Legacy Matters
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.
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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".
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"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)
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“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.
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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
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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.
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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.
