Actually laughable how every single time I say “Israelis are human beings who don’t deserve to die” some unhinged weirdo comes into my mentions or my inbox to yell “SO YOU THINK PALESTINIANS ALL DESERVE TO DIE THEN???” Every single day. Every. Day.

Literally, what the fuck are you actually on about??? Stop projecting your violent dehumanisation fantasies onto me, you lunatics. If it is inconceivable to you that some of us actually don’t want ANYONE to die, that’s very much a you problem.

fun funeral facts

For those of you interested, the youtube channel Ask A Mortician does a lot of videos on taboo death subjects, answers questions and is a huge advocate for natural burials and being present during the actual funeral process so you don’t get taken advantage of by the funeral industry. She’s one of my favourite youtubers and I highly recommend her videos.

I’m not OP, but as a fellow Ask a Mortician fan (I’m even on the Patreon, Caitlyn is out here doing G-d’s work), HERE IS AN UPDATE:

—cremation and burial are not your only options. Some states now offer aquamation (basically your body is put in a special brine that breaks it down into nothing in a few hours) and terramation (aka human composting; your body is put into a dedicated pod with plant matter that accelerates the decay process and turns you into nutrient-rich soil in about six weeks). You also have the option to donate your body to a body farm or medical school. Check your state’s or country’s laws, and if you don’t see the option you want, contact the Order of the Good Death to find out who’s advocating in your area. If the answer is nobody, YOU can always be the person who starts the ball rolling.

—“bury your cremains in this fancy urn and you’ll become a tree!” is a scam. Cremains contain no organic matter. If you want to be a tree, go for terramation or natural burial.

—“turn your loved one’s cremains into a diamond!” is a scam. While you can technically turn cremains into a zircon (artificial diamond), the result is likely to be EXTREMELY ugly due to the amount of inclusions. If you want to wear a loved one’s cremains as a memento mori, you’re far better off speaking to an artisan jeweler about getting a modern version of one of the glass rings or pendants that were popular in the Victorian era. There are likeminded people out there who will absolutely do this for you in a beautiful and compassionate way, but the “it’s diamonds!” techbro startup thing is not the way to go.

—what is and is not respectful to the dead will vary based on culture, but the one constant should be consent of the deceased. What do THEY want to happen to their body? Have this conversation with your loved ones while they’re alive, and make sure the answers are written down. I know my sister wants a traditional Jewish burial—“just put me in the dirt and forget about it,” in her words—and she knows I want to be terramated. I know my dad wants to be buried next to my mom, although I need to check in with him if he wants his body buried or if he wants to be cremated first. Destigmatize this talk. It doesn’t have to be uncomfortable—making sure your loved ones know exactly what you want takes a burden off them in the future, and making sure YOU know what THEY want will both help you when the time comes and provide the comfort of knowing you’ve fulfilled their wishes.

And finally:

The reason I’m such a staunch Caitlyn evangelist is because there is a nonzero chance one of her videos saved my life. My mom died sometime in the night between the first and second of January, 2021. Because travel for large amounts of people was off the table, my dad opted for two small funerals—one here with a funeral home that refused to handle her body without a showing (unfortunately this was part of Covid price gouging—there was literally nowhere else capable of taking her), and one with our proper family funeral home in our hometown. Because of Covid, this meant it took A FUCKING MONTH for my mother to be buried, and that shit is absolutely scarring. I’d recently watched Caitlyn’s “what does a full embalming look like” video, and her partner for that video said she likes to bring the family in to assist in helping with the deceased person’s hair, makeup, clothing, any part of the process they’re willing to do, because she feels it helps with the grieving process. I was ready to grasp at anything that would let me feel like my mother wasn’t stuck in an episode of American Horror Story, especially after the shitshow that was the funeral home here in Arizona. With this in mind I called the family funeral home and asked to do my mom’s makeup; while I personally shudder at the thought of a traditional American burial, it’s what she wanted. Nancy—our family’s mortician for the last 40 years—readily agreed.

And so I went in, put on some of my mom’s favorite old country singers, and did her makeup exactly the way she taught me when I was sixteen, with her own cosmetics instead of what the funeral home had on hand. Her hair was thin and fragile from her last illness and I couldn’t curl it, but I fixed it up as well as I could, and painted her nails.

And let me tell you something.

The other mortician lady was right.

It was a massive comfort to me when Nancy took one look at my mom and said “oh, when you said she did her makeup differently you were right. I never would have guessed to do this.” (I don’t know where my mom learned to put on blusher, but she did basically the exact opposite of every makeup tutorial I’ve ever seen, and her method of doing eyeshadow was extremely 1940s.) Every single person at the service kept saying she looked exactly like they remembered from so-and-so’s wedding, such-and-such’s graduation, this-and-that’s honorary party. It wasn’t a vague “oh she looks so good”—she looked LIKE HER to those who remembered her. People who knew I’d done her makeup said they could tell it had to be someone who’d known her well. I remembered her horror at seeing unfamiliar makeup on her own mother’s face, and it was a massive comfort to me to know she was turned out exactly as she would have liked. And my dad? My dad hadn’t even cried yet. But he cried when he saw her in the same makeup style she’d worn at their wedding. He was finally able to cry and connect to my mom, his wife and beloved, and begin to find closure, seeing the woman he knew instead of a tired, worn body that bore little resemblance to her. It mattered. To him, to me, to my mom’s friends. It mattered a lot.

I don’t know that I would have ended up suicidal if not for that hour alone with my mom and Charley Pride and a stack of Bare Minerals compacts. But her death hit me hard and the month that followed was a special circle of hell, and I think I might have. Every time I think of her death and her burial, I think of that video and I’m insanely grateful it exists. (Incidentally, Nancy agreed. She said she thought she might make it an option for other families, after seeing both my response and the response of others in our family circle.)

Caitlyn knows her stuff. Watch, learn your rights, teach others to be death-positive. Life is the only occupation with a 100% mortality rate, so we might as well do it the way we want.

Does anybody else get legitimately worried when a fanfic author who was updating regularly just suddenly disappears with no warning? Like, is it a serious case of writers block or are they in a coma? Did they just up and quit? Was it me? Were my reviews not good enough?! Did they die 😳?! Were they kidnapped? Do I need to file a missing persons report? Excuse me officer, there’s been 13 weekly updates and now nothing for months! Find them! What’s their name?! Name!? I don’t know their name but they write 3k+ chapters and I need them safe and back in my life!

Sir, that’s my emotional support fanfic author.

Officer: i’m sorry, but you can’t file this person missing.

Me: you don’t have all the facts.

Officer: which are?

Me: i love them.

So, painful story, but I’ve really needed to tell it for a while.

My best friend, the woman I loved for 13 years, was a fic writer in the middle of an especially long piece. She updated on a schedule and had for years. She had a small, but loyal following.

And then she died out of nowhere. One day we were laughing, the next she was in a coma, 3 days later she was dead. She hadn’t been ill and to this day we don’t know what took her. She was just gone.

I knew she had friends all over the world so I went into her email to see if I could find addresses and notify people after a week of blind grief. In her inbox were about a dozen concerned messages from her readers. I cried. I cried and cried and I responded to all of them, telling people she had passed.

And the messages kept coming. Those people spread the word and message after message came in, most of them addressed to me now, as I had given those original readers my contact info. There were words of comfort and grief and just every emotion imaginable in that scenario. I wrote back to them all, thanking them and comforting them.

For months after she died, during the worst of my grief, I had those messages. I had those people. And they had me. I really think I might not have made it to the other side without them.

So, the fact that you care? That you think of them? That these authors who became a presence in your world are missed when they aren’t there? It means something very real. On the off chance that the author did die? Anyone who has seen this post will find comfort during the loss of their friend or family member, knowing that you all exist. That they aren’t alone. That you CARE that the world now lacks their loved one.

So, yeah. I’ve seen this post and ones like it for years and wanted to share this story. I finally could today.

Thank you, every person who reblogged this post. People like you are the biggest reason I’m alive today.

ideal ways for me to die

1. old age, peacefully in my sleep

2. after a long and illustrious career i am at a rooftop gala hosted in my honor. i am wearing a beautiful gown, holding a glass of red wine, standing by the railing. a scorned lover approaches and, after a passionate spat, they push me over the edge of the building. the wine glass goes flying, splattering their outfit in red as a visual metaphor for the blood on their hands. as i descend my gown flies around me like two beautiful wings, a bird in flight. a photographer on the street manages to take a photo before i hit the ground and that photo wins the pulitzer. a new york times think piece is released regarding whether or not it's moral to profit off a photo of someone's death. the think piece also wins a pulitzer.

3. sex accident.

Man but the notes on that post really are just tumblr showing they have no idea how anything works.

"report to your local animal abuse people not to cops" local animal abuse people would be animal control. Animal control officers are cops.

"rabies is treatable if you go to the doctor right after the bite" rabies is PREVENTABLE, not treatable. There is no cure for rabies. If you suspect you came into contact with a rabid animal, you need to get a series of rabies vaccinations to prevent the virus from taking over your body. This is not a treatment and it only works if you go right away. If you show any symptoms of rabies it is too late.

"rabies is fatal in animals but treatable in humans" rabies has a 100% fatality rate and is not considered a survivable disease at this point in time. If you contract rabies YOU WILL DIE. The "treatment" in humans is called the Milwaukee Protocol, only 14% of people survive it, and it leaves you with massive brain damage and effectively turns you into a vegetable. You do not return to a normal life afterwards. Very few people who have undergone this process are capable of doing more than laying in a hospital bed and eating and breathing through tubes. To my knowledge only one person was able to live a semi-normal life after years and years of ongoing therapy and was not expected to have made it even through her first year after treatment.

I cannot stress enough how rabies is unlike any other disease you may be thinking of. It's required on a federal level in this country to vaccinate pretty much any domestic animal that comes into contact with wildlife for one reason and one reason only: it is not considered possible to cure rabies and the spread of disease would threaten all mammalian life including our own if allowed to continue to propagate.

Didn't expect this post to blow up so much but to clarify:

Yes, some small town animal control folks aren't cops. However, they all work very closely with police when it comes to seizing animals from owners, issuing fines, etc. They might not technically have a gun and a badge in every city, but rest assured, they are still also technically a branch of law enforcement. The difference is splitting hairs imo.

What inspired this post were the notes on a different post about anti-vaxxers not wanting to vaccinate their dogs for rabies. Most of these notes were in agreement that anti-vaxxers are in the wrong. HOWEVER most of these notes also sorely sorely sorely misunderstood exactly how dangerous rabies is.

Unfortunately now this post has some of those same notes:

Rabies is not rare in the US. The only reason for anyone living here to think that is because they do not have a lot of contact with wild animals and do not work in vet medicine.

Yes, you are more likely to get rabies from a wild animal (bats, skunks, raccoons, and foxes are the most common) however when it comes to unvaccinated domesticated animals, dogs, cattle, and cats make up 90% of rabies cases. So yes, be very cautious about any bite or scratch from a stray dog or outdoor cat. The only reason it is less common for domesticated animals to spread it than wild animals is because rabies comes from contact with other rabid animals, so it is more likely that wild animals will have contact with rabies than domesticated which are typically hanging out with humans (which are, thankfully, largely not rabid). Dogs are the #1 rabies vector worldwide, it is only in countries with robust vaccination protocols and dog-owning culture that keeps them inside most of the time that the risk transfers mostly to bats. The majority of human rabies-related deaths are caused by bites from stray or outdoor dogs.

Animals who are suspected to have rabies are killed, decapitated, and their brains destroyed in the process of testing for rabies. There is no other way to test for rabies. "Nooooo the poor doggo :(" and "it's not the dog's fault the owner sucks" sure but consider: rabies testing requires biopsies of the brain and brain stem, aka punching holes in the tissue in order to examine the changes on a microscopic level. That's uh. Not survivable. There is no other way to detect rabies in an animal. It doesn't live in the bloodstream, it just uses it as a highway to zip up to the brain and then starts doing its thing. Even though it is spread via saliva, blood, and brain matter, we have yet to be able to reliably detect it in rabid animals in anything but the last. (it is detectable in the first two but only at the late stages, well after the animal has become infectious and when it is obvious to anyone who has seen a rabid animal before that the animal is rabid)

It is not required on a federal level for all domesticated animals to have a current rabies vaccine- unless said domesticated animal came into contact with a wild animal known to be a rabies vector, at which point the CDC gets to decide and not the individual state. To me this is a really stupid rule because imo all of the continental US and Alaska should be vaccinating for rabies (Hawai'i and other island nations we've colonized don't need to if they've wiped out rabies or never had it spread, though import laws are super strict in those areas on purpose as a result) and if the dog or cat has a fight with a wild animal or a Mysterious Bite Wound the owner's just gunna be told to vaccinate anyway except now they have a lengthy quarantine ahead of them so we might as well just do it in advance everywhere.

So I've gotten a couple of these based on this post and respectfully? I don't think you're understanding the severity of the damage rabies leaves behind, which is why the Milwaukee Protocol is not considered effective treatment.

29 people to date have survived the Milwaukee Protocol. Of those 29, 28 of them are still in their medically induced comas or in a similar vegetative state or have passed away due to other causes. There is brain activity, so they aren't braindead. The majority of them are not awake either and have not been for years and are not expected to ever wake up. They *might* dream, but they show no signs other than some mild activity on brain scans of being sentient anymore. It is debateable whether they are actually alive or if they are a step above braindead and teetering on the edge.

Of those 29 survivors, 1 of them was able to return to full conciousness. The fact that she survived by itself is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that she was capable of being more than a still body hooked to machines is a medical marvel. She is permenantly disabled. It took years- decades- of ongoing therapy after she woke up to get where she is now and she has spoken about how difficult the journey was and how lucky she is to not be like the remaining 28 survivors. Because that's what it came down to. Luck. She was never expected to survive let alone wake up.

This is also why rabies is not considered a survivable disease. The other 28 survivors are barely registering enough brain activity to be considered "alive". No motor functions, no higher thought, no communication, no voluntary muscle movement, no control over your background functions, no awareness of their surroundings, nothing. We keep them alive because of the very, very slight chance that they'll wake up and be able to be like Jeanna Giese. A few have woken, but none have shown the recovery she did. They have yet to be able to reproduce this success.

And- don't get me wrong, Jeanna is still disabled and shows many symptoms of extensive brain damage. She leans and lists to one side when she moves. Her speech is slow and slurred. She has trouble with overstimulation and with processing new stimuli. I have brain damage too- those are my symptoms as well. She is still considered to be capable of living a normal life, just like I can, as long as accessibility is an option.

Rabies is considered 100% fatal because Jeanna Giese is a fluke. And until we figure out why it worked for her and has yet to work for anyone else, she will continue to be considered a fluke. The closest anyone's gotten was a little girl who could move her fingers and blink voluntarily. They weren't able to communicate with her and she didn't recover further because she died from pneumonia she caught in the hospital that was treating her for rabies. There was also a little boy who woke but shortly after began to seize and eventually the seizures cooked the rest of his working brain. I do believe he is still alive but in that aforementioned vegetative state. Those who study the disease still consider Giese to be the only actual survivor.

This was Jeanna before she recovered. Of the other 28 survivors that are still alive, this is still the state they're in.

When I say you don't return to a normal life, this is what I mean. This is the rest of your life IF you survive the Milwaukee Protocol, which again, only has worked 14% of the time. Forever. You're not awake. You're not moving. You're not aware of anything. Your body is kept alive while doctors try to figure out why she woke up and you didn't. This is what "surviving rabies" looks like.

Go straight to the ER with a bite from an animal you don't know whether it's wild or domestic (or if you have had potential exposure via a bat-- they may not leave visible puncture marks. Consider waking up and finding a bat in your bedroom possible exposure).

Rabies shots hurt a lot less than rabies. That goes for pets, too.

Fantastic breakdown and only one thing to add from me! Waking up in a room with a bat is considered potential rabies exposure. As the last person said, they may not leave visible puncture marks so you don't know if you've been bitten. And so you don't have to say "hey a random vet on Tumblr told me to go to the ER", here is the CDC's webpage on bats and rabies.

This is really important to me to bring up because I was told at the ER after waking up with a bat in my room that I did not see a bite so therefore a bite did not occur. If I hadn't been in my final year of vet school I wouldn't have known how completely wrong that is, so I wouldn't expect average Joe off the street to know. Maybe it was a one off with this particular hospital, but it honestly scared the shit out of me that a medical professional told me something so insanely incorrect. So passing on this helpful tidbit because as stated above, this disease has a 100% mortality rate. Don't mess around with it.

And for my vet med peeps, if you are vaccinated, you do not need to get the full post exposure series; you just need a booster. But make sure you check your titer levels intermittently, especially if you work with wildlife/exotics.

Due to centuries of cultural exchange there are a lot of similarities between the hamster religion and that of the chipmunks, both now being functionally death cults. The root of where they differ is how the two religions view this holy death.

To hamsters, death is an art form, an ever-ascending pillar of the strange and the grotesque. Hamsters seek beauty and uniqueness in death, venerating the most outlandish of the dead as saints: Our Lady of the Plumbing, Saint Tim the Blended, and Saint Ms. Cupcake Who Got Into That Barrel of Degreaser, to name a few. Through death, they connect with their god, whose immense corpse formed the world after choking to death on a stray asteroid. Hamsters will spend weeks planning their deaths and awaiting an opportunity to swan dive off this mortal coil.

Chipmunks follow a warrior’s religion. While hamsters embraced humanity as creators of new and exciting shapes and poisons, chipmunks never forsook their wild ways. Chipmunk culture idealizes the divine struggle: to face insurmountable odds and to die with honor. Only by throwing themselves under the wheels of a moving vehicle can they earn their reincarnation and escape the cruel jaws of the fox-god who awaits them in the underworld. Every chipmunk goes to their death secure in the knowledge that they have faced their fate a million times before and that they will face it a million times again.

Squirrel religion does not speak of death.

According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.

And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.

Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.

So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.

Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.

Death

Edit: The love on this piece omg, some of the nicest tags I've ever received. Thank you lovely tumblr people ♥

internet cable line accidentally drilled through unknown buried woman

So Gregor Mendel (yes, the guy with the pea plants) wrote down that he wanted to be given a thorough autopsy after he died. The year he died was 1884. Autopsies were increasingly common at the time, but Mendel was an Augustinian friar and the arguments preventing donating your body to science for teaching autopsies, research, etc. were theological. The “ethical” source of teaching cadavers for doctors to autopsy was (in many places) the bodies of executed criminals, as a sort of post-mortem punishment.  Mendel became a monk specifically because he couldn’t afford to study otherwise, even after one of his sisters donated her dowry to the cause. He did too well as a monk to continue his work as long as he wanted: he got promoted to Abbott and the last sixteen years of his life were spent doing administrative work, and his experiments weren’t properly replicated, or examined as a viable alternative to then current theories on inheritance, until 1990. But he chose to donate his body to science (which he loved) and be of material benefit to the field of medicine, which he didn’t practice but two of his nephews did.  There’s just something beautiful about a guy who lived through the era where having your body dissected was the height of dishonor, in an institution that had advocated against the practice, deciding that anything that helps humanity as a whole was worth doing. There’s something just as beautiful about the fact that he was exhumed for genetic sequencing on his 200th birthday - usually we don’t just dig people up and grab their genes as a surprise party, because in addition to it being a lot of work we can’t assume they would have appreciated it, but Mendel? He would have been jazzed. 

The Young Prince

In 1942 at Arene Candide Cave, Liguria, Italy, the 23,500-year-old remains of a young, Upper Paleolithic man we’re discovered. Thought to be a member of the Gravettian culture, this young male is aged to be around 15-years-old at time of death. Reports seem him tall and seemingly strong, likely a hunter during his lifetime.

Found on a bed of red ochre, the man was “spectacularly ornamented” with shells and deer canines, all perforated, and likely having formed some kind of cap. Also found alongside the remains was a mammoth ivory pendent and a 23cm-long flint blade in his right hand. The items found with the remains are what earned him the nickname ‘Il Principe,’ AKA The Young Prince.

Sources (x) (x) (x) (x)

Jaime Sabines

'nother little group pic, favorite Deaths this time :)

Got Lord Namo Mandos from the Silmarillion, Death of the Endless from Sandman, DEATH from Discworld, and The Lord of the Black Hood from my og work (The Domesday Book of Faerie tag, not much to see there yet but there will be)