Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”

Pat O’Hara was the head of a Zen Buddhist center in New York City at the time of the September 11 attacks, when the towers of the World Trade Center came down in a scream of chaos and metal. “The smell didn’t go away for several weeks and you had the sense you were breathing people,” she said. “It was the smell of all kinds of things that had totally disintegrated, including people. People and electrical things and stone and glass and everything.”

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.” The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves.

The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves

But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror

Beware of what you shall discover, my pretty.

But it would not be beautiful because death was hidden or denied; it would be beautiful because death would be embraced

“The smell didn’t go away for several weeks and you had the sense you were breathing people,” she said.

In bad economies, major cities see a drastic increase in unclaimed bodies, not all of them homeless, or even without a family. A son may have loved his mother, but if his house is in foreclosure and his car repossessed, his mother’s body might shift from relic to burden very quickly

Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending

Camille Paglia’s lament: “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”

In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve out relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.” The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings

We are all going to die and we know it

Looking mortality straight in the eye is no easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded

Looking mortality straight in the eye is no easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

When Edgar Allan Poe’s love, Annabel Lee, is taken by the chill of death and entombed, the lovelorn Poe cannot stay away. He goes to “lie down by the side, of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.”

The exquisite, alabaster corpse of Annabel Lee. No mention of the ravages of decomposition that would have made lying down next to her a rancid embrace for the brokenhearted Poe.

Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.

Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves.