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On average, 6,324 people in the world die every hour – that’s 151,776 every day, about 55.4 million a year. That’s more than the population of Australia falling off the planet every six months.
need to be able to separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief, she said.
we are told that people on the whole can accept a disaster. They can grieve their lost loved ones and can handle grim truth better than you think. But they cannot and will not accept an inadequate response from a company that had no plan for the living or the dead. §
Politics is completely involved in the funding and the approach to a disaster.’
As a viewer of images of death, the crucial element is context: we need to know what happened or they float loose in our memories as unmoored horror, the effects of which might be accumulative fear or numbness, depending on who you are.
the long-term mental-health repercussions for prison staff are not something that tends to be a focus in the death penalty debate. The spotlight generally falls on justice, revenge and the statistically unproven idea of a deterrent. But it’s there if you look: short opinion pieces about decades of sleepless nights from former superintendents, the stress and anxiety of practising to kill someone over and over, worrying about it going wrong, living with it going right. Some former executioners become abolitionists, they write memoirs, they travel the world trying to convince those in power to
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In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, families periodically take the dead out of their tombs to wash and dress them, offer them presents, light their cigarettes. In the period between death and the funeral, a body can be kept at home – sometimes for years.
Hold a brain in your hand and you realise how much danger we put them in to score points while others watch and eat hot dogs. I imagine what a bullet would do.
Lara had paused beside him and said that a case like this makes her wonder what it was like to be him, what it was like to inhabit this body. How did he breathe? What did that feel like? His feet and hands were black with dirt. He was the culmination of years of neglect and malnutrition. When was the last time he shampooed his hair? That day, it was washed and combed for him. Despite the relative brutality of a post-mortem, he was treated with more care by these women than he gave himself.
There is little public discussion about what happens, physically, to a woman after a baby is born – she goes from being a protected vessel to a kind of milk accessory, one so changed physiologically that her post-mortem is a speciality in itself.
What shocked Lara was how social factors, like race and economic status, would play such a huge role in whether she lives or dies; Maggie Rae, president of the Faculty of Public Health, was quoted in the British Medical Journal saying that these complex social factors underlying this increased risk need action beyond the health sector, and long before pregnancy, in order to make any difference.
She notices how many deaths are lonely ones, and mostly she just doesn’t want to die forgotten. ‘I don’t want to be one of the people who lie dead in a flat for months. I want to be missed,’ she says. ‘I want someone to notice.’
According to Tommy’s – the largest charity carrying out research into pregnancy loss and premature birth in the UK – it is estimated that one in every four pregnancies ends in loss during pregnancy or birth. One in every 250 pregnancies ends in stillbirth; eight babies are stillborn across the UK every day.
‘The first dead body you see should not be someone you love.’
We are squeamish, as a society, about dead bodies; we’re conditioned to be apart from them. We construct them in our imaginations, stacking them up to all the heights of horror our minds are capable of.
