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"Day of the Living Dead",,"As someone with a profound interest in and curiosity about death culture, I was very excited when visiting family last summer I had the opportunity to visit several cemeteries outside of Denver, Colorado. Headstones can tell us so much about the past and I am endlessly fascinated with them as rich sources of material culture, and taking the time to visit them instills within me a sense of connection to peoples, places, and times that feel so out of reach and foreign. One cemetery in particular, located in an abandoned-ish mining town, gave me more pause than usual. I was caught off guard by just how... active this cemetery is. There were so many gifts left throughout the cemetery, many more than I am used to seeing, particularly where the headstones have been so worn and weathered as to be nearly indecipherable. As I worked my way throughout the cemetery, which had been built into the landscape and not the other way around, I found countless children's toys, coins, and even small works of art left as tokens of respect for those who had passed long ago. This experience instilled in me the notion that the connections that exist between the living and the dead are very real and that our humanity brings us together, with brief fleeting moments and offerings facilitating the very real exchanges between the past and the present for which so many long. ",,"A cemetery",,"Summer 2020","Kendyl M, Schmidt, 34, PhD Student",,,,,,day-living-dead,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Connection,Death,Gravestones,Humanity,Material Culture",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/501/tombstones-3031047_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Bright Sun Before Nightfall",,"Late this spring, my foster dog Sally unexpectedly died. I should’ve known she had cancer, but I not a veterinarian, and I didn’t think to apply Occam’s razor to the growing list of her ailments. She came to me rotund with extra weight, and over the course of eight months, lost so much that her beautiful tawny fur hung off her in ripples. She started to stumble into walls, and the short trip to the front yard left her breathless. One Sunday in May, she had a seizure, and I knew something was terribly wrong. All the way to the emergency room, her heart beat steadily under my palm, but within the hour, the critical care vet had diagnosed anemia, severe muscle wasting, and metastatic cancer. I was bereft. I let her go.
I’ve had chronic fatigue syndrome for over fifteen years, and for my comprehensive exams in English literature, I put together a list of twentieth-century illness literature. It’s not a death list, but narratives in the cancer section often end with that unauthorized coda. I had assumed that W;t, Margaret Edson’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, was autobiographical and thus a story of survival, but it is completely fictional, a composite of the playwright’s work in the cancer and AIDS unit of a research hospital while she was in college. The action follows Donne scholar and university professor Vivian Bearing as she enrolls in experimental chemotherapy for stage IV ovarian cancer. From her sick bed in the hospital, Vivian leads us through an analysis of Donne’s Holy Sonnets until she can take us no farther, and then the research intern and head nurse take over to close out the play.
Since Sally passed, the netherworld of death has hovered very close, a ghostly afterimage blurring my otherwise vivid existence. I can’t decide which plane of reality is more real: that of life or of death. Not unlike Donne and Vivian, I can’t reckon with the dull, mad fact of absolute oblivion; really I can only handle the relative truth that for now, I must live without my dog. In its split-stage conclusion, W;t poignantly captures this paradox of the human condition. On the spiritual plane, as Vivian’s life slips away, she steps out of bed, disrobing from her hospital gown and bracelet, to reach for the light shining above her; on the physical plane, the research intern confronts his unexpected grief at her loss when he forgets her do-not-resuscitate order and calls in the code team to revive her. The team scoffs at his amateur error and leaves; meanwhile, Vivian has transcended to Donne’s afterlife, wherever it is. I admire this scene for its brilliant use of the dramatic format and Edson’s graceful display of how life goes on even as it ends.","Margaret Edson",W;t,,"June 2021","Genevieve Guzmán, 37, PhD student",,,,,,bright-sun-nightfall,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Virtual Summer Residency","Cancer,Death,Donne, John,Drama,Edson, Margaret,Grief",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/497/runnel_walk.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"From Aesthetic Shock to Ethical Awakening: How an Environmental Artist and Activist Found Purpose",,"Environmental activist, photographer, and teacher Subhankar Banerjee recounts a time, shortly after moving to New Mexico, when he walked out of his house to encounter a small dead bird lying motionless on the porch. This humble, private moment of grief, confusion, and aesthetic complexity echoed the sensations he had previously felt while viewing Albert Pinkham Ryder’s 19th-century painting “The Dead Bird.” As Banerjee’s career has evolved to address the large-scale crisis of global biological annihilation, he still emphasizes that this small interaction between the human and non-human affected him profoundly and set him on a lifelong ethical journey.",,,,,"Subhankar Banerjee, environmental activist, photographer, and professor at the University of New Mexico",,,,,,subhankar-banerjee-aesthetics-ethics,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Beyond Despair environmental humanities conference","Aesthetics,Art Museums,Dead Bird,Death,Environmental Justice,Ethics,Paintings,Photography,Ryder, Albert Pinkham,Santa Fe, New Mexico,The Phillips Collection,Washington, D.C.",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/288/Unknown.jpeg,"Moving Image",,1,0
"This Couldn’t Happen to Me",,"This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my head was there’s no way this could happen to me. Tragedies, catastrophes, and other huge losses have never affected me so directly.
Then, in one of my English classes we began to read a book Beyond Katrina, which detailed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Reading about these people who lost so many family members so suddenly and so young just broke my heart in ways I had never understood until now. The same thought was most likely going through their heads, this can’t be happening to me.
It was at this time that I realized that we really are all in this together. Death and loss is a tragic thing, but it brings people so much closer and that is the most human thing I have ever felt. It was so beautifully sad.",,"Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey",,"April 2018","Madison Forrest, 18, student ",,,,,,this-couldnt-happen-to-me,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,Death,Emotional Experience,Environmental Humanities,Families,Grief,Natural Disasters,Students,Trethewey, Natasha",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/153/download.jpg,Text,,1,0
"We All Float On",,"When I was a senior in high school, one of my friend's passed away from a tragic accident. My friend and I decided to attend the funeral together for comfort and support. I picked her up early that morning to shed our tears over him, and after spending some time with the family, we made our way back home. We decided to turn on some music to lighten the mood, when a Modest Mouse song came on the radio- ""We All Float On."" The two of us started bawling, but by the end of the song we felt we had healed, if only a little bit. We felt weightless. Life is short, and we're all just bumping around in it. Its crazy how sometimes the universe gives you exactly what you need. ",,"""We All Float On"" by Modest Mouse",,2014,"Katie Clark, 21, Student",,,,,,we-all-float-on,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Accidents,Consolation,Death,Friendship,Grief,Modest Mouse,Music,Radio Music,Song Lyrics,Students,We All Float On",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/138/radio-1920x1180.jpg,Text,,1,0
"When Breath Becomes Air","What makes life worth living in the face of death? How do you handle the loss of all you’ve dreamed and what do you hope for when the future you’ve imagined is no longer possible? These are some of the questions with which Paul Kalanithi wrestles and for which he realizes his medical training offers few, if any, answers. When preparing to go to the hospital, he writes of packing three books: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, telling his wife, “I need to make sense of my cancer through literature.” His decision to write the memoir of his decline also served as an exercise in understanding.","Just as he was completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air, the memoir Kalanithi wrote in the midst of his illness, traces his journey from brilliant medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” to his life as a patient and new father faced with his own mortality. As his body declines, his spirit expands. “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life,” he writes, “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
What makes life worth living in the face of death? How do you handle the loss of all you’ve dreamed and what do you hope for when the future you’ve imagined is no longer possible? These are some of the questions with which Paul Kalanithi wrestles and for which he realizes his medical training offers few, if any, answers. When preparing to go to the hospital, he writes of packing three books: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, telling his wife, “I need to make sense of my cancer through literature.” His decision to write the memoir of his decline also served as an exercise in understanding.","Paul Kalanithi",,,,"Robert D. Newman, President and Director, National Humanities Center",,,,,,robert-newman-when-breath-becomes-air,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Death,Illness,Kalanithi, Paul,Lung Cancer,Memoirs,Mortality in Literature,Neurosciences & the Humanities,When Breath Becomes Air",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/2/17/When_Breath_Becomes_Air.jpg,Text,"Robert D. Newman ",1,0