O manual of our impending doom, teach us your secrets. These snippets are from Mortuary Services in Civil Defense from 1956. In this helpful little pamphlet you learn how to round up…
March 30, 2012 | Blog
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Of Corpses and Museums
My dear friend Andrew, who is currently living in Jamaica (not relevant, just awesome) sent me a book called Human Remains and Museum Practice. It’s basically like The Hunger Games — except…
March 28, 2012 | Blog
Bust Magazine
Caitlin Doughty’s “Ask a Mortician” Videos Bring the Darkest Corners of Death to Light L.A.-based mortician Caitlin Doughty has always been fascinated with death. Right out of college, she explored this…
March 23, 2012 | Press
The Compost Burial of Lil’ BunBun
Order member Shannon sent these photos from her father’s compost pile in Texas, where a bunny crawled in to die. I don’t like… KNOW this bunny or anything (and it’s dead now…
March 19, 2012 | Blog
Anatomy
Bethany Pope wrote this poem, in her own words, “after far too many back issues of ‘The Lancet’ and yellowed journal entries about clouds of killer sparrows.” Accompanied here by the work…
March 14, 2012 | Blog
Sunday Afternoon Tea Party & Death Fears
Oh hello there. Welcome to my home. I hope you’re hungry, my dears. First let me offer you some tea. Do you take sugar in your tea? How about a cookie? Now…
March 11, 2012 | Blog
Ask a Mortician Episode 6
Apologies for the Ask a Mortician absence in the month of February. In my defense, February is a strange little month with little to recommend it. This episode is about my favorite…
March 8, 2012 | Blog
To take a lunch with the dead
Lunching in cemeteries was not always the cringe-inducing activity it is today. The Victorians loved a good shady spot under a tree to enjoy the more park-like cemeteries that developed in America…
March 7, 2012 | Blog
The Ideal Funeral
For my last contribution for Fortnight Journal, I was challenged to demonstrate my ideal funeral through a series of photographs. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an ideal funeral — to…
March 5, 2012 | Blog
Guest Essay: Sympathy for the Tumor
Andy Prendergast, scientist and good friend of the Order, wrote us a provocative essay on cancer and where it fits into our evolutionary development. If you like hard science made accessible and…
March 2, 2012 | Blog
Sympathy for the tumor, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love cancer
Andy Prendergast is a developmental biologist studying fate choice in neural crest. He lives in Seattle and just published this paper in Development. *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Every malefactor, by attacking social rights, becomes…
March 2, 2012 | Essays by Contributors
Mission Update: Relationship with Death
Updated Mission section for the Order, On the Fear of Death There is absolutely nothing wrong with being interested in mortality and death. Don’t let anyone ever tell you you are “sick”…
March 2, 2012 | Blog