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The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

Philip Larkin

The brainchild of Katrina Spade, the founder and C.E.O. of the Seattle-based startup Recompose, human composting is an accelerated form of decomposition by which a corpse is placed in a vessel with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Oxygen is pumped in to increase thermophilic, or heat-loving, microbial activity. After a month, a corpse will yield about a cubic yard of fluffy soil, which will then be given to the deceased’s family or to a conservation group. The process, which will cost five thousand five hundred dollars, uses an eighth of the energy that cremation does. People who have suffered from prion diseases will not be eligible.

Everything You’re Afraid to Ask About Human Composting | The New Yorker

If all goes according to plan, future generations will be able to interact with departed relatives using mobile devices or virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, asking the deceased questions, eliciting stories and drawing upon a lifetime’s worth of advice long after their physical body is gone.

All my life I have been thinking about death + it is a subject I am now getting a little tired of. 1974

(via Susan Sontag's Diary on Twitter)

(via laney on Twitter: "Keanu Reeves gives the right answer to an impossible question.… ")

(via Brad Farberman on Twitter: "There are so many amazing Mingus anecdotes. One of my favorites is from Yusef Lateef, who was asked to jam on . . . the idea of a coffin. https://t.co/oFOakbIWHX #HappyBirthdayCharlesMingus… https://t.co/b9HYquFEsx")

The succession of falling sadnesses, like the grains of sand in an hour-glass, had gradually weighed upon his heart and his memory: until he realised that he was receiving an education for his own death.

— Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur: Or, The Prince of Darkness

I see life as a road-side inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Family Medicine | The New Yorker

A son reflects on his grief and the loss of his father, who had been a physician.

He never really did return. For the final weeks of his life, he remained in a fog, from which he very occasionally emerged for a minute or two, and never when I was there. One day, when my mother was sitting by his bed, he woke up. He told her that he had been visited the previous afternoon by Uncle Eddie, his adored role model whom the F.B.I. had tried to recruit nearly a century before, and who had lived in a gilded apartment on East Tenth Street with a secret office behind a faux bookshelf.

“Aaron, your uncle died fifty years ago,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But nonetheless.”

(via Family Medicine | The New Yorker)

Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves by Gerard Manley Hopkins | Poetry Foundation

“Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.”

(via Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves by Gerard Manley Hopkins | Poetry Foundation)

The funeral after he faked his death by blowing up his work shed: Our father’s first apparent passing was a complete shock to us all. The initial few days without him were incredibly difficult, especially for my mother, who would collapse in despair at the mere mention of Dad. We held the funeral service at our local parish, where dozens of friends and family came to offer their condolences. I’d pushed through my grief to prepare a eulogy, and just as I stepped behind the lectern to deliver it, my father burst out of the church organ to announce that he was furious no one wore crossing guard uniforms as his will specifically asked of his funeral’s attendees. We were livid that he could do something so cruel and callous, but ultimately more relieved that he wasn’t gone forever. After all, he’s our dad.

(via 5 Of My Father’s Funerals Where He Turned Out To Be Alive And In Attendance, And 2 Funerals Where He Was Actually Dead)

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”

(via How Do People Communicate Before Death? - The Atlantic)

So photographs of death are as much about the dead as they are about those who are not — those who might be responsible for a death, those who might be bystanders, those who have lost a loved one… (or any combination of these). And, of course, much like all photographs they’re also about and for those looking at the pictures, the people who will respond to someone having pointed her or his camera at the dead.

(via The Last Image: Photography and Death | Conscientious Photography Magazine)

From the effects of the American Civil War, philosophical words of wisdom, historical accounts of death, African American experiences of dying, and personal accounts of loss, we’ve compiled a list of books on death and dying that touch on many facets of the human condition

(via More Books About Death and Dying | TalkDeath)

Is this how you want to go out, with a show that gets smaller and smaller until it’s gone?

Maybe that’s O.K. I think you have more of a problem with that than I do. [Laughs.] At this point in my career, I could go out with a grand, 21-gun salute, and climb into a rocket and the entire Supreme Court walks out and they jointly press a button, I’m shot up into the air and there’s an explosion and it’s orange and it spells, “Good night and God love.” In this culture? Two years later, it’s going to be, who’s Conan? This is going to sound grim, but eventually, all our graves go unattended.

You’re right, that does sound grim.

Sorry. Calvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I’ve been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there. And by the way, I’m the only late-night host that has been to Calvin Coolidge’s grave. I think’s that what separates me from the other hosts.

I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.” None of it matters? “No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.” It’s so funny because you’d think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that.

(via Conan O’Brien Wants to Scare Himself With the New, Shorter ‘Conan’ - The New York Times)

Save your darkest thoughts for a journal, and never reread this journal. Label it in such a way that no one will ever be tempted to read it, like, “My Longer Dream Interpretations” or “A List of My Moles.”

(via Opinion | Tell Me One More Time What to Do About Grief - The New York Times)

Best Book of 1921: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | Will Harris | Granta

But the Tractatus sticks with me because of what it meant to me then. One section, in particular, was luminous. It’s where Wittgenstein writes about how in death ‘the world does not change, but ceases.’ (6.431) The next sub-proposition explains what he means more literally: ‘death is not an event in life’ because it is ‘not lived through’ (6.4311). As we age and our eyesight dims, the world changes with our experience of it; when we die it just stops. This echoed exactly how I’d felt at my grandparents’ death. It was abrupt, prosaic. One second, we were all in the world together; the next, I was (still) and they weren’t.

Wittgenstein goes on to say something else. The flipside of the fact we can’t live through death is that our experience of the world is timeless – without an afterwards perspective, we have to confront the always-presentness of our lives. ‘Our life is endless,’ Wittgenstein writes, ‘in the way that our visual field is without limit.’ Reading this I imagined following the outer edge of the visible horizon, knowing that even if it was momentarily obscured by buildings, trees or clouds, it hadn’t gone. And sometimes, I remember, that’s a state reading can induce. It can remind us what it means to be free.

(via Best Book of 1921: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | Will Harris | Granta)

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