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February 8 - February 12, 2018
Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world.
Nietzsche, who famously said in Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,”
The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career.
Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead body present or even realistic talk of death, just Dad’s favorite old rock-n’-roll songs playing while everyone drank punch, seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one.
Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.
performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion.
It seemed unfair that I could spend a lifetime making sure I was dressed well and saying all the right things only to end up dead and powerless at the end.
The Golden Gate Bridge creates a new corpse in this way about every two weeks.
we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.
The rare virus that survives longer (for example, HIV, up to sixteen days)
A son may have loved his mother, but if his house is in foreclosure and his car repossessed, his mother’s body might shift from relic to burden very quickly.
cremation process, which uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body,
how do we get to be that guy? The one who is facing his own death with complete calm, ready to get on with the moving-on.
because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying.
Medicine has given us the “opportunity”—loosely defined—to sit at our own wakes.
mouth of hell. You can almost gaze through such a wound into our dystopian future. We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible
modern medical system.
“I asked Chad Boult, the geriatrics professor now at Johns Hopkins, what can be done to ensure that there are enough geriatricians for our country’s surging elderly population. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s too late.’”
