Posts tagged “death”

  1. There is a home video, made when you were about nine. You watch your nine-year-old self lead your aunt (behind the camera) off into the house, blithely walking past your mother as she sits on the couch. Stop, you want to tell the girl onscreen. Reach out and touch her!

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  2. I’ve embraced the beauty that comes with living fully. Living the whole way. You know, being alive all the time, 24/7, no breaks.

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  3. - It dinnae hardly hurt nae more, ma'am

    - You maughtn't mind the muckle nai more, miss, for there's an everlasting city what swims before these eyes a-nights, and so you musn't cry none, not for this poor Christian soul

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  4. Do you know what I am strongly not about? The entire motif of Memento mori in Western art history. You're familiar with the general premise, where supposedly Roman generals being fêted in the streets during a Triumph were followed about by servants whispering "Remember you will die", and then medieval artists picked up the theme and bunged a lot of skulls into their paintings.

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  5. Disappointed hopes
    Navy fever
    Northern air
    This last winter was too hard for young Master Jamesington
    Unanswered letters

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  6. "He took it to the front office, and they corrected that."

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  7. It is early Sunday morning and my cat has just pounced on my quilt-covered ankles to inform me her dish is empty: our weekly waking ritual on my faith’s holy day. If I don’t oblige right away she will start in on her most mournful arias, so I stumble through the dark of my basement apartment, scoop some kibble into her dish, and stare into the bathroom mirror at my badly lit face

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  8. If your Dead Mother was not already Dead, no doubt your theatrics would kill her. That was your Dead Mother’s favorite horse. It trampled her to death when it became jealous of her attentions to other creatures. Anyway, it’s yours now. You do not resemble your Dead Mother in the slightest, except for your eyes. Your damned, cursed, pale eyes. Your Dead Mother’s feet were so small, she wept bitterly every time she danced. It…

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  9. Feed them a liquid diet through the bars of a cage. Use a hamster water bottle to slow them down on the protein shakes and avocado smoothies because they don’t know when to stop. Makes the plan more affordable. Also the clicky noise the the ball bearing makes as it releases drops of liquid will reassure you that they are still alive.

    Subtweet your darlings. Or go ahead and get in

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  10. Yes, she was 94. Yes, time passes and mows down various generations with it. People die every day. I myself am subject to the laws of decay and death, I'm told. And yet: Age, thou art shamed. Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, has died; she was the last of the Mitford sisters. They are all now gone from the earth.

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  11. Most people understand cryonics to be the freezing of bodies after death, and they're mostly correct. Cryopreservation stores biological material at an incredibly low temperature for use at a later date. The main goal of cryonics is to preserve brain functions before it's undergone irreversible damage in the hopes that technological advancements will be able to revive it in the future. This requires quick action once the heart has stopped, not to mention a relatively…

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  12. I first went to Toscanini’s on an August afternoon with my father when I was nineteen. It’s a café in Cambridge, Massachusetts nestled on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and MIT’s brooding campus, Toscanini’s is the hub for study sessions and Central Square locals alike. The halogens are dimmed a little too low for it to be a family joint probably, because there are rarely families around. My dad ordered rocky road, which Toscanini’s calls…

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  13. I used to be a regular at the pet store on the second floor of my local mall, down by Sears. Whenever I had to go with my mom to run errands, at the end of our quest, I would drag her to the pet shop. I gaped at the squirmy puppies – all cartilage – and kittens no more than eyes and fluff, along with the usual sickly goldfish and colorful, preachy birds. What…

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  14. I’m running late this morning; I barely have time to print out a list of the day’s cases before rushing into morning report. The small conference room is packed with day shift investigators, autopsy assistants, the medical student rotating here this month, one of the two forensic pathologists doing autopsies today (I am the other one), and the file boxes, broken chairs, and assorted detritus permanently stored in the room. I slide into the last…

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  15. John Leavitt's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

    18. Tennessee Williams - Tried to open eye drop bottle with teeth, choked on cap.

    17. Joe Orton - Bludgeoned to death by partner during domestic dispute.

    16. Jean-Paul Sartre - Infected papercut.

    15. Arthur Miller - Frowned for too long, too deep.

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