Clone/Consequence

As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
Kazuo Ishiguro

Amazing Grace

"Death is not the ending of anything. I believe all of us are only energy that becomes matter. When the matter goes away, the energy still exists. You can't destroy it. It never dies. It manifests itself somewhere else. We are never alone. Even by ourselves, we are not alone. Death is just a door opening to somewhere else. Some day we'll know what that door opens to."
Willie Nelson

Immortality Musings

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not not dying."
Woody Allen

Psychopomp

The "guide of souls" - responsible for guiding the newly deceased souls to the afterlife.

Pre-Death Optimism

Disagree? Plato said that an aging man "can no more learn much than he can run much."

Be Not Proud

... any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne

Stop All the Clocks

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum, Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

Why Didn't You Stay?

A summer's passing ...

Why didn't you stay and where did you go?

Go to Hell

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
Shakespeare

The Big Sleep

According to his son, Mitchum was defiant to the end: "The night he died, he sat in his chair and there was a stubbed out Pall Mall and an empty glass that reeked of tequila. He got up during the night, knocked back a shot, smoked a cigarette, got in bed, and died in his sleep."

Miller Light

"Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world."
Henry Miller

Way To Go

The Jazz Funeral is a major celebration. The roots date back to Africa. Four centuries ago, the Dahomeans of Benin and the Yoruba of Nigeria, West Africa were laying the foundation for one of today's most novel social practices on the North American continent."
Bourbon Street Black

Our Town

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Thornton Wilder "Our Town"

World Wide Cemetary

... the absorbing work of mourning ...
Freud

Emily/Eulogy

From Emily Dickinson's eulogy:

As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship.... Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career - her endowments being so exceptional - but the "mesh of her soul"... was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work....

Memento Mori

Memento Mori means "remember that we all die." If we must confront this, we must do it with the help of Muriel Spark:

The novel tells the story of a group of older adults, all of whose long lives have intersected, and who are now all receiving phone calls from a mysterious, anonymous caller telling them to remember that they must die. In their varied reactions to this caller, as well as their relationships to one another, we see a wide variety of human temperaments and weaknesses thrown into relief as they confront approaching death.

It is funny. And a masterpiece.