Death

Friday

Druin Burch

What the death of my beloved son taught me about Easter

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds, but not my boy? In the Emergency Department I met the woman who became my wife.

easter

Sunday

Simon Ings

The art of aging

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.” The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

aging

Tuesday

Bill Kauffman

The life of Karl Zinsmeister

It’s strange interviewing a friend who is dying, but Karl Zinsmeister is at peace. I met Karl in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1981, when we two Upstate New York hicks were new to the staff of Senator Pat Moynihan. The first thing I learned about him was that he and his girlfriend (and later wife) Ann, while on some do-gooder mission in Africa, had wandered into Tanzania and been held on suspicion of being spies. (They weren’t.) Karl threw himself into both intellectual and manual labor with fierce enthusiasm, doggedness, even hard-headedness. Over the past 45 years he has edited magazines, renovated ruined tenements, been embedded in Iraq, raised three kids, lived with Ann on a houseboat, served as White House chief of domestic policy and produced more than 20 books.

karl zinsmeister

Thursday

Gage Klipper

Missing Cowboy, our great farm manager

Life in the country is unforgiving. Animals die, labor is unceasing and nature fights back at every turn. We say losing a beloved horse or a loyal farm dog is like losing a member of the family. But while the pain is real, it’s certainly not the same as losing a dear friend. Our long-time farm hand died late last year. He was not an old man by any means and he had the vigor of a younger man still. By the grace of God, he passed away peacefully at home in the small cottage just down the road from the farm. I’ll call him Cowboy, because in truth, that’s what we called him most of the time. He didn’t like his real name. And he certainly lived up to the moniker. Cowboy could solve any issue, big or small.

Friday

Katherine Dee

My father gave me the internet

My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes. The waitstaff called back 11 times over the next two days. I thought they were debt collectors. Finally, I went into his office, where we had found him, picked up his phone, and yelled, “He’s gone! Stop calling!” That’s how I learned what he’d been doing. They were trying to confirm. And in the corner of my eye, on his bookshelf: Irish Folk and Fairy Tales by W.B. Yeats.

father internet

Friday

Bridget Phetasy

Bryan Johnson and the meme-ing of life

In fifth grade my class read Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, the story of a ten- year-old girl who stumbles on a family of immortals, the Tucks, who impress upon her that eternal life is unnatural and actually a curse. The novel had a profound effect on me. I became obsessed with the book and with the relationship of life to death. One passage in particular has haunted me for decades. “You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got,” the patriarch, Angus Tuck, says. “We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.” I’ve been thinking about this book a lot since I became aware of the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.

Monday

Jane Stannus

Chicken soup for the souls: a feast for the dead

It’s indisputable. Food & Drink is The Spectator’s most important section. Ask yourself this: if you hadn’t eaten in days, would you have the slightest interest in perusing the deft political analysis, elevating cultural commentary and scintillating wit to be found the rest of the magazine? Without food, the only reading worth bothering with is Preparation for Death. As starvation sets in, only the two inevitables remain — Death and Taxes — and what need to worry about taxes? Tombstones have no mailboxes, shrouds no pockets. For over a millennium, November has been the month of the dead. The eleventh has been dedicated to fallen soldiers ever since World War One; but All Souls’ Day goes back much farther.

Souls

Thursday

William Newton

Böcklin brings out the dead

In the fall, a middle-aged man’s fancy turns to thoughts of death. As shadows lengthen, decay takes root in the raised beds, and the “spooky season” recalls the shortening of our days. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on how one artist embraced this time of year. Much of the life of the Basel-born Symbolist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) was haunted by the specter of death. His first fiancée died before they could marry; he himself nearly died of typhus. Of his fourteen children, five died in childhood; three others predeceased him. His daughter Maria was buried in the English Cemetery in Florence, where Böcklin spent much of his life. Scholars believe that the cemetery partly inspired Böcklin’s most famous work, 1880’s eerie “The Isle of the Dead.

Böcklin

Monday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

The peculiar American attitude toward death

Dying sensibly has always eluded Americans — from Elvis to Houdini — and that’s before you even get to the funeral part. In fact, in America, something peculiar has occurred over the last century. Traditional obsequies have fallen out of favor as Americans increasingly opt for “anything but” the conventional when it comes to final resting places: that is, no more six feet under. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the majority of Americans now choose cremation, with the rate expected to surpass 80 percent by 2045. Ecofriendly departures — think hemp coffins or ashes strewn over a living coral reef — are also becoming more popular; 60 percent of respondents to one recent survey expressed an interest in “green funeral options.

death
monterey
Cockburn

Does your mass shooting suit my worldview?

In the wake of Saturday’s horrific shooting at a Lunar New Year celebration in the heavily Asian neighborhood of Monterey Park, California, Democratic lawmakers sprang into action, speculating that the violence may have been racially motivated. Hours later it emerged that the shooter was himself also Asian. The frequency of mass killings in this country is harrowing. But Cockburn finds such tragedies are made all the more gruesome when politicians so often jump ahead of the facts, ascribing motivations or reasons to the violence that are politically beneficial to them or fit their ideological framework. Representative Adam Schiff, for example, pegged “bigotry towards AAPI individuals as a possible motive.

Wednesday

Estella Shardlow

The wellness retreat reborn

Rebecca Illing’s résumé doesn’t read like your typical hotelier’s: circus school graduate, free diver, marine conservation advocate and certified death doula. So when the thirty-seven-year-old Londoner inherited a rundown guest house in Portugal’s northerly Minho region, the property was destined to be reimagined as something more than a straightforward B&B. Illing had spent childhood summers at Paço da Glória, roaming its cork oak woodlands and swimming in the nearby Lima River. But the circumstances of her return in 2020 were less idyllic. Europe was entering lockdown, and she was grieving the sudden death of her brother.

retreat

Monday

Elle Nash

Blake Butler: ‘I don’t want this story to end as “Molly killed herself”’

A recent controversy rocked the literary world when coverage of author Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, about his late wife, notable poet Molly Brodak, hit tabloids and spun for the worst. The coverage sparked debate over the ethics of writing about relationships, as online attackers made accusations that the widower weaponized Brodak’s private life and exploited her death for fame or revenge.   Claims gained ground that it was a “shameless cash grab,” “literary revenge porn,” or that it shouldn’t have been published due to privacy concerns, since the memoir reveals Butler’s discovery of his late wife’s affairs after her passing.

blake butler

Thursday

Nick Russo

Mocking murdered leftists is not based

At 1:30 a.m. on Monday, Philadelphia freelance journalist Josh Kruger was shot seven times at the base of his stairs by an intruder. He stumbled, bleeding, into the street and collapsed on the sidewalk before being transported to the hospital, where he soon died. Come 10:00 a.m., news of his death was reported by local outlets, and Philadelphia’s media ecosystem was in a full-fledged state of lamentation. Friends, professional acquaintances and public leaders poured their hearts out for Kruger. But the moving display of mourning didn’t last long.  Before Kruger’s body went cold, prominent figures on the dissident right caught wind of the murder and discovered to their delight that he was a vocal defender of Philly’s progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner.

josh kruger murdered

Friday

Cockburn

Flashback: Dianne Feinstein smokes schoolchildren in climate debate

Washington was stunned this morning to learn of the premature death of California senator Dianne Feinstein at the mere age of ninety. Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992 and was its longest serving female senator. She was a vocal advocate for gun control and headed the Senate Intelligence Committee for several years, leading a review of the CIA's interrogation and detention program in the aftermath of 9/11. But to Cockburn, the most iconic moment of Feinstein's storied career came in 2019, when she deployed the heft of her decades in Congress to smack down some urchins from the Sunrise Movement who were hectoring her about climate change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

dianne feinstein

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

The problem facing US cemeteries

On a hillside on the outskirts of my town is an expansive cemetery where more than 20,000 of Philipsburg’s ancestors have been laid to rest since 1869. For decades, its thirty or so acres have been cared for by three dedicated men who dig and fill graves, mow and trim the grass, repair equipment, patch and plow roads, maintain old headstones and gather leaves “for next to nothing,” as Paul Springer puts it. This work must “go on constantly,” says Paul, but changes in the mores surrounding death mean “generating the income necessary to support these activities is becoming impossible.” Paul is my friend and one of those indispensable do-ers small towns across the country rely on to keep things ticking.

cemeteries

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Dumb risks are worth taking

The plight of the Titanic submariners has engulfed the media over the past week and demanded the attention of countless rubberneckers to catastrophe. Parts of that attention are due to morbid curiosity, or the ghoulish nature of social media's animosity toward the super rich; those who Ben Dreyfuss terms "the abnormal people" on his Substack: "They heard the news, read the stories, took in all of the information that made you sad, and their first reaction was: anyone who can afford a $250k tourist trip deserves to die." But another slice of attention is due, at least in part, to the audacious nature of their chosen craft.

titanic adventure

Saturday

Monday

Ann Coulter

Daniel Penny’s mistake was to resist mayhem

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. "First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will... But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag." This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

Daniel Penny

Sunday

Dan Buck

The Jordan Neely Rorschach test

Most of those who follow the news have already seen the distressing video. A black man, Jordan Neely, walked onto a New York subway train screaming obscenities and ranting about his own destitution. Another passenger, a former Marine called Daniel Penny, came up behind him, took him to the ground and placed him into a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and died. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist could not create a better scenario that perfectly exemplifies everyone’s societal meta-narratives, a Rorschach test onto which we can map our assumptions and biases. It resembles a “what do you see? Two women or a wine glass?” kind of picture. Is this a black man, destroyed and choked by oppression, or the inevitable result of societal decay?

jordan neely

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Queen Elizabeth II made a difference — to Britain and the world

“The Queen is dead, boys, and it’s so lonely on a limb.” So the ever-provocative Morrissey sang on the title track of the Smiths’ 1986 album. At the time, his wishes were regarded as little more than republican throat-clearing, shot through with satirical wit. In the same song, he imagined an unlikely encounter with the Queen, who remarks caustically, “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing.” Some of his detractors might agree. But now, thirty-six years on, the Queen really is dead. Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history, died on September 8, 2022 at the age of ninety-six. The second Elizabethan age — one that surpassed the first for both achievement and longevity — has come to an end.

queen elizabeth ii