deathternity

Amazon Alexa can now let u hear voices of dead people.!!!!

2022-06-23T10:53:00.002-07:00

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/06/23/amazon-alexa-feature-mimic-dead-person/7709050001/

The New Art of Dying (& Burial) !! by Axios

2019-08-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

Jessie LiAug 10, 2019

Special report: The new art of dying

Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Axios

Modern burials and death practices are changing how we die and where our bodies go after we die.

Why it matters: Today, the funeral industry is worth $17 billion ($). Businesses are innovating on traditional practices, and more people are taking control of how they wish to die and be buried — in unconventional, surprising and even extraterrestrial ways.

It now ends with most of us getting turned into dust and obituaries posted online. Some new burial practices and places include:

Orbit in outer space. SpaceX recently launched the cremated remains of 152 people on its Falcon Heavy rocket. A company called Celestis facilitated these “funeral flights,” charging over $5,000 for 1 gram of “participant” ashes.
Transformation into a diamond. Engineers can turn the carbon from human ashes into diamonds that are physically and chemically identical to natural diamonds.
Green burial. Touted as an environmental and financially friendly option, green burials can be as simple as wrapping a body in a cotton shroud and lowering it to the ground — factoring out conventional vaults, coffins and embalming.
Green cremation. Instead of using flame, green cremation uses heated water and an alkali solution to accelerate the natural decomposition of the body.
Celebration of life ceremony. In lieu of a somber funeral, an end-of-life ceremony celebrates a person’s life and legacy, often with a dedicated event planner, a speaker and activity lineups.
Digital tombstones: One Slovenian cemetery is experimenting with digital tombstones that can show pictures and video, and potentially link to a smartphone application for interactivity.
Smart library. One Tokyo crematorium allows you to summon ashes with the swipe of a card: A machine transports the ashes from an underground vault through a conveyor belt to the right room.
Pet burial. “Togetherness Resting Places” reunite humans and pets “when the time comes.”
Memorial reef. Florida-based company Eternal Reefs mixes ashes with “reef ball” material, creating memorial reefs that can serve as habitats for sea life.
Living wake. Some people are attending their own funerals ahead of death — by holding a “living wake,” offering family and friends a chance to say goodbye.
Live-streamed funerals. An estimated 20% of funeral homes offer livestreaming, allowing those who can’t make it to a funeral to share the experience — and those who’ve attended to look back on it.
Disney World. About once a month, Disney employees clean up scattered remains ($) in the park, where visitors sneak in ashes to disperse at Cinderella’s castle, on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and throughout the Haunted Mansion.

15 Morbid And Bizarre Funeral Cakes / Beautiful Nightmare Cakes

2019-07-26T10:07:00.002-07:00

15 Morbid And Bizarre Funeral Cakes

Entertainment / By MetDaan Editorial Team

When it comes to cakes and cake decorations it is safe to say that the Internet has been witnessing some true masterpieces of cakes. Wedding cakes, birthday cakes, cartoon-inspired cakes, and cupcakes have had extraordinary displays thanks to pastry masters. However, there are some people and events that call for more morbid confections. For instance, a morbid and pretty bizarre funeral cake.
Forget about all of those colorful candy balloons, and floral designs. The following funeral cakes are decorated with coffins, hearses, and headstones. And if that is not enough, there is an even a dead body figure. Of course, at first, it sounds off-putting until you remember that these pastries are made with the same frosting and baking mix as every single wedding or birthday cake.
Scroll down to see the list of 15 morbid funeral cakes, courtesy of Ranker. You might be surprised that some of them actually might look appetizing.

1. Coffin cake with a ‘sweet’ corpse

Photo: Party Animal Online

2. A casket black and white cake without corpse

Photo: Gore Goodies

3. A ‘Pimp my ride’ or die confection

Photo: Sweet Harvest Bakery/Pinterest

4. The funeral-wedding-celebration-day cake?

Photo: Respect Funeral Cakes

5. A good hearse cake

Photo: Patti Blanton/Pinterest

6. The holy cake that is not healthy

Photo: Gresham Lodge Cakes/Respect Funeral Cake

7. Funeral-inspired cupcakes

Photo: Debbie Smith/Good Funeral Guide

8. A desirable plot cake

Photo: Lesly’s Home Delights/Respect Funeral Cakes

9. The skulls and roses cake

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

10. Funeral-cake with an intriguing presentation

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

11. A sweet cemetery cake

Photo: Debbie Churan/Pinterest

12. This cake lets you make the choice

Photo: Abbey Cakes/Respect Funeral Cakes

13. A peacefully morbid cake

Photo: abromaym/Cake Central

14. A cake that even death can’t stop

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

15. Sweet cake-coffin with flowers

Photo: Trista/Pinterest

Source: Ranker

About the author

MetDaan Editorial Team

These Made-to-Order Cakes Look Like Beautiful Nightmares

Meet English baker ‘Annabel Lecter.’

by Eric J. Wallace July 09, 2019

English pastry chef Annabel de Vetten crafts what may be the world’s most fantastically morbid confections. Her Birmingham studio and cooking space, the Conjurer’s Kitchen, is filled with feasts of macabre eye candy rendered with ghoulish precision.

Here is a plate heaped with thumb-sized maggots and grubs. There a bloodied human heart lies in a pool of green, molar-strewn slime. A stainless-steel coroner’s table hosts the disemboweled upper-torso of a corpse. It’s flanked by a four-foot statue of a saint, his face melting away to bone. On the counter, the neck of a deer’s partially fleshless head sinks its roots into a bisected flowerpot; a sapling bursts from its skull like a unicorn horn.

And the wedding cakes? These tiered works of art look like something you’d expect to emerge from the kitchen of Morticia Adams—or the mind of filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro.

Edible anatomy.

“Some people recoil when they see my devilish delights,” says De Vetten, 47. “But once they’ve tasted a lemon intestine or chewed a white-chocolate eyeball, they always want more.”

Around the world, people interested in oddities have taken note: De Vetten’s darkly humorous creations have won her a star-studded clientele and the nickname “Annabel Lecter.” Recent patrons include writer Neil Gaiman as well as Bryan Fuller, writer-producer of darkly offbeat TV series such as Hannibal and American Gods.

De Vetten’s nickname is “Annabel Lecter.” Photo by Sharon Cooper

“I consider myself one of the luckiest ladies in the world,” says De Vetten with a laugh. “I’m the person people call when they want something offbeat and fantastically weird. I get to spend my days up to my eyeballs in gore!”

One week she’s baking a massive four-tiered cake adorned with a human heart and chocolate deer antlers to celebrate the final season of Hannibal. The next is spent crafting dozens of historically accurate terracotta warriors out of pizza dough for a Beijing restaurant chain. Then comes a person-sized edible dragon for a wedding at Warwick Castle. After that, it’s chocolates for a function at New York City’s Morbid Anatomy Museum and an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

While all her virtuosic concoctions are edible and delicious, De Vetten arrived at baking by accident. Her artistic career began with sculpting in college, including body casting. Post graduation, she worked as a full-time fine-art painter and occasionally helped with effects for horror films. She took up taxidermy as a hobby in the 2000s.

Her foray into the culinary arts, though, began at her own wedding, when she and magician Thom Peterson married in 2010. To save money, the bride-to-be baked a wizard-themed cake topped with a levitating lady. Attendees were astounded and asked about orders. De Vetten was amused. She created a Facebook page and started baking cakes for friends and family. One of the first was an anatomically correct swan: Its head, beautifully feathered; its body, skinned and grotesquely bloody. Online photos led to thousands of likes and countless inquiries. The business grew into a full-time job, essentially overnight.

Part of the Dexter cake that spurred De Vetten’s renown. Photo by Wayland Thor Badger

In 2013, FOX commissioned De Vetten to create a life-sized cake depicting Michael C. Hall, the lead for its hit series Dexter, lying in a coffin. The piece was five-foot-10-inches long and took more than 100 hours to make. Completing it required 20 blood oranges, 240 eggs, 55 pounds of flour, 44 pounds of sugar, and 33 pounds of buttercream. According to London PR guru Emma Thomas, known as Miss Cakehead, its viral success sealed De Vetten’s position as “the world’s preeminent producer of weird cakes and candies.”

While De Vetten regularly invites clients into the Conjurer’s Kitchen, it’s not open to the public. (Her work all comes from commissions.) But as a result of her success in the film and television industry, she’s in the process of moving to Los Angeles, where, De Vetten says, she also hopes to open a storefront. So if you’d like to eye a full counter of Annabel Lecter’s culinary creations, you may soon be in luck.

Note the ring on this Victorian wedding cake.

Not everyone is a fan of ghoulish pastry. De Vetten’s creations—particularly her onetime production of life-sized dead-baby heads made of white chocolate—have spawned detractors. But she is dismissive of the criticism and says her work comes from a good place.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Why would you choose to do such weird, dark stuff?’ And the answer is pretty simple: It would be weird for me not to,” chuckles De Vetten. She says mortality has, and will always be, a subject of infinite fascination. “Death is a fact of life. It is a primary artistic theme. To me, I just prefer to have some levity about it. I enjoy the dark and the morbid, but I want a dash of lightheartedness to go along with it. At this point, if I suddenly started making pink, girly cakes with flowers? My friends and family would probably have me committed.”

Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.

What Happens To Yr Body When U Die In Space?!

2019-07-23T12:30:00.001-07:00

What happens to your body when you die in space?

And should colonists on Mars be allowed to eat each other?

By Shannon Stirone

‎January‎ ‎20‎, ‎2017

NASA

ON JULY 21, 1969, when the Apollo 11 crew was due to depart the lunar surface after a 22-hour visit, two speeches were placed on President Richard Nixon's desk. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," read the contingency speech. Would Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong live out the rest of their days staring at the blue glow of Earth from 250,000 miles away?

We've lost only 18 people in space—including 14 NASA astronauts—since humankind first took to strapping ourselves to rockets. That's relatively low, considering our history of blasting folks into space without quite knowing what would happen. When there have been fatalities, the entire crew has died, leaving no one left to rescue. But as we move closer to a human mission to Mars, there's a higher likelihood that individuals will die—whether that's on the way, while living in harsh environments, or some other reason. And any problems that arise on Mars—technical issues or lack of food, for example—could leave an entire crew or colony stranded and fending for themselves.

No settlement plans are being discussed at NASA (leave those to pie-in-the-sky private groups like Mars One for now), but a crewed mission has been on the docket for some time, and could touch down as early as the 2040s. NASA's "Journey to Mars" quotes an estimated three-year round-trip, leaving plenty of time for any number of things to go wrong.

"The real interesting question is, what happens on a mission to Mars or on the lunar space station if there were [a death]," says Emory University bioethicist Paul Wolpe. "What happens when it may be months or years before a body can get back to Earth—or where it's impractical to bring the body back at all?"

Today's astronauts travel to space by way of the Russian Soyuz, then spend a few months on the International Space Station. Because astronauts are in impeccable health at the time of launch, a death in the ISS crew would likely result from an accident during a spacewalk.

"In the worst case scenario, something happens during a spacewalk,” says Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut and former commander of the ISS. “You could suddenly be struck by a micro-meteorite, and there's nothing you can do about that. It could puncture a hole in your suit, and within a few seconds you're incapacitated."

This hypothetical astronaut would only have about 15 seconds before they lost consciousness. Before they froze, they would most likely die from asphyxiation or decompression. 10 seconds of exposure to the vacuum of space would force the water in their skin and blood to vaporize, while their body expanded outward like a balloon being filled with air. Their lungs would collapse, and after 30 seconds they would be paralyzed—if they weren’t already dead by this point.

The likelihood of death on the ISS is low, and it’s never happened before. But what would surviving astronauts do if it did?

Prepare for the Worst

ISS and shuttle astronaut Terry Virts served two expeditions on the space station and one mission on the space shuttle. In total he’s clocked 213 days in space. But the astronaut says he’s never been trained to handle a dead body in space. “I did quite a bit of medical training to save people, but not for this.”

NASA's official statement to Popular Science on the subject left a lot to be desired:

"NASA does not prepare contingency plans for all remote risks. NASA’s response to any unplanned on-orbit situation will be determined in a real time collaborative process between the Flight Operations Directorate, Human Health and Performance Directorate, NASA leadership, and our International Partners."

“In my 16 years as an astronaut I don’t remember talking with another astronaut about the possibility of dying,” Virts says. “We all understand it’s a possibility, but the elephant in the room was just not discussed.”

Though they don't like talking about it, NASA astronauts do prepare for death of a crewmate.NASA

But NASA's out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy on death may not be the norm. Commander Hadfield tells Popular Science that all international partners who train for missions to the ISS (including JAXA and ESA) do in fact prepare for the death of a crewmember.

"We have these things called 'contingency simulations' where we discuss what to do with the body,” he says.

Hadfield discusses these 'death simulations' in his book An Astronauts Guide to Life. He sets the scene—"Mission control: 'we've just received word from the Station: Chris is dead.' Immediately, people start working the problem. Okay, what are we going to do with his corpse? There are no body bags on Station, so should we shove it in a spacesuit and stick it in a locker? But what about the smell? Should we send it back to Earth on a resupply ship and let it burn up with the rest of the garbage on re-entry? Jettison it during a spacewalk and let it float away into space?"

As Hadfield points out, a corpse in space presents some major logistical problems. The fact that a dead body is a biohazard is definitely the biggest concern, and finding the space to store it in is a close second.

Since NASA lacks a protocol for sudden death on the ISS, the station’s commander would probably decide on how to handle the body. "If someone died while on an EVA I would bring them inside the airlock first," Hadfield says. "I would probably keep them inside their pressurized suit; bodies actually decompose faster in a spacesuit, and we don't want the smell of rotting meat or off gassing, it's not sanitary. So we would keep them in their suit and store it somewhere cold on the station."

If submarines lose a crew member and can’t make it to land right away, they store bodies near the torpedoes—where it's cold, and separate from the living quarters. The crew of the ISS already stores trash in the coldest spot on the station; it keeps the bacteria away from them and makes smell less of an issue. "I would probably store them in there until a ship was going home, where they would take the third seat on the Soyuz,” Hadfield says. They could also store a body in one of the airlocks.

Freeze-Dried Funerals

NASA may not have specific contingency plans for a sudden death, but the agency is working on it; in 2005 they commissioned a study from Swedish eco-burial company Promessa. The study resulted in a yet-to-be-tested design called "The Body Back." The creepy-sounding system uses a technique called promession, which essentially freeze-dries a body. Instead of producing the ash of a traditional cremation, it would turn a frozen corpse into a million little pieces of icy flesh.

During the study, Promessa creators Susanne Wiigh-Masak and Peter Masak collaborated with design students to think about what this process might look like while en route to Mars. On Earth, the promession process would use liquid nitrogen to freeze the body, but in space a robotic arm would suspend the body outside of the spaceship enclosed in a bag. The body would stay outside in the freezing void for an hour until it became brittle, then the arm would vibrate, fracturing the body into ash-like remains. This process could theoretically turn a 200-pound astronaut into a suitcase-sized 50-pound lump, which you could store on a spacecraft for years.

The "Body Back" could provide astronauts frosty funerals.Promessa

If freeze-dried cremation isn't an option, you can always "jettison” the body out on a forever path into the void. While the UN has regulations about littering in space, the rules may not apply to human corpses. "Currently, there are no specific guidelines in planetary protection policy, at either NASA or the international level, that would address 'burial' of a deceased astronaut by release into space," says Catherine Conley at NASA's Office of Planetary Protection.

But the laws of physics might trump the laws of humankind on this one. Unless we strapped a mini rocket to the deceased, they would end up following the trajectory of the spacecraft from which they were ejected. As the years went on and the bodies accumulated, that would make for a morbid trip to and from Mars.

Martian Burial Rituals

But the risks of dying along the way are nothing compared to the inevitability of dying once you get there. In promoting his own future space settlement plans, SpaceX's Elon Musk has openly cautioned that, "If you want to go to Mars, prepare to die.” Which begs the question: if someone dies on the Red Planet, where do you put them?

If someone were to perish on the spaceship en route to Mars (or beyond), cold storage or a round of promession could be a fine solution. But there isn’t a morgue on the surface of Mars, and spaceships are usually low on extra space.

So what would Martian explorers do with a body? "I would expect that if a crew member died while on Mars, we would bury them there rather than bring the body all the way home,” Hadfield says.

That makes sense because of the long journey back, but it poses some potential contamination problems. Even the rovers exploring Mars are required by law not to bring Earth microbes to their dusty new planet. Spacecraft are repeatedly cleaned and sanitized before launch to help protect potentially habitable locales from being overtaken by intrepid Earthly microbes. But the bugs on a rover are nothing compared to the bacteria that would hitch a ride on a dead body.

This makes the issue of planetary protection even more nuanced, but a Martian graveyard might not be so far-fetched. "Regarding the disposal of organic material (including bodies) on Mars,” NASA’s Conley says, “we impose no restrictions so long as all Earth microbes have been killed—so cremation would be necessary. Though planetary protection does require documentation of disposal, to ensure that future missions are not surprised."

But not everyone who dies in space will be treated like inconvenient cargo. Some of those corpses will actually save lives.

Worst Case Scenario

Space may be the final frontier, but it wasn't always that way. Humans have spent millennia traversing difficult landscapes and putting themselves in bizarre and dangerous situations in the name of discovery. Thousands of lives have been lost in this pursuit, and on occasion the deceased have actually saved the lives of their comrades. Not through acts of deadly heroism, mind you, but through acts of cannibalism.

Don't think for a second that this couldn't happen in space. In the book The Martian, author Andy Weir wrote in a scene (spoiler) in which the Ares crew decides to go back to Mars to save a stranded Mark Watney. Johansen, the Ares systems operator and smallest crew-member (requiring the least amount of calories) on the mission tells her father that the crew has a last-ditch plan to make it to Mars if NASA won't send them supplies for the trip. "Everyone would die but me, they would all take pills and die. They'll do it right away so they don't have to use up any food," she explains. "So how would you survive?" her father asks. "The supplies wouldn't be the only source of food," she says.

While extreme, the crew’s plan to commit suicide so one member could save Watney is not totally unheard of. "That's a time-honored tradition," says bioethicist Paul Wolpe. "People have committed suicide to save others, and in fact religiously that's totally acceptable. We can't draw straws to see who we're going to kill to eat, but there are many times when we’ve considered people heroes who jump on the grenade to save their buddies."

Wolpe says the school of thought on cannibalism for survival is split. "There are two kinds of approaches to it. One says even though we owe the body an enormous amount of respect, life is primary, and if the only way one could possibly survive would be to eat a body, it's acceptable but not desirable."

Mars boasts a landscape so barren and dead, it would put the frozen mountains that drove the famous Donner party to cannibalism to shame. If anything interrupted the mission’s food supply, they’d quickly run out of alternatives.

But no space agency has an official policy on Martian cannibalism—yet.

A Journey Into the Void

Humans have only been traveling to space for a short time relative to our existence, but we’ve been pushing the boundaries of exploration for thousands of years—and we will no doubt continue to do so despite the risks. Every astronaut or space tourist wishing to embark on a journey to Mars will ultimately be forced to grapple with the reality of deaths both sudden and slow.

NASA may never have officially published a contingency plan for the Apollo moonwalkers, but they were prepared to lose the crew. In his biography, Nixon speechwriter William Safire recalled the tenuous Apollo 11 liftoff. “We knew disaster would not come in the form of a sudden explosion,” he wrote. “It would mean the men would be stranded on the moon in communication with Mission Control as they slowly starved to death, or deliberately ‘closed down communication,’—the euphemism for suicide.”

In fact, NASA had planned to shut down communication with the stranded astronauts and issue them a formal “burial at sea.” But even given that morbid hypothetical turn of events, everyone knew they would keep going to the moon. “Others will follow, and surely find their way home,” Nixon’s back-up speech read. “Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.”

Earth rising.NASA

As we enter an age of space exploration sure to be filled with rocket launches and crewed missions, the thought of death looms over every crew-member and decision maker.

Astronaut Terry Virts may never have casually chatted about dying over coffee with his friends, but he knew what was at stake when he launched into space. "I believe that it is worth it, and that any great endeavor will involve risk,” he says. “We consciously accept the unavoidable hazards that we face.”

Like most explorers, shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino is quick to say that the risk is worthwhile. "It's about increasing our understanding," he tells PopSci. "I think it's worth the risk we take. Exploration has always taken lives and I'm sure it always will."

The realistic options for a deceased crewmember—cannibalism, cold storage in the trash room, being freeze-dried and shaken into a million frozen flakes—lack the dignity we associate with the majestic endeavor of spaceflight. But Wolpe doesn't think humankind will have a hard time adjusting to the harsh realities of posthumous treatment in space. We already accept that Earthbound explorers may suffer indignities if they die in the field. Wolpe sees Mount Everest as a perfect Earthly analogue for the future Mars missions: when people die, their bodies just stay there. Forever.

We're forever chasing that next giant leapNASA

Every year around 800 people attempt to reach the summit of the mountain. Every year, some of those people die. And then another 800 people try the next year. These people want to be first, to be the best, to explore something marvelous and rare. And with this determination comes the risk of paying the ultimate price.

"If you climb Everest, you know that if you die you're being left there," says Wolpe. There’s no fancy method of cremation on Everest, no respectfully somber place to stow a body, no way to reasonably pick up a corpse for burial back home. Over 200 bodies lay across the mountain, some of them still visible on days when snow cover is light. Everyone who climbs past them is reminded that they’re risking their lives—and their chance at a proper burial—for a chance at reaching the summit. "You just accept that,” Wolpe says. “That's part of climbing Everest.”

Stairway Down to Daughter's 1871 Coffin & Viewing Window

2019-07-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Atlas Obscura

Natchez, Mississippi

The Grave of Florence Irene Ford

Florence’s mother built a stairway down to her daughter’s coffin so she could comfort her during storms.

When Florence Irene Ford died at the age of 10, her mother made a strange request: she asked that her daughter’s coffin be fitted with a small window, with stairs leading down to the casket.
In 1871, at the age of 10, Florence died of yellow fever. Her mother, naturally distraught, couldn’t bear the thought of Florence being buried, as she still wanted to comfort her during storms, even as she lay at rest.
So Ellen had a small window fitted at the head of her daughter’s casket, and a narrow stairway built six-feet down to the level of the window. Ellen had hinged metal trapdoors installed at the top of the stairs so she could shut them during storms, protecting her from the wind and rain as she sat by her daughter’s coffin, reading or singing to her until the storm passed.
The grave has changed very little since 1871. The epitaph on the gravestone is still easy to read: “As bright and affectionate a Daughter as ever God with His Image blest.” And behind the gravestone lie the metal trapdoors, which can still be opened today, so cemetery visitors can still comfort Florence during storms.
The only real change came with the addition of a concrete wall in the mid-1950s, erected at the bottom of the stairway to cover the glass window, preventing any potential acts of vandalism.
Natchez City Cemetery sits on the banks of the Mississippi River, its white tombstones neatly arranged on the green grass of Adams County. It’s a quiet spot, and home to a handful of notable tombs. There’s the tomb of Rufus E. Case, a large three-tiered structure that contains both Case and his favorite rocking chair. And the Turning Angel, a monument that watches over five graves and appears to turn to look at people as they walk towards it. But the grave with the most peculiar and arguably most touching backstory is Florence’s.

Know Before You Go

The grave of Florence Irene Ford is located in Natchez City Cemetery at 19-27 Cemetery Road in Natchez, Adams County, Mississippi. The cemetery is open from 7 a.m. until dusk, and the gates are locked at the end of the day. You can freely walk around the cemetery on your own, or you can arrange a private guided tour (contact the cemetery or Natchez Pilgrimage Tours for more information).

Is Death (A Funeral) Time To Celebrate A Life, Or Be Traditional ?

2019-04-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3h4

Listen now

A year and a day

Heart and Soul

Is celebrating the life, or remembering the dead the right thing for a funeral?
Show more

When Colin Brazier lost his wife Jo to cancer last summer, he felt pressure to put his grief on show, to make her funeral a celebration.
Friends expected him to give the eulogy at her funeral, and some wanted to wear bright colours to celebrate her life. But that felt completely wrong, and though one mourner turned up in shorts and flip flops, the service was a traditional one with hymns and mourners dressed in black. As a Catholic, the ritual of the Requiem Mass felt cleansing and appropriate.
As much of Europe and the US becomes more secular, Colin explores the modern funeral and the growth of the personalised, celebratory service, in contrast to the service he organised for Jo. With pall bearers dressed as super-heroes and wakes at McDonalds, is death being given its true state, and should it be a time to celebrate?
In a highly personal programme, Colin talks to non-believers too, and asks how they navigate death without the framework of religion to guide them.
Presenter: Colin Brazier
Producer: Henrietta Harrison
Picture: Jo Brazier. Credit: Colin Brazier
Show less

27 minutes

Last on

Sun 17 Mar 201919:32 Local time

BBC World Service

Is grief getting ‘medicalised’?

Duration: 02:28

AQUAMATION !!=Water Cremation,Liquefy Corpses,Humans&Pets,Drink Uncle Frank?! INVERSE

2019-01-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

By Yasmin Tayag

on October 16, 2017

Filed Under Bones & Chemistry

On Sunday, California Governor Jerry Brown passed AB 967, an innocuously named bill for a not-so-innocuous law. The bill, proposed by assembly member Todd Gloria, a San Diego democrat, will make it legal for Californians to liquefy their corpses after death in a bath of caustic juice.

The process, referred to as water cremation (or aquamation, resomation, bio-cremation, or flameless cremation), has been proposed as a much more environmentally friendly way to dispose of a body after death. The bill is sponsored by Qico, Inc., a “sustainable cremation” company that specializes in this form of corpse disposal, and it will go into effect by at least July 1, 2020.

“A lot of people view water creation as a more respectful option and we’re glad a lot of people will be able to have it,” Jack Ingraham, the CEO of Qico, tells Inverse. “We think this is a trend for the future. I think within 10 years to 20 years, cremation will be thought of as a water-based process, and the entire flame process will be replaced.”

Unfortunately, no actual liquid is returned to the survivors, only the remaining calcium, or the bones. “These are crushed into the ashes returned to the family,” Ingraham says, who adds that the process also results in about 20-30 percent more “ashes” being returned to the family. So while you can’t drink Uncle Frank, you will get more of his ashes.

These days, the only mainstream options available are burial or cremation, both of which aren’t especially green; coffins take up a lot of valuable space and are made of slowly biodegrading wood, and cremation requires reaching temperatures of up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn’t exactly energy efficient. Then there’s the option of sending a dead body to space in a rocket, which is not green, for obvious reasons.

Aquamation, in contrast, dissolves a body, DNA and all, in a vat of liquid into a relatively unharmful solution of slightly alkaline water that can be neutralized and returned to the Earth. California is the latest state to make the procedure legal, joining 14 others.

The chemical process behind aquamation is called alkaline hydrolysis, which involves sticking a body into a solution of potassium hydroxide and water that’s heated to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, a slightly lower temperature than boiling and waiting for it to dissolve.

Potassium hydroxide, often referred to as potash or lye, is a common chemical used in manufacturing soft soap and biodiesel. Its defining quality is that it’s chemically alkaline, which means that it’s packed with oxygen-hydrogen pairs known as hydroxide groups. In strong enough concentrations, hydroxides can dissolve organic solids into liquids; it’s essentially the same process that happens when you pour Drano into a sink clogged with fat or hair.

In aquamation, raising the temperature and pressure helps the process move along faster. Usually, it takes about four hours to dissolve a skeleton. By the end of the process, the only solid thing that’s left is a pile of soft bones (potassium hydroxide won’t eat through calcium phosphate) that gets crushed into a sterile powder for family members of the deceased to take home.

As for the flesh, blood, and guts? Everything else gets dissolved into a green-brown liquid that’s slightly less basic than it was at the start of the process. What starts as a solution with a very strongly alkaline pH of 14 (the most basic possible) ends up somewhere around pH 11. Truly neutral water has a pH of about 7, so technicians sometimes add an acidic substance, like vinegar, to balance out all the excess hydroxides floating around.

It’s “what happens in a natural burial in the ground, just in a faster time frame,” Ingraham says.

The process is already a popular way to dispose of a dead pet’s body; not only is it less energy-intensive than other methods, but it also kills potentially life-threatening pathogens, like viruses, bacteria, and prions that cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (the type that cause mad cow disease), which aren’t always inactivated by heat.

The thought of liquefying a body is pretty weird, but California is not the first state to make it legal: Oregon, Minnesota, Maryland, Maine, Kansas, Illinois, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada have already joined the ranks of the corpse dissolution supporters. It’s something we’d better get used to in the long run. The world is running out of space, both for living and dead bodies, so it’s in our best interest to figure out what to do with all of our future corpses. Besides, if humans aren’t going to do anything good for the Earth while we’re alive, we might as well find a way to do so in death.

What’s next for aquamation in California? Ingraham says his two-year-old company expects to have their technology ready by 2019 and to be in agreement with state regulators by then as well. Meanwhile, he’s hopeful that demand will grow for this new technology that he expects will cost a little more than traditional cremation but ultimately will be set by funeral homes.

While you can’t scatter traditional ashes at Venice Beach because they’re relatively toxic — they’re ashes, after all — you won’t have those restrictions with the result of a water cremation, Ingraham says.

“When people hear about it they tend to prefer it,” he says, noting that the white “ashes” from water-based cremation can be scattered in more places.

Human Composting . ! ? CITYLAB

2019-01-15T10:45:00.000-08:00

An artist's rendering of the future Recompose facility. MOLT Studios

Could ‘Human Composting’ Mean a Better, Greener Death?

Hallie Golden Jan 14, 2019

As Washington State considers legalizing human composting, advocate Katrina Spade explains the process as a needed alternative to standard burial and cremation.

SCROLL DOWN PLEASE.

Last month, Washington State Senator Jamie Pedersen pre-filed a bill to legalize human composting, also known as “recomposition.” If it passes, Washington would be the first state in the U.S. to allow the practice. (The bill would also legalize alkaline hydrolysis, the dissolving of bodies in a pressurized vessel with water and potassium hydroxide, or lye; it is already legal in 16 states.) Pedersen introduced a bill to legalize alkaline hydrolysis in 2017 but without success.

The fact that human composting is on the legislative agenda is largely thanks to designer and entrepreneur Katrina Spade. Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a human-composting company, and she has spent years promoting it as a greener alternative to standard death practices. In the process that Recompose has devised, the body is placed in a vessel with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw, which work to decompose the body. The company co-sponsored a recent trial at Washington State University that determined recomposition is safe and effective, and Spade and her team say it uses only one-eighth the energy of cremation.

Katrina Spade (left) with Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a soil scientist and research advisor for Recompose. (WSU Communications)

Spade wants to build a fully functioning human-composting facility in Seattle when the practice becomes legal. This would not simply offer a new way to dispose of remains, but be a place of comfort for relatives and friends of the deceased, with gardens and events like poetry readings. CityLab caught up with Spade to find out more about human composting and her vision for this state-of-the-art facility. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about how you first became interested in this idea of human composting.
I was in graduate school for architecture, and I began thinking about what would happen to my body after I died. And then I got a little obsessed with the funeral industry and the options we have. And then a friend of mine told me about this practice that farmers and agricultural institutions have been using for decades now to recycle animals back to the land. It was like a light bulb went off, and I decided to make it my mission to apply those principles to humans and create a new option for human disposition.
Once you had this idea, where did you go from there?
I had the luxury of being in graduate school, so it became my thesis project. I was at my desk many, many hours a day at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the architecture department, just kind of imagining what would be meaningful and thinking a lot about what the space would look like and feel like.
In 2014, I got this fellowship called Echoing Green. It was really surprising to me that this wasn’t just an idea for my friends and family, but it was something that the broader community was really interested in. That fellowship came with seed funding and allowed me to quit my day job and just work on the project full time. I was then able to start a nonprofit called the Urban Death Project. We did a lot of the initial research into the work and also started to build a community around the idea.

In 2017, we closed the nonprofit and started Recompose, which is a public-benefit corporation. Most of our focus has been on co-sponsoring research with Washington State University. We’re also working with the Washington state legislature to try to pass proposed legislation that would allow recomposition for public use. And then we’re always working toward designing and developing Recompose Seattle, which hopefully will be the first place in the world where recomposition is offered.

What’s your vision for this facility?

We will probably lease a warehouse base. Ideally, it will have character. And then we’ll fit it out to make sure that there’s natural light and interior gardens, and mostly just make a space that feels really comfortable and really comforting to people. And then we would implement our recomposition system in the building itself, so families can come and have a memorial service, spend time together, and also start their loved one’s body on this journey of transformation from human to soil.

Tell me more about the recomposition process. Besides putting a body in a vessel with materials used to break down the remains, what else is involved?

With the aerated process, oxygen is a really important piece, because essentially what we’re doing is creating the right environment for microbes to do their job. [It] requires oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, and then the microbes really do a beautiful job of breaking everything down on a molecular level and creating this beautiful, usable soil.

Could the process work for everyone?
The process is good for just about everyone. I think the only exception would be if you have a disease where you’re quarantined. That wouldn’t be a fit. But those are exceedingly rare [cases].
One of the reasons you argue for recomposition is the positive environmental impact it could have. Can you say more?

One of the reasons I started developing the concept was because I found out that both cremation and conventional burial have a significant carbon footprint. Thanks in part to sequestration of carbon that occurs during the process, it has been estimated that recomposition will save just over a metric ton. That means that for every person that chooses to be recomposed instead of cremated or buried, it will save just over a metric ton of carbon, which is pretty significant.

I think one of the things for me, in addition to that carbon savings, is just having a way to create usable soil. Something that you can go grow a tree with and have sort of this ritual around that feels meaningful.

Can recomposition help in large, dense cities where cemetery plots are limited?

My vision has always been that conventional burial—giving everyone their own spot in this city—probably isn’t very sustainable in the long term. So what’s a process that works for our urban population? And I think recomposition really fits that. [In] a lot of cities, people are concerned about land use. And cemeteries are filling up, so one of the things recomposition does is solve for that problem.

Are there psychological benefits to human composting?

I think in general, death is a really personal thing. And people experience death of a loved one in so many ways. So our goal with recomposition is just to add more choice when it comes to death of a loved one, so that it’s still really personal.
In my vision, we have a dozen options for disposition in the next 10 years or so, because I think that’s really what we as a diverse and creative society deserve. But for now, we’d like to add recomposition to the list.

About the Author

Hallie Golden

Hallie Golden is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.

Are There Alarm Clocks In Heaven ?! funny comic - PEARLS BEFORE SWINE

2019-01-06T12:12:00.001-08:00

“Don’t bother,” says 💀 Death as You R Washing Your Hands

2018-12-21T14:55:00.001-08:00

“Don’t bother.”

What's Hiding Under Graveyards ? ! Cemeteries = Landfills ?

2018-10-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

ATLAS OBSCURA :

Grief Sounds re Death-Forrest Gander “Be With” Poems

2018-08-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander’s Grief Sounds https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/forrest-ganders-grief-sounds

FORREST GANDER’S GRIEF SOUNDS

In his new collection, “Be With,” the poet yearns, endures, and tries to spin the inchoate into words.

By Dan Chiasson

The elegies in “Be With” chart the addled chronology of loss.Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The title of Forrest Gander’s latest book of poems, “Be With” (New Directions), is a blurted command welling up from yearnings not quite expressible in language. Gander’s partner of more than thirty years, the poet C. D. Wright, died unexpectedly in her sleep in 2016. Later that year, a new volume by Wright, “ShallCross,” was published posthumously, with a dedication to Gander: “for Forrest / line, lank and long, / be with.” Gander borrows his title from that dedication, which reads like a message from beyond the grave. This collection of elegies for Wright confirms receipt of the message and returns it. Poetry often creates a supernatural-seeming rapport with the dead, but rarely has the communication between worlds felt so eerily reciprocal.

Gander, who teaches at Brown, is the author of eleven books of poems and two novels, plus multimedia collaborations and distinguished translations. In “Be With,” he is at once adamant about the ineffability of grief and committed to getting his inchoate “grief-sounds” somehow into words. The book’s sputtering, flinching style, with its syntactical dead ends and missed connections, feels like both an accommodation to the necessity of language and proof of its inadequacy. “Beckoned” is a poem about finding the words. The parallel structure of its sentences suggests hasty bulletins delivered in a narrowing span of consciousness. It begins abruptly, in the middle of some story we haven’t read, capturing the sudden, repeated shock of Wright’s death:

At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.

Something like a drifting swarm of bees.

At which point in the tetric silence that followed

I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness.

At which point there was no way out for me either.

The heavy silences between these single-line stanzas suggest a blackout or a seizure, something more dire than a break for thought. Grief takes us back to the same “point” in time, again and again, even as the clock—and the book itself—moves forward. Coming to in this interstitial state, Gander finds himself suspended in a “semi-coma, dreaming I was awake,” where actions and symbols share a single plane:

At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again.

At which point I conceived a realm more real than life.

At which point there was at least some possibility.

Some possibility, in which I didn’t believe, of being with her once more.

The distant future gets the past tense: even the unknown trajectory of Gander’s emotional life is described as fixed, and finished. There’s nothing ahead for him except grieving. The “possibility” that he constructs contains both supreme hopefulness and self-cancelling disbelief. “I outlived my life,” he writes.

The book’s title gives away its most tragic insight. “Be with”: the phrase is stripped of its object; the beloved has been ripped from the world. Reciprocity is suddenly broken, as though one player in a game had walked off the court mid-volley. “Who was ever only themselves?” Gander asks in “Son,” a poem addressed to his and Wright’s “one arterial child.” In “Epitaph,” another jarring phrase substitutes for more mellifluous expressions:

To write You
existed me
would not be merely
a deaf translation.

For there is no
sequel to the passage when
I saw—as you would
never again
be revealed—you see me
as I would never
again be revealed.

The line breaks scramble and reframe the memory of when the two parties, by seeing the other see, brought each other into existence. Because “there is no / sequel to the passage,” Gander is compelled to continue revisiting it. Birth and death are all there in that first glance: “never again” conveys irrevocable loss. The line break in the second instance—“never / again”—suggests that, for the living, the full emotional weight of eternity must “be revealed,” and endured, again and again.

To write about profound loss, you step inside a genre, elegy, that is full of haunting echoes. Gander’s poems call to mind those Thomas Hardy wrote after the sudden death of his wife, Emma. Hardy’s verse skips over his immediate, painful past to a moment “when our day was fair,” dwelling on the uncanny traces his wife left behind in “a room on returning thence.” Gander shares the intensity of Hardy’s grief—his morose fixation on moments squandered. The poems in “Be With” recall the happy parallel paths in life and in art that he and Wright followed—always within a holler of each other. After Wright’s death, Gander’s memories revolve around objects, landscapes, work, and routines—symbols that become nearly sentient in their embodiment of his pain:

The cabinet
door’s squeaky
dactylic remark:
Hap-pi-ness?

What Gander calls the “spectacularization / of the trivial” occurs when the everyday—an ordinary cabinet, a mundane memory—“means just / what it feels like / it means.” We teach our objects how to speak our language. This poet’s cabinet even talks in meter.

“Be With” charts the addled chronology of personal loss. The linear march of time is scattered with vignettes from Gander and Wright’s life together, often out of order, often repeated. Early on, she candled eggs for a poultry farm while he played “frisbee on the green.” One night, instead of making love Wright takes a bath, her knees poking up “through the soap bubbles,” while Gander stargazes under the “Prawn Nebula.” Loss is what makes these memories visible; without it, what you have is just another evening of slightly divergent marital priorities. A more recent, more painful memory captures the contesting imperatives of finality and delay:

“If you want
to throw in
some dirt,” the priest
addressed the widower
and his child generally
but did not
complete
the sentence.

The priest doesn’t finish the sentence, but Gander must.

Meanwhile, the world proposes alternative measurements of time and loss. One day, Gander discovers that “the spider / vibrating on its long legs in the ceiling corner / over my desk doesn’t exist now.” The spider’s work, so deeply associated with writing poetry, has been cut short. In an interview, Gander has said that one poem in the collection, a loose translation of the first ballad of St. John of the Cross, was literally interrupted by Wright’s death. This breach is honored in real time: the poem suddenly veers off in a personal direction. The book as a whole replicates this effect: it is a self-suturing wound, equal parts bridge and void.

The fleeting moments that Gander assembles seek an order that is not merely chronological. He remembers a question from Wright: “If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent?” The most obvious answer is language, though, as Gander discovers, language often fails. “Creepy,” he writes, “always to want to pin words on ‘the emotional experience.’ ” Sometimes he gets rid of the binding agents altogether, as in “Deadout,” a two-part poem that arranges fourteen sentence fragments into intelligible couplets, then scrambles them into dreamlike illogic. The result isn’t nonsense; it’s a haunting near-sense made by foiling cause and effect.

Gander has a degree in geology and is the author, with John Kinsella, of “Redstart,” a pioneering hybrid treatise on ecopoetics, a movement in contemporary poetry that, according to Gander, explores “the economy of interrelationship between human and non-human realms.” In the same way that the vocabulary of faith might aid a religious poet in a time of crisis, Gander’s deep affinity for the natural world provides a kind of solace. There phenomena “rarely have discreet beginnings or endings” and instead reveal “layers, duration, and transitions.” The impulse to go very small or very big, from the microscopic to the cosmic, is evident in the opening poem. “You lug a bacterial swarm / in the crook of your knee,” Gander writes, while “through my guts / writhe helminth parasites.”

The book’s final section is titled “Littoral Zone”—the part of a body of water, usually near the shore, where enough light passes through for plants to grow. My Google search tells me that by the time sunlight reaches the bottom of the littoral zone it is usually one per cent or less of its surface strength. That’s about as much comfort as arrives in this harrowing, sometimes despairing book. But even in near-darkness there’s light enough for a new, strange kind of love poem:

. . . From
afar, do you see me now
briefly here in this phantasmic
standoff riding
pain’s whirlforms?

The phrase “phantasmic standoff” is lifted directly from “Redstart,” where it refers not to humans but to strange “nocturnal / pods,” surging in the dark water. It was Nietzsche who defined human beings as “hybrids of plants and ghosts.” The comfort of the littoral is, I take it, entirely figurative. ♦︎2

"My Friends Don't Get Buried" Wonderful Poem by Edward Hirsch

2018-06-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker

Poems

June 25, 2018 Issue

My Friends Don’t Get Buried

By Edward Hirsch

Audio: Read by the author.

My friends don’t get buried
in cemeteries anymore, their wives
can’t stand the sadness
of funerals, the spectacle
of wreaths and prayers, tear-soaked
speeches delivered from the altar,
all those lies and encomiums,
the suffocating smell of flowers
filling everything.
No more undertakers in black suits
clutching handkerchiefs,
old buddies weeping in corners,
telling off-color stories, nipping shots,
no more covered mirrors,
black dresses, skullcaps and crucifixes.
Sometimes it takes me a year or two
to get out to the back yard in Sheffield
or Fresno, those tall ashes scattered
under a tree somewhere in a park
somewhere in New Jersey.
I am a delinquent mourner
stepping on pinecones, forgetting to pray.
But the mourning goes on anyway
because my friends keep dying
without a schedule,
without even a funeral,
while the silence
drums us from the other side,
the suffocating smell of flowers
fills everything, always,
the darkness grows warmer, then colder,
I just have to lie down on the grass
and press my mouth to the earth
to call them
so they would answer.

"This Calls For Some Spooky Music" HUMOR He ain't dead, he's alive !!!!!

2018-06-18T14:53:00.001-07:00

“This calls for some spooky music.”

May 18, 2018

Google Training Machines To Predict Death

2018-06-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

technology

Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

AI advances by the 'Medical Brain' team could help the internet giant finally break into the health-care business

Mark Bergen

‎June‎ ‎18‎, ‎2018‎ ‎5‎:‎00‎ ‎AM

Created by illustrator Maria Chimishkyan for Bloomberg Prognosis

Then came Google’s turn. An new type of algorithm created by the company read up on the woman -- 175,639 data points -- and rendered its assessment of her death risk: 19.9 percent. She passed away in a matter of days.

The harrowing account of the unidentified woman’s death was published by Google in May in research highlighting the health-care potential of neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence software that’s particularly good at using data to automatically learn and improve. Google had created a tool that could forecast a host of patient outcomes, including how long people may stay in hospitals, their odds of re-admission and chances they will soon die.

What impressed medical experts most was Google’s ability to sift through data previously out of reach: notes buried in PDFs or scribbled on old charts. The neural net gobbled up all this unruly information then spat out predictions. And it did it far faster and more accurately than existing techniques. Google’s system even showed which records led it to conclusions.

Hospitals, doctors and other health-care providers have been trying for years to better use stockpiles of electronic health records and other patient data. More information shared and highlighted at the right time could save lives -- and at the very least help medical workers spend less time on paperwork and more time on patient care. But current methods of mining health data are costly, cumbersome and time consuming.
As much as 80 percent of the time spent on today’s predictive models goes to the “scut work” of making the data presentable, said Nigam Shah, an associate professor at Stanford University, who co-authored Google’s research paper, published in the journal Nature. Google’s approach avoids this. "You can throw in the kitchen sink and not have to worry about it,” Shah said.
Google’s next step is moving this predictive system into clinics, AI chief Jeff Dean told Bloomberg News in May. Dean’s health research unit -- sometimes referred to as Medical Brain -- is working on a slew of AI tools that can predict symptoms and disease with a level of accuracy that is being met with hope as well as alarm.
Inside the company, there’s a lot of excitement about the initiative. "They’ve finally found a new application for AI that has commercial promise," one Googler says. Since Alphabet Inc.’s Google declared itself an “AI-first” company in 2016, much of its work in this area has gone to improve existing internet services. The advances coming from the Medical Brain team give Google the chance to break into a brand new market -- something co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have tried over and over again.

Software in health care is largely coded by hand these days. In contrast, Google’s approach, where machines learn to parse data on their own, “can just leapfrog everything else,” said Vik Bajaj, a former executive at Verily, an Alphabet health-care arm, and managing director of investment firm Foresite Capital. “They understand what problems are worth solving," he said. "They’ve now done enough small experiments to know exactly what the fruitful directions are.”
Dean envisions the AI system steering doctors toward certain medications and diagnoses. Another Google researcher said existing models miss obvious medical events, including whether a patient had prior surgery. The person described existing hand-coded models as “an obvious, gigantic roadblock” in health care. The person asked not to be identified discussing work in progress.
For all the optimism over Google’s potential, harnessing AI to improve health-care outcomes remains a huge challenge. Other companies, notably IBM’s Watson unit, have tried to apply AI to medicine but have had limited success saving money and integrating the technology into reimbursement systems.

Google has long sought access to digital medical records, also with mixed results. For its recent research, the internet giant cut deals with the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Chicago for 46 billion pieces of anonymous patient data. Google’s AI system created predictive models for each hospital, not one that parses data across the two, a harder problem. A solution for all hospitals would be even more challenging. Google is working to secure new partners for access to more records.
A deeper dive into health would only add to the vast amounts of information Google already has on us. "Companies like Google and other tech giants are going to have a unique, almost monopolistic, ability to capitalize on all the data we generate," said Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer for data company Immuta. He and pediatric oncologist Samuel Volchenboum wrote a recent column arguing governments should prevent this data from becoming "the province of only a few companies," like in online advertising where Google reigns.
Google is treading carefully when it comes to patient information, particularly as public scrutiny over data-collection rises. Last year, British regulators slapped DeepMind, another Alphabet AI lab, for testing an app that analyzed public medical records without telling patients that their information would be used like this. With the latest study, Google and its hospital partners insist their data is anonymous, secure and used with patient permission. Volchenboum said the company may have a more difficult time maintaining that data rigor if it expands to smaller hospitals and health-care networks.
Still, Volchenboum believes these algorithms could save lives and money. He hopes health records will be mixed with a sea of other stats. Eventually, AI models could include information on local weather and traffic -- other factors that influence patient outcomes. "It’s almost like the hospital is an organism," he said.
Few companies are better poised to analyze this organism than Google. The company and its Alphabet cousin, Verily, are developing devices to track far more biological signals. Even if consumers don’t take up wearable health trackers en masse, Google has plenty of other data wells to tap. It knows the weather and traffic. Google’s Android phones track things like how people walk, valuable information for measuring mental decline and some other ailments. All that could be thrown into the medical algorithmic soup.
Medical records are just part of Google’s AI health-care plans. Its Medical Brain has unfurled AI systems for radiology, ophthalmology and cardiology. They’re flirting with dermatology, too. Staff created an app for spotting malignant skin lesions; a product manager walks around the office with 15 fake tattoos on her arms to test it.
Dean, the AI boss, stresses this experimentation relies on serious medical counsel, not just curious software coders. Google is starting a new trial in India that uses its AI software to screen images of eyes for early signs of a condition called diabetic retinopathy. Before releasing it, Google had three retinal specialists furiously debate the early research results, Dean said.
Over time, Google could license these systems to clinics, or sell them through the company’s cloud-computing division as a sort of diagnostics-as-a-service. Microsoft Corp., a top cloud rival, is also working on predictive AI services. To commercialize an offering, Google would first need to get its hands on more records, which tend to vary widely across health providers. Google could buy them, but that may not sit as well with regulators or consumers. The deals with UCSF and the University of Chicago aren’t commercial.
For now, the company says it’s too early to settle on a business model. At Google’s annual developer conference in May, Lily Peng, a member of Medical Brain, walked through the team’s research outmatching humans in spotting heart disease risk. "Again," she said. "I want to emphasize that this is really early on."

Finding The 83,000 US MIAs Military

2018-06-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Peter Horvath

MILITARY

Some 83,000 members of the U.S. military are missing. This group tries to bring them home.

How elite military and scientific teams bring home fallen U.S. soldiers.

By Vince Beiser Yesterday at 9:30am

Early on the morning of January 25, 1944, eight young American airmen strode across the gravel of an airfield in Kunming, China, toward a B-24J bomber. Their mission was to fly the 67-foot-long aircraft, its nose bedecked with a picture of a pinup girl and the slogan “Hot as Hell,” over the Himalayas to pick up supplies from British-held India. It was a routine run but still plenty dangerous. The weather over the mountain route, known as the Hump, was fearsomely unpredictable and severe. Some 600 American planes would crash in the area by the war’s end.

The men settled into their positions: two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier, a radio operator, a flight engineer, and two gunners. At 7:40 a.m., the plane roared up into the sky. Smooth sailing as they climbed to 15,000 feet. But three hours into the trip, thick clouds rolled in. The pilots could barely see a mile in front of them. Somewhere in that vast mountain range, out of sight and out of touch with their base, the Hot as Hell went down.

In 1947, with the fighting over, the United States mounted a campaign to find the bodies of the more than 300 Americans who had gone missing in plane crashes on the Hump. The searchers traveled by truck, mule, and foot, fording rain-swollen rivers and fending off malarial mosquitoes, but never found the spot where the Hot as Hell fell to Earth. The area in which it presumably lay, the search party’s official report declared, “encompasses many thousands of square miles of mountainous jungle terrain, some of it inaccessible, unexplored, and uninhabited.” Their conclusion: “Any further attempt for the recovery of their remains would prove unsuccessful.”

Sixty-eight years later, on a sunny October morning, Meghan-Tómasita Cosgriff- Hernández came clambering along a rocky trail 9,400 feet up in the Indian Himalayas. The anthropologist and her 12 teammates had hiked uphill under a glaring sun for more than two days to reach the spot where they now stood. Before them was a steep gully, thick with trees, brush, and boulders—and littered with a weather-beaten propeller, wing, engine, and the other ragged pieces of what had been the Hot as Hell. The group’s mission was as straightforward as it was daunting: search through acres of that jungly growth and unstable scree for the remains of the airplane’s crew.

Well, thought Cosgriff-Hernández, looking over the expanse, let’s get to it.

Search-team members load dirt and loose stones into buckets.

Peter Horvath

Cosgriff-Hernández’s team was one of many the United States military regularly dispatches all over the world—but these are squads of scientists as well as soldiers. Their task is not killing enemies but rather finding dead Americans. Some 83,000 American military personnel have gone missing in conflicts since World War II—presumed to have died in plane crashes, ship sinkings, and chaotic battles. Dozens of times a year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (which goes by the initialism DPAA) sends teams of forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, aircraft experts, and others to scour Vietnamese jungles, European forests, Pacific islands, and other former battle zones for those service members’ remains. Finding the bodies is just the first hurdle; next comes the challenge of using forensic dentistry, DNA analysis, and other techniques to identify to whom those bone fragments and broken teeth belonged. The agency boasts a $112 million annual budget and a staff of about 700, working out of a center in Hawaii and a network of far-flung labs and field bases. At any given time, investigators are working on about 1,200 cases.

The project began after the Vietnam War, when families of missing soldiers pressured the government to figure out what had become of their loved ones. Hundreds of remains from that conflict have since been found and returned to relatives. “Because of that success, later on Congress added the Korean War,” says Kelly McKeague, a former Air Force major general who is director of the DPAA. “Then other families started asking, ‘What about us?’”

The agency is now officially tasked with providing “the fullest possible accounting” of the fates of missing personnel from the Second World War through today’s conflicts. As many as 39,000 of the total were lost at sea, and the agency does not expect to ever recover their remains. But that still leaves a staggering caseload.

Map of the estimated crash site.

Staff Sgt. Erik Cardenas, U.S. Air Force

Many searches begin in musty archives and digital databases. DPAA historians and archivists pore over battle reports, flight and ship logs, and other documents to figure out where those soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are likely to have actually died. The Hot as Hell crash site, though, was handed to the agency: Clayton Kuhles, an Arizona mountaineer and self-appointed MIA hunter, found some of the plane’s wreckage with the help of a local guide in 2006.

Kuhles reported his discovery to the Department of Defense, but the site lies in Arunachal Pradesh, a politically sensitive state in northeastern India; China claims part of the region, which borders Tibet. Getting permission for a gaggle of U.S. military personnel to poke around up there proved tricky. Indian authorities finally allowed a recovery crew access early in 2009, but a snowstorm forced them to quit after only a few days. A second try later that year found no human remains. They weren’t allowed another shot until 2015.

Cosgriff-Hernández was the scientific lead on the 2015 mission, and one of just two women. (In other searches, she is often the only one.) Fast talking and athletic, she’s always thrived on physical challenges. In college, she competed at track and field. Growing up in San Diego, she was also intrigued by the dead sea creatures she’d run across on the beach—all those strangely shaped skulls and teeth. “It sounds morbid,” she says, “but I’ve always been fascinated by death.” She wound up getting a doctorate in biological anthropology, and was hired by the DPAA’s predecessor agency in 2012. She quickly developed a reputation for volunteering for the hairiest missions. Besides the Himalayas, she has spent months in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam, Laos, Papua New Guinea, and many other places. “I’m trying to get in all the crazy, intense missions while my body is still up for it,” she says with a half-smirk.

Left: On a steep slope, workers must dig while tied to safety lines.
Right: Scientific lead Meghan-Tómasita Cosgriff-Hernández.

Staff Sgt. Erik Cardenas, U.S. Air Force

When the request went out in mid-2015 seeking volunteers for the Hot as Hell mission, her hand shot up. It would be tough by anyone’s standards—more than a month spent high up a steep mountain, far from any human habitation. Cosgriff-Hernández—who often goes by Mitch, an abbreviation of her unwieldy multihyphenated name—trained for three months, hauling heavy packs on 10-mile “ruck marches.”

In late September, the group flew to northeastern India and drove SUVs to the remote town of Damroh. Then they continued on foot. They hiked about nine hours the first day, and more than six the next. The views were unutterably beautiful, but the high-altitude trek was often tortuous. Even team medic Sgt. 1st Class Saule Plott, a U.S. Special Forces veteran of three Iraq tours, found it tough. “It was very, very steep, and extremely hot,” he says. “I would say the majority of us were not ready for it.”

The searchers set up a base camp about an hour’s hike from the wreckage; that was the closest spot with enough flat ground. Cosgriff-Hernández, Plott, and a few others made the first foray to the site the next day. Plott was astonished. “It’s a sight to see, especially in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “An entire plane, busted into parts. Fuselage, engines here, tires there.” All scattered over a square mile and a half. He knew there wouldn’t be anything as obvious as a skeleton in a flight suit in there; after more than 70 years of exposure to the elements, all that was likely to remain of the crewmembers were fragments of “osseous material”—bones or teeth. How, Plott wondered, were they supposed to find something as small as a single tooth in all that debris-strewn wilderness?

Marine Staff Sgt. Bobby Perez sweeps for metal.

Staff Sgt. Erik Cardenas, U.S. Air Force

Before the search began, an explosive-ordnance technician swept the area with a metal detector for unexploded shells. The slope was so steep that team members would have to do their digging while tied to lines anchored around trees. There wasn’t even enough level ground on which to set their sifting screens, forcing them to build an improvised ledge out of branches and rope.

Cosgriff-Hernández set a fixed starting point and laid out a grid of 4-square-meter digging areas. Using hand rakes and trowels, a rotating group dug through a carpet of moss and roots, and manhandled the exposed dirt and loose stones into buckets. Those were passed along to another group at the sorting screens. They sifted everything through quarter-inch wire mesh, filtering out the dirt and examining whatever was left, picking through the rocks, sticks, and leaves for anything that might have once belonged to one of the missing air crew.

Cosgriff-Hernández took turns on the trowels and screens, swapping jabs and jokes with the crew. In the evenings they’d play gin rummy or watch movies on someone’s solar-battery-charged laptop. One night Cosgriff-Hernández made s’mores, and on Halloween she doled out king-size candy bars. “Instead of being like, ‘Oh, thank you,’ they were like, ‘You’ve had this in your tent the whole time?!’” she says, laughing.

On the eleventh day, one of the soldiers looked up from his screen. “Hey, Mitch, I found something,” he called. He handed Cosgriff-Hernández a small, curved dark shard. She knew immediately what it was. “We found cranium!” she called out. A mighty whooping and cheering rose up. “I’m sure the village down below heard us celebrating,” she says.

No more remains turned up that day. Nor the one after that, nor the one after that. It started raining. The temperature dropped. Plott found himself miserably sifting through a bucket of mud one day, thinking: This is a lost cause. This is absolutely pointless. Then he spotted something on his screen: two discolored teeth, clinging to a shard of jawbone. The sight hit him harder than he’d expected. “I had to fight back tears,” he says. “I suddenly thought I had made the right decision in volunteering to come.”

But soon the weather worsened into hail and snow, and the close calls were piling up. One searcher was briefly trapped under a runaway boulder, and another hurt her knee. Cosgriff-Hernández had to dive out of the way of a landslide at one point. The team decided it was too dangerous to continue. After 35 days in the Himalayas, they packed up their precious finds and headed back to Hawaii.

Marine Capt. David Gooch hikes to the site where the B-24J went down.

Staff Sgt. Erik Cardenas, U.S. Air Force

The DPAA operates out of an imposing three-story building on a joint U.S. Air Force and Navy base on the outskirts of Honolulu. The federal government built the facility as the agency emerged out of a major restructuring of the MIA recovery effort in 2015. For years, several different Pentagon offices had been involved in hunting for missing military personnel. Their collective pace was leisurely: Between 2002 and 2012, they accounted for an average of just 72 service members each year. The program was hammered by the press, veterans’ families, and politicians for being wasteful, inefficient, and lagging behind the scientific curve.

As a result, in 2015 most of the mission was consolidated under the rubric of the DPAA. The tempo has quickened substantially since then. Last year, the agency identified 201 missing service members, the most in its history. (Still, at that rate, it will take over a century to clear the list.) Director McKeague credits the higher number to better organization and technology—including one of the world’s largest forensic anthropology labs.

Dozens of sets of human bones lie neatly arrayed on metal tables in an expansive examining room on the DPAA building’s second floor. Some consist of just a few vertebrae and a tibia or two, some nearly complete skeletons. The pieces are often cracked or broken, and discolored by fire, chemicals, or years in the ground. The grisly scene is surreally counterpointed by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the island of Oahu’s lushly forested mountains.

Many of the remains come from sites such as the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, aka the Punchbowl, in the hills above Honolulu. It is the resting place for more than 33,000 service members, more than 2,000 of whom are still unidentified. Disinterring and identifying those remains is part of the DPAA’s mission.

While finding those bones is easy, identifying who they belong to is not. Many caskets turn out to hold the parts of more than one person, all jumbled together. The agency’s anthropologists spend painstaking hours sorting out which go with which, piecing them together one by one. Bones themselves can offer important clues about who they came from. The degree to which cartilage has ossified is an indicator of age. The shapes of chins, eyebrow ridges, and pelvic girdles tend to differ between men and women. Features of skulls can point toward ancestry: Asians, Africans, and Europeans tend to have characteristically shaped eye sockets, cheekbones, and nasal apertures. Several years ago, John Byrd, the DPAA’s lab director, stumbled across a forgotten trove of chest X-rays the Armed Forces had taken of inductees to screen for tuberculosis. By comparing the shapes of unidentified bones to those in the X-rays, DPAA analysts have helped identify well over 100 service members.

Search teams hand off their finds to DPAA scientists. Forensic anthropologist Sarah Richer analyzes a specimen.

Sgt. Lloyd Villanueva

Cosgriff-Hernández’s involvement with the remains from the Hot as Hell site ended with their arrival at the lab. She handed them off to another anthropologist, who worked “in the blind,” knowing nothing about who the fragments might have come from, a standard precaution to prevent her biases or expectations from influencing her analysis.

She couldn’t tell much, though, from the little pieces of skull and jaw. So she sent them to one of the DPAA’s partner agencies, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s DNA lab, which specializes in gleaning information from the tiniest of biological samples.

Kimberly Root, an analyst at the AFMES facility in Dover, Delaware, got the case. The lab has developed several techniques to deal with often badly decomposed remains, including procedures that have enabled its staff to extract genetic material from a mere 0.2 grams of bone material, and from remains treated with DNA- damaging formaldehyde.

Root broke off a fragment of the cranium piece, and extracted a sample of dentin—the dense tissue beneath the surface enamel—from one of the teeth. Both procedures are tailored to do as little damage as possible to the remains, since they will ultimately be returned to family members. From those samples, Root and her fellow analysts extracted profiles of both mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mothers to their children, and Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed only from fathers to sons. They first determined that the skull and tooth were from the same person. Comparing those profiles to DNA samples given by surviving family members, Root found that the mtDNA matched up with one particular crewmember’s maternal niece and nephew, and the Y-chromosome DNA matched the same crewmember’s paternal nephew.

Hot as Hell crewmember Robert Eugene Oxford, whose remains were returned to family members.

Courtesy Handout

That’s not quite proof positive, but as Root wrote in her report, that combination indicated it was 623,000 times more likely that the skull sample came from that missing flyer than “from an unrelated individual in the general Caucasian population.”

With the airman’s identity all but confirmed, the case went back to Honolulu and forensic odontologist Calvin Shiroma. There were no X-rays of the Hot as Hell crew’s teeth, which would have enabled Shiroma to compare the shapes of crowns and roots; all he had were paper dental records. The molars Plott found in the Himalayas had fillings; the records showed that the airman the DNA lab had identified had fillings in the same teeth. Taken together, the DNA, odontology, and other evidence pointed conclusively to one person.

His name was Robert Eugene Oxford, of Concord, Georgia. The youngest of six children, he was a slim, dark-haired young man who played gospel and hillbilly guitar, worked on his family’s farm and at the local post office, and planned on marrying his sweetheart. One month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, Oxford volunteered for the Army Air Corps. By the end of that year, he was sent overseas as a second lieutenant. He was 24 when he died in the Hot as Hell crash.

Merrill Roan was on her way to lunch with her husband in Thomaston, Georgia, in spring 2017 when she got the call that Oxford’s remains had been found. He was her husband’s uncle, and something of a family legend. “It was unbelievable,” she says. “We were ecstatic. We started calling all the kids and grandkids.”

Roan had been involved for years in a campaign to pressure the DPAA to find the Hot as Hell crew’s remains. She still resents what she sees as the agency’s foot-dragging: “Some of his loved ones who knew him could have been here” for his funeral if he’d been found sooner.

Many relatives of missing Americans complain about the DPAA’s bureaucracy, and some charge that it privileges Vietnam operations at the expense of World War II cases. But perhaps the most obvious question about the agency’s work is simply: Is it worth it? Does it really make sense to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to recover a few shards of bone?

“Objectively, it makes no sense,” acknowledges McKeague. That said, “it’s worth it from the standpoint that these individuals made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of this nation,” he says. “It’s an obligation, a sacred one, that we’ve committed to. It also sends a strong signal to those currently in uniform that this country will do everything humanly possible to ensure that they’re brought home. That they will not be forgotten and that their sacrifice will not be in vain.” Cosgriff-Hernández was delighted when she heard the news about the Oxford identification. She has been in touch with a few of the families whose loved ones she’s located, but those are the exceptions; usually, as in this case, she just moves on to the next job. When we last spoke, she was gearing up for her next mission, in the mountains of the Philippines.

All of Oxford’s siblings, friends, and his fiancée were dead by the time his family held a service for him in a high school auditorium near Concord. Nonetheless, hundreds of people turned out—dozens of relatives, as well as scores of neighbors, veterans, local politicians, and other well-wishers. At a ceremony before the burial, a framed photo of the airman stood next to his casket. Beside it, his family placed pictures of the other seven Hot as Hell crewmembers.

Vince Beiser is the author of the forthcoming book The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science

Beans of Death !!

2018-05-30T13:13:00.001-07:00

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/favism-fava-beans

Why Beans Were an Ancient Emblem of Death

Fava beans can be lethal.

BY ANNE EWBANK

MAY 25, 2018

Pythagoras, pictured here next to a fava bean plant, might have had good reason to fear them. PUBLIC DOMAIN

THE GREEK MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER Pythagoras, who you might remember from geometry class, had his very own cult. Followers lived communally, studied the cosmos, and ate vegetarian. But unlike today’s vegetarians, they also avoided beans. This wasn’t just a quirk. Like the Ancient Egyptians and Romans, they considered broad beans (also known as fava beans) a supernatural symbol of death. And due to a deadly allergy, the beans likely deserved their reputation.

Fava beans remain common in Greece, but other popular beans, such as green beans, kidney beans, and lima beans, only reached Europe and Asia after 1492. “When the word bean is used in European texts prior to 1492, it is almost always the fava,” writes food historian Ken Albala. Cultivated for millennia, they were an important source of protein across the classical world.

Fava beans, in their pods. TWO HELMETS COOKING/CC BY 2.0

Despite being one of the first cultivated crops in history, many cultures had mixed feelings about favas. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Egyptians refused to cultivate beans at all. Though this was untrue, beans were often used for sacrifices, and in later Rome, priests of Jupiter couldn’t touch or even mention beans, due to their association with death and decay. For Roman funerary feasts, or silicernium, certain ritual foods were served: eggs, lentils, poultry, and favas.

Pythagoras’s aversion to beans, though, always got a lot of attention, even from ancient writers. According to Pliny, Pythagoreans believed that fava beans could contain the souls of the dead, since they were flesh-like. Due to their black-spotted flowers and hollow stems, some believers thought the plants connected earth and Hades, providing ladders for human souls. The beans’ association with reincarnation and the soul made eating fava beans close to cannibalism. Aristotle, writing earlier, went much further. One possible reason for the ban, he wrote, was that the bulbous shape of beans represented the entire universe. Nevertheless, other Greeks ate plenty of fava beans, and Pythagorean beliefs were mocked. The poet Horace tauntingly called beans “relations of Pythagoras.”

In this Rubens painting, a buff Pythagoras advocates for vegetarianism. PUBLIC DOMAIN

There’s also more earthly reasons to avoid beans. Diogenes Laertius, the Roman biographer of the Greek philosophers, wrote that beans were made of soul-stuff, much of which was present in humans. As it happens, the Greek word anemos means both “wind” and “soul.” Famously, beans are the magical fruit. Diogenes thought the excessive farting caused by eating too many fava beans was downright disturbing. Aristotle also thought that Pythagoreans abstained from beans as a political protest against democracy, since colored beans could be used to cast votes in elections (Pythagoreans favored oligarchy).

All symbolism aside, Pythagoras’s aversion to beans may have even contributed to his death. Legend has it he had to live in a cave for a time, to hide from a dictator. Some accounts of his death describe him fleeing attackers, who chase him until a field of flowering fava beans blocks his way. When he refuses to run any further, he’s killed.

The lovely flower of a fava. JONATHAN BILLINGER/CC BY-SA 2.0

This may seem ridiculous, but for certain people, a field of fava beans can spell certain death. Some researchers believe that historical suspicion about fava beans could be rooted in favism, a genetic disorder more common in the Mediterranean than anywhere else. Named for the triggering bean, people with favism develop hemolytic anemia from eating favas, or even inhaling the pollen from its flowers. After consumption or contact, red blood cells start to break down, which can cause anemia-like symptoms, jaundice, and even heart failure. Even today, one out of 12 people affected die of favism.

Perhaps Pythagoras had favism, or perhaps not. But the association between beans and somber rituals still exists: They are a Lenten meal in Greece and give name to the Italian All Soul’s Day cookie, fave del morti, or beans of the dead. Certainly, otherworldly beans give a whole new meaning to the requisite funeral three-bean salad.

Pet’s Death Hurts More Than Human Death.?!

2018-05-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

ANIMALS

A pet’s death can hurt more than losing a fellow human

Social norms are wrecking your grief experience.

By Dyani Sabin 9 hours ago

Deciding when to take a suffering pet to be put down can leave owner's with a lot of guilt.

Deposit Photos

The perfect coffin for a gerbil is a Celestial Seasonings tea box. With the tea bags removed, the white wax-paper bag inside is the ideal size funeral shroud for a tiny body. This unfortunate factoid, like much of the information about how to dispose of a beloved pet’s body, comes from personal experience. I buried four gerbils in my backyard as a child, complete with incense on their graves and a few words.

As an adult with a puppy well on his way to being over 60 pounds, I hadn’t given much consideration to how I’d deal with other pet deaths until a friend asked me, “this is a terrible question, but what do you do when he dies?”

I dug into the question, and as I did I found that I wasn’t alone in wondering—but that there isn’t a great answer.

The experts I talked to emphasized that our relationship to pet loss has changed over the last century. “It’s not surprising to me that we feel such grief over the loss of a pet, because in this country at least they are increasingly considered family members,” says Leslie Irvine, a sociologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own a pet, an increase of twelve percent since surveys of pet ownership started in the 1988, when it was already booming. Losing a beloved animal friend is made harder by the relative novelty of the experience, often being a person’s first experience with a close death, and by it being one of the few times most people chose euthanasia to end a life. And depending on the relationship, the loss of a pet can be more traumatic than the grief we feel after the death of family and friends. In part, this is because pets share some of our most intimate relationships—we see them every day, they depend on us, we adjust our lives around their needs—and yet publically grieving their loss is not socially acceptable.

We haven’t always felt this way, though. As a society, Irvine says, we’ve moved from thinking of pets as accessories or mindless pieces of furniture to thinking, feeling beings.

Pets become family members because they actively shape how we live. “A lot of people who have pets wake up at a certain time, not because of any alarm clock or any need of their own but because their dog needs a walk,” says Irvine. “Just as other humans participate in becoming family by doing these practices—getting up together, eating together, navigating the bathroom times, and all that—so do animals become part of the rituals that make family.”

And it isn’t just a daily ritual that makes pets familial. We form attachments to animals in the same way that we form attachments to people, says Cori Bussolari, a psychologist at the University of San Francisco. She points to a study in Science from 2015 that found when people gazed into a dog’s eyes, both the person and the dog had increased levels of oxytocin. Oxytocin, sometimes called the love hormone, regulates social interactions. It’s released when humans stare into each other’s eyes, and when parents look at their newborn children. “I’m sure if you did the study with other animals it would be the same,” Bussolari says.

I already imagine losing my puppy will be harder than burying my gerbils, but I also didn’t stare into my gerbils’ eyes quite as much. No matter the species, our bonds with our pets are unlike our other relationships. For one, Bussolari says, they’re entirely dependent on us. For another, Irvine says, “we idealize animals, especially dogs. We create them as these almost angelic characters, so we have this idea of unconditional love for us.” When they die, she explains, it almost seems like a violation of this mythos we’ve built around them.

On a personal level, the death of a pet is often a person’s first exposure to the loss of a close relationship, says Thomas Wrobel, a psychologist at the University of Michigan-Flint. Human death has been relatively sanitized, he explains. We have an industry for funerals and cremations, and you don’t typically have to deal with a dead body yourself. “With pets it’s a lot more in your face,” says Wrobel. “Unless you do the cremation option, you’ve got this dead dog you have to deal with, which is a lot more intimate experience of the death.”

The author's dog, Ajax, pictured here snoozin'

Dyani Sabin

With pets, you also have to decide if you are going to euthanize, and when. In a study of 305 pet owners, Bussolari found that almost seventy percent chose to euthanize their pet. It’s often medically necessary—the kindest thing to do for a dying animal—but the decision can wrack the owner with guilt. In 2005, Wrobel did a study of the relationship between symptoms of grief and attachment to pets. “In our results we saw that guilt was way up there [on the list of emotional responses], because a lot of people are carrying the animal to where it would be euthanized,” says Wrobel.Years ago, my cat, who I had rescued as a kitten, developed a urinary tract infection that lingered due to a weakened immune system from his feline HIV. I’d tried everything to help him get over it. One day, I came home and saw from his tepid movement that he was clearly in incredible pain—he was dying. Driving to the vet was excruciating, and my mom had to be the one in the room when he was euthanized because I was too upset.

“After the passing of a pet ninety-nine percent of people say to me in some shape or form, this was harder for me than the loss of my mom, or my grandma,” says Dani McVety, veterinarian and CEO of Lap of Love, a veterinary hospice network. She has found that the option to have in-home euthanasia and pet hospice makes death easier for families.

In-home euthanasia helps remove the negative experience of knowing that you’re driving your pet to their death in a place that you know causes them stress. In her practice, she sees the same kind of anxiety over deciding the right time for euthanasia at the end of a pet’s life. “I’ll tell them, I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but when this is done, you will feel relief,” McVety says. “And people do this thing after it’s done. . .they stand up and put their hands on their head and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I feel so relieved.’”

But despite the fact that 68 percent of Americans own a pet, and have grown to treasure them like members of the family, taking care of a dead animal’s body isn’t the same as dealing with a human corpse. In New York City, if you look up what to do with a deceased pet on the 311 page, you come to this statement:

You can bring the remains of a dead pet to an Animal Care Centers of NYC drop-off location to be cremated for a fee.

You can also put a dead animal out for pickup by the Department of Sanitation on your garbage day. The remains must be placed in a heavy-duty black plastic bag or double plastic bag and a note should be taped to the bag stating its contents (for example, "dead dog" or "dead cat").

If you think that’s appalling, you’re not alone.

“Wow. Wow, you end up just treating it like a raccoon. Wow, that’s crazy,” says McVety. The New York Department of Sanitation doesn’t keep data on how many pets are left on the curb so it’s unclear how often this happens. Other major cities, like Houston and Los Angeles, will pick up pets curbside, and in other cities you can call for pickup.

These guidelines are written so that the city has some response available, but they don’t take the emotional element into consideration, says Bonnie Beaver, professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M.

City services aren’t the only ones to fail to see how emotional a pet death can be.

“You feel often isolated, socially,” says Beaver, “because people don’t understand what you’re going through, because they might say, ‘get over it, it’s just a dog’—which is exactly the wrong thing to say.”

When you lose a person, there are rituals—the funeral, the memorial—and it’s acceptable to take time off work and talk about your loss. “What people grieving the loss of a pet don’t realize the first time they lose a pet is the strength of the grief and how long it lasts,” says Wendy Packman, a psychologist at Palo Alto University. “So it surprises the griever, and it really surprises the people who aren’t sympathetic to pet loss.” Although Packman has found that the depth and length of grief is similar to how we grieve people, this social stigma causes it to feel more painful.

“With disenfranchised grief is there is less support, and the grief can be even worse than for a person because there are no rituals,” says Packman, “and when people do go out and do a ritual, when they feel brave enough, they can be ostracized.”

As I was researching this story, friends told me about the lengths they went to in order to bury their pets properly, despite regulations about where and how you may dispose of animal remains. One snuck into their community garden at midnight to bury a pet rat under a rose bush. Another drove out in the middle of the night to bury their cat underneath a beautiful oak tree they pass on their daily commute. Even my gerbil burials, and the funeral I held for my cat were private affairs, in the backyard with my family—our secret, quiet grief shared together.

Packman believes this social acceptability of grieving for pets is changing, noting that she’s seen a rise in memorials for pets and pet cemeteries. But in the meantime, says Bussolari, we grieve our pets so deeply because we feel like we’re not supposed to. “We worry a lot about making people uncomfortable, because then they don’t want to be around us—and if they don’t want to be around us then we’re by ourselves,” she says. “But the reality is that the more we talk about grief, the more we normalize grief.”

tags:

Grim Reaper Is Not Loud, At Night !! Comic

2018-04-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

1 and Done 4/27/2018: “Death be not loud.” :

London’s KILLER FOG kills 12,000, 150,000 hospitalized in 1952 .?! 4,000 animals killed.

2018-04-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.history.com/news/the-killer-fog-that-blanketed-london-60-years-ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/londons-1952-killer-fog-cause-revealed/

By KACEY DEAMER LIVESCIENCE.COM December 12, 2016, 3:02 PM

Scientists determine cause of London's 1952 "killer fog"

Despite the deaths of thousands, the killer fog largely remained a mystery for decades.

COURTESY OF TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

London may be known for its drizzly weather, but in 1952 the city’s quintessential fog cover turned deadly, and no one knew exactly why — until now.

For five days in December 1952, a fog that contained pollutants enveloped all of London. By the time the dense fog cover lifted, more than 150,000 people had been hospitalized and at least 4,000 people had died. Researchers now estimate that the total death count was likely more than 12,000 people, as well as thousands of animals. Despite its lethal nature, the exact cause and nature of the killer fog has largely remained a mystery. Recently, a team of researchers has determined the likely reasons for its formation.

Researchers have for a long time connected emissions from burning coal with the killer fog, but the specific chemical processes that led to the deadly mix of pollution and fog were not fully understood. To determine what turned the fog into a killer, an international team of scientists from China, the U.S. and the U.K. recreated the fog in a lab using results from laboratory experiments and atmospheric measurements from Beijing and Xi’an, two heavily polluted cities in China. [In Photos: World’s Most Polluted Places]

Study lead author Renyi Zhang, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, said that sulfate was a big contributor to the deadly London fog. Sulfuric acid particles, which formed from the sulfur dioxide that was released from the burning of coal, were also a component of the fog. The question was, How did sulfur dioxide get turned into sulfuric acid?

“Our results showed that this process was facilitated by nitrogen dioxide, another co-product of coal burning, and occurred initially on natural fog,” Zhang said in a statement. “Another key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process.”

The natural fog contained larger particles, Zhang explained, with the smaller acidic particles evenly distributed throughout. When those fog particles evaporated, an acidic-haze was left covering the city.

The 1952 killer fog led to the creation of the Clean Air Act, which the British Parliament passed in 1956. Researchers still consider it the worst air pollution event in European history.

20 PHOTOS

China's smog problem

The air of cities in China, which is often heavily polluted, has a chemistry that’s similar to the killer fog in London, Zhang and his colleagues found. China has battled air pollution for decades, and it is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, according to the researchers. For instance, air pollution in Beijing often far exceeds the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable air standards.

The researchers said that the main difference between China’s smog and the killer London fog is that China’s haze is made up of much smaller nanoparticles. Also, the formation of sulfate is only possible with ammonia, the scientists added.

“In China, sulfur dioxide is mainly emitted by power plants. Nitrogen dioxide is from power plants and automobiles, and ammonia comes from fertilizer use and automobiles,” Zhang said. “Again, the right chemical processes have to interplay for the deadly haze to occur in China. Interestingly, while the London fog was highly acidic, contemporary Chinese haze is basically neutral.”

A better understanding of air chemistry is key to developing effective regulatory actions in China, Zhang said.

“We think we have helped solve the 1952 London fog mystery and also have given China some ideas of how to improve its air quality,” Zhang said. “Reduction in emissions for nitrogen oxides and ammonia is likely effective in disrupting this sulfate-formation process.”

The research was published online Nov. 9 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

New Ways To Grow Old, Age

2018-03-07T19:53:00.001-08:00

PART 1 : Japan, New Ways To Grow Old
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05yq3lm?ns_mchannel=email&ns_source=worldservice_ps_newsletter&ns_campaign=worldservicenewsletter060318&ns_linkname=bbcrworldservice_documentary_japan1_link&ns_fee=0

Part 2:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05zfg1c

Japan: New Ways to Grow Old - Part One

The Documentary

Japan has the fastest ageing society in the world with more than a quarter of its population over the age of 65. It currently has 66,000 centenarians, more than any other country. Toshiko Katayose and AkiMaruyama Leggett explore some of the innovative ways in which Japanese people are adapting to living longer.

For over 20 years Toshiko Katayose edited Japan’s most popular magazine for senior readers. Now 67 and facing retirement, she reveals how her generation of baby-boomers born after World War Two, are overturning stereotypes about old age and how businesses are responding to these more demanding silver consumers. She visits Japan’s first supermarket built specifically to serve older shoppers which offers everything from crystal-studded walking sticks to try-before-you-buy coffin experiences.

(Photo: A cornucopia of stylish walking sticks at Japan’s first supermarket for older consumers. Credit: Mukti Jain Campion)

Show ,http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05zfg1c'

Japan: New Ways to Grow - Part Two

The Documentary

Could living in a home designed to deliberately demand more effort from you each day help you stay fitter and more alert in your later years? And could people living with dementia be better integrated in the community through work? Aki Maruyama Leggett examines some of the novel ideas for senior housing and social care emerging in Japan.

Beautiful Death Letter-Choose Your Death

2018-03-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

https://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/goodbye-and-good-luck-zm0z16fzsel

Goodbye and Good Luck!

An 84-year-old grandmother in the early stages of dementia dragged a foam mattress to one of her favorite spots on Bowen Island, British Columbia, so that she could die the death of her choosing.

By Gillian Bennett, from Humanist Perspectives

| Fall 2016

I do not like hospitals—they are dirty places. Any doctor will tell you to stay out of them if you possibly can. I would not want a fall, a stroke, or some unforeseen complication to mess up my decision to cost Canada as little as possible in my declining years.
Photo by Gotovan

August 18, 2014. I will take my life today around noon. It is time. Dementia is taking its toll and I have nearly lost myself. I have nearly lost me. Jonathan, the straightest and brightest of men, will be at my side as a loving witness.

I have known that I have dementia, a progressive loss of memory and judgment, for three years. It is a stealthy, stubborn and oh-so reliable disease. I might have preferred an exotic ailment whose name came trippingly off the tongue, but no, what I have is entirely typical. I find it a boring disease, and, despite the sweetness and politeness of my family I am bright enough to be aware of how boring they find it, too. It is so rough on my husband, Jonathan. I don’t think my lovely cat has noticed, but I’m not sure.

Dementia gives no quarter and admits no bargaining. Research tells us that it’s a “silent disease,” one that can lurk for years or even decades before its symptoms become obvious. Ever so gradually at first, much faster now, I am turning into a vegetable. I find it hard to keep in my mind that my granddaughter is coming in three days’ time and not today. “Where do we keep the X?” (coffee / milkshake-maker / backspace on my keyboard / the book I was just reading) happens all the time. I have constantly to monitor what I say in an attempt not to make some gross error of judgment.

There comes a time, in the progress of dementia, when one is no longer competent to guide one’s own affairs. I want out before the day when I can no longer assess my situation, or take action to bring my life to an end. There could also come a time when I simply must make a decision based on my deteriorating physical health. I do not like hospitals—they are dirty places. Any doctor will tell you to stay out of them if you possibly can. I would not want a fall, a stroke, or some unforeseen complication to mess up my decision to cost Canada as little as possible in my declining years.

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Understand that I am giving up nothing that I want by committing suicide. All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country’s money but having not the faintest idea of who I am.

Each of us is born uniquely and dies uniquely. I think of dying as a final adventure with a predictably abrupt end. I know when it’s time to leave and I do not find it scary.

There are so many things we obsess about. We seem to have a need to get things right. Should we bring a bottle of wine or some flowers to the party? Will jeans and my new boots work or is that too casual? How do I find a new mate?

We do NOT talk much about how we die. Yet facing death is thoroughly interesting and absorbing and challenging. I have choices that I have reviewed, and either adopted or discarded. I think I have hit upon the right choice for me.

I have talked it over with friends and relatives. It is not a forbidden topic. Anything but.

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Every day I lose bits of myself, and it’s obvious that I am heading towards the state that all dementia patients eventually get to: not knowing who I am and requiring full-time care. I know as I write these words that within six months or nine months or twelve months, I, Gillian, will no longer be here. What is to be done with my carcass? It will be physically alive but there will be no one inside.

I have done my homework. I have reviewed my options:

1. Have a minder care for my mindless body. This would involve financial hardship for those I leave behind, or involve them in a seemingly endless round of chores that could erode even their fondest memories of me.

2. Request whatever care the government is willing to provide. (The facility will expect my husband, children, grandchildren, to visit often to thank the caretakers for how well they are looking after the carcass. Fair enough, but not what I wish for my family.)

3. End my own life by taking adequate barbiturates to do the job before my mind has totally gone. Ethically, this seems to me the right thing to do.

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I can live or vegetate for perhaps ten years in hospital at Canada’s expense, costing anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 per year. That is only the beginning of the damage. Nurses, who thought they were embarked on a career that had great meaning, find themselves perpetually changing my diapers and reporting on the physical changes of an empty husk. It is ludicrous, wasteful, and unfair.

My family, all of whom are rational and funny to boot, would not visit me in hospital, because they know I would not want them to.

The world strains under the weight of an aging population. We are living longer, and our life expectancies continue to grow. By 2045, the ratio of working-age citizens to their elderly dependents will become increasingly burdensome in almost every part of the world. In Canada and the United States, the ratio is expected to be 16 workers for every ten elderly dependents. It is a social and economic disaster in the making.

Yet most people say they would like to live to 90 or 100, or even beyond.

There are many ethical issues here: Life extension radically alters people’s ideas of what it is to be human—and not for the better. As we, the elderly, undergo manifold operations and become gaga while taking up a hospital bed, our grandchildren’s schooling, their educational, athletic, and cultural opportunities, will be squeezed dry.

The heart of the problem is arithmetic: The post-World War ll Social Welfare State, created at a moment when the baby boom was still gestating, is built on a generational Ponzi scheme. As life expectancy increases and birth rates decline, the population pyramid is being inverted—and in some countries that is causing the entire economy to topple.

Everybody by the age of 50 who is mentally competent should make a Living Will that states how she wants to die, the circumstances under which she does not want to be resuscitated, etc. Add a statement such as: “If I am ill and frail and have an infection such as pneumonia, do not attempt to restore me to life with antibiotics. Pray let me pass. I do not give any relatives or doctors or psychiatrists the right to squelch this decision.” One’s general practitioner would have a copy.

Legally, everyone should have an obligation to make a Will, which would be stored electronically, could not be destroyed, and would be available automatically to any hospital in the world.

What about a person who refuses to make a Will? There should be a fallback Will that applies to everyone who has not done his civic duty. I do not have all the answers, but I do think I’m raising questions that need to be raised.

Three outsize institutions—the medical profession, the Law, and the Church—will challenge and fight any transformative change. Yet we all hear of changes in each of these professions that suggest a broader approach, guided and informed by empathy. My hope is that all of these institutions will continue to transform themselves, and that the medical profession will mandate, through sensitive and appropriate protocols, the administration of a lethal dose to end the suffering of a terminally ill patient, in accordance with her Living Will.

Life seems somewhat like a party that I was dropped into. At first I was shy and awkward and didn’t know what the rules were. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. It turned out that I was there to enjoy myself and I didn’t know how to do that. Someone kind talked to me and made me laugh. I began to understand that actually I had to make up my own rules and then live by them.

I did pick up that I needed to know when to leave, and that is now.

All members of my immediate family are in Vancouver: daughter, son, two granddaughters and four grandsons. All know that it matters to me not to become a burden to them, or to Canada. I have discussed my situation with them all. In our family it is recognized that any adult has the right to make her own decision.

Just in case anyone is tempted to think I must be brave to off myself, you should know that I am a big sookie. I am sorely fearful of being alone in the dark. I am scared something will get me. I do not want to die alone. If my cat were failing in the way that I am, I would mix some sleeping medication in with top-quality ground beef, and when she fell asleep, carry her lovingly to the garden and do the rest. Who wants to die surrounded by strangers, no matter how excellent their care and competence?

I have had a husband beyond compare, and children and grandchildren who have outstripped me in most meaningful ways. Since I was 7 I have had wonderful friends, whom I did and still do adore.

This is all much tougher than it need be on Jonathan, and I wish he did not have to be alone with his wife’s corpse. Canadian law makes it a crime for anyone to assist a person committing suicide, and Jonathan, therefore, will in no way assist me. Our children, Sara and Guy, would so willingly be with their father, but the laws being what they are, we will not put them in jeopardy.

Today, now, I go cheerfully and so thankfully into that good night. Jonathan, the courageous, the faithful, the true and the gentle, surrounds me with company. I need no more. It is almost noon.

Gillian Bennett, maiden name Quentin-Baxter, was born in 1930 in Christchurch, New Zealand. At Canterbury University, Gillian became friends with Jonathan Bennett, a fellow Philosophy student. In 1954, Gillian received a scholarship to study in Bonn, Germany. Jonathan and Gillian were married in Cambridge, England, in 1957. New Zealand is a country of wild beauty and infinite depth. They often ached to be there but accepted early on that career decisions gave them no way back. “Like a toi toi arrow shot in the air. Never no more. Never no more.” Over the next 40 years Gillian and Jonathan lived in Cambridge (England), Vancouver (Canada), and Syracuse (USA). During her time in Syracuse, Gillian trained to become a psychotherapist, and practised and taught group and individual therapy. Gillian’s mentors were chiefly Richard Erskine and Rebecca Trautmann. In 1996, Gillian and Jonathan retired to Bowen Island, just off the coast of British Columbia. They have two children, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, all of whom—thanks be—are flourishing.

Reprinted from Humanist Perspectives (Winter 2014-15), a quarterly Canadian magazine that seeks to promote the idea that human problems can best be solved by human beings, by relying on our intellectual, moral and social capabilities, free from notions of supernatural purpose or design, and affirming that human life has meaning in its own terms.

Leigh

3/2/2018 8:09:33 AM

What a beautifully written goodbye letter. So grateful that it could be shared here.

Why Do Some Chinese Funerals Involve Strippers?!

2018-02-24T22:32:00.002-08:00

Why do some Chinese funerals involve strippers? - BBC News US https://apple.news/AeSp4ga1ER1irJHZrnI3x1A

Where Pumpkin Beer ComesFrom/FUNNY!?/Off Grid Kid

2018-01-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

Free Range:

1 and Done:

http://www.gocomics.com/1-and-done/2018/1/22

Walls Of Death - Arsenic Wallpaper

2018-01-25T09:42:00.000-08:00

How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples

The arsenic-laden pages of “Shadows from the Walls of Death” should not be touched without gloves.

BY ALEXANDER J. ZAWACKI

JANUARY 23, 2018

The title page for Shadows from the Walls of Death, and a sheet of wallpaper. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE/ PUBLIC DOMAIN

SHADOWS FROM THE WALLS OF DEATH, printed in 1874 and measuring about 22 by 30 inches, is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.

The book is the work of Dr. Robert M. Kedzie, a Union surgeon during the American Civil War and later professor of chemistry at Michigan State Agricultural college (now MSU). When he came to serve on the state’s Board of Health in the 1870s, he set out to raise awareness about the dangers of arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. Though a lethal toxin, arsenic can be mixed with copper and made into beautiful paints and pigments, most commonly Scheele’s Green or Paris Green. This was no fringe phenomenon: near the end of the 19th century, the American Medical Association estimated that as much as 65 percent of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic.

The Victorians knew that arsenic was poisonous when eaten, of course—it had gained a reputation as an “inheritance powder” that could be used, for example, to bump off elderly aunts with large fortunes—but most saw little risk in plastering their homes with the stuff. Kedzie argued (correctly, we now know) that arsenical wallpapers shed microscopic dust particles that can be inhaled or ingested. In the preface to Shadows, he warns that arsenic can kill not only by “sudden and violent destruction of life” but by slow, chronic poisoning, a mysterious and lingering illness that might baffle sufferer and physician alike. He wrote of women taking ill and withdrawing into their wallpapered bedrooms to recover, not knowing that all the while they were inhaling “an air loaded with the breath of death.”

A detail of arsenic-saturated wallpaper from the book Shadows from the Walls of Death. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE/ PUBLIC DOMAIN

As part of his campaign to raise awareness about poison papers, Kedzie produced 100 copies of Shadows and sent them out to public libraries across Michigan. Each one is a slim volume, containing few words—just a title page, a short preface, and a note from the Board of Health explaining the purpose of the book and advising librarians not to let children handle it. The macabre title page reproduces a quote from the Biblical book of Leviticus: “And behold if the plague be in the walls of the house, with hollow streaks, greenish or reddish, then the priest…shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an unclean place.” The remaining pages, 86 in full, consist of wallpaper samples taken from common merchants.

Of the original 100 copies, only four remain. Most libraries, concerned about poisoning their patrons, destroyed their volumes. Two of the surviving books remain in Michigan—one at MSU and the other at the University of Michigan. MSU’s copy rests on an unassuming shelf in the library’s Special Collections division, housed in an appropriately green box. Each page is individually encapsulated in plastic so that researchers and the curious can handle it without fear.

The book was only sealed up in 1998. Before that, says Andrew Lundeen, a staff member at MSU’s Turfgrass Information Center who consults with the library’s Special Collections division, “those wanting to look at the book had to wear special gloves. There were restrictions on how long you could have it out, and you had to be very careful—don’t lick your fingers and turn the page.”

A copy of the book held by Michigan State University; each page is encapsulated in plastic. ANDREW LUNDEEN

The other two copies of Shadows have made their way to the Harvard University Medical School and the National Library of Medicine, which has digitized the entire volume and made it freely available online. That was no simple task: Dr. Stephen Greenberg, head of the rare books and early manuscripts section of the NLM’s History of Medicine division, says workers had to suit up in protective gear before handling the book.

“It was scanned under laboratory conditions, under a fume hood,” Dr. Greenberg says, referring to the large ventilation chambers used in chemistry labs to suck up hazardous gases. “Picture guys wearing masks and hoods.” The NLM is currently working to encapsulate its volume as MSU has done; previously, it was kept isolated in a sealed container.

The colors of the wallpaper samples have faded somewhat in the century and a half since Dr. Kedzie bound them together, but their hues and patterns remain beguiling. Lundeen says no digital image can do it justice: “It’s worth seeing in person. The light plays off of it beautifully.”

“But,” he adds, “it’s like a poison dart frog. The most beautiful things can be the most dangerous

deathternity

Amazon Alexa can now let u hear voices of dead people.!!!!

The New Art of Dying (& Burial) !! by Axios

Special report: The new art of dying

15 Morbid And Bizarre Funeral Cakes / Beautiful Nightmare Cakes

15 Morbid And Bizarre Funeral Cakes

1. Coffin cake with a ‘sweet’ corpse

Photo: Party Animal Online

2. A casket black and white cake without corpse

Photo: Gore Goodies

3. A ‘Pimp my ride’ or die confection

Photo: Sweet Harvest Bakery/Pinterest

4. The funeral-wedding-celebration-day cake?

Photo: Respect Funeral Cakes

5. A good hearse cake

Photo: Patti Blanton/Pinterest

6. The holy cake that is not healthy

Photo: Gresham Lodge Cakes/Respect Funeral Cake

7. Funeral-inspired cupcakes

Photo: Debbie Smith/Good Funeral Guide

8. A desirable plot cake

Photo: Lesly’s Home Delights/Respect Funeral Cakes

9. The skulls and roses cake

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

10. Funeral-cake with an intriguing presentation

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

11. A sweet cemetery cake

Photo: Debbie Churan/Pinterest

12. This cake lets you make the choice

Photo: Abbey Cakes/Respect Funeral Cakes

13. A peacefully morbid cake

Photo: abromaym/Cake Central

14. A cake that even death can’t stop

Photo: Confessions of a Funeral Director

15. Sweet cake-coffin with flowers

Photo: Trista/Pinterest

Source: Ranker

About the author

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