End-of-life
“Rites of Passage: Death”
In the first episode of his series on rites of passage, English artist Grayson Perry creates rituals to commemorate the life of Jordan Seddon – a 17-year-old boy killed by a drunk driver – and officiates a celebration of life for Roch Maher, a man dying of motor neurone disease. A powerful, moving argument for … Read more“Rites of Passage: Death”
“An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours”
Emma Goldberg writes for The New Yorker: The gray Oklahoma skies opened into a drizzle. Moss wondered what he had to offer Hancock in these final hours, when ordinary wisdom seemed to fail and prayers, in this case, were irrelevant. Heaven, hell, salvation: He had talked about it all with Hancock, but neither of them … Read more“An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours”
The Place of No Words
Recommended viewing by actor/filmmaker Mark Webber: “Where do we go when we die?” It is this simple, but unanswerable question from a precocious three-year old that kicks off an epic journey as the small lad leads his family on an imaginative adventure through fantastic lands filled with mythic creatures.
“The race to optimize grief”
Mihika Agarwal writes for Vox on the rise of AI-assisted grief processing: In the spring of 2023, Sunshine Henle texted her mother. She asked where she had gone, told her that she missed her, and soon received a response: “Honey, I wish I could give you a definite answer, but what I do know is … Read more“The race to optimize grief”
“Dying for Beginners”
A short animation, voiced by Dr Kathryn Mannix, which guides you gently on a step by step journey through the process of dying.
“What Justifies a Life? In Memory of Liam McCarty”
Jared Morningstar writes for Medium in memoriam of his friend Liam, and on the intrinsic value of life in relation to death: To be is also to experience, and the conscious experience of human life is something of both irreducible individuality and incomparable richness. In merely experiencing life as ourselves — in all its complexity … Read more“What Justifies a Life? In Memory of Liam McCarty”
“How Do I Make Sense of My Mother’s Decision to Die?”
Dr. Lindsay Ryan writes for The Atlantic: One doctor told us of a landscape architect who drank the fatal cocktail while exulting in her garden in full bloom. It sounded perfect—except that in all my years as a doctor, I’ve never seen a perfect death. Every time, there’s some flaw: physical discomfort, conversations left unfinished, … Read more“How Do I Make Sense of My Mother’s Decision to Die?”
Silverweed’s poem and the Death Cult of the Shining Wire
In Richard Adams’ 1972 masterpiece Watership Down, a group of rabbits must leave the doomed Sandleford warren and embark on a perilous journey to find a new home. Along the way they encounter many strange things, including a warren of curiously fatalistic and decadent rabbits, whose philosophy is represented in verse by their poet, Silverweed: … Read moreSilverweed’s poem and the Death Cult of the Shining Wire