#Death and dying

[maggieannemillerart]

"yet I cannot be sated without you."

Work in progress: "Sated."

[saycheeseandsmile]

[diana-andraste]

Some of Bluebeard's Wives, Charles Yates Fell, 1904

Chamber of Bluebeard's dead wives from Georges Méliès silent film, 1901

John Carradine in Bluebeard, 1944

A children's staged play, late 1800s

Depictions of Bluebeard's wives through the years.

[maudnewton]

Friends, it's been a while. How've you been, apart from... everything? Catch me up if you'd like.

If you don't remember why you're following me: I'm a writer. You might like my book, Ancestor Trouble, if you're interested in family history, genealogy, mental health, generational trauma, systemic harms, and spiritual practices around ancestors and our alienation from those practices in Western modernity. I was finishing it up at the end of the first Trump administration, and to be perfectly honest I viewed it in part at that time it as a kind of stealth self-help book for people who might be groping toward the same kinds of questions in a period where the world seemed to be moving backward.

Ancestor Trouble was called a book of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, the Boston Globe, Esquire, Garden & Gun, and more. It was a pick for Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club and a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for a first book in any genre.

In a sense it's a memoir, and it's also broader than a pure memoir. On Bluesky, the religion professor Seth Shafer recently described it as "the most unexpected textbook I use [in my Death and the Afterlife class] because it shows very personally how the dead always have a relationship with us whether we know it or not. It's also got the best treatment of ancestor religion I've ever read." A review in the latest National Genealogical Society Quarterly characterizes Ancestor Trouble as fascinating, fun, engaging, and relatably meandering.

Here are some excerpts and related essays:

My Ancestors Enslaved Black People; Acknowledging that Matters, for Guardian US

A Doorway, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Medium

Learning About Ourselves From Genealogy, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Wall Street Journal

On My Father, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Esquire

On Uncovering Family Histories America Is Still Wresting With, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Time

My Accused Witch Ancestor Was Also an Enslaver, at Medium

The seeds of the book were family history posts on my blog in the aughts, and a Harper's cover story, America's Ancestry Craze, in 2014.

[wesleyscreaming]

its always ”b-b-but arent you DEAD??” and never ”was it fun getting buried it looked fun?” never ”was it difficult to claw your way through the soft earth?” they NEVER ask if the first breath of air after fighting myself out of my coffin was refreshing and tasted like sorrow and relief. it did. by the way. not that anyone CARES >:(

[shaotie]

**WARNING** this comic does NOT have a happy ending

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What if Leo didn't survive the prison dimension?

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"Took You Long Enough"

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- masterpost for my rottmnt ao3 fanfics and art

[weirdlookindog]

Jean Grandville (1803–1847) - La Mort et le Mourant (Death and Dying), 1838

illustration for Jean de La Fontaine's 'Fables de La Fontaine, édition illustrée par J. J. Grandville'

[victusinveritas]

Detail of a Roman mosaic of a grinning skeleton, Pompei - ca. 1st cent AD.

[potatoesarecheese]

oh, nothing. just thinking about...

characters that simply refuse to die

characters where the universe will not let them die, you have one more job, you have one more purpose, you have just one more day that you have to live through- and they keep living because they know that the universe is right.

characters that stand on deaths door for just a few seconds too long, and then turn around. they are drawn back to the land of the living through love and fear and pure spite and the raw, visceral need to live.

characters who stand on deaths door and knock, and are let in for afternoon tea. who are so familiar with death that they can have a friendly chat with the reaper, and then return to the land of the living.

characters that crawl out of their graves hissing and spitting and something entirely inhuman, intent on dying again and dragging as many people along with them.

characters that crawl out of their graves screaming and crying, so full of pain that all they can do is wander the streets and wail. no one listened to them in life, so they refuse to be forgotten in death.

characters that crawl out of their graves hollow and carry their burdens alone. they fill their hollow bodies with someone else's tears and take away everyone's sorrow, because they've already survived this much, they can handle a little more. and by the time they realize they're dying again, it's already too late.

[pissboy-supreme]

Crow skull - my first ever cleaned find! It’s the length of my middle finger and incredibly delicate. I’m scared to whiten it more cause I don’t want to damage the bone. I’ve been burying animals (especially crows) since I can remember, so it seems perfect that I’d start with one.

Rest in peace, little guy 💙

[lakeville-lolita]

two can keep a secret if one of them is dead

abandoned morgue

[anonymousobsidian]

[diana-andraste]

Untitled (Transformation), Laura Makabresku, 2016

[dozydawn]

Dying, Death, and Bereavement: A Challenge for Living (2003) by Inge Corless, Barbara B. Germino, and Mary A. Pittman.

[cciujelteeb]

i don't like leon (in a good way)

@villcipher EVERYONE REBLOG NOOWOWOWOWOWOWO

[mortalityisoverrated]

I so desperately don't want to stop existing. I want to keep learning and thinking and feeling, I want to experience everything I possibly can, I want to see how the future looks. I try to live life to the fullest but I already had such a late start, being disabled and too poor to afford care until very recently. It was only through sheer luck that I was able to get to where I am now in life, and the second I started to really enjoy myself, I suddenly can't escape the knowledge that one day it will end. And life after death being the same as life before birth does not comfort me. I know what happened before I was born, I get to experience the past to a certain extent while I'm alive, but the future? I will never see the future. It feels like the world is ending, my chest gets tight, my heart starts beating so fast and loud in my ears, my brain gets cold and fuzzy, my fingertips go numb and tingly, and suddenly I'm hyperventilating and dizzy and sobbing on the floor.

There's just not enough time. I'm so young, only 26, and yet the past decade went by so fast it's like I was 16 and I blinked and now I'm close to 30. And sometimes, the fact that I'm so young also scares me. It means that the worst thing to happen to me probably hasn't happened yet. So many diseases I could get, accidents that could happen. And then BOOM, no more me. No more of everything I've ever known. I smoked heavily for 8 years, and even though I've now quit, what if those 8 years were enough to end me? I just hope that when I do die, I'm not aware that I'm about to die, because I know that I wouldn't enjoy my final seconds. I would be desperately clinging to life, begging a god I've never believed in to please let me stay a little longer. Please let me exist just for a few more hours, days, years. Don't take this away from me, please.

Sometimes I write in my journal little messages to future humans, where I give consent to bring me back. Just in case in some distant future they finally crack the code, please I give you permission, please bring me back, please give me another chance. I find myself imagining an ethics board of futuristic scientists all debating whether or not it's morally okay to bring past humans back to life. They will be using quantum computers to scan massive databases of archived journals written by ancient humans, and then they will find my little plea. And they'll bring me back.