I always read obituaries

It always fascinates me, how someone's whole life could be squeezed into few sentences.

[bookgeekdom]

[strandbooks]

It’s #StaffPickFriday again! Basement bookseller Destiny (@destinystegall) recommends Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by @thegooddeath. 💀🖤 “I always feel weird about recommending a book about a mortician but I really like this book and the author. She explains the funeral industry and her experience as a mortician humorously and honestly. She talks about how death has become more sterile and more hastily put away, and since we or our families don’t talk about it, a lot of the time we aren’t prepared to manage after-life affairs. Caitlin encourages us to think about death a bit more because it makes us appreciate life a bit more.” 🖤 — view on Instagram http://bit.ly/2CXukok

[strandbooks]

👀👀 Tag someone who probably has these kind of weekend plans 🤣 — view on Instagram http://bit.ly/2G8uE7K

[nprbooks]

Image courtesy of Penguin Press

Beloved poet Mary Oliver has died at 83. Lynn Neary’s lovely remembrance is here.

And here’s her poem “When Death Comes”

When Death Comes

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox;

when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

She will be sorely missed

– Petra

[npr]

George, the last of his species of Hawaiian land snail, died on New Year’s Day. He was approximately 14 years old.

His death was confirmed by Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources.

George was born as part of a last-ditch effort to save his species. Back in 1997, the last 10 known Achatinella apexfulva were brought into a University of Hawaii lab to try to increase their numbers. Some offspring resulted, but all of them died – except for George.

As the last remaining A. apexfulva, George lived out his days alone in a cage at DLNR’s snail lab in Kailua, Oahu, alongside 30 other species close to extinction.

Those who knew George say he kept to himself.

“For a snail he was a little bit of a hermit,” David Sischo, a wildlife biologist with the Hawaii Invertebrate Program, tells NPR. “I very rarely saw him outside of his shell.”

Sischo said George likely died of old age, as 14 is “up there in snail years.”

George, Reclusive Hawaiian Snail And Last Of His Kind, Dies At 14

Photo: David Sischo/Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

"In Sischo's line of work, witnessing the last days of a species is common. He estimates that since he began working with snails in 2007, he's been the last person to see 10 or 20 species in the wild. Even so, his heart sank a bit when he learned that George had died. "It's not so much that this one particular snail died, but it's all of the history that goes with George," he says, explaining that A. apexfulva was the very first snail species in the Hawaiian Islands to be described by Western science. "I mean, he's the last of his kind. ... To have that last individual perish under your watch, it's pretty depressing."

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

The Jazz Funeral | New Orleans

The jazz funeral celebrates life and mourns death. New Orleanians use music as a way to "cut loose" and help heal. Click here to learn the history of the jazz funeral.

[npr]

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, photographer Tyrone Turner returned to his native New Orleans to report on the persistent rise of violence in the region. While photographing the funeral of Malik Braddy, an 18-year-old who was shot and killed in the Lower Ninth Ward, he noticed something striking: family and friends taking photos with, hugging and lifting into the air a life-size cutout of Malik.

“When you take a selfie with the cutout, it looks like the person’s there. I was really fascinated by it,” Turner says.

Afterwards, he continued to see more cutouts displayed at black funerals around the city. While covering a second line parade — a local tradition where people strut and dance to brass bands through the streets — Turner saw a man standing on a rooftop, dancing with a cutout of a young man who had been killed.

The public and communal celebrations of the dead are powerful representations of black New Orleans, and cutouts have become a modern and unique tradition of its own. Though they are also used in other celebrations, such as birthdays and graduations, “lifesizes” — as they’re sometimes referred to by locals — are most frequently made to remember young men, teenage to mid-20s, who died from gun violence.

Photos by Tyrone Turner for NPR

Continue reading: Life-Size Cutouts Help Extend The Relationship With Lost Loved Ones In New Orleans

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

Dan Pearson on Instagram: “Iris ‘Demi Deuil’ and ‘Anvil of Darkness’. When naming lives up to expectation”

1,950 Likes, 39 Comments - Dan Pearson (@coyotewillow) on Instagram: “Iris ‘Demi Deuil’ and ‘Anvil of Darkness’. When naming lives up to expectation”

irises "Demi Deuil" ("deuil" = "mourning") and "Anvil of Darkness"

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

Instagram post by @diegoluna_ • Jul 22, 2018 at 12:35pm UTC

10.4k Likes, 68 Comments - @diegoluna_ on Instagram

"Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we shall never forget it." - Michel Leiris (prompted by Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica")

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

What Are the Differences Between Suicidal Thoughts and Suicidal Obsessions?

Suicidal thoughts are a major health concern in the U.S. and many parts of the world today. In 2016 it was estimated that 3.7 percent of…

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

The Messy Business Of Mourning A Problematic Parent

When my mother passed away the first emotion I felt was anger. I sat at an iron patio table on my aunt’s front porch, smoked a pack of…

[ouijalords]

Persephone 🌹💀

Poem by: @softspokenspells Edit by: @witchglitch

[mmmbuttery]

Women We Overlooked in 167 Years of New York Times Obituaries

The poet Sylvia Plath and the novelist Charlotte Brontë. Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching activist. These extraordinary women — and so many others — did not have obituaries in The New York Times. Until now.

“Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female.

Charlotte Brontë wrote “Jane Eyre”; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now.

Below you’ll find obituaries for these and others who left indelible marks but were nonetheless overlooked. We’ll be adding to this collection each week, as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section, and expanding our lens beyond women.

You can use this form to nominate candidates for future “Overlooked” obits, and read an essay from our obituaries editor about how he approaches the challenge of diversifying subjects.”

[lastnightsreading]

Mohsin Hamid at Shakespeare and Company, 1/23/18

[bimbogollum]

When I die I want to be buried with grave goods that make future archaeologists think I was of much higher status than I actually was so that my grave will be referred to as a princely burial and I’ll be remembered by some cool name like “The Colchester Barrow Princess” (I’ve decided that I will be buried in a highly visible barrow, possibly with a ship) and the National Trust will erect a small museum about me filled with entirely incorrect but cool sounding archaeological assumptions

[the-busy-ghost]

Be buried literally holding a sword and axe and then sit back and watch the endless ‘powerful warrior queen v. just usual valuable grave goods indicating a high status individual’ debate from the afterlife.

[amuseoffyre]

I want a spring-loaded casket and non-degrading glitter. I will be remembered as “that *£^$% thing that killed Professor Hannover”

[glitterary]

As an archaelogist I completely support this.

“Characteristic of 21st century society is the sharp delineation between the funerary practices of more conservative, traditionalist groups and the generally younger and more creative subcultures. While those who identified as more conservative nevertheless frequently included personal items in their grave goods, the individuality of their burials pales in comparison with the eccentricity and extravagance of the neoteric groups.  Funerary archaeologists have been hard pressed to find commonalities between these individualistic burials. It is likely that members of these subgroups competed to include the most unique ritual items amongst the grave goods of the deceased.

One example from Colchester could be read as a highly detailed homage to the seventh-century Taplow boat burial. Dendrochronology of the vessel dates the burial to the mid- to late-21st century. The opulence of the burial is at odds with what we know of contemporary social structure. As such, it is likely that the deceased or their family wished to indicate a strong connection to the area by aligning their identity with the Anglo-Saxon royal history of the region.

Another example, this one from Milton Keynes, included a bewildering array of items. Archaeologists uncovered a Tudor coin, a Whitney Houston CD, and a mobile phone inscribed “Bite me, historians”. Taken together, these grave goods indicate a disdain for archaeological research and the reconstruction of identity using material culture. It is possible that members of this subgroup sought to use creative anachronism to conceal the date of their death. Some researchers have argued that individuals buried under similar circumstances believed that this knowledge could be used for identity fraud or necromancy.

There has been some research done into the psychological trauma associated with excavating human remains. Most of this research has focused on the emotional challenges of excavating mass graves resulting from genocide or plague, with the occasional footnote regarding individual burials (such as the excavation of a lead coffin in Whitechapel which produced a fountain of liquefied Roman remains when the air seal was pierced). It is my view, however, that further research in this field is urgently needed following the sad and horrifying events of the recent excavations on Orkney. I am sure I do not need to go into further detail about the dig that shook our discipline to the core, and will refrain from doing so. For those of a gruesome persuasion, the full excavation report has been lodged with the ADS. Field archaeologists are advised to wear protective clothing including goggles and, where possible, shields when excavating graves of this period.

Professor Hannover is sincerely missed and a monograph of papers in her honour is scheduled for publication next year.”

[vaspider]

… it got better.

[nypl]

Many children must face the terminal illness and death of pets, grandparents, other friends and family members, and more. Even children who aren’t directly dealing with loss or grieving often still have questions about the concepts. Our children’s book experts put together a list of picture books on the topic.

[ialwaysreadobituaries]

Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered. And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.

   Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown