Click here to read Eva Holland’s excellent essay on the lives and intentional deaths of Alaskan artists Eric and Pam Bealer (note that the story is also available as a professionally-read audio-essay): Below their declaration was a passage attributed to Richard Bach, which said: “Why, instead of suffering and fighting it, don’t people reach a … Read more“The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart”
Humanist chaplain and creator of the Adventures of Memento Mori podcast D.S. Moss has created a comprehensive new online course for people seeking to “learn to live by remembering to die”: Culture may put us in boxes, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay there. Life – the fact that we’re living, breathing, thinking, … Read moreStarting Point: a new, memento mori-themed online course
Zoe Williams writes for The Guardian: You might get lucky with what they call “compressed morbidity”, a very short period of illness before you die, but you probably won’t. You might, in the event, find the suffering less awful than it looks, in which case you will, of course, retain the right to die in … Read more“Assisted dying is on nobody’s bucket list – but preventing it is deeply unjust”
A close-up of the Ghost puppet from my late father’s Punch and Judy collection. Dad had been a Punch and Judy puppeteer (or “Professor”) as a young teen, touring around various New Zealand venues during the 1950s. He was popular enough that his high school principal was frequently contacted by prospective venues, so the principal … Read more“Look behind you!”
Any readers intrigued by the mostly inchoate phenomenon that I optimistically refer to as Poetic Faith – the notion and practice of creating one’s own religion, as a work of art – should track down Alan Moore’s story Grandeur & Monstrosity, which appears in the graphic narrative anthology “God is Dead: the Book of Acts; … Read moreAlan Moore’s “Grandeur & Monstrosity”
I came across this small vernacular shrine dedicated to those lost to the Covid pandemic on my riverside walk this evening. The shrine features simple dedication messages in English and Spanish as well as bouquets of flowers, scatterings of flower petals and some candle jars.
In the following article, originally published in the Summer 1980 edition of Television Quarterly, documentarian Richard Ellison describes the production of his highly controversial special “Choosing Suicide”. The documentary was produced at the request of its subject, Brooklyn-based artist and psychotherapist Jo Roman, who had decided to end her own life after receiving a terminal … Read more“On ‘Choosing Suicide’: Documentary as Confrontation”
As part of my annual Memoria activity during late October and early November, I enjoy attending the Día de Muertos exhibition, staged each year by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. Here’s a gallery of some of the 2022 displays: