Death Cafe
This post is reproduced with permission from Jayd Kent’s One Queer Femme Anatomy blog. It describes the first-ever pop-up death cafe, the brainchild of Jon Underwood, curator of the Death Cafe blog and one of the nicest and, underneath that, brainiest people you could meet. A death cafe is long-held dream of John. How marvellous […]
Planning for a happy death
posted by our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson A recently widowed middle-aged woman came in tears to Benedictine monk Fr Christopher Jamison, and thanked him for explaining in a talk based on his book, Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life, what she had felt since her husband died. Fr Christopher had shared his thoughts on achieving a happy death, […]
Meet Angeline Gragasin and Caitlin Doughty
I know a number of you drop in around this time (10.30 am) hoping there may be a new post because you need a little light displacement activity. Well, I’ve got you something that’s anything but little and light. Two short films here by Angeline Gragasin starring/narrated by Caitlin Doughty “documenting the life of a […]
A time to die
Every week in the Spectator magazine Peter Jones takes an occurrence or development in contemporary society and politics and considers it in the light of what the ancients did when faced with the same circumstances. This week he considers the art of dying. I’d now bung you a link but I can’t: the Speccie does not […]
Materialism gone mad and the what’s-it-all-about question
Here’s an interesting piece by Peter Popham in the Independent, first published in May. I’ve only just found it. He begins by talking about Christopher Hitchens, who has oesophageal cancer, and how impending death has reconfigured his identity: “…when the bitter laughter dies away, there is Hitch, locked away from healthy us, in a land […]
Letting go
Rhoda Partridge took up painting when she was 70. Now 90 she’s still hard at it. Her spirited life has also embraced scuba diving, gliding and ceramics. In an interview in this month’s Oldie magazine she is asked: Do you find that after 70 years you live in the shadow of death? She replies: Oh […]
The only way round is through
Once upon a time people dreaded dying. They couldn’t be sure it would be painless. They dreaded being dead, too. Some feared the unknown. Others lamented the end of their existence. A very few people had no fear whatever of being dead because they trusted in a joy-drenched afterlife. But even these people dreaded dying. […]
Helpers fail, comforts flee
I enjoyed this piece by David Nobbs, creator of Reginald Perrin, in yesterday’s Observer. Here are some extracts. My mother died on 7 August 1995. I didn’t realise, that day, my life had changed … My mother died, as she had lived, unselfishly. After she’d died, my wife Susan and I were just in time […]
The sun that bids us rest is waking
It’s going to be interesting to track the development of, both, the right to die and its concomitant, the responsibility to die. Old age doesn’t just become physically unendurable, it gets to be economically unaffordable, too. The darkness is increasingly going to fall at our behest. Choosing the moment will be straightforward enough. Humans live […]
Embracing the unacceptable
There’s a good piece over at Salon magazine which I’ve been holding over for a while to use on a slow news day in Deathworld. This is such a one. And what follows is a lot more nourishing than a bit of tittle-tattle. The piece is by Fred Branfan and is titled Choose Death. What […]
