Month: February 2010

Categories
Death + Art / Architecture Death + Popular Culture Death + the Web

The Dark Arts

Etsy.com, the DIY/craft juggernaut, is the go-to place to buy and sell all things handmade. If you are familiar with this phenomenon, you would know that if it’s vintage button earrings and owl-themed stationary you desire, then Etsy has it locked down.

The Etsy craze is so hot right now that it was recently featured in a NY Times story. Online since 2005, Etsy employs 74 people — and one dog named Dottie — according to the “About” section of their website. And, you really know you’ve made it when another site pops up mocking yours — see Regretsy.com.

Since I am interested in craft and DIY culture, and I like to troll Etsy from time to time, I decided to do a little searching on some death-related terms and see what comes up. I figured I’d see some skeleton-themed, Halloween-y stuff and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. But digging a bit deeper, one comes across a most interesting array of death/dead/dying oriented items that are available for purchase for that special someone in your life.

I compiled a list of search terms and their corresponding hits below. But alas, there are some false hits. For example, in searching the term “dying,” Etsy doesn’t make the distinction between a seller writing that you may be “dying” to get your hands on her vintage fabric scrap neck gator vs. actual items that somehow are related to the actual act of dying. The “Advanced Search” supposedly allows you to narrow your search by adding the minus (-) sign, but it doesn’t always work. So, to use the “dying” example again, if you search on that term, you will also be given items that are tie-died and die-cut. As you can imagine, this annoys this here librarian. The date of this search was Sunday, February 21, 2010.

  • We found 11,675 results for dead.
  • We found 3,470 results for death.
  • We found 16,098 results for dying.
  • We found 549 results for coffin.
  • We found 337 results for funeral.
  • We found 11 results for morgue.
  • We found 62 results for burial.
  • We found 161 results for suicide.

Peering further into these categories, here now are but a few of the handmade goodies on offer (click the photos to see the items in Etsy). I’ll let you explore some of the more “shock and awe” items on your own.

Toe-Tag Party Invitation


Natural, Green Burial Casket


Vintage Wells Fargo Casket Tag


Human Bone Necklace

Categories
Death + Humor Death + the Web Monuments + Memorials

The Overdue Death (and Snarky Remembrance) of Internet Explorer 6

A Funeral Is Being Held for IE6 on March 4. Browser to Be Buried Without the Body
MG Siegler, Tech Crunch (February 23, 2010)

In response to Google’s announcement that come March 1, it will no longer support Internet Explorer 6, the Aten Design Group is holding a funeral for the much be-loathed, cantankerous old man that is Microsoft’s eight-year ancient blunder of a browser.

Mock funerals forever! You can attend the service in person in Denver on March 4, send flowers or merely leave some memories — rants, backhanded compliments or even begrudging respect — at the memorial site. A few of our favorites (may require special knowledge to appreciate and fully ROFL):

Cromat: Enjoy that coffin and remember margin: 0 auto;height: 100%; is valid in heaven.

Danny Raede: He was the browser i used for many years. I will never forget installing xp, booting him up, and then downloading firefox.

Michał: Oh IE6… Such a hard person to please. Always thought he was more !important than everyone else. It’s like he could never fall inline and instead just float’d along by himself. And though he was often the bane of my existence, it pains me to see him now that he has Layout in the coffin. It makes me want to just * > #cry. Is that coffin 100% height?

b0ne5: I’ll always remember IE6 as a maverick. It rendered things its own way, even when all the other browsers were conforming to standards. Conforming was not in its lexicon & it refused to bow to pressure to conform to web standards. Shine on you crazy diamond!

Topher Fangio: I just rewrote a good portion of our site, and he (like an old man with thick glasses) didn’t quite see it just right. The images were distorted, and the colors looked a bit faded. Sad to go that way, looking at a bleak and awkward world…

Amos Vryhof: Die you sick twisted bastard!

Chris Shattuck: The one purpose in our existence that seems incontrovertible is that we should work steadily to improve the quality of the lives of our children and children’s children. IE6 had a difficult, highly criticized life and kept mostly to himself, but he was also successful in this one respect.

Transparency was incredibly difficult for him, perhaps because it would expose too much of his pain. But by forging his way in a world where there were no standards (at least that he was aware of), he did the hard work for his progeny, and IE6, 7 and 8 are a testament that from the flawed can emerge a greater perfection (though there’s still room for improvement). And for all his backwards ways, IE6 is still valued by holdouts across the world who rally for the qualities that he was unable to pass successfully onto the next generation. IE6, I salute you and respect your role in my world.

But damn, good riddance.

Internet Explorer 6: Hai guys! Just thought you should know I will be unable to attend… as this page is broken and does not render properly for me.

Categories
Death + Humor Funeral Industry

Sexy Coffin Calendar Showdown!

Coffin Calendars Are a Sexy Hit
New Poland Express (October 16, 2009)

via Trendhunter Magazine, “Controversial Casket Calendars”

Last October DeathRef tweeted about Italian coffin maker CofaniFunebri, which created a coffin product catalog featuring scantily clad goths. (This did not make the Death Reference Desk proper — while fine with being a sexy goth coffin calendar tweeter, I was reluctant to become a sexy goth coffin calendar blogger.)

Hesitation, begone! This is officially a post-worthy trend, which I initially missed but to which Trendhunter (appropriately enough) just alerted me. Not about to be outdone, Poland’s largest coffin manufacturer, Lindner, came out with its own sexy model, coffin-humping calendar. Hey, guys, don’t you know there’s a crisis going on? And perhaps it’s because of declining casket sales that marketing teams are getting creative (read: skanky) with outreach initiatives.

In response to criticism about the appropriateness of such a venture, the Lindner managing director, Barthosz Linder, says:

I don’t believe that sex alongside death is shocking and offends people who have just lost someone close to them. I produce coffins. I could produce furniture or something else. But I don’t. And this is a good coffin. I decided on such advertising because I wanted people to know about our brand. That’s it.

And about ripping off the Italians? What say you to that, Mr. Lindner?

The idea for this calendar is mine. Although I admit that I was inspired by an Italian calendar. There, a company does the same thing, but I thought, ‘Well, our Polish girls are prettier, and our coffins are better. … So we can do better.’

This is the part where I’d say, “You be the judge!” if I didn’t suspect you had better things to do. But if not, you can check out the full CofaniFunebri calendar here and see teaser pages from the Lindner calendar here, which boasts of “12 beautiful coffins [and] marvelous pictures of 12 beautiful Polish girls in magic landscapes.”

Categories
Death + Crime Death + the Law

Dying by the Numbers in Europe

Who Dies of What in Europe Before the Age of 65
Elodie Cayotte and Hartmut Buchow, Eurostat (2009)

On the heels of last week’s post about mortality rates in New York City, comes this hot hot hot report on how Europeans are dying. Special thanks to my good friend Gauti for sending it along.

The usual postmortem causing suspects are covered: heart disease, lung cancer, alcohol related deaths, suicide, transport accidents, cervical cancer, and AIDS. I read this report, in a bar, while drinking a pint of beer (I live in England…) which seems fitting given the high number of alcohol related deaths in the UK. Indeed, the report sums up overall EU mortality rates this way:

The countries with very low mortality below age 65 are Italy, Switzerland, Malta, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Spain. Within the United Kingdom, there is a strikingly large north-south division that encompasses the whole range of EU mortality. A number of former industrial areas with high mortality are found in Northern England and the north- east of France.

And let me tell you, the North-South divide in England is intense. A person might as well just give up the ghost if he or she lives north of the Midlands. The difference in life expectancy between Southern England (where I live in lovely Bath) and the North is almost seven years. Across the board, in every category, death seems to lurk at every turn in Northern UK regions. It seems that television ads have become extremely important in this public health dilemma and I found the following binge drinking gems, per usual, on YouTube.

Categories
Death + Popular Culture

Funeral for the Aints

Jazz Funeral to Bury the Aints Nickname
Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune (February 19, 2010)

A short article out of New Orleans caught my mock funeral adoring attention: on Saturday at four, a jazz funeral procession will commence for the no longer relevant nickname, “the Aints.” Saints once more, the NFL team rocked the Superbowl a couple weeks ago. After those celebrations, the homecoming parade proper and of course Mardi Gras, N’awlins is addicted to fun.

Fans are encouraged to bring their old Aints paper bags and place them in a coffin.

…The paper bags being what fans used to wear over their heads at games during particularly dismal seasons. Nice.

Categories
Death + Crime Death + the Law

Dying by the Numbers in New York City

In the City’s Vital Statistics, so Many Ways to Die by Accident
Al Baker, New York Times (February 15, 2010)

Summary of Vital Statistics 2008
Bureau of Vital Statistics, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (January 2010)

‘Tis the Season for Annual Reports on Mortality Statistics. The City of New York has now released its 2008 numbers for all forms of human death. Good news for Gotham: homicides are down and so are accidental deaths. That said, at least one person is killed a week while walking. Make sure and wait for the crosswalk sign.

Here is an interesting section from the New York Times article at the top on the overall mortality rate changes.

In 2008, of the 54,193 people who died in the city, 1,044 deaths (excluding drug overdoses) were classified by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as accidental — an 8.8 percent decline from 1998, when there were 1,145 accidental deaths. In contrast, the number of homicides fell 17.5 percent in that same period. The contrast is more stark going back to 1993: accidental deaths have fallen by 30.1 percent, while homicides have dropped by 73.2 percent…

…There are roughly 6,000 codes used to define deaths by accident, reflecting all types of violence and disorder. People are run over by cars, buses or taxis. There are dozens of codes to define deaths from drug consumption. Some die from the smoke and flames of fires, or they fall at construction sites or in their own backyards. Others are hit by trains, drown at beaches or crash their bicycles.

I understand why Departments of Health compile these statistics because it is useful to know how people are dying in a local area. Lawyers generally like to know these numbers too and a good funeral director can just tell you how people are dying without even looking at the vital statistics. Death by the numbers, as I like to call it, also reminds me of Meg’s recent post on Life Insurance Policies. Mix in bizarre, insane, unbelievable accidents and you basically have the annual Darwin Awards.

But I digress…

If you are a true student of Mortality statistics (and I have some friends who are) then please download the official 2008 report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Vital Statistics.

And if your attention span can’t handle charts, graphs, and brief descriptions of tragedy then please, oh-please, watch these short Public Service Announcements about preventing accidental deaths in the workplace. I am always amazed at what YouTube offers when you really need a solid bit of video:

Categories
Death + Art / Architecture Grief + Mourning

Death Bear,

Need to Get Over Your Ex? Call Death Bear
Laura T. Coffey, TODAYshow.com (February 12, 2010)

Ah, Valentine’s Day — the most prodigious of the Hallmark Holidays, buttering up lovers (and by buttering I mean fattening) and sending single people into quiet rages, whether feeling left out of others’ romantic schlock or when needing to justify or prove indifference, which invariably comes off like denial.

It may be especially bad for those recently devastated by love’s crueler arrows – specifically, the snapping off of that arrow, having it jammed the rest of the way through one’s heart, and watching love run like hell. Sigh.

The end of a relationship can feel like death — or at least to the precocious living, scrambling for extreme metaphors to give meaning to these darkest of times. AND that bastard left a pile of his crap in your apartment that you’re too furious/wimpy/apathetic to demand that he pick up, and/or haul out to the trash yourself.

Enter Death Bear — that is, if you’re lovelorn in Brooklyn. Upon summoning via text, performance artist Nate Hill will don his gloomy alter-ego, a seven-foot tall, weirdly narrow bear with an over-sized hard plastic head. This phantom is all black except for the ghastly humanoid hands that collect the memories you want to forget — at least the physical manifestations that call them forth. Your ex’s clothes. Lame CDs. All those heart-sharing soul-binding letters that were obviously LIES.

From Nate Hill’s website:

We all have someone or something we would rather just forget. Things fall apart. Love hurts. Dreams die. But when you summon Death Bear to your door, you can rest assured that help has come. … Death Bear will take things from you that trigger painful memories and stow them away in his cave where they will remain forever allowing you to move on with your life. … Let Death Bear help you, and absorb your pain into his cave.

Awesome. And remember, this isn’t just a Valentine’s affair. Getting dumped, like death, can happen anytime of the year — and Death Bear will be there.

Categories
Funeral Industry

Three Feet of Snow Does Not Stop Funeral Directors

Funeral Directors’ Challenge: Death Waits for No Snowstorm
William Wan, The Washington Post (February 12, 2010)

This is a classic news article about two kinds of hot topics: funeral directors and freakish weather events. You put these two things together and WHAMMO, you’re king of the world.

So right now in Washington, DC (which is still digging out from under three feet of snow) local funeral directors are working working working because people keep dying. Indeed, mortality rates tend to go up during heavy snow storms because of accidents and strenuous shoveling. Meanwhile, cold weather and snow forces some cemeteries to close, which in turn forces families (and therefore funeral directors) to scramble when it comes to interment, calling around to find open graveyards or, alternatively, storage facilities until the snow clears. Funeral directors may work around the clock, sleeping at work among the dead–on couches, not in the caskets.

My father the funeral director did all these things (and more) during snow storms in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is just part of being a funeral director: you never stop working because death doesn’t stop.

Categories
cremation Death + the Law

UK Hindu Man is Burning Down the House

Hindu Wins Northumberland Funeral Pyre Battle
BBC News (February 10, 2010)

Hindu Man Wins Court Battle for Open-Air Cremation Pyre
Matthew Taylor The Guardian (February 10, 2010)

It has been a big week for cremation in the UK. On Wednesday, Davender Ghai, a 71-year old Hindu man from Newcastle won a landmark court case on Appeal. The Ghai case is fairly straightforward: when he dies, he wants to be cremated on an open air pyre, as opposed to inside an industrial grade crematorium furnace. Mr. Ghai is a devout Hindu so his request is grounded in religious reasons.

When Mr. Ghai first made the request in 2006, he was told ‘No’ by Newcastle officials. He then took his case to the UK Courts and kept losing until this most recent decision.

I am providing an extremely rushed explanation of the case. Burning through it, you might say. The Guardian and BBC News articles at the top explain the case history. I also wrote about Mr. Ghai’s case a few weeks ago on the Death Reference Desk.

So let’s skip ahead to why the Ghai case is important. Two important questions were pondered by the Appeals Court: 1.) What is a building, as stipulated in the 1902 Cremation Act? And, 2.) Does the mere thought of an open air pyre cause the general public mental anguish?

In a nutshell, Davender Ghai agreed to a pyre enclosed by four walls (with no ceiling) and his lawyers demonstrated that his request didn’t cause the general public mental angst. Indeed, it seems to me that this form of ‘natural cremation’ (a term cleverly invented by Mr. Ghai’s legal team) will have a huge appeal to all the natural and green burial people in the UK. How that gets managed is an entirely different question, since Mr. Ghai made his request based upon religious reasons.

More than anything, this case demonstrates that supposedly immutable death laws can be challenged and changed to encompass the world’s religions. And in the case of Mr. Ghai, his request faithfully follows the law.

Watch this video to see Devander’s Ghai’s happiness with the decision. I have never been happier for an individual’s eventual death…

Video: Devout Hindu wins funeral pyre fight – Watch more Videos at Vodpod.
Categories
Death + the Web Grief + Mourning

Grief Revisited

Photo credit: DeviantArt.com

A recent article in the New Yorker entitled “Good Grief”, by Meghan O’Rourke, delves into the subject of grief and grieving and asks the question “Is there a better way to be bereaved?”

The article revisits Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ seminal work on the subject and seeks to examine the “stages of grief” in relation to new research on grief and mourning. The new research suggests that

Grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process–sometimes one that never fully ends.

Interesting as well is that,

Searching or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief. As [another reasearcher, Bonnano says] “We want to know what has become of our loved ones.”

Popular culture is full of references to the ubiquitous five stages of grief as posited by Kubler-Ross. The latest issue of Adbusters, entitled “The Post PostModernism”, states that

Our upcoming issue explores the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and personal and planetary demise. Which stage are you in? Send your deepest insights and wildest notions to editor@adbusters.org.

Or this article from Reason regales us with

Therapists looking to study the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in that order—need look no further than Washington Democrats struggling to come to grips with the fact that the health care overhaul they spent nearly a year crafting is now dead.

And then there is this icky YouTube video of a mother who taped her young daughter as she was told that her goldfish has died. The mother crafted a video of her daughter going through the “stages of grief” and set it all to a bad soundtrack comprised of a shitty song and the TV blaring in the background. Seriously? It reminds me of the mother who Tweeted her grief hours after her son’s drowning death, a questionable and hotly debated topic of late. However, in the case of the mother Tweeting, she was the one grieving in her own way; the “goldfish mother” is choosing to film her daughter as she is grieving over her beloved pet. Good grief!

Categories
Death + Biology

Lolcats? No, Death Cat.

The story of Oscar, the “Death Cat”, is making the rounds these days. From articles in Discover and the New England Journal of Medicine, to an episode of House to a recent posting on this Danish death-related blog, AND a newly published book, this cat gets around—but only if you’re about to die!

Oscar is a therapy cat who currently resides at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His special (and for some, disturbing) talent is seeking out and curling up on the beds of terminally ill patients near death. Then, as soon as they’ve passed, he jumps off the bed and disappears.

Some say the cat is able to smell certain ketones in the blood that are released during the pre-death process. It is similar, they say, to the reported cases of cancer smelling dogs. Others think it’s just a coincidence or that he just likes to snuggle up with the heating blankets often present on the patient’s beds.

I tend to think that Oscar is indeed aware of something beyond human detection. I don’t think it’s that hard to believe that their olfactory senses are so sensitive as to detect almost infinitesimal chemical traces in humans. Think of cadaver or drug-sniffing dogs, for example. Smell is such a powerful sense in both humans and animals—although we humans are like a brick of rock compared to the finely tuned nasal capacity of certain animals. Fun facts: Bloodhounds have over 300 million olfactory receptors and the average house cat has about 200 million receptors. Humans have a mere 5 million (New Scientist). And for more about smell, check out The Smell Report by the Social Issues Research Centre. But why does Oscar feel compelled to lay with the patient? Is he trying to comfort the dying? Or is he just trying to send a message/warning to the living and the dying, that hey, someone is going to die here? Who knows. But I think it’s super fascinating. What do you, dear reader, think?

Categories
Death + the Law Death Ethics Suicide

Give Terry Pratchett the Freedom to Die…

Sir Terry Pratchett Calls for Euthanasia Tribunals
Maev Kennedy, The Guardian (February 02, 2010)

Terry Pratchett: My Case for a Euthanasia Tribunal
Terry Pratchett, The Guardian (February 02, 2010)

Last week, the British writer Sir Terry Pratchett (he of Discworld fame) catapulted the ongoing UK discussion on Assisted Dying back into the news. This is a persistent topic in the UK and I have written about it quite a bit on Death Ref here.

Terry Pratchett (who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s) is asking that a tribunal system be set up in England which then evaluates an individual’s request to die. The goal of setting up the tribunals is to make sure that any person making this request is of sound mind and not being coerced into the situation. Suicide has been legal in England since 1961 but helping another person commit suicide is against the law. So, a number of legal and political battles have dealt with the limits of what “assisting” another person means.

I have discussed these issues quite bit in the Death + The Law section.

In so many ways, this issue just keeps going and going and going. So much so, I’ve been collecting various articles for months because they appear daily and posting each one would be a full-time job.

Terry Pratchett’s request for a new UK system (or, at least, something for England… Wales and Scotland might be on their own) is another article for the group.

The problem, of course, is that all these issues and arguments are really interesting and important to discuss/think about/mull over.

But even I get Assisted Dying debate fatigue, and thinking about death is my job. The biggest dilemma, it seems to me, is that death is a human “problem” without terminus. At least in the twenty-first century West. England is certainly taking its time with any permanent changes to the law. It’s a slow process, to be sure, but it is a process. Terry Pratchett’s request will go a long ways in helping change UK law.

In the event you are a person doing research on Assisted Dying and the plethora of issues related to this topic, here are the articles that I have been recently collecting.

To wit:

The Guardian on the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland: ‘Death tourism’ leads Swiss to consider ban on assisted suicide

The Guardian on an elderly couple who committed suicide together: Couple wrote to BBC to tell of suicide decision

The Guardian on tour in the Dignitas clinic: Inside the Dignitas house

New York Times Magazine article on Brain Death and Organ Donation (which are related….): When Does Death Start?

New York Times on End of Life Care in California: Months to Live: Weighing Medical Costs of End-of-Life Care

New York Times on End of Life sedation: Months to Live: Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation

BBC News on push in Scotland for a Terry Pratchett-like law: Most MSPs oppose end-of-life bill