Tag: death

Meet Fred. He’s cold-blooded, beady-eyed, a picky eater, and likely to outlive us all.

For her essay in the New Yorker, Kate Daloz relied on a precious set of letters to tell the story of her grandmother’s abortion.

Reporters Nina Martin and Renee Montagne go behind the scenes of their multi-part series on women who die in childbirth.

Contemplating history, family, and today’s America, Dane A. Wisher tells the story of spreading his father’s ashes on the battlefield at Gettysburg National Park and coming to terms with his life and death.

Scientists closely monitor the last member of a species. Is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no tomorrow?

Seth Davis Branitz had an awful suspicion he’d feel relieved when, some day, his very troubled brother would pass. He had no idea about the other ends it would rapidly bring with it.

The author, speaker, and performance artist was far more than her final, heartbreaking Modern Love column.

Andrew McMillen writes on palliative care as a critical service, and of the “power and the grace” required to care for those who are terminally ill and grant their dying wish: to die peacefully, at home.

At Mother Jones, Julia Lurie reports on a rising trend: death by opioid withdrawal in jail. Read about how addict shame and silence, jail short-staffing, scant medical equipment, and a general apathy toward inmates make a deadly combination.

Michelle Allison pens an essay in The Atlantic our relationship to food and what really underlies our obsession with food choice and finding the “best” diet.

When you work the night shift for too long, the murders start to link up with one another, blending cause and effect in a centrifugal force that gnaws away at the city. The veteran reporters start to see this; the man gunned down one night is related to an ongoing gang dispute, which originates in […]

At The Walrus, Georgina Blanchard reflects on the stillbirth of her son, Charlie Showman.

What they don’t tell you about death—or what you don’t really understand until it happens close to you—is how permanent it is. In the months afterward I kept thinking to myself, all right, I get it. This is too painful. Let’s just take a little break from the loss. Let’s have a weekend off. A […]

Daniel Wallace killed a chicken — and it didn’t really change him. He reflects on the strange ease of poultry murder and the inevitability of death in this fun but sobering piece in the Bitter Southerner.

Isaac Blum writes in the Iowa Review about his young sister’s death, the shadow Heinz ketchup casts over his family, and the different ways people mourn.

Nothing is set in stone, except of course your epitaph. In a recent essay for Aeon, Tom Pitock mused on the difficulty of writing his own father’s epitaph, and why we etch words on tombstones to remember people we loved. But not every culture uses epitaphs, as Pitock learned in Greenland: It took real effort to find the cemetery […]

‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’

Ironically, it was this desire to be close to the dead that ultimately helped usher bodies out of the home. Embalming—which advanced as a science around the same time as the Civil War—allowed for the corpses of men who had died on far-off battlefields to return home for some semblance of the Good Death. “Families […]

A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]

Alcor agreed to accept Matheryn as a patient, and enrolled her as a member. The initial plan was to fly Einz to the United States while she was still alive, so Alcor’s team could perform the procedure domestically. That procedure is complex and highly invasive; the BBC calls it “intense.” It involves moving the patient onto an ice bed, […]

Elvis Presley and I had at least one thing in common: A love of racquetball.

Von Hagens has no shortage of donors. His exhibitions have used 1,100 bodies – but he claims to have another 12,100 living donors signed up. One is Emma Knott, a PR consultant in London. “I was so inspired after I saw the exhibition], which is why I made that decision,” she says. But does she have reservations? “Not really, I mean let’s face it I’m going to be dead.” For her, the attraction lies in encouraging people to get excited about science and anatomy.

In the Oxford American, Alex Mar goes to San Marcos, Texas to visit the Forensic Anthropology Center, which contains the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Body farms are research facilities where families or individuals can donate their bodies for scientific studies, like how our bodies decay when left out in the sun and exposed to nature for weeks at a time.

What is [death]? It’s a fact that human beings—no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are—are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that’s a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around. It’s a very strange […]

The following is from Rachael Maddux, who wrote about contemplating the idea of death and mortality at a young age. Maddux wrote this essay for The Paris Review last June: For almost as long as I’ve been alive I have known that I am going to die. This awareness came to me when I was […]

When do we really die? Is it when the heart stops—or is there a certain point that brain death means actual death? As we make advances in medicine, it’s raising new questions about what’s final. An excerpt from Teresi’s new book, The Undead: Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at […]