ialwaysreadobituaries

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#death #immortality #secret to immortality #bookwarm #Harris County Public Library

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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

#book #Smoke Gets in Your Eyes #Caitlin Doughty #cremation #mortician

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

#lvanden1 #Strand Books #weekend plans #cookbook #poison #in English #Lauren VanDenBerg

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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

#Mary Oliver #poem #When Death Comes #poet #death #in English

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"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."

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

#obituary #in english #Achatinella apexfulva #snail George #NPR #Hawaiian land snail #Laurel Wamsley #Snail Extinction Prevention Program

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#New Orleans #jazz funeral #funeral #funeral tradition #funeral procession #funeral parade

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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

#lifesizes #life-size cutout #New Orleans #Tyrone Turner #NPR #selfie with the cutout #funeral #funeral tradition #modern funeral tradition #second line parade #funeral parade #funeral procession

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

#Dan Pearson #gardening #flowers #iris #deuil #mourning #bereavement

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"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")

#Michel Leiris #love #death #getting ready for death

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#Natalie Frank #suicidal thoughts #suicidal obsessions #Suicidal Obsessive Compulsive Disorder #S-OCD

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#Tamara Moon-Graves #mourning #bereavement #in english #problematic parent

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Persephone 🌹💀

Poem by: @softspokenspells Edit by: @witchglitch

#Persephone #GoddesOfDeath #softspokenspells #witchglitch

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“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.”

#obituary #NewYorkTimes #Overlooked

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

#Mohsin Hamid #death #dying

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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

#fun #burial rites #burial #tomb #grave #archeology #future archeology #funny

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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.

#grief #grieving #bereavement

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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    

#quote #literature #Terry Pratchett #The Shepherd's Crown #Tiffany Aching #Granny Weatherwax #grave #tomb #memories