The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.
Here is the story of how I died. I wish it were a glamorous story; sadly, there was little glamour in my death. The end for everyone is much the same, sad, lonely, and cold. Only, most people don’t wake up again, I did. And I was hungry, so bloody hungry.
I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion.
Her strategy for honoring the dead had always been to take action - solve the mystery, punish the criminal. But what did you do when there was no one to punish? When there were no answers to find? How do you assimilate that kind of loss without losing your mind?
Your father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glorious raiment. He waits eagerly by his palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at the high table, by his side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory thatsomeone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of livingis a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one dayyou look down and see how much pain has eroded.
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
Toward evening, Harriet found herself thinking the oddest thoughts: that twilight is not really dark. It's gray. The sun gone, the world turns gray, without emotion, without color. It seemed a fitting time for a little girl to slip free of all this pain, to let go.
Do you really think anyone needs some kind of notarized statement saying 'Dear Saint Peter, here's another stiff, pass him through the gates, signed, Father McGonnigill.'...'PS: He once had a hot dog on a Friday, but don't hold that against him.'
Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth.
That’s when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
He watches the sun out of the world and the stars into it and sometimes I wonder if he watches the sun come up again. Is it hard to sleep when you know you are almost at the end? Do you not want to miss a moment, even those that would otherwise seem dull and unremarkable?
And what after all, is death?? 'Tis but a cessation from mortal life; 'tis but the finishing of an appointed course; the refreshing inn after a fatiguing journey; the end of a life of cares and troubles; and, if happy, the beginning of a life of immortal happiness.
Death is life's way of saying you can have a nice sleep. Despair at its highest point is somewhat of a challenge. But on the other hand life in general has no intrinsic value for it to be meaningful. In the end nothingness eats away the bones, so be thankful that it does.
