Category: Defying Death

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Afterlife Burial Defying Death

Adventures of Momento Mori

The Adventures of Momento Mori

Meg, here. There’re some new death kids on the block, and they aaiight. The Adventures of Momento Mori launched about a month ago at the deliciously named remembertodie.com (why didn’t I think of that? why?!). The videos at their YouTube channel Yo! Mori take a listicle approach—short, shocking, wacky bits of death-related trivia aimed at short attention spans that constantly need their minds blown.

The real meat—or the promise of meat, or Quorn for us vegetarians—is in the podcast. Here’s their blurb:

The Adventures of Memento Mori or, (A Practical Guide for Remembering to Die) is a bi-weekly, 30-minute podcast exploring death. Satirical and philosophical, the show follows host, D.S. Moss, as he attempts to reconcile his own impermanence. The show aims to change how people think about mortality. Moss challenges listeners to welcome death as part of life’s cycle, thereby compelling them to live more meaningful lives (himself included).

It’s a young podcast and it shows, with some super echo-y interviews that undoubtedly cause endless heartache and will never happen again. Episode 2: Communicating with the Dead left me bemused to listen in on spooky stories and a modern séance then be served the tidy conclusion that “it was all  a subjective experience made meaningful in our brains,” seeking patterns and profundity because we’re monkeys like that. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want woo served without science—but it sounds like they want it both ways, and you can’t have it both ways, at least so says derisive adult me. Twelve-year-old me squees because GHOSTS!

Whether this is them refining their voice or me being a total grump, the podcast clearly has producing and editing chops and, frankly, it’s fun. Transhumanist presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan is interviewed in episode 3 from inside his 40-foot coffin bus. Episode 1 gives us a template for straight-forward, no-nonsense, gitterdone conversations about end-of-life planning (pro tip: frame the executorship of your will as an honor, not a burden).

Suffice it to say, The Adventures of Momento Mori is now favorited in my Stitcher, and you can get it from iTunes, SoundCloud or streamed directly from their site. It’s a decent one I reckon will become damn great.

Plus, that hipster nerd skull! Duuuuuuuude.

Categories
Death + Biology Death + Technology Defying Death

Freezing Yourself like Time in a Bottle

Cryogenic Preservation Is Changing What It Means to Be Dead
If you could freeze yourself until a future age, are you sure you’d want to?
Judith Shulevitz, The New Republic (July 27, 2014)

Good article in The New Republic on the uses (and abuses) of extreme cold technology for the nearly dead, almost dead, and very certainly completely dead.

Just remember: cryopreserving yourself for the future may one day be feasible (maybe), but is it desirable?

That’s the question.

Besides, the actor Timothy Hutton can only defend the rights of one defrosted humanoid during his lifetime.

Categories
Afterlife Death + Popular Culture Defying Death

Day 24: How Praying Really Hard and Grave Sucking Might Help Raise the Dead

Deadraiser
Directed by Johnny Clark (October 04, 2013)

 

Evangelical Christians want access to more corpses … to hone their ‘raising the dead’ skills

Barry Duke, The Freethinker (March 10, 2014)

 

The people who believe in medical miracles
BBC News Magazine (March 10, 2014)

 

What is Grave Sucking?
Michael Boehm, Youth Apologetics Training (February 12, 2014)
Helping teens understand and defend Christianity. Helping parents train up their young in the faith.

Last February and March I started collecting information on Evangelical Christian groups that believe in the power of prayer to resurrect the dead. It’s not an entirely new idea for Christianity (e.g. Jesus) but its supporters have ebbed and flowed over the centuries.

One of the new groups that’s involved is called the Dead Raising Team.

Filmmaker Johnny Clark made a documentary about the Dead Raising Team and you can watch the doc’s trailer at the top of the page.

Slightly before I came across the Dead Raising Team, I encountered a somewhat connected but different practice called Grave Sucking. Michael Boehm, writing for the pro-Christian Youth Apologetics blog, explains that:

Grave sucking or mantle grabbing is the belief and practice of pulling the supposed Holy Spirit powers from the dead bones of a previously empowered believer.

Not much else to say, really.

It’s worth noting, I think, that Boehm doesn’t support Grave Sucking and thinks that it’s, um, impractical.

Then again, ‘miracles’ do happen. Just last February a man was declared dead in Mississippi only to wake up inside a body bag. This could also be a case of a less-than-rigorous end of life medical exam.

http://vimeo.com/63016718

Categories
Defying Death

31 Days of Death: Happy Fifth Birthday Death Reference Desk

Five years.

It was five years ago this summer that Kim Anderson, Meg Holle, and I (John Troyer) started the Death Reference Desk.

And to celebrate this major achievement (in internet years) we present the fancy new Death Reference Desk website!

In case anyone doubts our origins, here is the almost-very-first post by Meg on June 07, 2009 about funeral business stories on the This American Life radio programme:

TAL: Business of Death

The very very first post also occurred on June 07, 2009 but the links in the post are all broken and dead. Remember– five years(!) is a long time for the interwebs.

None of us had any idea that we would make it to year five. Indeed, this entire adventure started as a series of e-mail messages that Kim and I exchanged about wanting to start some kind of new website to discuss death, dying, and the dead body but in an interesting and compelling way that didn’t automatically revert to wacky funerals and lame puns.

Very quickly, however, Kim and I realised that we didn’t know anything about creating anything online so I e-mailed Meg who did and who also studied death. She said sure.

And that, dear Death Reference Desk friends, is how we made it to five years.

Sure sure we’ve had our collective ups and downs. Each of us has moved, loved, lost, laboured, felt guilty and then not guilty about not posting enough on the website. It’s just so easy (SO EASY) to use Facebook and Twitter….

Oddly enough, the three of use have never actually been together in the same room at the same time during the last five years. Not once. But the internet being the internet and death being death, it didn’t really matter.

Most disastrously for Death Ref, I unwittingly developed some naughty web posting habits that really irked Google and suddenly in 2012 ye olde Death Reference Desk stopped showing up in search results.

Thankfully Meg has swooped in and is fixing those issues while we continue to revamp and play with our fresh and minty new website.

We heart you Google!

In order to celebrate both the new website design and our first five years I am going to try something that I have always wanted to do with the Death Reference Desk.

For the next 31 Days, I will post at least one news story, thought, image, or idea each day on the website to demonstrate a key part of my own Centre for Death and Society research: we Humans are surrounded by death every single day. Not a day goes by where we don’t see/hear/smell something about death.

I will also use these 31 Days to flag up some of my favourite previous Death Reference Desk posts and try some other content ideas that I’ve never gotten to.

It’s important, I think, to challenge the conventional wisdom that describes death as a taboo and socially repressed topic. If Death Ref has demonstrated anything, it’s that both of these ideas are incorrect.

Museum of Morbid Anatomy

The next 31 Days will also be used for my own shameless self-promotion as I prepare to be the Morbid Anatomy Museum’s Scholar in Residence during the month of August. I will be giving a series of lectures, curating film screenings, and running field trips during the Residency.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum, as many of you may know, is in Brooklyn, New York and I already know how jealous everyone will be that I get to spend AUGUST in NEW YORK. I am already predicting daily experiences with aromatic summertime organic flesh decomposition.

A final big thanks to all of the Death Reference Desk’s readers. We’ve gotten many amazing (and, um, sometimes slightly creepy) e-mail messages over the years and we love it. All of it. All of you.

Especially from all of those kids writing High School or College essays on death who found Death Ref while pulling an all nighter and realised that Meg, Kim, and I saved them from complete and total failure.

We got your backs kids.

Onwards to the next five years.

Yours in Death.

— John, Kim, and Meg

Categories
Afterlife Death + Biology Death + Popular Culture Death + Technology Defying Death

Cryopreserve Me into the FUTURE!

In Pictures: Frozen in Time
Photographer Murray Ballard catalogues the world of cryonics, which involves freezing a dead person’s body in liquid nitrogen until technology has advanced enough to bring them back to life.

 

Photographer Murray Ballard’s Best Shot
‘This is a cryonics lab. Four whole bodies can be frozen in each vat. But just getting your head done is cheaper’
Kate Abbott, The Guardian (August 15, 2011)

One day, in the future, the people who chose to have either their heads or their whole bodies cryogenically preserved will look back at these photos as the in-between-time in their lives.

So the theory of cryopreservation and eventual reanimation suggests.

I’m still not sold on the idea that cryopreservation will work but I am fascinated by the people who opt for the procedure.

I am also curious what happens when people who died a century (or more) ago find themselves in a world which has moved on without them. That specific problem fascinates me the most.

But we are not here today to discuss the practicalities of cryopreservation. No no. We’re here to discuss photography. It just so happens that a new photography exhibition by Murray Ballard has opened in Bradford, England and it captures how the cryopreservation process appears to the non-cryogenically preserved individual.

Ballard’s images, which can be seen in the articles at the top, show how industrially heavy the cryopreservation process becomes. I was also struck by how low-tech the entire process looks in these photographs.

Robert Ettinger, the man considered to be the ‘father of modern cryogenics,’ recently died and you can read his obituary here. His body was cryopreserved after he died.

And here is a little 1990’s era cryopreservation humor….

Categories
Afterlife Death + Humor Death + Technology Defying Death

Head of the Household

happiness_marriage

There was an interesting article in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine about cryonics; or more to the point, cryonocists and the people who love them. The article is fascinating for the fact that it delves not so much into the science informing cryonic preservation (as our last cryonics post did) but rather, about how differing beliefs about the practice in the context of marriage can be problematic. It’s he said/she said taken to a whole new level. Ba-da-bing!

Peggy and Robin, the couple primarily featured in the piece is especially interesting because wife Peggy (the unenamored one) is herself a hospice care worker, well-versed in end-of-life issues but vehemently opposed to husband Robin’s plans for the final disposition of his head after death. Peggy finds the quest “an act of cosmic selfishness.” Robin, an economics professor, is “a deep thinker, most at home in thought experiments” but sensitive enough to understand the potential abandonment issues. Apparently, this type of discord has a name—and could be confused for the punch line of an Andy Capp cartoon. According to the article:

Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.”

Even though the article is intended as a serious look at the marital strife that can be caused by deeply held beliefs about death, life and what comes after, I couldn’t help but think about Woody Allen movies and imagined New Yorker cartoons—and my own marriage. While my husband has no plans for cryonic preservation, his vague plan involving the reanimation of his skeleton, a large glass vitrine and the gerryrigged ability to emit recorded voice clips with the push of a button, has generated much discussion and debate in our marriage. My husband is a bit of a joker, but in this he is dead serious (pun intended). All I can say is, I love you honey, but I hope I die first.

Categories
Defying Death Suicide

TAL: Trouble Bridge Over Water

This American Life: The Bridge
originally aired May 7, 2010

Act One, Bridge Over Troubled Water

We posted last December about the Cliffs of Tojimbo in Japan, a popular tourist destination but also suicide hotspot, and the man who made it his mission to talk down and counsel would-be jumpers.

Act One of This American Life‘s episode The Bridge follows a similar situation in China, where Chen Sah patrols a four-mile long bridge thronged by thousands of pedestrians every day and averages one suicide per week. In standard This American Life fashion, the story is at once tragic, hopeful and bewildering, as reporter Mike Paterniti is embroiled in his own rescue of a jumper, a young man whom Chen then scolds and threatens to punch in the face for being a coward.

Categories
Afterlife Death + Biology Death + Technology Death Ethics Defying Death

Mr. Freeze

Robert C.W. Ettinger

The January 25 issue of the New Yorker features an amusing article about cryopreservation of bodies, a.k.a. cryogenics or cryonics. The article doesn’t so much shed light on the science of this controversial procedure; but rather, it spotlights Robert C.W. Ettinger, one of the founders of the cryonics movement.

The ninety-one year old Ettinger gives journalist Jill Lepore a tour of his Cryonics Institute, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit. Ettinger is matter-of-fact as he dodders around the facility and explains the processes and pitfalls of cryopreservation. Ettinger’s two wives and his mother are frozen at the Institute as part of the current total of 883 members, not including the 64 pets also in cryostasis. Several pictures are here from the Immorality Institute’s forum page.

In his youth, Ettinger was a reader and writer of science fiction which informed his interest in and ultimately his career choice as a cryonicist. And indeed, he has an interesting take on what the future holds. Regarding the idea that if no one ever dies, won’t there be too many people on the planet? Ettinger posits:

The people could simply agree to share the available space in shifts and could “go into suspended animation from time to time to make room for others.” There will be no childbirth. Fetuses will be incubated in jars. Essentially, motherhood will be abolished. Then too, eugenics will help keep the birthrate down, and deformed babies could be frozen against the day that someone might actually want them.”

If you wish to learn more about Mr. Ettinger’s postulations, visit your local library or retailer and take a gander at some of his books:

Prospect of Immortality (2005)
Man into Superman (2005)
Youniverse: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy of Immortalism and Cryonics (2009)

Categories
Death + Popular Culture Defying Death Suicide

Death Meets Corporate Retreat in South Korea

South Koreans Experience What It’s Like to Die — and Live Again
John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times (January 4, 2010)

For $25 a client, the Coffin Academy in Daejeon, South Korea, will help you experience what it’s like to be a corpse, including penning your own epitaph, writing final letters to loved ones and attending your own funeral — supine in the darkness of a closed coffin.

In a country with an exorbitant suicide rate, these kinds of death seminars are viewed as a means to “appreciate life by simulating death” and are particularly popular with large firms hoping to boost worker productivity. But they’ve also been criticized as “how-to manuals” for suicide, or apt to lead to suicide ideation–the opposite of the intended effect.

Interestingly, advocates aren’t only selling it as an effective vehicle for life reassessment and renewal, but as a morbid “scared straight” encounter. That’s right — don’t kill yourself, because it’s dark and scary in a confining coffin, which your employer has just required you to experience. Proponents of unsavory future lives may argue otherwise, but I’m pretty sure death is a cure for claustrophobia.

Check out the full article linked above. While unfortunately slim on follow-up — just how productive, happy, readjusted or suicidal anyway are the participants the next week, month or year? — it does provide a good overview of the seminar and descriptions of the emotional impact on participants along the way. Just a teaser… many of them are freaked the heck out.

If the South Koreans are too dour and psychologically wounded for you, perhaps an account of a three-day “death rehearsal” workshop in California will be of interest. Here they don’t just lie in their coffins, they paint them pretty colors, plus share a potluck dinner of “food that one would bring to a family in mourning.”

Mm-mmm.

Categories
Burial Death + Popular Culture Defying Death

Dead Man Walking….Into His Own Funeral

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Dead wrong: Man attends own funeral after mix-up over body’s ID

On the holiday known as the Day of the Dead, a Brazilian bricklayer walked into his own funeral.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: So a guy walks into his own funeral… but apparently it wasn’t so funny for the friends and relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves. You see, Mr. Goncalves had been presumed and identified as dead. As it turns out, it was all just a case of mistaken identity. Ha ha!

This isn’t the first time the deceased will attend his or her own funeral—nor will it probably be the last. Take the case of the late Leonard Shlain. After Mr. Shlain’s green burial in northern California earlier this year, a film was shown, featuring himself in a white suit saying that he’d always wanted to attend his own funeral. Filmed a few months before his death, it gave him a platform to set the tone for the affair—surprising and humorous, but also deeply touching as he reassured his loved ones that he was happy, that he missed them, and felt blessed.

This all got me to thinking—just how many ways are there to attend your own funeral? I found these two flakey chicks doing a video tutorial of sorts on attending your own funeral. The message here seems to be about taking stock of your life and thinking about how you want to be remembered before you die. I really didn’t find this very helpful or uplifting, but perhaps Sarah and Suzi will convince you otherwise.

And then there are tales like this one that involve a massive lie in order to “spare everyone’s feelings.” It seems there are easier ways to ditch your friends, no?
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Finally, what about the poor folks who have been interred and buried alive? Also known as premature burial, tales of being buried alive have been found across cultures and time. Some of my favorite stories growing up were Poe’s The Telltale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado. O.K., technically, you are not actually attending your own funeral—just your own burial. But this seems like the worst of all possible ways to go. If anyone has any other ideas about how one can attend his or her own funeral (or burial) let us know via our comments feature. We’d love to hear from you—dead or alive.

Categories
Afterlife Defying Death

Research of Near Death Experiences May Improve Resuscitation

Questions and Answers about Moment of Death: AWARE Project Uses Technology to Investigate “Out-of-Body Experiences”
Today &#8211 MSNBC.com (September 28, 2009)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

According to the Today show’s Q&A, the Awareness During Resuscitation study — AWARE for short — is investigating “what happens to the human mind and consciousness during clinical death and the relationship between consciousness and the brain.” The hope is improved research will inform better resuscitation practices — though I suspect it’s also attempting to lasso the afterlife moon. As the video shows, part of the experiment involves putting a sign on a shelf high above hospital beds with the idea that astral travelers will see it and be able to relay messages once resuscitated. Shout backs, anyone?

Though I find this less than rigorous, the research protocol has been peer reviewed, as will be the results, and the study also uses technology to measure the flow of blood to the brain for a more technical analysis of what the heck is going on during and after death.

…And I suppose it would be pretty cool if someone, floating above his or her dead body and the heads of the doctors and nurses as is often reported, reads and relays the message of the sign. But assuming this study will not prove the existence of an afterlife, I’m just as jazzed to know we have such amazing, imaginative, immersive-experience minds.

We at DeathRef will keep our eyes skinned on this one.

Categories
Death + Technology Defying Death

Better Living Through Not Dying: Cryonic / Belief Suspension

This American Life: Mistakes Were Made
originally aired April 18, 2008.

This American Life does it again. “Mistakes Were Made” looks at the rise and fall of cryonics—the freezing of people at the moment of death with the hope and belief that death in the future will be merely a disease: curable if not entirely preventable. Interviewing Bob Nelson, president of the Cryonics Society of California in the ’60s, this podcast superbly captures the optimism, naivete and undeniably quirky drama of the cryonics movement.

Hard science and religion tend to dominate discourses of death; cryonics goes to show that imaginative, techno-magical thinking—that technology and the future will save us from biology—makes an equally fascinating contribution to our ideas about the natures of both life and death.