Status Updates From Unnatural Causes: The Life ...

The heart is an organ one can hold neatly in the palm of one's hand. So small but so steady, a little fist, clenching and unclenching seventy times a minute, day and night, year after year, 30 billion times over a lifespan. A faithful friend. Until it stops.

Enjoyable and informative 😀

People find it hard to believe that, in mass disasters, visual identification is unreliable, especially so when death has been traumatic or the body has been immersed in water.

Only moderate force is required to penetrate major organs like the heart or the liver, and so even perpetrators with little strength can kill by stabbing.

One of us was always just about to leave for work. And if we were both home there were a thousand topics which required our attention: the children and their schoolwork, difficulties at work, the house repairs... I wondered how I was supposed to fit love into all this?

I really do understand that it is hard, very hard, to recognise the finality of death. To understand that the son who was thinking and feeling and animated yesterday is not so today. To comprehend that yesterday he would have been in agony when I inserted my knife but today he cannot feel it at all.

Most people misunderstand death. They see it as an instant event. You think that one moment your daughter was alive. And the next... gone. But death just isn't like that. Humans only switch off completely, in one moment, like lights, if they're vaporized in a nuclear explosion. In all other circumstances, death is a process.

One of the normal phases of grieving is guilt. "There was nothing you could have done," won't magically wipe away guilt, but it may allow it to pass more quickly. I hope so.

Nowadays we know about SUDEP - sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. We know it is something that can happen without warning to those who suffer from epilepsy, usually in the night and not necessarily after a seizure.