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A Tower of Voices Completes the Flight 93 National Memorial
A live web cam brings you there, an audio file simulates the soundIn a few weeks, the healing sound of a giant wind chime will resonate through Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when the Flight 93 National Memorial commemorates the 17th anniversary of the plane’s crash on September 11, 2001. The newly constructed, 93-foot Tower of Voices will serve as a permanent visual and audible reminder of the heroism…
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“In Blackwater Woods”
A beautiful poem about love, loss, and letting goMary Oliver is a contemporary American poet widely recognized for her descriptive poetry that draws on metaphors from the natural world, typically from the forests of her adopted Massachusetts. One particularly resonant poem from her 1983 collection “American Primitive” is “In Blackwater Woods,” in which Oliver simply and beautifully relays the connection between the human experience…
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Art Project “Famous Deaths” Uses Aroma to Capture a Celebrity’s Final Moments
The Sense of Smell project seeks to humanize important moments in historyFor many of us, our experience with celebrities is limited to sight and sound. We see images of President John F. Kennedy standing at the podium and we hear Whitney Houston’s voice serenading us through the car radio. But smell is a sense that we rarely relate to celebrities–when we’re watching TV or listening to…
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San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Has Closed Its Doors
After 30 years, the hospice has succumbed to budget woesOne of San Francisco’s oldest and most revered inpatient hospices closed its doors this month. Already, the old Victorian building on Page Street that housed the Zen Hospice Project is empty and bare. The furniture is gone, the floors are covered with tarps, and the building — by all appearances — is being prepped for…
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“Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die”
A collection of death stories of Hindu, Tibetan, Buddhist, and Zen MastersThis book is not necessarily an instruction manual on how to die with grace, but it can provide inspiration to help the reader re-frame his or her perspective of death, fear it less, and hopefully be prepared for it when it comes. How? By perceiving death as the Masters in this book did — as an inevitable…
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The Weight of the Soul
Why does a flawed centuries old experiment still fascinate today?Despite the huge variation in cultural practices around death that exist across the globe, there is one area in which most cultures agree — the existence of the soul. Definitions of exactly what that is differ widely, yet most modern cultures share several core beliefs. These include the idea that the soul exists independently of…
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Southern Resident Orca Mother Mourned Newborn Who Had Died
The mom, known as J35, carried her baby who had died for more than two weeksA recently reported incident out of the Pacific Northwest has added to the notion that animals grieve their loved ones who have died like humans do. A Southern Resident orca caught nationwide attention for two weeks when she was spotted carrying her dead calf on July 24. The mother, named J35, is 20 years old and,…
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How Can You Say Goodbye to Your Kids?
A young mother talks about how she is preparing for her deathWhen I was a pediatric oncology nurse, people often asked me,“How can you work with children with cancer? It’s so sad!” And I would invariably tell them, “Yes, it is, sometimes. But children are so resilient. They don’t feel self-pity or resentment or frustration the way adults often do. They live moment to moment, and…
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