedures such as spinal and reconstructive surgeries. Christopher's cardiac tissue was used to patch a defect in a young boy's heart in Massachusetts.
In all, Christopher's tissue donation will have gone to almost 50 people in need, according to the New England Organ Bank.
When she gave birth to an out-of-wedlock baby boy, the result of an affair with her dancing instructor, Gladys Mary Briggs locked the baby's body in a suitcase and kept it with her in her council flat for 50 years.
She died three months after council staff discovered the body.
The baby's father, now 102, had no comment because he "was very worried about the consequences."
Mother kept baby's body for 50 years.
A sad, much too soon, death in Palo Alto
Man electrocuted while decorating tree with lights.
In effort to add holiday cheer to an East Palo Alto neighborhood ended in a gruesome tragedy Saturday when a man stringing lights in a tree at an apartment complex struck a high voltage power line, sending 12,000 kilovolts of electricity through his body and killing him instantly, fire officials said.
Hundreds of neighbors looked on for more than an hour at a grisly scene as the body of the 23-year-old man was suspended about 60 feet above ground because the electricity that had passed through him had affixed him to the tree, according to Menlo Park Fire Protection District Chief Harold Schapelhouman.
"Electricity always tries to find a ground and it went through his arm and leg and essentially welded him to the tree," Schapelhouman said.
"Our heart goes out to this young man and his family; he was trying to improve things a little bit for Christmas and he made a small miscalculation and it cost him his life."
Condolences to his family.
Is someone brutally killing Mexico's country music stars?
Thirteen have been brutally murdered in the past 18 in a bizarre wave of torture and murder.
Songs of Love and Murder, Silenced by Killings
The motives for the killings remain a matter of speculation, and no evidence has been found to link them to a single killer. In some cases, the musicians appeared to have ties to organized crime figures, making them potential targets in reprisal attacks from rival gangs.
Others had composed ballads known as narcocorridos, glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which can offend other drug dealers and hit men. In still other cases, as the musicians’ fame grew, they may have become embroiled with criminals unwittingly.
I think this is so horrifying because it seems to be counter to all instinctual tendencies, much less spiritual or religious ones.
Cancer mother - given six months to live - kills 5-year-old son before taking her own life.
The father of the boy is grief-stricken. A friend said, "She adored Lewis and I guess she didn't want to be apart from him - even in death. I think that's why she did it."
To me it seems the ultimate in selfishness and confusion, a sad tale of dying woman who couldn't think straight.
It seems to be an affliction of the times when some women see their children not as persons but as extensions of themselves.
Remember the story about the world's oldest mother who gave birth to twins a week short of her 67th birthday. She lied about her age to get IVF treatment because she always wanted children even though she had never married. She choose the donors of eggs and sperm from a catalogue and paid the estimated $40,000 by selling her flat in Spain. She's been struck down with cancer.
UPDATE: Apparently the woman who killed her five-year-old did not have cancer. Said Detective Chief Inspector
"We would like to clarify on behalf of the families that Emma had not been diagnosed with cancer and therefore was not receiving treatment.
"We do not know, and will never know, why Emma said she had the disease.
Since 1983, Medicare has paid for hospice care for people in their last six months of life, about $135 a day.
It worked quite well as long as most hospice patients were cancer patients who died pretty quickly once curative treatment stopped and only palliative care continued.
But now more patients are using hospice and those patients are living longer in hospice, often well past the 6 month limit. Hospice payment has become one of the fastest growing components of Medicare with spending nearly tripled since 2000.
In Hospice Care, Longer Lives Mean Money Lost.
The federal government wants its money back,
Hundreds of hospice providers across the country are facing the catastrophic financial consequence of what would otherwise seem a positive development: their patients are living longer than expected.
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.”
Israeli fashion model died weighing only 60 pounds. Two years ago she was admitted to the hospital when, unable to bear her own weight, she collapsed into the arms of her fashion photographer and friend Adi Barkan.
"When she fell down, I felt the bones going into my legs, like a knife. When she fell down, I felt like I took hold of something from the grave,"
He is now campaigning to end the use of underweight models
Did Model Die from Pressure to be Thin?
A father who ordered his daughter's death for falling in love with a man who didn't come from their Iraqi village was found guilty of murder in a London court yesterday
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was strangled with a boot lace, stuffed into a suitcase and buried in a back garden.
Her death is the latest in an increasing trend of such killings in Britain, home to some 1.8 million Muslims. More than 100 homicides are under investigation for being potential "honor killings."
Because the European authorities are bringing more of honor killings to trial, it seems that in Turkey anyway, women are forced to commit suicide for bringing dishonor on their families.
Women Forced into Honor Suicides
Young girls can be accused of dishonouring the family simply for wearing jeans or glancing at a boy or even being looked at by a man in a wrong way.
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Sky News spoke to another woman whose identity cannot be revealed. She married at the age of 15. Her husband beat her and was unfaithful.
When she complained and asked for a divorce her own family told her to commit suicide.
"My sister said kill yourself, kill yourself. Your husband, your family disowns you.
Only the code of silence, the blanket of secrecy is keeping these crimes from coming to the attention of the prosecutor. The shame of such families who abet such actions is misplaced, it belongs on them.
After his girlfriend kicked him out, 32-year-old Charles Tucker, Jr decided to sneak back into her house using the cat door.
The girlfriend found him dead in the door and called 911.
"He's a big guy. I don't even know how he could fit through there," Elliot (his good friend) said. "Probably to get in and unlock the door. They said he had one arm through there and his head was caught in there like he was to reach up and unlock the door because there's no way he could fit through there."
The nun who felt a call to be a funeral director
From the Deacon, She sees dead people.
"I was reading St. Mark's account of the resurrection and the words seemed to jump off the page: 'When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.' It hit me that those three women were the first ones to witness the resurrection because they were going to minister to Jesus in death as they did in life. Now it's called embalming. I just couldn't get it out of my head.
She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. "Consoling the sorrowing and burying the dead are directions in the Rule of St. Benedict, the way of life we as Benedictines follow," Sister Chris said. "And, I knew that the best gift I had been given in my lifetime was the gift of compassion, along with the ability to listen. I realized I should use that gift; I didn't have the right to ignore it. So I went to Sister Mary Agnes Patterson, who was the prioress at the time. She looked at me and asked, 'Where would you go to study?' There was a program offered at Kansas City Kansas Community College, so I wouldn't have to travel very far. With my community's blessing I took the first steps toward this ministry."
More
"Funerals are for the living, not the dead. A funeral is a time for family and friends to express their love and gratitude for what that person has done for them."
The day before the New York City Marathon, runners were stunned when they learned that 28-year-old professional runner Ryan Shay collapsed and died in Central Park during the Olympic marathon trials.
“To have someone so young and so well trained die in the race, it is just an incredible fluke,” said Dr. Lewis Maharam, the medical director of the New York City Marathon. “Something had to be underlying.”
Small town mourns a running marvel
It snowed the night they brought Ryan Shay home to bury him. Three hundred candles in paper bags lined the inner lane of the high school track. The wind extinguished some candles and ignited several bags into balls of flame.
“A kid from a village of 1,000 makes it big, that’s a million-to-one shot,” Quinn Barry, the athletic director at Central Lake High, said as he patiently relit candles, maintaining his frozen vigil.
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He died at 28, and Ryan Shay will be remembered here as the precocious, dedicated boy who could do 25 one-armed pushups in kindergarten; who was co-valedictorian of his high school class and four times the state cross-country champion; who was a cardiovascular marvel with a standing heart rate from youth of 30 beats a minute.
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Autopsy and toxicology reports have yet to be completed. Given the tarnished nature of running, where doping has been widespread, Shay’s father has asked that the toxicology report be made public so that it might absolve any suspicion that Ryan used illicit substances.
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His father said that Shay was found to have an enlarged heart at age 14 and was told last spring that his low heart rate might require him to wear a pacemaker when he got older
My sincere condolences to his wife Alicia who married him in July. This is not her first experience with death. When she was 16, her boyfriend, also a runner, died of a rare form of leukemia.
My heart goes out to her.
A 24-year-old lab technician has been arrested in New Jersey on a charge of sexual penetration of human remains.
A new employee, he conned a guard into giving him access to the morgue at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. There he unzipped the body bag of a 92-year-old woman and was having sex with her corpse when the guard saw him.
"Utterly shocks the conscience," said the superior court judge.
Yesterday, the Feast of All Saints, Catholics celebrated all those now in heaven. Today, Catholics commemorate All Souls Day for all the faithful departed.
Many churches display the Book of the Names of the Dead which contains the names of all those who have died in the parish.
Souls that are not yet in heaven are undergoing purification in Purgatory. Prayers can speed their passage from Purgatory to the Beatific vision of Heaven, so prayers for the dead can be especially useful.
In Mexico, the "Dia de Los Muertos" is celebrated on November 2. Catholic beliefs have merged with some pre-contact beliefs and the Day of the Dead has become a happy celebration with family ancestors that have died. The Day of the Dead Blog has many photos of vigils and the parade of the children.
In Manila, the Day of the Dead is for the living
After lighting candles and praying at the tombs of their loved ones, Filipino families spend the whole day in the country's graveyards, eating and chatting.
"We celebrate this every year, no fail. We all come here together and bring food, and we stay all day," said Lolita Capoquian, who came to pay her respects to her daughter who was killed in a car accident 14 years ago.
The Day of the Dead festival has its origins in a pre-Hispanic belief that the dead return to earth one day each year to visit their loved ones.
She contracted the hospital superbug, c. difficile, while undergoing dialysis and passed it on to husband when she returned home.
When both were in the hospital, the staff moved their beds next to each other so they hold hands, then they switched off the life support machines.
They died within 20 minutes of each other.
Their deaths are blamed on the superbug that thrives on poor hygiene that appears to be endemic in NHS hospitals in Britain.
Newlyweds' perfect hike ends in tragedy
They were newlyweds spending a brilliant autumn day hiking through the White Mountains, a pair of Harvard graduate students enjoying the foliage of the northern woods.
When Brian Wood and Stine Rossel sat on a fallen tree at the top of a crest, they thought they had found the perfect perch to view the fall colors. Then, from the simplest act - a picnic in the woods - a bizarre, rapid-fire series of events led to unimaginable tragedy Saturday.
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Wood said he "scooted over" to be closer to his new wife, then heard a snapping sound - the tree breaking at its roots. In a flash, the part of the tree where they were sitting shifted, sending the couple tumbling down the hill. The tree rolled down on top of them, slamming into Rossel's head and knocking her unconscious.
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"She was extremely happy" Matskevich said. "She got married to the man she loved. She finished her PhD. She was full of plans. Who could have guessed it was her last evening?"
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"She was like the sun," Wood said of his wife. "It's like the sun disappearing from the sky."
What a sad story. Condolences to her family, especially her husband.
Writing in Encounter magazine in 1955, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argued that death had become the great unmentionable. The Victorians were prudish about sex and candid about death, he said, whereas Westerners of the mid-20th century were garrulous about sex and, well, stiff about stiffs. Death be not loud.
The New Death by Stephen Bates in the Wall St Journal.
But we shouldn't be too hasty in congratulating ourselves and deriding earlier generations as uptight and self-deluded. We can chatter and chortle about death without honestly confronting it. In fundamental ways, our culture is reinventing death rites and, in the process, growing further apart from death itself.
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What's wrong with all this? At the individual level, funerary frivolity trivializes both the death and the life that preceded it. At the social level, tradition and ritual, passed from generation to generation, create a common framework for discussing life's ultimate questions. When we choose customized, individualized, let-it-be-me funerals, we start slipping from lingua franca to tabula rasa. Soon, we're talking only to ourselves.
Next week, October 30 at 9 pm, Frontline will present a documentary featuring the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch about whom I've written a number of posts.
The Calling of a Funeral Director
Going the Distance
Death Lite
The Gorer quote brings to mind a favorite quote, Money has replaced sex as a driving force, death has replaced sex as a taboo, and sex has replaced bridge as a social event for mixed foursomes, Reginald Perrin.
Cannabis-smoking satanist admits knifing vicar to death in act of 'inhuman savagery'
A deranged cannabis smoker who was obsessed with Satanism stabbed a country vicar to death in his churchyard.
Father Paul Bennett, 59, was killed in a vicious daylight attack by Geraint Evans as he tried to protect his family.
His horrified wife fought desperately to fend off paranoid the schizophrenic as he knifed the grandfather repeatedly in the head and throat.
Georgina Bennett grabbed the first thing she could find - her grandson's toy sword - in a brave effort to protect her husband but was unable to stop the killer land a final knife blow through the vicar's heart.
What a terrible way for a country vicar to die. May in rest in peace and deep condolences to his family.
The Chinese woman who killed her lover with a kiss of death when she suspected him of being unfaithful was sentenced to death in Shanghai.
She passed a capsule of rat poison from her mouth to her lover who swallowed the capsule and died.
Chinese woman gives kiss of death.
Ever wondered what goes on in a funeral home when a body is prepared for viewing?
Linda's brother-in-law is a funeral director, a mortician and she hung out with him one day where he worked. Kicking buckets and whistling in the dark.
I never understood why the dead were painted and made to look alive, but now I see that’s not really the purpose. Watching Joe at work, I see that he restores bodies to a restful state, rather than an unnatural one. They don’t look like they’re going to sit up in the casket and say howdy, they look dead. But they look readied for a journey; dressed up, cleaned, and arranged just so. He creates an environment that helps people say goodbye.
I suppose what my brother in law does for a living gives a lot of people the creeps, and sure, there are some creepy aspects to it. It’s not a career for everyone. But when I picture the great web of people he has influenced, whose tears have soaked the shoulder of his suit jackets, whose loved ones’ bodies he prepared for their last reunion, I am incredibly proud to know him. I’m amazed by him, really.
You’ve got to love a guy who once sent out a picture of himself in mortuary school holding up a corpse’s hand in the thumb’s up position, with the text “I PUT THE FUN IN FUNERAL” underneath.
via Growabrain.
The obituary editor of the Economist reflects on death and the afterlife in The Glad Reaper.
Lives as they are lived are far from neat. But the summing up of a life in a thousand words needs the imposition of a shape, and a circle is as good as anything.
Although I write biographies in my spare time, I’ve never been happy with the chronological or longitudinal form. I seldom read biography for fun, and when I do it’s in a strange way: first the childhood, usually until the subject falls in love, and then the death. Sometimes I read no more than that: the beginning and the end. It seems to me that these are the times (before the chaos of existence really closes round) when the essence of the person is most naked and exposed. We see who they are.
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In this strange age―where we fear death from left-behind back-packs and parked cars, and where we watch the deaths of strangers on the evening news but shrink from attending the deaths of our friends―obituarists have the easier cases. I deal generally with natural mortality in lives full of years and doings. But whether death comes slowly and privately, or randomly and publicly, its cause is not what most interests me. The vital question is, what next?
David Kipen explores Mark Twain's lifelong preoccupation with death in Twain's most chilling time was a fall in San Francisco
A cheerful approach it isn't, but a careful scrutiny of Twain's life and career discloses a man fascinated with suicide, murder, funerals, wakes, corpses, damnation and reincarnation to a degree well beyond mere morbidity. Rumors of Mark Twain's obsession with death cannot possibly be exaggerated.
Ultimately, of course, death is one of the few things we all have in common. However, Twain survived a youth more shadowed by mortality than many, and they were deaths of a particularly immediate and grisly kind.
Not only did his forbidding father, Judge Clemens, die of pneumonia when Twain was 11, but Twain is said to have witnessed the autopsy through a keyhole. Not only was he at his "sinless" brother Henry's bedside as he lay dying after a steamboat explosion, but Twain would forever blame himself for getting Henry his fateful job on board.
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But the uncanniest evidence for Twain's fixation on mortal matters is simply this: that in his two most enduring books, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and its habitually underrated junior partner, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," both title characters essentially attend their own funerals
Twain came very close to suicide in San Francisco in 1866.
When Twain put the pistol to his head that day in San Francisco, he couldn't know that he was holding the future of American literature at gunpoint. No man in that position ever knows just how much one bullet can wing. As always, best not to chance it.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more
than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
George Bernard Shaw
Rawlins Gilliland writes in Dying Laughing about the time his next door
neighbor Chuck died.
At the funeral home, his widow was hurt to see so few flowers in his viewing room. So, spotting a sea of unattended flora next door, I decided to briefly borrow a triumphant standing easel spray and placed it next to Chuck. Unfortunately, the family of the intended recipient began arriving. There was no discreet way to return their show-stopper from Chuck's room since the entire family was admiring his splashy arrangement, although confounded; who were "Denise and Tony", the names on the card? Feeling guilty, I impulsively entered a third room and purloined a carnation showpiece and delivered IT to the original man's congregation. However, when someone read this card aloud, inscribed, "We'll make love in heaven. Love, Marla", the dead man's significant someone became bellicose, bellowing, "Who the hell is Marla?"
Georgia Man Dies after Armless Man Headbutts Him During Fight Over a Woman
Catholic clarification on administration of food and water to those in "vegetative states"
First question: Is the administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a "vegetative state" morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or cannot be administered to the patient without causing significant physical discomfort?
Response: Yes. The administration of food and water even by artificial means is, in principle, an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life. It is therefore obligatory to the extent to which, and for as long as, it is shown to accomplish its proper finality, which is the hydration and nourishment of the patient. In this way suffering and death by starvation and dehydration are prevented.
Second question: When nutrition and hydration are being supplied by artificial means to a patient in a "permanent vegetative state", may they be discontinued when competent physicians judge with moral certainty that the patient will never recover consciousness?
Response: No. A patient in a "permanent vegetative state" is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means.
We've learned There's more 'there' there . That sleeping pills might wake some of these people to strange and wonderful rebirths, or music might stir their damaged brains, or they might come back to say they were totally aware of everything even as they were being starved.
Others ask What's the Point?
I agree that the administration of 'extraordinary' methods such as ventilation and respiration are not required, and, if used can cruelly prolong dying, but the deliberate starvation of any human is abhorrent.
These days when the boundary between life and death can be so murky, when people often don't know what to do, the position of the Vatican is bracing.
After three days of non-stop internet gaming, a Chinese man dies.
Police rule out suicide, say it was exhaustion. New laws planned.
Did Ddemetrio Nagtalon cause his own death by rushing to help a after a truck he rented and brought back because the parking brake repeatedly malfunctioned while a worker inside tried to fix the brake?
This may be the first death by guillotine in the U.S by some one who did it himself.
Man Builds Guillotine to Kill Himself
I learned that Rosh Hashanah is The Birthday of the World from Judith Kesher at Kesher Talk.
Happy New Year 5768.
After watching my favorite songwriter Leonard Cohen and learning that he reworked the poem recited in Jewish synagogues on Rosh Hashannah, a rellgious poem meant to strike fear, I had to read the Unetanah tokef
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.
But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severe decree.
These are Leonard Cohen's lyrics for Who by Fire
And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche, who by powder,
who for his greed, who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?
May You Be Written and Sealed for a Good Year.
In Argentina, thousands are seeing the serene gaze of a remarkably preserved mummy of an Inca maiden. La Donacella or the Maiden was found at the bottom of an icy pit on a volcana, still dressed in fine clothes.
She was probably sacrificed in a ceremony marking the annual corn festival, given alcohol to sleep, and left to die at an altitude of 22,000 feet on a volcano over 500 years ago.
Teenage girl was frozen sacrifice
Struck and killed by a school bus, the office of the medical examiner tried for two days to identify the victim who had only an iPod and some keys in his possession.
Authorities use iPod to ID crash victim
With help from Apple employees, they used the digital music player’s serial number to trace the device to Adam Ray Finley, 30, a former Des Moines man who moved to the Twin Cities five years ago.
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Finley was a TV and film reviewer for America Online and wrote for several digital publications. He is survived by his parents and two siblings. His funeral will be Monday at Lake City Union Church in Lake City
“He was a tender-hearted gentle young man. We are devastated,” his father said. “It’s all just a blur.”
Let this be a lesson to those of you out there who don't bring beer and soft drink cans back to the store for the nickel deposit or throw them in the trash.
Beer cans block Ohio man's escape from burning house.
A Cincinnati area man who died in a house fire early Wednesday morning may have survived if his escape had not been blocked by a large pile of beer cans
Mabel Lopez, mother of 8, GED graduate and teacher of English as a second language lived in Phoenix for 40 years, reached out to anyone who needed help.
Two men, illegal immigrants, were on the street when Mabel found them. She let them live in a studio apartment behind her house, even gave them work painting rental houses she owned.
When she found them drinking beer at her house, she asked them to leave. They stabbed her.
With her last breath, she prayed for her killers
"At the first trial, they asked him (Martinez), 'What was the lady saying, was she screaming for help?' And he said, 'No, she said, "May God have mercy on your souls," ' " Paddack recalled. "With her dying breath, she was praying for her murderers. She wasn't praying for her children; she wasn't praying to have her life saved. She was praying for her murderer's souls. That's a hell of a lesson."
Condolences to her family.
Hanging from the inside of a two-story high tent, I assume with a rope around his neck, yet it was two hours before anyone in the large tent thought to take him down.
"His friends thought he was doing an art piece," reports the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Land Management.
I guess they counted too much on radical self reliance.
The first suicide in the 21 year history of the Burning Man festival
At Slate, Daniel Kevles gives us a history of poison. Favored more by women, trusted with food preparation and administration of medicine, as an undetectable way to get rid of husbands, cover up theft, and gain inheritances, arsenic became know as poudre de succession, "inheritance powder."
Poisoning was also relatively easy to get away with for centuries because possession of the murder weapon was by no means a clear indicator of guilt. Would-be poisoners could easily obtain the requisite materials from the shops of apothecaries or chemists, under the guise of using them in small doses for a cosmetic or medical purpose.
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Emsley, an accomplished science writer based at Cambridge University, dons his own detective's hat. He deploys recent scientific analyses of hair and exhumed bone, matches them against historical reports of victims' symptoms, and offers plausible explanations of the victims' bizarre behavior and mysterious or disputed deaths.
Mozart probably died of antimony poisoning, King Charles II of Britain, likely died from inhalation of intense mercury vapors while The Madness of King George was a textbook case of acute lead poisoning.
Most interesting is the case of Napoleon Bonaparte who was exhumed from his grave on St Helena to be reburied in Paris at Les Invalides twenty years after his death. His body was chemically tested and found to contain high levels of arsenic.
Who poisoned him? Was if the British? A jealous husband? Emsley argues that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper.
or more precisely, drawing on the work of an Italian scientist named Bartolomeo Gosio, by the green, arsenic-rich pigment in the wallpaper's star pattern.
At the end of the 19th century, Gosio was prompted to investigate why so many Italian children were inexplicably sickening and dying. Physicians suspected arsenic poisoning. Gosio demonstrated that a microorganism that grew on the flour-paste backing of the wallpaper could turn the arsenic in it into a gas that was powerful enough to make people ill and even kill them. If Napoleon chose the colors of his wallpaper to commemorate his imperial colors, Emsley writes, "[H]e did himself no favours … though they reminded him of his glorious past."
UPDATE: A new report from Vienna claims that Beethoven was done in by his physician who overdosed him with lead in a case of a cure gone wrong.
UPDATE 2: How could I have forgotten Oscar Wilde's last words, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
All from a deathbed friendship between a bishop and an atheist.
Fallaci returned to Italy in her final days because, she said, she didn't want to die in exile. She asked Fisichella to help arrange a room for her in Florence where she could look out at the famous dome of Brunelleschi atop the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. She also requested a CD with the sound of church bells to play softly in the background.
It was Fallaci's desire, Fisichella said, that on the day of her funeral, the bells of the cathedral would ring out. It wasn't easy to arrange, Fisichella said. Though he didn't elaborate, it's well known that some Catholics objected to bestowing such an honor upon a professed atheist, while others argued that it would be seen as an endorsement of her stridently anti-Islamic views. Nonetheless, Fisichella said, he managed to pull it off.
"With a great deal of difficulty, due to various polemics, it happened that when her coffin left the clinic to go to the cemetery, the bells of the Cathedral of Florence pealed for Oriana Fallaci," he said, to thunderous applause from the crowd in Rimini.
"We're prolonging life, but we're also prolonging dying," says Mercedes Bern-Klug, an end-of-life researcher at the University of Iowa, who studies what she terms "ambiguous dying syndrome." Hundreds of thousands of people are surviving longer with advanced dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or in coma states. For their loved ones, "coping with the ambiguity creates a unique type of stress," says Dr. Bern-Klug. "It's a form of angst we don't even have a name for in our culture."
Jeff Zaslow in the Wall St. Journal on Waiting for the End: When Loved Ones Are Lost in Limbo.
As medical advances continue to "deform the dying process," Dr. Bern-Klug predicts, families will have to deal with variations of limbo that are now unimaginable. It's territory that must be charted carefully, she says, as more of us share that experience of standing on a riverbank, waiting.
As a long-time mystery fan, I've been enthralled from time to time with the idea of the perfect murder.
Not that I have any plans or anyone in mind, I assure you. Seems like the best place for a perfect crime is aboard the high seas as Congressman Christopher Shays warns us in Missing on Cruises.
Disposal of the body is the difficult part so the prospect of being able to toss the body overboard is inviting.
The other big problem is keeping the secret and not telling anyone how brilliant you were.
Some murderers keep the body in a freezer sealed with duct tape until they confess on their deathbed.
A perfect murder is just too delicious not to share especially if it's about "the most missingist man in America", Judge Crater. An old woman who left a letter "Do Not Open Until My Death" in her safety deposit box broke open that case 73 years after Judge Crater stepped into a cab never to be seen again.
The desire to confess may prove irresistible.
And so, we come to the crime of the decade in Poland.
Crime author charged with murder after police read his perfect plot.
An author leafing through a newspaper comes across tantalising details of a murder so grisly that he becomes obsessed, and imagines the events into a novel. Or a murderer, so self-satisfied with the brilliance of his perfect crime, pens an account to pass off as fiction and enshrine it in literary history....
Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.
Prolonged litigation can split marriages, estrange families and deform lives. So I was delighted to read Pearl Buck heirs reach accord
The long-squabbling heirs of Pearl S. Buck's legacy have discovered a way to resolve their complex litigation: Banish the lawyers.
The Nobel laureate's children and Pearl S. Buck International, the charity in Bucks County the writer established before her death in Vermont in 1973, announced an amicable settlement yesterday of their dispute over who owns the recently recovered manuscript of The Good Earth, Buck's masterwork.
They sat down in the kitchen and locked out the lawyers.
"I don't think it was Pearl Buck's intent to have everybody at each other's throats over this," Long said. "This is the first time in 30-some years that everyone is talking nice, and that's important."
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Buck, who spent her later years promoting international harmony and racial understanding, left a legacy of disharmony among her closest survivors.
In her final years, the widowed writer took up with a dance instructor half her age, disinherited her children, and bequeathed her belongings to various competing interests. It took her heirs seven years in Vermont probate court to sort out ownership, though some issues were unresolved until yesterday.
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The agreement also calls for all litigation to cease.
"Abe Lincoln had useful advice - avoid litigation at all costs," Walsh said. "I wished we had been able to, but we couldn't. But now we have."
They shared a paranoid view of the world and gradually slipped into a shared psychosis.
The Puzzling, Tragic End of a Golden Couple
They were one of those New York couples: good-looking and ridiculously gifted. She had a voracious mind that intimidated nearly everyone, and blond hair she kept in braids. He was a certified art star, with appearances at the Whitney Museum and a CD cover for Beck among his lengthy list of credits.
Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were a formidable pair, and by all accounts, soul mates for the last 12 years. So a few weeks ago, when Duncan committed suicide at the age of 40, friends and family knew that Blake, 35, was devastated. No one, though, knew how devastated -- not his mother in Takoma Park, where he grew up, nor the curator putting together an upcoming solo show in Washington at the Corcoran.
A week later, on July 17, witnesses on Rockaway Beach in New York saw a man take off his clothes and walk into the ocean. On Monday, police confirmed that Blake had taken his own life, leaving behind a note that authorities would describe but not quote. "It was basically about wanting to be reunited with Theresa Duncan," said Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department. "It referenced her suicide and said that he hoped to rejoin her."
Ernest Norton was playing cricket with his 17-year-old son in Kent, England, when a group of 15 youths gathered at the fence around the outdoor tennis courts and began shouting abuse. The verbal abuse grew worse and the group began throwing stones and pieces of wood until one stone hit the side of his face and Norton collapsed and suffered a major heart attack.
Father died after being pelted by young mob.
One 12-year-old, two 13-year-olds and two 14-year-olds are now on trial.
Eugene Pilouw has diabetes that has damaged the nerves in his nose. That's why he says he couldn't smell his dead wife's body decomposing in a storage room in the back of their house.
He thought she had run away again and taken $250.
Tests are being conducted on the living and the dead.
The New England Journal of Medicine on Oscar the Cat
Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves
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Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices. [...]
From Scientific American, Arpad Vass, a forensic anthropologist answers the question, After a person's pulse and breathing stop, how much later does all cellular metabolism stop?
via bookofjoe.
Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Der Spiegel, his first in many years.
SPIEGEL: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of enormous desperation?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: Whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it.
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SPIEGEL: In 1987 in your interview with SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein you said it was really hard for you to speak about religion in public. What does faith mean for you?
Solzhenitsyn: For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.
SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?
Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me -- he died at the age of 27 -- and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
When you come face to face with death, what do you say to the victim's family? Seeking Words of Balm from The Ambulance Driver.
via Pajamas Media.
The Ambulance Driver recalls the moments, over seven years, when he had to tell anxious loved ones the person he was crouched over was dead; beyond his help. There were men gone from old age, young blond accident victims, the middle-aged expired from a heart attack, daredevil young men on their shattered motorcycles. And the anxious survivors “… and then I say The Words. ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’
The most popular grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is that of an American.
Jim Morrison, the lead singer for the Doors, was only 27 when he died, supposedly in a bathtub of natural causes. But a recent book says Morrison died of a heroin overdose in a hot Paris club, the Rock ' n Roll Circus.
How Jim Morrison died
"There was foam coming out of his lips," the former nightclub owner told TIME. A doctor who was in the club that night concluded that Morrison had overdosed, and "said Jim was dead," he says. "I wanted to call the police or rescue people to help. They [Morrison's drug dealers] said no," and instead had the body driven back to the apartment the singer had rented with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. It was then soaked in the bathtub.
This might sound like a juicy tale concocted to sell books. But Bernett isn't the only person in Paris who remembers that night 36 years ago, although it appears to have taken the publication of his book to prompt them to finally speak up. Patrick Chauvel — now a renowned war photographer — told TIME he was 19 and drunk that night, when he was dragooned into helping load Morrison's body into a car. Since he had just returned from photographing the Vietnam War, Chauvel was deemed especially suited to dealing with corpses. "We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," recalls Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison and did not cooperate with Bernett's book. Explaining the cover-up, Chauvel says: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it is not good p.r.
Maybe they are just used to dead bodies in New Jersey,
How else do you explain a 45-year-old man who came upon a dead man in a car than drove away with the corpse in the vehicle so he could try to use the dead man's ATM card.
He was only arrested after he tried to steal a purse from a woman and the police happened to come up the decomposing corpse in his pickup truck in the parking lot.
Condolences to the family of Maynard Samuel Anthony.
Most women I know generally pitch in to help clear off a dinner table and put away food after a dinner party. They don't think anything of it.
Even if they go down to the basement to put away food in the deep freeze, they certainly don't expect to open the door, and find, like the woman in Belgium, the dead bodies of the host's wife and stepson frozen solid.
Emily Post had no words for such an event, neither do I.
There's nothing like a deathbed confession to get people buzzing.
Lt Walter Haut, the public relations officer at Roswell Air Force base in 1947, left behind a sealed affidavit describing an alien craft and alien bodies
He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin.
They are described in his statement as about 1.2m tall, with disproportionately large heads.
Towards the end of the affidavit, Haut concludes: "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space".
What's particularly interesting about Walter Haut is that in the many interviews he gave before his death, he played down his role and made no such claims.
Jules Crittenden was dispatched to Roswell in 1997 to conduct a thorough investigation and delivers an important update on UFOs.
Personally, I think anyone who uses penis enlargement creams is a bit tetched in the head.
But concocting your own is just plain nuts.
The Cambodian government is warning delusional men against trying their own home remedies after a 35-year-old construction worker self-injected hair tonic cream into his own penis in the hopes of growing a thicker, more lustrous one. His treatment caused massive ulceration and left him in such permanent agony that he killed himself.
Home penis enlargement ends in painful death.
Now I am a fan of Tiger Balm.
Some say that Tiger Balm or Vicks Vaporub can cure a night time cough if you rub it on your feet.
But too much of a good thing is never good.
Arielle Newman, a 17-year-old New York girl used too much muscle cream and died. Lethal amounts of methyl salicylate, used in Bengay and Icy Hot, were found in her blood.
So far as I can tell using Wikipedia methyl sacliylate are not used in Tiger Balm, but is an active ingredient in Bengay and Icy Hot Heat Rub.
Condolences to her family who now will think of her whenever they smell the certain distinctive aroma.
No rain, no clouds, the sun shone down on David Canales, a landscaper, when he was struck and killed by a "bolt from the blue". That bizarre meteorological phenomenon is also called dry lightening and can kill without warning.
Dan Dixon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami, said that when Canales was hit, a typical afternoon storm was forming but nowhere near the area.
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''Most lightning will come from the base of a thunderstorm, inside that rain-shaft area,'' Dixon explained. ``But occasionally, what we call a bolt from the blue comes out of a thunderstorm still several miles away.''
The fair-weather bolts pack a bigger, deadlier punch and form differently.
Most lightning bolts carry a negative charge, but ''bolts from the blue'' have a positive charge, carry as much as 10 times the current, are hotter and last longer.
The bolts normally travel horizontally away from the storm and reach farther than typical lightning, then curve to the ground.
Like a killer curve ball
'My wife said the sky was blue, but the lightning bolt was the most horrible sound she had heard in her life,'' said Clemente Vazquez-Bello, owner of the home where Canales and two workers had come to do landscaping.
via Scribal Terror
Sleeping with the fishes takes on a whole new meaning...
DUBLIN, Ireland -- Pathologists inspected the thawed remains Wednesday of a missing Dublin criminal whose body was found, frozen rock solid, in the Mermaid Fish Shop.
Lost in the immigration debate is what happens when an illegal immigrant dies in the U.S.
Rev. John Brown who ministers to Mexicans at the St. Joseph Catholic Church is quoted in the New York Times article as saying
"For Mexicans, the bonds of the family unit are very strong. The bond is broken when they go to work in the United States. It is restored in death.”
In Journey Home to Mexico Grave, an Industry Rises
To bring a body home, collection boxes are set up in grocery stores, employers chip in, discounts are negotiated and Mexican politicians get involved.
“I hadn’t seen my brother in four years; we didn’t know where he was,” said Ignacio Ponce Martínez, El Cholo’s older brother. “We had to send him to Mexico with his mother. We couldn’t just leave him here.”
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For illegal immigrants, some of whom pay $2,000 to $3,000 to be smuggled across the border through the Arizona desert, the return trip in a coffin can be more expensive than the journey into the United States.
Be careful if you're hanging around New-Agers, especially if a sweat lodge is involved.
In Australia, almost every one was having a fine old time dancing, chanting and playing drums when not ducking into the sweat lodge for "cleansing."
When two fainted because of the heat and were found unconscious, they were dragged out unconscious. Their fellow celebrants thought they were "astral traveling", that is having an out-of-body experience because of their deep meditative state.
Hours later both still unconscious,, somebody thought it might be a good idea to get some help.
One couldn't be revived. He died of severe dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Jennifer Hollis, an accomplished musician, creates and plays music that heals by taking cues from a patient's vital signs.
Healing Patients with the Harp
"I use live harp and vocal music at the bedside of people that are close to the end of life for patients,? Hollis said. When all medical options have been exhausted, Hollis uses the chords of her harp and tone of her voice to bring peace and solace to her patients, as they transition from life to death. She has been playing at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington since 2005. "It was absolutely beautiful," said Mary Sansone, daughter of 86-year-old Lydia Ayotte.
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Doctors are seeing amazing results.
"It makes a huge difference in a person's blood pressure and heart rate," said Dr. Elizabeth Collins, a palliative care physician at Lahey Clinic.
More information can be found at the Music Thanatology official website
Growth House Radio offers music for the dying and a short history of how such music has been and is being used.
The Chalice of Repose offers training for interested musicians
In the Philippines, poor Romy Baligula was singing at a karaoke bar when the security guard shouted that he was out of tune. Romy kept singing and the security guard pulled out his gun and shot him in the chest killing him instantly.
Home-buyer finds mummified body of former owner on couch
A man making his first visit to a home he bought in a foreclosure auction found the former owner's mummified body sitting on the living room couch, police said Tuesday.
Coroners estimate the woman's remains had been there since 2001, when she stopped making payments on the residence in the coastal town of Roses in Spain's northeast Catalonia region.
The body mummified instead of rotting partly because of the salty seaside air in Roses, a Catalan regional police official said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
The woman, in her mid-50s, was estranged from her children in Madrid, and no one had reported her missing. She was not identified by officials..
How very sad, to die unnoticed for 6 years and unmourned.
HT to Siggy.
Dead man found breathing on his way to the mortuary
A patient who was declared dead by doctors on Easter Sunday was very much alive when mortuary attendants arrived in the hospital ward to remove his body.
Officials at the Mater hospital in Dublin have begun an investigation. The man’s family had already been told that he had died when staff realised that he was breathing.
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"Needless to say, the hospital is very perturbed at what happened.”
May Day is an important holiday in the People's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union and in other communist and socialist countries where it is known as International Workers' Day.
I support Ilya Somin's proposal
I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century's other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day.
Along with Glenn Reynolds, The Belmont Club and Dr. Sanity
The Distributed Republic has a May Day 2007 Day of Remembrance for those who lost their lives to an ideology that promised to free the workers of the world but did the opposite.
The real estate agent will never get over this.
Owner lay dead while pair toured her home
A Janesville real estate agent can't believe she didn't realize that a form on the bed at a house she showed Monday night was a woman who apparently had been dead for two weeks.
"I've smelled death. I know what death smells like," she said. "I can't believe my sinuses were that bad."
