Life in the Garden

Matters of Life and Death

Television

When A Co-Worker Checks Out – Permanently

YOLO Neon

When a former co-worker called me today to report that one of our colleagues had died I was a little taken aback, we’d worked together for a few years and he was my age. On Monday he didn’t show up for work and wasn’t answering the phone which was out of character for him. He’d left the office keys on his desk and taken a few things home like maybe he didn’t plan to come back after the weekend. His online profiles were scrubbed. His supervisor and police officers went to his home and discovered the body.

Suicide is such a mystery and can feel like the ultimate F.U.

My heart breaks for his family. My relationship with him was tumultuous. We argued often.  I hope he found peace.

Image Source: Emily Mughannam, EM Design

What To Do When People Won’t Die? Get Low.

One of the most interesting films I’ve seen in a while, Get Low, a 2009 release set in 1930’s backwoods Tennessee;  filmed in Georgia.

Bill Murray plays a cash strapped funeral director who encounters the town hermit Robert Duvall who comes out of a self-imposed 40 year isolation and wants to throw a funeral party.  While he’s alive.  Great writing and acting, even though Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek have never been in a film together, they are comfortable together and Bill Murray has some of the best lines.

“Hermit money?  Ooooh, that’s good.”

There is so much I want to tell you about last week

blood book
Photo credit University of Texas at Austin

The Victorian Blood Book fascinates everyone who has ever seen it.

On his deathbed in November of 1963, just as he was passing away, Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley; a man who for many years had been fascinated with the effects of psychedelic drugs since being introduced to mescaline in 1953 – asked his wife Laura to administer him with LSD. She agreed.

Ralph Morse, an ambitious photojournalist for Life magazine, covered a funeral in New Jersey on April 18, 1955. Now, 55 years later, Life.com is finally publishing the pictures he took that day during the cremation and funeral of Albert Einstein.

where to buy cremation urns for ashes

October 1939: Hitler signs the following memo, backdated to September, and the euthanasia program becomes official. Now named Action T4, the program no longer discriminates with regards to age and all persons, young and old, can now be killed should they be  ‘unworthy of life’.

hitler rock paper sissors

November, 1942: Five brothers, all serving on the same vessel during World War II, are killed in action as a result of said warship sinking at the Battle of the Solomons. Two months later, after hearing no word from the Navy regarding her sons’ well-being, Alleta Sullivan writes the following, deeply moving letter to the Bureau of Naval Personnel.

Donna Reed

After nearly 65 years in a shoebox inside an old trunk, letters written by WWII soldiers to Hollywood actress, Donna Reed asking for a pinup have finally been made public.

The DJ stayed longer, and we bought extra beverages.

vintage postcard

When the family told the funeral director they planned to hold a pig roast fundraiser to pay the bill for a loved one’s funeral, he wasn’t optimistic.

He’d heard ideas like this before and knew the best intentions don’t always lead to the bills getting paid.

When the family called a few days after the memorial service, his doubts were confirmed.

“We’ve got some good news and some bad news,” the caller said. “The good news is, we had the pig roast and it was a lot of fun. The bad news is, we spent the money. The DJ stayed longer, and we bought extra beverages…..”

comic book art

Prices Subject To Change Based on Customer Attitude

Top 10 list of bad tenants in New York City includes the Hoarder and the Serial Evictee.

This list is heavy with people who live in public housing or otherwise receive housing subsidies. City employees also heavily populate the list.

Nikola Tesla

Because of his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments regarding electricity, Nikola Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist by many late in his life. Tesla died with little money at the age of 86 in a hotel suite in New York City in 1943. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s patent number 645576 in a ruling that served as the basis for patented radio technology in the United States.

Abandoned machinery near Moscow, Russia

A standard three-drug sequence is used in the United States to execute prisoners by lethal injection. A shortage of sodium thiopental used in the recipe has sent U.S. states scrambling to find supplies, or alternative drugs. Sodium thiopental had been sourced through a company in London-until UK government officials put a stop to its export.

Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.