Legacy Matters
"Those cups of tea with dad were special and when he died I really missed them."
John Lowndes has no problem stirring up happy memories of his dad after putting his ashes in an urn with a difference.
He found that when Ian died 10 years ago aged 75, one of the things he missed most was their tradition of putting the world to rights over a nice cuppa.
So he brewed up the idea of giving him leaf eternal by having his ashes mixed with clay to make a teapot.
He approached local potter Neil Richardson who made two teapots - in case one breaks.
From Newsweek, The Russert Miracles
The first "Russert miracle," as attendees called it, happened at the private funeral service held at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown; the family of the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert had requested that Senators Obama and McCain to sit together, and the two presidential combatants obliged. CNN Washington Bureau chief David Bohrman, a former NBC producer, describes the scene to NEWSWEEK: "They sat side-by-side and spoke for twenty minutes. The body language was total friendship. They were warm and friendly and truly engaged in a conversation.... I kept thinking here we are at the funeral at the son of a sanitation worker and the presidential candidates are having their first one on one conversation here."
After the memorial service, the crowd moved to the rooftop where they saw the sky open up to a rainbow.
"After the magical experience of this service, to come out and see the rainbow and Luke at the bottom of it made the last dry eye weep," said NBC News executive Phil Griffin. The last song in the memorial service was, fittingly, "Somewhere over the Rainbow."
When asked his reaction to explain the sudden appearance of the rainbow at the exact moment, Luke Russert, his sparkly smile so reminiscent of his father's, said: "Is anyone still an atheist now?"
Howard Kurtz reports on the memorial service for Tim Russert,
From the three network anchors to a former governor to the Buffalo nun who taught him in seventh grade, Tim Russert's extended family bid farewell yesterday to "an unmade bed of a man, with an armful of newspapers and a cellphone to his ear," as Tom Brokaw described his colleague
But it was Peggy Noonan who grasped the essential point in A Life's Lesson.
When somebody dies, we tell his story and try to define and isolate what was special about it—what it was he brought to the party, how he enhanced life by showing up. In this way we educate ourselves about what really matters. Or, often, re-educate ourselves, for "man needs more to be reminded than instructed."
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The beautiful thing about the coverage was that it offered extremely important information to those age 15 or 25 or 30 who may not have been told how to operate in the world beyond "Go succeed." I'm not sure we tell the young as much as we ought, as clearly as we ought, what it is the world admires, and what it is they want to emulate.
In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That's what it really admires. That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich." We say, if we can, "The thing about Joe was he took care of people."
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After Tim's death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won't be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they're loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. "Enjoy life, it's ungrateful not to," said Ronald Reagan.
Tim had these virtues. They were great to see. By defining them and celebrating them the past few days, the media encouraged them. This was a public service, and also what you might call Tim's parting gift.
Hi-tech tombstones in Japan let mourners link to videos of the deceased.
mobile phone QR codes on tombstones that link to photographs and video clips of the deceased.
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In addition to images of the deceased, people can view a greeting from the chief mourner at the funeral and browse through the guest book. They can also make entries using their cell phones.
Bo Diddley's funeral rocked and rolled Saturday with as much energy as his music.
For four hours, friends and relatives sang, danced and celebrated the life of the man who helped give birth to rock and roll with a signature beat that influenced Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and many others.
As family members passed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's casket, a gospel band played his namesake song. Within moments, the crowd of several hundred began clapping in time and shouting, "Hey, Bo Diddley!"
A Rocking Sendoff for Bo Diddley
The funeral of Yves Saint Laurent at the Saint-Roch church in Paris
If anyone was going to have a designer funeral, it was Yves Saint Laurent.
Scores of the world's most beautiful women gathered yesterday in Paris to pay tribute to one of the most iconic couturiers of the last 50 years.
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Miss Bruni noted how Saint Laurent had put women into masculine tailoring.
And her husband, President Nicolas Sarkozy, said: 'One of the greatest names of fashion has disappeared, the first to elevate haute couture to the rank of art. He was convinced that beauty was a luxury that every man and woman needed.'
Tributes to the 71-year-old 'fashion prince', who died on Sunday from a brain tumour, highlighted how he modernised female fashion in the Sixties and had empowered women by putting them in leather biker jackets and army uniforms.
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He was cremated and his ashes flown to a botanical garden in Marrakech, Morocco, where he spent much of his life.
The inventor of Pringles, Fredic Baur who died this month in Cincinnati at 89, was cremated with his ashes buried in a Pringles can.
Via Kottke who remarked he was a clever marketer to the very end.
Cincinnati Enquirer story on Baur's career as an organic chemist and food storage technician at Procter & Gamble.
An alert reader in the U.K. pointed me to this article to show how webcasting a funeral service has made ceremonies more accessible.
You may wonder how a crematorium in Essex can help bereaved people abroad, including soldiers in Iraq. But we can, thanks to new webcasting equipment.
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The system was installed in March last year and is simple and discreet. In the chapel is a fixed camera and two microphones. The webcast is available online live and for a week afterwards. It is password protected, so the family has control of who watches it. The camera also takes a recording, which is sent overnight to Wesley Music, the company that provides the service. They tidy up the sound before offering it as a DVD to mourners.
The benefits of webcasting were clear when we started arranging a funeral last August for a serviceman who died in Iraq. The family and the Ministry of Defence were grateful for the opportunity to broadcast the event to his colleagues in Basra. Wesley Music also worked with the family to make a DVD that included footage of the full military band and ceremonials outside the chapel.
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As well as taking the pressure off mourners, it frees up funeral directors to focus on the family’s needs, which is our first priority. For such a small outlay, we feel the system will be of lasting benefit for us as we evolve our services and for mourners in the grieving process
Mysterious, enigmatic Stonehenge was a burial ground for centuries new research suggests.
"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead," Parker Pearson said in a statement,
Nearby homes were excavated at Durlington Walls
"It's a quite extraordinary settlement, we've never seen anything like it before," Parker Pearson said. The village appeared to be a land of the living and Stonehenge a land of the ancestors, he said.
There were at least 300 and perhaps as many as 1,000 homes in the village, he said. The small homes were occupied in midwinter and midsummer.
The village also included a circle of wooden pillars, which they have named the Southern Circle. It is oriented toward the midwinter sunrise, the opposite of Stonehenge, which is oriented to the midsummer sunrise.
National Geographic will feature the new study this coming Sunday.
The highest ranking African prelate Cardinal Bernardin Gantin died last week in Paris at 86. His body was taken back to his native Benin where he was given A Hero's Sendoff. Rocco Palmo tells the story.
Earlier, a Memorial Mass was held at St. Peter's where Pope Benedict gave the homily.
A railway worker's son, Benedict said that "his personality, human and priestly, made for a magnificent synthesis of the qualities of the African soul with those of the Christian spirit, of the culture and identity of Africa and the values of the Gospel." Despite being, at age 38, the first native-born African archbishop and the continent's first son to assume a top role in the Roman Curia, the Pope said that Gantin never let the accolades get to his head, adding that the "secret" to his humility likely lay in "the wise words that his mother repeated when he became a cardinal... 'Never forget the little faraway village from which you came.'"
Fury as museum bosses cover up naked Egyptian mummies to protect 'sensitivities' of visitors
The last time they had the chance to offend anyone was 2,700 years ago when they were wandering around ancient Egypt.
Since then the mummies have led a blameless existence, spending the last 120 years in a museum where countless thousands of visitors have managed to see them without anyone becoming in the least bit upset.
So museum officials in Manchester covered them with shrouds to protect their modesty and, following government policy, began a process of public consultation.
Josh Lennon, a museum visitor, said: "This is preposterous. Surely people realise that if they go to see Egyptian remains some of them may not be dressed in their best bib and tucker.
"The museum response to complaints is pure Monty Python - they have now covered them from head to foot rendering the exhibition a non-exhibition. It is hilarious."
The body of Padre Pio who died forty years ago and was declared a saint in 2002 is now on display in San Giovanni Rotondo. While not totally incorrupt, his body was still remarkably well-preserved. No sign of his famous stigmata was present.
There are more than 250 incorrupt bodies of Catholic saints whose bodies did not decompose in the normal way.
Would you pay $150 for a user name and password to people who live far away or are housebound so that they can watch the funeral service online?
One crematorium in England is betting that offering a better service to people who are bereaved will be profitable.
Pay-Per-View Funerals bring Mourners Online.
If you are gay and live in Copenhagen, you now can choose to be buried in a gay graveyard.
"We have our own places where we can meet and have fun, gay bars and such. That is why we wanted our own graveyard," Larsen, a priest, told public broadcaster DR.
After they buried their 30-year-old son, they stopped at a store for soda and the father bought $10 worth of lottery tickets.
Grieving father wins $9-million lottery
"I know you're supposed to be happy when you win it, but I'll tell you it's not no big thing," he said.
"I'd rather have my son than my money."
Terry Teachout on the William F Buckley memorial service held yesterday at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Home from the Sea
All I can tell you was that today’s service seemed as splendid as it could possibly have been. The cathedral was full of mourners, the choir loft full of singers, and the music was mostly appropriate to the occasion. Bill was a serious amateur musician who loved Bach above all things–he actually performed the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto in public on more than one occasion–so the organist played “Sheep May Safely Graze” and the slow movement of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major. No less suitable were the sung portions of the Mass, drawn from Victoria’s sweetly austere Missa “O magnum mysterium,” and the closing hymn, the noble tune from Gustav Holst’s The Planets to which the following words were later set: I vow to thee, my country–all earthly things above–/Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.
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Bill was the least weltschmerzy person imaginable. Henry Kissinger, who eulogized him this morning, alluded to that side of Bill’s personality when he remarked that Bill “was vouchsafed a little miracle: to enjoy so much what was compelled by inner necessity.” I couldn’t have put it better.
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Christopher Buckley, Bill’s son, followed Henry Kissinger, and gave just the sort of eulogy I’d expected from him, funny and light-fingered, putting much-needed smiles on our faces. Only at the end did he sound a darker note, quoting the lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” that he chose as the epitaph for a man who loved sailing as much as he loved Bach: Here he lies where he long’d to be;/Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/And the hunter home from the hill.
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Somehow you never imagine outliving the people who show you through the doors that lead to the rest of your life
In Colorado a man crashed a memorial service, groping the deceased woman's sister and showing her mother pornographic pictures.
A physical confrontation ensued, police were called and the man arrested.
via Ace
Benjamin LaFlamme didn't. He just buried his father alongside his mother in Bennington, Vermont.
Now two of his siblings are petitioning the court to exhume their father because they weren't given the chance to offer their last respects.
I suppose it was only a matter of time. Company offers moon as final resting place.
Personally, I prefer the stars.
"Shoot for the moon and if you miss it you will still be among the stars" wrote Les Brown.
The three directors of black funeral parlors here have been assaulted at services and each has had gunshots fired during burials. Concealed-weapons, pre-funeral intelligence briefings, cameras, panic buttons and armed security guards are becoming as much a part of services as the eulogy.
"I've been in this business 42 years and I'm jittery now," Mr. Glover says.
Across the country, black morticians are changing the way they operate. The reason: a spike in African-American murders -- and the violence that sometimes follows victims to the grave
Violence Roils Black Funeral Parlors
The mastermind of the odious scheme to plunder corpses from funeral homes in the Northeast and sell them for millions of dollars has pleaded guilty in a deal that will put him away in prison for decades.
Ex-doctor confesses to stealing body parts.
Michael Mastromarino, a 44-year-old former oral surgeon, confessed to the judge that he carried out the scheme from 2001 to 2005. He will face 18 to 54 years and will have to forfeit $4.68 million. He pleaded guilty to 14 counts that include enterprise corruption, body stealing, and reckless endangerment.
The plea was made more than two years after the gruesome scandal broke, with evidence that corpses were being hacked up without permission or proper screening for diseases and sold for dental implants, knee and hip replacements, and other procedures around the country.
The looted bodies included that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke.
Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist. Prosecutors said the defendants had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.
The New York Times reports that the archbishop, just after he was kidnapped and while in the trunk of his own car
In the darkness, he managed to pull out his cellphone and call the church, telling officials not to pay a ransom for his release, they said.
“He believed that this money would not be paid for good works and would be used for killing and more evil actions,” the officials said.
The Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was buried Friday, two weeks after he was kidnapped in the troubled northern city of Mosul, two days after he was found dead.
The body was found buried in the ground in Al Intessar, a residential area near the city known as a haven for gangs and criminal activity. Iraqi officials in Mosul said that the church had received a phone call telling them where to find the body, and church officials dug up the body with the help of the local police.
It was not immediately clear how the archbishop died. However, Shlemon Warduni, the auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, ..said that the body showed no sign of gunshot wounds or other violence. He said the archbishop was in precarious health and his kidnapping could have aggravated his condition. He said the kidnappers had called on Wednesday to say that the archbishop was ill and later that he had died.
A morgue official in Mosul also said the body showed no signs of violence and that the archbishop had apparently died from natural causes. The archbishop had suffered from high blood pressure and had a heart condition.
Hundreds of Iraqi Christians mourn archbishop throwing flowers on his wooden coffin while women wailed.
Rahho's body was found a day earlier in Mosul, where his religious community has faced attacks from Sunni Arab extremists and criminal gangs.
Gunmen grabbed Rahho Feb. 29 outside his church after he had finished celebrating a prayer service. His driver and two guards were shot dead in the abduction.
According to police and church officials, the archbishop, who suffered from heart disease and diabetes, died because his captors failed to provide him his regular medications. Initially, Nineveh province police chief Gen. Wathiq Hamdani said he believed Rahho had been shot when kidnapped and died of his injuries.
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Another martyr for the faith and one who will be deeply missed,
Christians remembered Rahho, who was in his 60s, for having continued to give hope to their dwindling numbers. In June, the archbishop's confidant, Father Ragheed Aziz Ganni, was shot dead along with three deacons outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, where Rahho was kidnapped last month. On one occasion, Rahho was accosted by gunmen, but he walked on, daring them to shoot him, said Nabil Kashat, an advisor to the Chaldean Charity Assn.
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He was encouraging Christians to stay in Mosul. He was pushing for tolerance among all factions. His loss is a big loss for all the Christians and Muslims of Mosul. It is a real shock for everyone. The Christians of Mosul will not be in a good position to believe that the city is safe for them," Kashat said.
A woman from Mosul, who identified herself as Rayat, said by phone that Rahho's death was the last straw for her. "After our holy man was killed, I don't want to stay in Mosul. Our good men are gone. When there are holy days, where will we go now?" she said.
In a dispute over how to bury the body, in a Maori rite as her some of her family wanted or as she expressed in her will "with some sort of Anglican involvement, the Family steals dead woman's body from hearse and fled in a four-wheel drive.
If you are an environmentalist and are thinking about cremation consider this.
Cremation ignites global-warming, atmospheric conflagration
Since it takes two to four hours at temperatures ranging from 1,400 and 2,100 F, or 760 and 1,150 C, the estimated energy required to cremate one body is roughly equal to the amount of fuel required to drive 4,800 miles, or 7,725 kilometers.
Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide are spewed in large volume, along with carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, particulate matter, heavy metals, dioxins and furans.
There is also release of cadmium and lead from pacemakers and mercury from dental amalgams. Total mercury emissions from cremation in Canada for 2004 were between 240 and 907 pounds, or 109 and 411.6 kilograms.
Read the comments to her post for hilariously gross solutions to this burning environmental problem.
They cost thousands of dollars but what's money when it comes to immortalizing the thugs who were part of the Russian mafia. They were ruthless and you just know they thought they were cool.
The photo above is from a cemetery in the city of Yekaterinburg, the city where the Tsar and his family were executed in 1918, known in the 90s as the crime capital of Russia, otherwise the main industrial and cultural center in the eastern Urals section of Russia.
Two thousand miles away lies Dnipropetrovsk, third largest city in the Ukraine, but the sensibility of mob culture are very much the same. Everyone wanted what the others had.
Photos from English Russia with a hat tip to Scribal Terror.
In the Washington Post, Dan Zak reminds us that you don't have to be at death's door to do a little planning for your final farewell.
But what about a handbook on this side of the mortality line? What about a guide for the not-yet-deceased-but-could-go-at-any-minute-without-warning? And we can go any minute. Choking on our roast beef, driving to or from work or simply dropping dead. Unlike the Baldwin and Davis characters, we can't haunt or communicate with our friends and families. So they are left to deal with a mess of personal effects and life's half-completed projects, e-mail and bank accounts with unknown passwords, and doubts about what to do with our bodies and legacies. In the wake of our deaths, we leave an incomplete puzzle whose pieces may be forever missing.
If you find that scenario less than appealing, there are simple things you can do to get things in order just in case. But many people don't know where to start -- or don't even want to start.
The Post then asked readers to send in their plans for a final farewell party. Here's a selection of their responses.
Feeding the Flowers
Nice as it might be, I don't believe in life hereafter. When I die, I will be cremated. My ashes will be mixed with wildflower seeds and packaged in little envelopes. This way, each person can sprinkle them wherever they want. It's a comfort to imagine myself of some usefulness after my death.
One Last Laugh
I have given strict instructions: a wry smile on my face if the embalmers can manage it and a prominent card on my chest to be viewed as any mourners gaze down upon my remains, reading "Smile . . . I'm dead and you're not."
Nothing but Blue Skies
My choice is to have a pilot friend scatter my leftovers over an unpopulated area of the Blue Ridge Mountains. No fuss, no crowds, no weeping/wailing. Just a final flight for this old aviator.
One Final Party
My plans are outlined in my documents folder under "Open Casket, Open Bar." The instructions include "take my remains to Demaine's" (a nearby funeral home). One week after my graduation into the Lord's presence, schedule a one-day viewing with open casket and open bar (wine, champagne, beer -- no mixed drinks) and '60s music: Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, the Who, the Doors, etc., as background.
An ethnic Chinese battling Malaysian authorities who snatched the body of his father after saying he had embraced Islam before he died, said on Wednesday that non-Muslims were getting a raw deal in the country.
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In the latest case, the elder Gan had been buried as Muslim after an Islamic sharia court in Negeri Sembilan ruled that the man converted to Islam last year. But his family insisted otherwise, arguing that Gan could not have converted because he was senile and paralyzed after suffering two strokes.
They said Gan was also unable to speak after a stroke in 2006, challenging a claim that Gan made an oral declaration in Arabic to accept Islam. His conversion papers were also flawed because they were not signed, they said.His family suffered a legal setback on Tuesday when a civil court rejected their bid to declare Gan a Buddhist, saying it had no jurisdiction over Islamic cases, a lawyer said.
"We are not Muslims, why should we go to sharia court?"
Seventeen days after Ledger was found dead, a memorial service was held in Perth, Australia for 750 friends and family.
After such an extended period of intense shock and grief following his death, I was not all surprised that the day ended with many rollicking in the warm waters of Perth, fully clothed in an exuberant expression of joy in being alive.
Heath's family and fiancee mourn him in bizarre beach party.
Funeral horses stampede, overturn hearse
A hearse overturned when the horses pulling it to a south London cemetery stampeded, dragging the carriage and coffin past appalled relatives and sending floral tributes flying.
"It was dreadful," a mourner told the South London Press. "The horses dragged the carriage to the cemetery on its side, tossing the coffin all over the place and destroying all the flowers inside.
A moving tribute to an ordinary man who was much loved and who will be missed.
Eddie Treacy lived in the shadows and died in his bed, the covers pulled up, his lungs full of fluid.
He was 33 years old, and there is no other way to say this: He died too young.
He came to Dorchester eight years ago from Athenry, in County Galway, part of what could be the last great wave of the young Irish to come here.
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After Mass, about 200 people posed on the front steps of the church for a photo to send back to Eddie's mother, Ann, so she would know that Eddie mattered here. Many of the young men standing there had given up a day's wages to pay their respects.
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Once, he told Muldoon he would be happy if he died in his own bed and they played "The Fields of Athenry" at his funeral.
He did and they did.
R.I.P. Eddie Treacy and condolences to his family.
In a small town in Hungary, a Dominican church was being restored when workers came upon a secret crypt that been bricked up for over 200 years.
Inside the crypt were 265 hand painted coffins, the corpses perfectly mummified.
Painted Death from Curious Expeditions.
Everything from the rosaries to the handmade stockings on their feet were equally intact, offering a gold mine for ethnographers on the funerary customs and everyday life of 18th century Hungarian villages. There was something there for doctors as well; traces of ancient tuberculosis. An Australian surgeon, Dr. Mark Spigelman, has devoted the past 6 years to studying the bacteria found in one mummy in particular, and the information gleaned from this ancient DNA could provide information that will help fight tuberculosis.
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Each coffin had been lovingly hand-painted with crucifixes, flowers, quotations, bible verses, angles, skull and crossbones, hourglasses, and Memento Mori inscriptions. No coffin is a repeat of another; the variety of color, decoration, motif and even language (some in German, some Hungarian, some Latin) is simply incredible. These coffins seem to be painted with an almost joyous hand, as a celebration of the life, not a mourning of the death. One coffin, belonging to a miner, is painted with bones, skulls and a miner’s pick and shovel. Each coffin had been personalized with great thought and care.
Many thanks to Miss Kelly.
From First Things On Being a Pallbearer by Paul Gregory Alms
The tradition carries codes and ways of acting. You step into a role and do what has been outlined for you. You realize that countless other Christians before you have carried the same burden, walked the same aisle. The task itself and many of its components are archaic, fast losing significance for those who witness them. The pall itself, for many a puzzling custom with little if any meaning, proclaims a tie to centuries long silent. That a simple white garment decorated only with a cross could be a final statement seems remarkable these days. A pall is wildly out of touch with the individualism and ostentation so in vogue. However, that is what pall bearers do; they bear the pall. They carry the dead, covered only with a baptismal emblem. That is what has been done for centuries.
To be part of it, to march in two tidy rows down the long aisle of a church with casket and family and clergy is to find oneself in a line, not just the line walking in and out of the church, but a procession of the living and the dead. From time immemorial mankind has gathered to mark death. All have had to deal with the fact of a corpse. In such times there is something sacred about we do. How we treat the dead says an awful lot about how we live. For the strong and able to serve the helpless dead, to honor frail remains, reaches deep inside us to something basic to humanity. To carry a heavy box filled with a father or mother or brother connects us to countless ancestors who have carried the mute dead. We are unlike them in so many ways, yet the experience of death unites us, the desire to honor the dead ties us together.
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A custom such as pallbearing is like a great tidal wave that rolls through the centuries.
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Pallbearing involves all of this. It is an ancient custom no longer necessary but one that remembers the dead and the dead before them. I walked in the same way, carrying my grandfather as he had walked, carrying his brothers as those before him had done. To do this same thing, to walk the same path as they, meant I was more than a solitary individual grieving alone. I was a part of a human community stretching back centuries, all of us facing death together.
I never knew that Dapper O'Neil was a hall of fame member of the Ring Four Veteran Boxers' Association. At his funeral he got his final count.
Literally. A bell clanged 10 times as a veteran boxer stood in front of the casket and counted aloud.
"That's it," said Mickey Finn, president of the Ring Four Veteran Boxers' Association. "The fight is over."
The bustling New Lucky Restaurant is famous for its buttery rolls and the graves between the tables.
Graveyard Seating at Restaurant in India
Krishan Kutti Nair has helped run the restaurant built over a centuries-old Muslim cemetery for close to four decades, but he doesn't know who is buried in the cafe floor. Customers seem to like the graves, which resemble small cement coffins, and that's enough for him.
"The graveyard is good luck," Nair said one recent afternoon after the lunch rush. "Our business is better because of the graveyard."
Most customers said they don't mind sitting next to graves.
"We spend all day here," Mohammed Tafir said between cups of tea. "The graves are holy, they're good luck. They bring us good luck too."
Some, though, say the restaurant is disrespectful.
"They should maintain the decorum of the graveyard," said a history professor who asked that his name be withheld. When asked why he didn't want to be identified, he smiled and said, "Because I have tea there."
via Book of Joe
Xeni Jarden at Boing-Boing reports on India's human skeleton black market and the work of investigative journalist Scott Carney who writes at Wired magazine.
There are grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the U.S. and Europe.
Scott tells more of the story on his blog, India's Underground Trade in Human Remains.
It is pitch black and raining when I first meet Manoj Pal: a man who makes his living defleshing rotting cadavers. I am a hundred kilometers outside of Calcutta in a small village called Purbasthali where police confiscated more than 100 bright white human skeletons. The bones they found were on their way along a two hundred year old pipeline for human remains that begins on the banks of Indian rivers and ends in the sacred halls of medicine in Westerncountries. The skeletons Pal prepared could have fetch as much as $70,000 on the black market.
Manoj Pal is the grunt labor for the industry. Part of the dom, or grave tending, caste his job is the most grim. When bodies are brought to him or recovered from a nearby cremation ghat he binds them in mosquito netting and lets them soak in the river for a week. When the bodies were waterlogged and mostly consumed by fish and stray dogs he scrubs off the remaining flesh, dumps the bodies in a boiling solution of caustic chemicals and lets them dry in the sun.
So many people wanted their ashes scattered at Disney World and Disneyland, that it's become a real problem as workers have to close down attractions to clean up cremated remains.
Cleaning up the ashes at Walt Disney world
If you have been charged to scatter a loved one ashes on Space Mountain, just scatter a tiny bit, saving the rest to scatter in the ocean or lake or woods.
Otherwise, your loved one will end up in a vacuum cleaner and then the trash.
When a drug dealer was killed in a helicopter crash in Mexico and his body sent to a morgue some 65 miles south of the US border, twenty heavily armed gunmen killed two policemen as they snatched the body from the morgue.
Drug hitmen snatch buddy's body from morgue.
The dead man was thought by police to be a member of the Arellano Felix drug cartel. His fellow traffickers were believed to have wanted his body to take it away for burial without having to identify themselves when claiming the corpse.
He died earlier this week in a helicopter crash along with another suspected trafficker, but the gunmen failed to get the second man's body from the morgue.
His fiery death as the helicopter hit electricity lines while watching a car race through the desert had already been shown on television.
A Less Than Honorable Discharge From the Wrong Plot
The story of how Mr. Hayes, who died with no money or family in a Bronx nursing home, wound up in an unfinished basement after resting in peace for four years in the dignified setting of Calverton National Cemetery involves a case of mistaken identity. Federal officials say it seems to be the first time in the history of the national cemetery system, which was created during the Civil War, that a veteran buried in the wrong grave has been disinterred. That’s 3.3 million burials in 125 cemeteries.
Was it a case of Identity theft or just a case of mistaken identity?
Koreen Hayes, a niece of the Harlem Willie Hayes, said she suspected that her uncle had been the victim of identity theft.
Some of his military benefits had stopped coming several years back, she said, but he did not make a big fuss because “he thought maybe they just ran out.” She said he finally contacted Social Security officials, “and they told him he had to prove he was still alive, because they had death records that said he had been dead for years.”
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."
In Egypt, King Tut's face is unveiled for the first time in 3000 years where he is now on display in a glass box for tourists who visit his tomb in Luxor.
Fragile Mummy
The mystery surrounding King Tutankhamen -- who ruled during the 18th dynasty and ascended to the throne at age 8 -- and his glittering gold tomb has entranced fans of ancient Egypt since Carter's discovery, which revealed a trove of fabulous gold and precious stone treasures and propelled the once-forgotten pharaoh to global stardom.
Tut wasn't Egypt's most powerful or important king, but his staggering treasures, rumors of a mysterious curse that plagued Carter and his team -- debunked by experts long ago -- and several books and TV documentaries dedicated to him have added to his mystique.
Above is a "reconstruction" of his face, built after 1700 CT scans by a team of forensic artists and scientists. He doesn't look at all like Steve Martin.
I am very happy with the results of this law suit and pleased that the jury found an invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Jury Awards Father Nearly $11 Million in Funeral Protestors Case
The father of a fallen Marine was awarded nearly $11 million Wednesday in damages by a jury that found leaders of a fundamentalist church had invaded the family's privacy and inflicted emotional distress when they picketed the Marine's funeral.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned later in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress to the Marine's father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa.
The defendants are the hateful people from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas who go around the country protesting at soldiers' funerals with signs saying "Thank Go for dead soldiers" and "Thank God for IEDs because they think the US war dead are punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.
I wrote about this suit last year Funeral Protesters Sued
We think it's a case we can win because anyone's funeral is private," Snyder lawyer Sean Summers said. "You don't have a right to interrupt someone's private funeral."
In A Soldier They Called "Pipes, I wrote about the dozens of uniformed and plain clothes cops who stood baring the sight of the protesters from the family and gathered throng of several thousand including the Governor in an outpouring of sympathy and patriotism in Marblehead, MA.
For the Patriot Guard Riders, every funeral of an American soldier became a mission to show respect and to shield the mourning family from the protesters.
Glitch Hits Burial of Man with Mobile Phone
A man whose dying wish was to be buried along with his mobile phone has to be dug up again after his family discovered they had forgotten to insert his SIM card.
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... after his funeral, his family discovered that his grandson, who was playing with the device, had taken out the SIM card.
"We put the phone in the coffin as he wanted, but my 10-year-old son had been playing with it and had taken the card out without my knowledge," Brano said. "So now we have got to dig him up again to put it in the phone."
More than 1000 people turned out in Liberty for the funeral of Jeremy Burris, a 22-year-old Marine lance corporal who, after rescuing two of his wounded buddies, was killed by an explosive device in Iraq.
He was buried in the Cooke Memorial Cemetery and within hours the grave was desecrated.
About 30 sprays of flowers were ripped apart, petals strewn over the loose earth. Flags decorating the gravesite were also torn down and sentimental notes and posters shredded.
"It looked like a big debris field about 40 feet square," said Liberty Police Chief Mike Cummings. "This wasn't done by the wind or animals. It was obviously intentional. We don't know if someone did this for a stupid prank or they were anti-war or what."
Liberty outraged over grave desecration
Let's hope the police quickly find the perpetrators. Freedom of speech and opinion does not include the desecration of graves.
UPDATE: Arrest made of Wallace DeBlanc, 41, who ripped the 25 floral arrangements apart so he could get to the wire stands, pewter cross and other decorations that could be resold to floral shops.
He was a thief.
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.
A woman who was not invited to her boyfriend's funeral, snuck into the cemetery, dug up his grave and stole an urn containing his ashes.
Woman Accused of Stealing Ex-Boyfriend's Ashes.
Athens County Prosecutor David Warren said it is the first case of body snatching he has had to investigate,...
"I have crimes that I like to refer to as aggravated stupid," Warren said. "I have been doing this for almost 30 years now and I have never had anyone steal someone's ashes."
For a look at funeral customs in Japan, sushiwalker, a 25-year-old Japanese man who lives in America most of the time happened to be in Japan when his grandfather died. He describes the death, the wake and funeral and the cremation in Chronicles of a Japanese Funeral.
(the type is very small, I had to bump it up twice for ease in reading.) via BoingBoing
After 53 years, a family can bury US Army Air Force Technical Sergeant Hyman Stiglitz, who was lost in a mission to bomb a German aircraft factory
...last month, the military told Stiglitz's nephews that it had positively identified his remains and those of his eight crewmates.
"It's just incredible that [military officials] have the respect for doing this."
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The recovery and identification of the remains of the airmen was part of an effort by the Defense Department to locate 78,000 American troops still missing after World War II,
Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an historic graveyard that now serves as a nature preserve, is the focus of a big controversy in London.
Anger over plan to dig up 350,000 bodies in historic London cemetery for Muslim burial site
The local newspaper has been bombarded with letters from historians and nature lovers declaring: "There is no way we'll allow them to dig up our ancestors."
But the Labour-controlled council's environment spokesman Abdal Ullah appeared to be in no doubt about the feasibility of the plan when he said: "To preserve the respect and dignity for everyone, I think most of the graves would have to be cleared out and we'd start afresh."
He said a corner of the cemetery would be reserved for Muslims who are buried in shrouds at a depth of 6ft and on their side facing Mecca.
By law, any graves more than 75 years old can be removed.
At the cemetery yesterday, liaison officer Ken Greenway - the only paid member of staff tending the 33-acre site - said he was astonished that anyone would even contemplate such a move.
Whenever I see a piece by Thomas Lynch, I know it's going to be great and I know I will to do a post about it.
I already have in Going the Distance and Death Lite. A funeral director for 40 years, Lynch is also a poet, a writer whose work appears frequently in various publications. He is the author of The Undertaking, a slim, wonderfully written book about the 'dismal trade' that I heartedly recommend.
"The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade" (Thomas Lynch)
Now, in a piece about the calling of funeral directors, Lynch talks about his own, Faith 'profession' - Catholic funeral directors see role as bringing God to the grieving, honoring deceased.
..his calling was not to the priesthood, but to follow his father into funeral service. That calling came for his father when he was 12 and saw “two men in shirtsleeves” lift the body of an uncle – a young priest – from a table and place him into a casket The symbolism of his father’s calling stayed with Lynch. “You have to understand, that for most Catholics, the elevation of the dead body is the central metaphor of our liturgy,” he said.
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he is outspoken about the need for the bereaved to experience grief. The generation today bringing loved ones to funeral homes is the first generation, he said, that tries to get past grieving by not having a body at a funeral. He believes this carries the risk of spiritual and emotional peril.
Hat tip to The Deacon, a new blog I quite enjoy.
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?"
China's First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi searched obsessively for eternal life writes John Wilson in the New Statesman, Mortal Combat.
He prepared to rule in a parallel universe underground with 7000 soldiers and press-ganged some 750,000 workers to build his his burial chambers.
Somewhere deep beneath my feet, in a vast subterranean palace, lies the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. According to legend, he is interred in a gold casket sitting in a lake of liquid mercury. Snaking out across the 80-metre-long floor are streams of mercury that map the routes of those great waterways, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The 15-metre-high ceiling is encrusted with pearls depicting the starry constellations. Antechambers reportedly contain the bodies of wives, concubines and advisers (not that their deaths coincided naturally; when it was Qin Shi Huangdi's time to go, friends and family were forced to follow him into the earth).
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, who is here in the name of cultural diplomacy. His mission is to secure the biggest ever loan of treasures from the tomb of the First Emperor, including members of the fabled, 7,000-strong Terracotta Army, guardians of the imperial afterlife.
"The First Emperor was able to dream on a scale that no one else has ever dreamt," he says with a boyish breathlessness. "No one else in history has tried to create a life-sized parallel universe in which he will rule for ever. So much of what modern China is can be seen as a direct consequence of what that man did. There are very few historical figures who changed the world in such a way that we are still living with the consequences."
New York Times obituary by Richard Severo
Jane Wyman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of a victimized deaf woman in the 1948 movie “Johnny Belinda,” played a fierce matriarch in the 1980s television series “Falcon Crest” and was the first wife of President Ronald Reagan, died Monday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 90.
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Their daughter, Maureen, was born in 1941. She died of cancer in 2001. They adopted Michael in 1945. Another daughter, Christine, died the day after she was born premature, in 1947. The marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and afterward neither Mr. Reagan nor Ms. Wyman spoke publicly at any length about their years together.
But she broke her silence about him after he died in 2004, saying “America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.”
A son's farewell to 'a great heart'. Michael Reagan's eulogy for his mother Jane Wyman who died Monday at age 90.
"A lot of people talk about my father," the syndicated radio talk show host said of the late President Ronald Reagan, "but I am who I am today because of my mother. She told me at the age of 10, she built men, not boys."
A Resurrection Mass was held for the devout convert to Catholicism who was interred in a modest wooden casket in a Third Order Dominican habit.
Wyman won an Oscar and Golden Globes and was nominated for two Emmys, but her friend Mary Farrell said her proudest achievement was being named to the Dominican Third Order, a Catholic fellowship of preachers and nuns said to "live in, but are not of the world."
Every week, two sisters visit their mother to sit with her and make sure she's looking her best even though she's dead and been in cold storage for ten years.
For £20 a week, G. Saville and Sons of Wembley, have kept the sisters’ mother refrigerated. Phillip Saville, a funeral director, told The Sun: “We are simply acting on the family’s wishes and keeping Annie ‘alive’ in this way, for visiting seems to be what they want to do.
“No health and safety violations have been breached and the corpse does not smell. There are no laws saying people can’t keep a corpse for years after registering the death, though it is normal to bury the body after just two weeks.”
When contacted by The Times last night, a spokesman for the funeral parlour refused to comment. In addition to the cost of storing their mother’s body, the sisters are said to have spent £2,000 on five wooden coffins, four of which have rotted while they and their contents were awaiting burial.
South African men steal hearse for a pub crawl
Worse still. When they ran out of gas, they asked three women they had met while at a bar to get out and help push the hearse
She took a few too many before she left for the cemetery to pay respects to a dead relative. When she got to the cemetery, she veered off the road, careened into one tombstone after another and eventually got stuck in a grave until the police pulled her out.
Before the doors of Notre Dame in Paris, the funeral for the man who described himself as a Jew, a Cardinal and the son of immigrants was begun with the reading of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead said in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
Another family relation, Jonas Moses-Lustiger, read Psalm 113 in Hebrew and French, a psalm of special significance to both Jews and Catholics.
For the full flavor of the funeral, read Rocco Palma at Whispers in the Loggia who posts You Were a Manner of Miracle
Recalling the Jewish origins of Jean-Marie Lustiger, convert to Catholicism, Maurice Druon addressed himself to his fellow "immortal": "you were, Jean-Marie, for a quarter century, a manner of miracle: incredible to behold, the inconceivable expressed, the impossible existent; you were the Jewish cardinal". "In a world in crisis, you took up, renewed and reconciled in yourself the bases of our civilization and helped it to withstand the blows not of modernism but of religion", insisted Maurice Druon at the solemn funeral.
Lustiqer was buried in the crypt of Notre Dame Cathedral. A commerorative plaque will be installed, a message from Lustiger
I was born Jewish.
I received the name
Of my paternal grandfather, Aaron
Having become Christian
By faith and by Baptism,
I have remained Jewish
As did the Apostles.
I have as my patron saints
Aaron the High Priest,
Saint John the Apostle,
Holy Mary full of grace.
Named 139th archbishop of Paris
by His Holiness Pope John-Paul II,
I was enthroned in this Cathedral
on 27 February 1981,
And here I exercised my entire ministry.
Passers by, pray for me.
† Aaron Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger
Archevêque de Paris
The downside of too cute urns.
Woman sells ceramic turtle with ashes of husband's previous wife at yard sale
She didn't mean too. Now she's desperately searching for the woman who said she planned to use the urn as a cookie jar.
Her husband's previous wife collected turtles.
UPDATE: The new wife found the ceramic turtle at a nearby Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Her husband only told her about the ashes after she sold the container.
In New York, a 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy was scanned by a "64 slice" CT scanner while curators, conservators and medical specialists looked on, "riveted by the macabre spectacle."
Mummy's Log: Visited Scan God in Land of the Dead
Demetrios died in his 50s, a quiet, natural death it seems. There was no indication of foul play though his heart was missing and a scarab was found in its place.
From the shape his bones were in, Demetrios enjoyed a high-status life in ancient Egypt.
“Either he had an easy life or was carried around a lot,” Dr. Boxt said. “He certainly didn’t do much heavy lifting during his lifetime.”
Now his portrait will join his mummy, along with 122 other objects for a traveling exhibition by the Brooklyn Museum to tell the story of Egyptian funerary practices.
Hong Kong, one of the most crowded cities on the planet, is running out of space for the dead and causing all sorts of problems for those who want to follow the Chinese tradition of visiting ancestors' graves.
The Dead, Too, Find Hong Kong Really Overcrowded
Even the Southern Chinese custom of a double burial in which the remains are dug up after 7 to 10 years, then cleaned of all hair and skin, reassembled in an urn and buried in a horseshoe-shaped grave, takes up too much room.
A permanent burial can cost as much as $36,000, so more and more, the dead are cremated and the ashes tucked into a niche in multi-story columbaria, where incense can be burned in a trough at the base of the wall.
But the columbaria are running out of room as well. Some families must wait 2 years for a niche. People object to building new columbaria because they don't want the ghosts of the dead near their neighborhoods.
By 2012 half of the people who die each year may not get a final resting place. So now, the government is subsidizing scatterings at sea for about $40.
Unless you want to start a bomb scare, when you use air transport for the ashes of a loved one, don't put other items like a watch in the package.
I never knew that cemeteries in San Francisco have been banned since 1900 and already existing cemeteries were declared in 1914 a "public nuisance and a menace and detriment to the health and the welfare of city dwellers" and had to remove all burial sites.
Joseph Bottum on Death & Politics at First Things, a fascinating but quite long article that will make several posts, argues that it's the dead, not the living, who give us communities, who tie us to a particular place.
Still, even the most ardent modernist might feel some misgivings about a rejection of the dead as complete as San Francisco’s. And such misgivings reflect, however dimly, a deep political insight—for a city without cemeteries has failed at one of the first reasons for having cities at all. Somewhere in those banished graveyards was a metaphysical ground for politics, and buried in them was a truth that too much of modern political theory seems to have forgotten: The living give us crowds. The dead give us communities.
He quotes Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr who once said, "Society rests on the death of men."
Think of this, too, in terms of the family. In all Western cultures, a person was once “gathered to his fathers.” But constant relocation and the urban distaste for cemeteries have made care of graves difficult. Why shouldn’t we expect family tradition to weaken at the same time as family graves begin to disappear?
Indeed, the logic loops back on itself to spiral downward: The failure to maintain the family graves increasingly leaves the family name without meaning, and the emptiness of the family name increasingly becomes a reason not to have family graves.
The modern failure of funerals serves as both a cause and a symptom of the shattering of culture, first into the nuclear family, then into atomized individuals, and at last into nothingness—with, for instance, the increasing use of “anonymous death,” a European innovation now beginning to appear in America, where the dead are abandoned without ceremony in deliberately unmarked graves, or their corpses are cremated with the ashes spread across large and indifferent spaces.
Weeks after those implicated in atrocities during the Communist regime were granted amnesty by the Afghan government, there are discoveries of underground prisons with hundreds of bodies, still gagged and blindfolded having been buried alive by the Soviets.
Hundreds of blindfolded bodies found in underground prison.
Nearly 70 years after his death in 1938, Frank L. White, the smiling chef on Cream of White boxes, finally got his headstone engraved with his name and an etching taken from the cereal box.
Hats off to Jesse Lasorda, a family researcher who started the campaign saying, "Everybody deserves a headstone."
Father Ganni, a Catholic priest and three subdeacons were driving away from their church after celebrating Mass when a group of armed militants blocked the car and shot and killed all four men.
Iraqi Bishop pauses due to weeping at funeral of priest, subdeacons
Many people want to have their ashes shot into space after their deaths. James Doohan, better know as Scotty on Star Trek did.
In Aye, Aye Sir, I posted how he wanted to be beamed up to the final frontier. And so he was.
But only for four minutes at the edge of space when the rocket which propelled his ashes and those of 200 others fell back to earth in New Mexico.
Wende Doohan, James Doohan's widow, told the Associated Press news agency her late husband "probably wished he could have stayed".
There's a new day of remembrance set by the Iraqi government. May 16 has been declared Mass Graves Day .
The International Herald Tribune
Traffic stopped in Baghdad's main streets and squares Wednesday as Iraqis observed a moment of silence to mark a new national day of remembrance for the victim's of Saddam Hussein's regime who were buried in mass graves.
The Iraqi government declared May 16 as Mass Grave Day to commemorate the day when the first such grave was uncovered near the Shiite town of Mahaweel, about 56 kilometers (35 miles) south of Baghdad.
Gateway Pundit has many more details.
I never knew there was a plot to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom back in 1876.
Stealing Lincoln's Body is a new book by Thomas Craughwell published by the Harvard University Press
On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president's corpse.
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This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens who honored their native son by keeping a valuable, burdensome secret for decades offers a riveting glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America, and underscores that truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Gladiators' graveyard discovered in Ephesus in Turkey.
Two pathologists at the Medical University of Vienna - Professor Karl Grossschmidt and Professor Fabian Kanz - have spent much of the past five years painstakingly cataloguing and forensically analysing every single bone for age, injury and cause of death.
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And the lack of multiple wounds found on the bones, according to the pathologists, suggests that they had not been involved in chaotic mass brawls. Instead, it points to organised duels under strict rules of combat, probably with referees monitoring the bouts.
But there was also evidence of mortal wounds. Written records tell us that if the defeated gladiator had not shown enough skill or even cowardice, the cry of "iugula" (lance him through) would be heard throughout the arena, demanding he be killed.
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"But this (new find) is extremely significant; there's nothing been found in the world at all like it. They've really dispelled quite a lot of myths about gladiators and how they fought."
Gladiators were prisoners of war, slaves or condemned offenders.
If a gladiator survived three years of fighting in the arena, he would win his freedom. Those who did often became teachers in the gladiator school; and one of the skeletons found at Ephesus appears to be that of a retired fighter.
Three weeks ago in Turkey, five young Muslims burst into a Christian publishing office, bound three Christians hands and feet to chairs, stabbed them repeatedly, then slit their throats.
"We did this for our country," an identical note in the pockets of all five young men read, Channel D television station reported. "They are attacking our religion."
According to the newspaper Hurriyet, one of the suspects declared during police questioning, "We didn't do this for ourselves. We did it for our religion. May this be a lesson to the enemies of religion."
The deaths mark the first known martyrdom of Turkish converts since the founding of the republic.
Two of the victims were Turkish converts from Islam; the third was a German citizen. Christians make up less than 1% of the Turkey's 71 million people.
Ben Witherington posts a report by Dr. Mark Wilson of the funeral of one of the martyrs.
Recently Dindy [Mark's wife] and I attended a funeral here in Izmir. I have attended many funerals, but this was my first in Turkey. And it was also the first time I attended the funeral of a martyr. I have been teaching and writing about martyrs and martyrdom for many years. ... But such martyrdoms are personally and historically distant.
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On Saturday, April 21, Necati's funeral took place on the grounds of an historic Protestant church in Buca, a suburb o
