#caitlin-doughty
"Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality." Irin Yalom, psychiatrist #death #life-and-death #mortality
Since religion is the source of many death rituals, often we invoke belief to denigrate the practices of others. #religion #rituals
I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a "barbarous act"), but on emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one's own culture. That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don't match our own. #relative-correctness #culture
Still, it is demonstrably wrong to claim that the West has death rituals that are superior to those of the rest of the world. What's more, due to the corporatization and commercialization of deathcare, we have fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to proximity, intimacy, and ritual around death. #intimacy #progress
A single acre of soil can contain 2,400 pounds of fungi, 1,500 pounds of bacteria, 900 pounds of earthworms, 890 pounds of arthropods and algae, and 133 pounds of protozoa. The soil teems with life, as does the dead body (inside its sausage of keratin, or dead skin). Microscopic sorcery takes place when a body is placed just a few feet deep in the soil. Here, the trillions of bacteria living inside you will liquefy your innards. When the built-up pressure breaks the seal of skin an orgiastic reunion takes place, in which our bodies merge with the earth. We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, "the bodies we give it back ar enot payment enough." Though, presumably, they are a start. #soil #nature #compost
Each separation is a small death, and should be honored. #death #honour #partings #separation
At almost any location in any major city on Earth, you are likely standing on thousands of dead bodies. These bodies represent a history that exists, othen unknown, beneath our feet. While a new Crossrail station was being dug in London in 2015, 3,500 bodies were excavated from a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cemetary under Liverpool Street, including a burial pit from the Great Plague of 1665. To cremate bodies we burn fossil fuel, thus named because it is made of decomposed dead organisms. Plants grow from the decayed matter of former plants. The pages of this book are made from the pulp of raw wood from a tree felled in its prime. All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person. #decay #life-and-death #ecosystems