Legacy Matters
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Nichols calls for culture that encourages spiritual preparation for death
Speaking in his homily at a Mass for the Sick at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, Archbishop Vincent Nichols reflected on death and suffering in health care. He advocated a culture of “true compassion and healing” that does not fear death but prepares for it with prayer, the sacraments, and “daily abandonment to God.”
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“A culture of true compassion and healing fosters a deep respect and attentive care of the whole person, it promotes genuine care characterized by a sense of humility, a profound respect for others, and a refusal to see them as no more than a medical or behavioral problem to be tackled and resolved. To care in this way is a gift of oneself to another. And, as with all true giving, the giver also receives.”
Rejoicing in Christian faith, the archbishop said, makes clear the “very fundamental truth” that each person has a God-given dignity and “a quality of life in relationship to God that can never be reduced to its external human behaviors.
“From the outside a life might seem restricted, reduced or burdensome,” the archbishop noted. “But from within, where the love and comfort of God is experienced, that same life might well be rich in both experience and promise.”
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We do not know how to deal with death. But fear cannot be our guide,” Archbishop Nichols stated.
He cited the Bishops of England and Wales’ recent document which said that respecting life and accepting death must be priorities in end-of-life care.
“We should never try to bring about death,” they wrote, but accepting death means that we should prepare properly and not “flee from the inevitable.”
“A religious person will see both life and death as coming from God,” the bishops added, describing each human being as “more than a bundle of genes and actions.”
The bishops said a “reductionist” mode of operating health care is a “hidden violence” in the system, stressing that death cannot be reduced to a “clinical event.”
Instead, Archbishop Nichols added, the “spiritual being of every person” must be central to health care, especially at the time of death.
“This moment is central to our pilgrim journey. We practice for it, day by day, rehearsing our final act of trust with smaller daily acts of abandonment to God, in prayer, in kindness towards others, and in our sacramental life.”
That's what New Hampshire resident Harriet Richardson Ames said from the hospice where she was being cared for when told that Keene State was researching her coursework to see whether it could award her the diploma Mrs Ames so desired.
Her daughter said, "She had what I call a 'bucket list,' and that was the last thing on it."
She got her college degree one day before dying, three weeks after turning 100.
A woman who was completely prepared to die, finds the unexpected in Guide to a good life.
Every summer but for three since 1953, Lella has returned to the three-storey towering white clapboard house by a brook in Judique, a rural community hugging the western coast of the island. She was born in the house with windows of wavy glass, walls of Douglas fir and a wood stove burning in June out of necessity. For three months of the year, they would open the kitchen door and serve their friends tea in the afternoon and something stronger in the evening and host ice cream picnics.
Michael, along with daughter Melissa, made the 13-hour drive for his parents. Lella's husband, Bob Dubuque, a retired Walpole police officer, had a serious stroke 10 years ago.
They arrived in July. Lella's brother had opened the house. A cousin had scattered vases of wildflowers, Lella's favourite, about the rooms. Her twin brothers flew in from Windsor, Ont. Her son, Mark, came from Kentucky.
Over the course of a week, more than 100 people came to see her in what has been described as a living wake. They exchanged old stories and brought her rosary beads, prayer cards, holy oil, even blessed salt. Lella assured anyone who asked about her illness that she was "looking forward to the journey" and to being with her relatives in Heaven.
From the Atlas Obscura comes this story of Ivolginsky Datsan and the mummified remains of Russia's most important Buddhist
In 1927, the 75 year old Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov announced it was time for his death. Itigilov, who was the 12th Pandito Khambo Lama, the titular head of the Buddhist faith in Russia, had the other lamas join him in meditation. He died mid-meditation. His sitting body was set upright inside a wooden box and buried. Shortly thereafter Buddhism was all but wiped from newly communist Russia.
In 2002, Itgilov's body was exhumed (it had been secretly exhumed and checked on twice by the monks during the Soviet era) and transferred to the Ivolginsky Datsan, the most important Buddhist monastery in Russia. Itigilov's mummified remains there, sitting in the exact same lotus position as when he died more than three quarters of a century ago. Though his eyes and nose are now sunken, the body is nonetheless a wonder of preservation.
Tom Foley, a 41-year-old tax advisor tells how he copes with terminal cancer.
‘I am stepping out of time into eternity'
But, why accept? Why not a solitary whine? Or perhaps even a trite: "This is not fair." Because all is grace, all is gift. And it is time to give the gift back, freely and willingly. A strong sense of Divine Providence strengthens me, a sense that I have been prepared for this. Both my wife and I had fairly dramatic conversions around the time of the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI. Since then the liturgy, particularly the Benedictine monastic liturgies at abbeys such as St Cecilia's, Quarr, Downside, Solesmes and Le Barroux, have become, for us, a foretaste of the Heavenly Liturgy. What can one say but when the cantor announces: "Deus, in adiutorium meum intende ("O God, come to our aid") our souls will fly to the stratosphere and we will be among the angels. And then, after the chanting of the psalm, the bow for the "Glory be" is a bodily enactment of what the soul proclaims at that moment: "All is well, God is in the heavens and we are his sons and daughters!"
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Rather, one can be possessed by joy and, dare I say it, one can begin to taste a little excitement at the thought of stepping out of time into eternity. But the horror of the rupture and wrongness of death must not be denied and it is thus not right to be too joyful.
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There is an oddness about modern funerals I simply cannot fathom. Why are people so chirpy? I will leave clear instructions: no jokes and no beatification ceremony (the modern custom). Instead: I desire that people pray unceasingly that my purgation will be short.
Man killed in church after stone altar falls on him.
Gunther Link, a devout Catholic, prayed to be saved after he was trapped in a lift – but was killed when he went to church to give thanks and the stone altar fell on him.
Link, 45, died instantly as he was crushed under the ancient 860lb monument in the Weinhaus Church in Vienna, Austria.
Roman Hahslinger, a police spokesman, said: "He was a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release.
"A short while later he was pulled out of the elevator and he went straight to the church to thank God.
"He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly.
It makes you think when your time has come, it's come, although I am glad he died instantly and in a good place, far better than an elevator .
The monk who died with a smile on his face
This photo of Elder Joseph of Vatopedi, a monk of Mt Athos, was taken at his funeral.
With Faith and Friends, Convent Offers Model for End of Life
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”
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“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
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Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.
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Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”
Several priests have moved into this Mother House like Father Shannon.
He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.
“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”
Matthew of the Shrine of the Holy Whapping delivers the sad news that Msgr William Kerr who baptized him in 1983, was felled by a massive stroke while in the pulpit last week at the co-cathedral of St. Thomas More.
There is a fascinating connection to Ted Bundy, the story of which you click the link to read. I want to focus on his last remarkable and unfinished homily.
Today, I want to share with you an anniversary that is important to me. I speak of the anniversary of my ordination as a deacon and of my first assignment. On my way to receiving that first assignment, I stopped by the chapel to go over my resume with God. This was in St. Louis and ten parishes and a hospital were to be assigned to deacons. I told God, "I would do well in a parish. You know I'm not good with hospitals."
After that, I stepped over to the bishop's office. I met with the bishop and received my assignment – it was the hospital.
When I arrived at the hospital, I was immediately directed to the burn unit. This particular hospital was famous for its burn unit and very gravely injured burn patients were brought here. I learned that the chaplain was out for the day and I was faced with this daunting task without any instructions. It was the doctor and me. He advised me to look in the patients' eyes and not at their disfiguring injuries.
My first patient was a young man who had been burned by an explosion. He was in critical condition. This young man, who came to have a tremendous influence on my life, worked in a factory. He had been tasked with picking up rags and spent containers. He disposed of them in an incinerator. This was a chemical factory and unfortunately the containers held chemicals that exploded, seriously burning him in the process.
His name was Michael, Michael Anderson, and he said, "'Father,'" (he called me 'Father,') I always wanted to be a priest, and now I won't get to – so I am offering my suffering to strengthen you in your ministry.
Amazed and almost at a loss for words, I said to him, "Now, Michael, we will get through this, together." But Michael, who probably had a better sense of his situation than I did, responded by insisting he would offer his suffering for me and my ministry.
Next to Michael was another patient who was well known in the area. He heard Michael's conversation with me and told him to put in a good word for him in heaven.
The doctor told me it was important for the patients to scream, to help them relieve their agonizing pain. But Michael never screamed. He held his suffering to himself until he died.
During the next few hours, I got to know Michael. The singular circumstances of our meeting led to friendship, and a special bond between us. And, over the course of my life, I have repeatedly felt that bond and that friendship. Many times I have asked Michael to pray for me to strengthen me in my ministry.
I often think about the priceless blessings I received from being assigned to that hospital and from meeting Michael. God knows us and he knows where we belong, even if we do not know ourselves. We must pray… we must pray…Michael…
R.I.P. Requiescat in pace
Whether he was visiting refugees in Rwanda or Bosnia or sharing Thanksgiving dinner each year with his longtime friend Roger Staubach , the former Dallas Cowboys and Navy star quarterback, Kerr touched lives, his friends say.
"He was as good a person as you would ever want to meet," Staubach told The Associated Press on Wednesday night. "He was always dedicated to others."
Monsignor William Kerr, a former president of La Roche College whose pursuit of peace touched presidents and prisoners, died Wednesday after suffering a stroke May 3 during Mass in a Florida cathedral. He was 68.
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When serial killer Ted Bundy murdered two women and severely injured two others in a sorority house in 1978, Monsignor Kerr was called to give last rites. Mr. Bundy sought counseling from Monsignor Kerr, who last visited him two days before his 1989 execution.
By then, Monsignor Kerr had spent five years as vice president for university relations at Catholic University. In 1992 he became president of La Roche.
"Under his leadership, La Roche College was transformed from a regional coeducational, liberal arts college into a global community of learners with a burgeoning international presence," said Sister Candace Introcaso, the current president.
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"For a man who gave his life to the church delivering the word, that's a pretty sweet way to go," he said.
Via the Deacon's Bench, comes this story in the Washington Post about a Maryland priest who died on Holy Thursday.
Md. Priest's Death Adds Meaning to Holy Week
Dying on Holy Thursday -- the day marking the creation of the priesthood -- on the floor of his parish's sanctuary, under the eyes of a statue of the patron saint of happy deaths, the Rev. G. William Finch left his Rockville congregation with powerful Easter symbolism.
Even as St. Raphael Catholic Church, one of the region's few Roman Catholic megachurches, mourned its pastor, members said yesterday that the imagery was striking. Not only did Finch die just after he finished saying Mass, surrounded by parishioners praying the rosary and priests anointing him, next to the statue of Saint Joseph, but it happened just before Easter, a time when Christians focus intensely on mortality.
That left Finch's community grief-stricken and inspired by the memory of a jolly 55-year-old who loved red wine, Italian food and dancing fervently.
"As tragic as it was, it was kind of perfect," John Reutemann, a seminarian who grew up at St. Raphael's, said yesterday afternoon in the sanctuary, which was quiet except for the organist practicing for last night's Easter Vigil and for today's services. "He celebrated the priesthood, had a great bottle of wine [the night before, for his birthday], celebrated Mass, Saint Joseph looking down at him. That's the way to go!"
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Finch had just finished leading Mass, and most parishioners were gone when he felt chest pains, the onset of a heart attack. He asked a priest to anoint him, something done for the sick or those near death. He was taken to a hospital but could not be revived.
"It was kind of a beautiful death," Dwyer said, choking back tears. "Sometimes in a priest's life, you're alone. Maybe he could have gone back to his room, but he was right there."
Amy Wellborn on the death of her husband Michael Dubriel.
There are stages, there are layers, there are bridges. There is a void, my best friend in the world is just - gone. But in this moment I am confronted with the question, most brutally asked, of whether I really do believe all that I say I believe. Into this time of strange, awful loss, Jesus stepped in. He wasted no time. He came immediately. His presence was real and vivid and in him the present and future, bound in love, moved close. The gratitude I felt for life now and forever and what had prepared us for this surged, I was tempted to push it away for the sake of propriety, for what is expected, for what was supposed to be normal - I was tempted to say, “Leave me” instead of accepting the Hand extended to me and to immediately allow him to define my life.
But I did not give into that temptation, and a few hours later I was able to do what I dreaded, what I thought was undoable, to be in a mystery that was both presence and absence and to not be afraid. To not be afraid for him, and for the first time ever in my entire life - to not be afraid for myself , either.
At last.
Two French wine-makers suffocated by carbon dioxide fumes from grapes they were treading
Two amateur French wine makers have died after they were suffocated by the fumes from the grapes they were treading with their bare feet.
The victims had volunteered to help a friend make wine at his vineyard in the northern Ardeche region and had climbed into the six-foot wide vat to begin the traditional process of extracting the juice from the grapes.
But police believe Daniel Moulin, 48, and 50-year-old Gerard Dachis were overcome by carbon dioxide fumes that are given off during fermentation and collapsed.
I can't decide what category this fits in, so it goes in both - No Way to Go and Good Death.
Bowler Dies Moments After First 300 Game
Don Doane belonged to the same team at a Ravenna bowling alley for 45 years.
Just moments after rolling the first perfect 300 game of his life, Doane collapsed onto the floor while high-fiving his Nutt Farm teammates.
The 62-year-old Ravenna resident was taken to a local hospital but couldn't be saved. A medical examiner determined that a heart attack killed Doane.
UPDATE from his teammates
The teammates say he was giving a high-five minutes before. They tried to revive him but Doane never spoke another word. He died of what was apparently a massive heart attack "He looked fine, reached across the table and gave me a high-five and he fell over," says Place.
"I think he died by the time he hit the floor." Don Doane was a member of the "Nutt Farm" bowling team at Ravenna Bowl for 45 years. His teammates says its strange not to see him on league nights.
"It was like a book, a final chapter," says Place. "He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face." "Don will be a legend," says Nutt. 'It's something that will never be forgotten as long as people bowl here." Ravenna Bowl is planning a memorial ceremony for Doan's' wife Linda and son Chad.
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Mummolo writes that the Father Who Died Saving Son Known for Sacrifice
If you ever ran into Nokesville dad Thomas S. Vander Woude, chances are you would also see his son Joseph. Whether Vander Woude was volunteering at church, coaching basketball or working on his farm, Joseph was often right there with him, pitching in with a smile, friends and neighbors said yesterday.
When Joseph, 20, who has Down syndrome, fell into a septic tank Monday in his back yard, Vander Woude jumped in after him. He saved him. And he died where he spent so much time living: at his son's side.
"That's how he lived," Vander Woude's daughter-in-law and neighbor, Maryan Vander Woude, said yesterday. "He lived sacrificing his life, everything, for his family."
Vander Woude, 66, had gone to Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Gainesville on Monday, just as he did every day, and then worked in the yard with Joseph, the youngest of his seven sons, affectionately known as Josie. Joseph apparently fell through a piece of metal that covered a 2-by-2-foot opening in the septic tank, according to Prince William County police and family members.
Vander Woude rushed to the tank; a workman at the house saw what was happening and told Vander Woude's wife, Mary Ellen, police said. They called 911 about 12 p.m. and tried to help the father and son in the meantime.
At some point, Vander Woude jumped in the tank, submerging himself in sewage so he could push his son up from below and keep his head above the muck, while Joseph's mom and the workman pulled from above.
For those who knew him, Vander Woude's sacrifice was in keeping with a lifetime of giving.
"He's the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back," said neighbor Lee DeBrish. "And if he didn't have one, he'd buy one for you."
Vander Woude was a pilot in Vietnam, a daughter-in-law said. After the war, he worked as a commercial airline pilot and in the early 1980s moved his family to Prince William from Georgia. In the years to come, he would wear many hats: farmer, athletic director, volunteer coach, parishioner, handy neighbor, grandfather of 24, husband for 43 years.
What a remarkable man. May he rest in peace.
Olive Riley began blogging at 108 to share stories from her life in the Australian outback, during two world wars and raising children on her own.
She delighted in her notoriety because she said it kept her mind fresh. She died singing a happy song as she did every day.
Ronni Bennet muses on the longevity of elderbloggers and leaves good advice for leaving a final blog post at the ready.
When Dr. Pepperberg put Alex parrot in his cage last Thursday night, he looked at her and said,"You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you."
Next day he was found dead in his cage.
Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End.
In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising.
But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes.
He lived through horror of the holocaust. He refused to swear allegiance to and then escaped from Communist Romania. When horror came to Virginia Tech, he saw it for the evil it was and sacrificed his life to save his students.
Liviu Librescu, 76, a professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, died holding the door against horror. He saved a classroom of students, giving them time to jump out the window, while he held the door shut with his body until the gunman, Seung-hui Cho, forced it open and shot him dead.
My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping.
Librescu emigrated to Israel, then to the United States where he and his wife enjoyed two decades of peace and prosperity.
The story of his heroic act shot around the world. But he is mourned by those who knew him and those who loved him, from the academic community in Romania where he was recognized with honorary degrees for his academic work, to his friends in Israel, and to his wife and son who, in their grief, must be immensely proud.
Our deep condolences and our salute to a brave hero.
Update. Joe Katzman writes
In the Jewish community, the response to hearing of a loved one's death is "may his memory be a blessing." Prof. Librescu's clearly is, demonstrating what real matryrdom is about - dying not to kill others, but to save them.
For those with faith Our dead are not absent and Love never ends.
The great and sad mistake of many people -- among them even pious persons -- is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes . . . Oh infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent. They are living near us, transfigured into light, into power, into love.
Just two months after his father shot his mother to death and then killed himself, Ernest Gallo got a wine recipe from the public library and took $5900 to begin making and selling wine for 50 cents a gallon.
Little did he know that the E&J Gallo Winery would become an empire selling 75 million cases of wine and changing the way ordinary Americans drank wine. Nor did he imagine that drinking his own wine help him live until age 97, or that he would become immensely wealthy and die peacefully surrounded by his family.
"My father died knowing that he had lived life to its fullest," his son said in a statement.
AP
Ernest Gallo, the marketing genius who parlayed $5,900 and a wine recipe from the Modesto Public Library into the world's largest winemaking empire, died Tuesday at his home in Modesto. He was 97.
"He passed away peacefully this afternoon surrounded by his family," said Susan Hensley, vice president of public relations for E.& J. Gallo Winery.
LA Times
"No one worked harder to build the base of American wine drinkers that we have today," Joseph Ciatti, owner of the nation's largest grape and bulk wine broker, said Tuesday. "Ernest made quality wine for the masses at a good price."
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When the Gallo brothers started the business, the joke was that Ernest's goal was to sell more wine than Julio could make, and Julio's was to make more wine than Ernest could sell.
Washington Post
If some Americans were uncertain about placing a bottle of wine on their table or of opening one at their parties, Mr. Gallo allayed their fears and stimulated their desires with his advertising, using billboards and later television. From 1948 to 1955, Gallo sales grew almost fourfold.
The brothers' winery, which began with a staff of three -- Mr. Gallo, his wife, Amelia, and his brother -- grew to have more than 4,600 employees and a presence in more than 90 countries
From a review by Will Blythe entitled Food for the Soul. of Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison.
Note how he records his family's history before he goes, so the memory is not lost.
In Donald’s opening monologue, a rambling family history for the benefit of his children, recorded by Cynthia, his wife and teenage sweetheart, Donald announces, “It seems I’m to leave the earth early but these things happen to people.” His mind remains clear while his body becomes “desiccated road kill,” as K puts it. Barely able to swallow, he must sniff rather than taste a final meal of barbecued pork ribs. However, Donald doesn’t rage against the dying of the light, nor indulge in the deathbed histrionics of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich. Dying seems to strike him as no more an aberration than birds returning to their roost at dusk. His mortality evokes the sense of a man going home at twilight, of — echoing the book’s lovely title — returning to earth. A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel.
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Donald’s dignified death is of a piece with his life (my father, a doctor, once said that in his experience people died as they lived, in character right to the end).
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This regal suicide marks only the halfway point of “Returning to Earth.” The novel’s subject now becomes an absence; Donald’s survivors must learn to negotiate the hole left in them by his departure. ... In treating the raggedy contours of grief, Harrison shows no patience with that banality known as “closure.” “There’s much talk about ‘healing’ these days before the blood is dry on the pavement,” Donald’s brother-in-law, David, complains.
The "inventor" and developer of Lexis Nexis, the vast electronic database used by law firms, the news industry and libraries, died November 12.
H. Donald Wilson, 82, died of a heart attack in front of his computer at his home.
From the Washington Post.
"He was essentially a practical visionary," said Paul G. Zurkowski, president of the Information Industry Association from 1969 to 1989. "At the time, the technologies were just emerging and people were focusing on the technology, but Don focused on their application to publishing."
Mr. Wilson started by developing a business plan for an engineer's invention of how to better search text for certain words or phrases. That plan became a company that started LexisNexis, now the world's largest online electronic library of legal opinions, public records, news and business information.
Born during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, died in Iraq, the remarkable arc of the life of Tung Nguyen says much about sacrifice and what it means to be an American writes Seth Gitell in the New York Sun.
If you've ever drunk Australian wine and enjoyed it, you have Len Evans to thank.
When asked what his greatest achievement was, Evans replied, "To make people want to drink wine for the sheer fun of it. To show the enjoyment in wine. You know, wine's a bloody drink. It's just a lovely drink."
Steve Waterson pens a wonderful tribute to his father-in-law, Len Evans in A Man in Full.
One summer evening 15 years ago Len Evans grabbed a good bottle of burgundy and led me out to his veranda for the would-be son-in-law conversation. As the sun fell behind the Hunter Valley's Brokenback range, we got to the part where he gauged my prospects. I was struggling with some banal career decision: one path boring but financially secure, the other much more interesting but relatively poorly paid. Seeking approval, I ventured that the sensible thing might be to go dull and safe. Len thought for a moment, turned to me and asked: "How many lives are you planning to have?"
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Most of the time, the expression "living life to the full" is a platitude. Len turned it into a masterclass, and we were his students. His professional face was that of the wine man, and according to those equipped to judge, he had few rivals in the world for depth of knowledge. Fewer still could match his palate; none could equal his contribution to Australia's wine industry. But to celebrate that expertise alone is to limit him. To my eye, his greatest love was people. His adored wife Trish, his children and grandchildren came first, without question, but I know of no one who took more energetic pleasure in friends and strangers, entertaining them with wine, song, fine food and, above all, laughter.
Via Tim Blair, Len Remembered.
The obituary for the man who put Australian wine on the map
Dominick Dunne, one of the few people who knew him when he was poor writes about the last days of Aaron Spelling in the current Vanity Fair.
He had become a deeply unhappy man, living sick and isolated in the biggest house in town, cut off from nearly everyone, estranged even from his daughter, and fearful that he was being betrayed. "There wasn't anybody sitting in there with him," one of his friends informed me. "Just a maid with a vacuum cleaner, cleaning the room."
How sad is that. Money can buy a lot of things, but not a good death.
Here is the N.Y. Times obituary.
Vanity Fair has not put Dunne's article online but there is a very good photo essay, Rare Scenes from 9/11.
Sometimes the way someone dies just fits. There's no disrespect to say David Bright died a good death, doing what he loved most.
Researcher Dies After Andrea Doria Dive
David Bright, a leading researcher into underwater exploration and shipwrecks, has died after diving to the site of the Andrea Doria off Nantucket, where he was working in preparation for the wreck's 50th anniversary. He was 49.
Bright, of Flemington, N.J., resurfaced from a dive late Saturday with decompression sickness and went into cardiac arrest, according to the Coast Guard. He was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital a short time later.
Bright was a historian and an experienced technical diver who had explored the Titanic, Andrea Doria and other shipwrecks many times - 120 times for the Andrea Doria
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"His passion has been growing for a little over 30 years, all kinds of shipwrecks and getting to know them," Elaine Bright, his wife of 23 years, said Monday.
"It's very traumatizing to his entire family but we know that he's happy. It's a very sad thing, but water, scuba diving was what he wanted to do," she said.
R.I.P. and condolences to his family.
A seventy-seven year old Italian man, clasping the tricolore, died instantly as he fell from a ladder as he tried to attach Italy's flag to a pole.
Man dies hoisting flag for World Cup final
He could have been only happier if he tried to hoist it after Italy's victory. A great way to go.
R.I.P.