Five times a day, my watch informs me I am going to die. This isn’t the beginning of a thriller—no stalking by some sinister, sentient AI. It’s an experiment with WeCroak, the app purportedly “inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.” Dutifully, WeCroak…
Tag: death
Views of Two Plagues
In 1744, an epizootic of cattle plague broke out in the Netherlands. This was the second such outbreak that the Netherlands experienced during the eighteenth century, the first having occurred from 1713 to 1720. This cattle disease was likely the virus known as rinderpest. Declared eradicated in 2011, rinderpest was a contagious morbillivirus affecting cows…
Life, Death and Grief in the Garden: Some Literary Roots
Avril Tynan // In Plant Dreaming Deep, May Sarton’s journal of her life in rural New Hampshire, the author describes her decision to buy a house in the USA following the deaths of her parents. The home(s) she once knew in Europe—in England, France, Belgium and Switzerland—no longer felt like home and, in the marriage…
Notes on Grim
Emily Waples// Last week, we reached a point in this pandemic that has been some eighteen months in the making: more Americans have now died of COVID-19 than of the 1918-1919 flu. I’ve been dreading the moment less for the fact of it than for the fanfare, anticipating the precise terms in which I knew…
a mature defense
Michelle Munyikwa // “The secret source of Humor is not joy but sorrow.” — Mark Twain, as quoted in Laughter Out of Place “You know, Michelle,” my senior resident said, in that didactic tone of voice that educators often use when they are about to drop some wisdom, “humor is a mature defense.“ We had…
The Fashion of Disease
Dr. Brian J. Troth // On January 23, 2020, my ex passed away when he was 34. When he was hospitalized, I took great care to select clothes that he loved for his bag and it reminded me of an undeveloped project on my mind: the fashion of disease. Though I haven’t quite threaded the…
Ars Moriendi
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” – Atul Gawande Last week, I flew…
Glimpses of a Dying Mother
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey // If Death is a paradoxical mother, Ève, the dying mother of French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous, is even more so. In her daughter’s phraseology, Ève Cixous is “a well alive dead woman” [1], coming back to life through the “Strange Autoportraits” that Hélène draws in Homère est Morte… (the English…
Notes from the Frontline: When Death Becomes Routine (Part 1)
David Thomas Peacock // I wasn’t prepared for so much death. Before I became an emergency room nurse, I worked on a neurology unit with stroke patients. I loved that job. I gained a lot of clinical knowledge from my colleagues, but I learned even more about what it means to be a human faced…
Laughing at Death – Part 2: When the Dying Tell Jokes
James Belarde “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” -Oscar Wilde, shortly before succumbing to illness In Mumbai, India, a kind-looking elderly woman sits on a stool behind a microphone and calmly quips “Life is like that TV journalist Arnab Goswami. Never take it…