I first went to a medium for the same reason probably everyone does: I hoped to speak to the dead. My brother had recently and unexpectedly died, and our family was in crushing grief. Perhaps a medium, we hoped, could give us some reassurance that he was safe on the “other side.” That’s what first… Read more →
Tag: Death
Modern Medicine Has Improved Our Lives, But What About Our Deaths?
In 1929, a young woman entered Koch Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Her symptoms may have included coughing, difficulty breathing, and fatigue. She was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. The disease is caused by a bacterium and, at the time, had no cure. Her doctor admitted her to a hospital that specialized in the care and… Read more →
What’s Old is New Again: The David Saunders Autopsy and Corporate Graverobbing in America
On August 24, 2021, 98-year-old David Saunders died from COVID-19 at a hospital near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nearly two months later, on October 17, he was publicly dissected in front of hundreds of spectators in a Marriott hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. When news of the event reached the Saunders family, they were shocked. His… Read more →
Screaming Over the Rubble: The Shifting Role of the Family in American Disaster Victim Identification
When the South Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, collapsed in the early hours of June 24, I shuddered to think about how many lives had been lost. Because of my research on the history of disaster victim identification (DVI), however, I also started thinking ahead to the recovery of the dead. I knew that the… Read more →
Irish Keens, Modern Grief, and the Digital Landscape of Mourning
In January 1833, an author known only as O’G published their musings on the Irish funeral cry, or caoine, in the Dublin Penny Journal. O’G described the cry as “the most singularly plaintive and mournful expression of excessive grief that could well be imagined.” In the article, O’G describes traveling the Irish countryside on horseback… Read more →
Alone, Together: Memory and Death in a Pandemic
“You’re lucky, then, that your mom died before all this began,” my friend said. “At least you got to be there. At least you got a funeral.” However starkly her words hung between us, I knew she was right. As shattering as it was when my mom died in Tucson four days before my sister’s… Read more →
Dead Babies in Boxes: Dealing with the Consequences of Interrupted Reproduction
One morning in June 2019, two city workers in Lyon, France, pulled a plastic bag out of the river that runs through the city center and found it contained the body of a “late term fetus or a newborn baby thought to be less than a day old.” Such occurrences have a long history in… Read more →
Burying the Dead, and Then Digging Them Up
About a week after my partner Clayton was murdered in 2015, I went back to his gravesite with one of his brothers to visit. The cemetery, located in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, was a peaceful place, with expansive lawns and even some trees that afforded much-needed shade near Clayton’s burial site. Clayton’s headstone… Read more →
News from the Dead
On December 14, 1650, 22-year old Anne Greene was led up the gallows in Oxford. She had been charged with infanticide; after sleeping with her employer’s grandson, she gave birth to a child—one she insisted was stillborn—whose body had been found “covered…with dust and rubbish” in the outhouse where she delivered it.1 After praying and… Read more →
The Deathbed and the Sound of Rebirth
What is the soundscape of the deathbed? Most often, for Chinese Buddhists, it has involved the sound of human voices chanting the name of Amitābha Buddha. According to the core Pure Land scriptures, Amitābha vowed to save all those who called on him, ensuring that after death they would be reborn in his Pure Land,… Read more →