Remember Me

Building on Dina's Death-related radio listening, last week's This American Life also touched on the topic:

283: Remember Me

Stories about people who are remembered very differently than they'd wished. The ghost of a kindly, distinguished philanthropist supposedly plays pranks on guests at a Ramada hotel in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A dying mother makes a tape for her developmentally disabled daughter, hoping she'll watch it someday, knowing she might not.

Prologue.

Host Ira Glass talks to Laura Mayer, editor of the New Trier Township High School yearbook, about the renegade student who jumps into as many club photos as he can. And contributing editor Jack Hitt explains how this impulse—to be remembered as someone you're not—can be traced back to Benjamin Franklin. It turns out even the man who invented bifocals padded his resume for history. The key on the kite story, for instance? Probably not true. (9 minutes)

Act One. Thinking Inside the Box.

David Wilcox tells the story of how his mother, who was dying of lung cancer, made a short videotape for his sister, who is severely developmentally disabled. She hoped the tape would become a daily part of her daughter's life, like the other music and movies she liked to play, that she would watch it and remember her mother. But she also knew her daughter might never even see it. (9 minutes)

And we hear two stories from people who recorded their own memories in a booth in Grand Central Station in New York, as part of the StoryCorps project. The first is Don "Moses" Lerman, a champion eater who's thought a lot about what he'll be remembered for. The second is Ronald Ruiz, a bus driver, who's never forgotten one of his passengers. StoryCorps funders include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute. (3 minutes)

Act Two. Where's Walter?

Starlee Kine rents a room at a Ramada hotel in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where a ghost supposedly plays pranks on the guests and staff. The ghost's name is Walter, for Walter Schroeder, the guy who originally built the hotel in the 1920s. It turns out Walter was a successful businessman and a kindly philanthropist who threw great dinner parties. So why would he bother haunting a Ramada? Starlee originally wrote and read a version of this story for The Little Gray Books Lecture Series. (14 minutes)

And...two more stories about remembering, from StoryCorps. The first is a conversation between Ralph Tremonte and and Donald Weiss, who were in mental institutions together as kids, and are reunited after 40 years. The second is Brad Skow talking to his mother, Mary Lou Maher, who gave him up for adoption when she was 17. (4 minutes)

Act Three. Giving Up the Ghosts.

Writer Shalom Auslander reads his short story about how he decided to start forgetting the dead, even though his job required him to remember. Shalom's book of short stories is called Beware of God. (15 minutes)

Song: "Live and Let Die," Guns N' Roses

Listen here.

The Death Show

Saturday afternoon I listened to a beautiful episode of Third Coast International's Re:Sound entitled The Death Show:

April 4, 2009 (#89)- The Death Show
Originally aired on April 12, 2008

Little Black Train
Nora Harrington - Independent Producer, USA

A year and a half after Nora Harrington's father died, at the age of 53, she was still trying to sort through her feelings about mortality. So she did something that most of us avoid: she confronted the topic head-on. She had a series of frank, intimate conversations about the end of life with a few elderly friends, her grandfather, and her mother. What results is a story that's sometimes profound, sometimes poignant, and sometimes surprisingly funny.

The Dead Can't Do You Nothin'
Katie Mingle - Independent Producer, USA

While in New Orleans, Katie Mingle poked around a pauper's graveyard -- even spent a night there -- hoping to encounter a ghost. Instead she befriended some gravediggers and learned a few truths about life and death in the Big Easy.

Live? Die? Kill?
Karen Michel - Independent Producer, USA

When someone dies, when someone is born, it's a little like the world stops turning for the people who are most closely affected. You can't help but think about the big questions: who are we, what is life about, why are we here... These things were on the mind of Karen Michel when she moved to Pleasant Valley, NY right after September 11th. She wanted to find out what was really important to people at this critical time. So she devised three very short, very big questions that got the heart of people's central beliefs and she started asking them.

You can listen to the episode here.

Sketching Death

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samsa1973/sets/1144252/
I worked in a gallery in Providence, RI and I was looking for artists who had work to show...William Schaff invited me to his apartment to take a look at his stuff. At the time (2005?) his front room had a bunch of pleasant sketches of his dog up on the wall. But in the second room, the main living room, there were a lot of scratchboards of piles of dead bodies and politicians vomitting skeletons. When he saw how much we liked his work he took us into another room in which he had many sketches and scratchboards of holocaust victims. It's true that the images were...gruesome...? But there was something about them that made me feel like Wil wanted to look at death as directly as possible - in a way that was far more courageous than the rest of us. What I would most like to post here is a link to his Flickr account, in which you can see the sketches he did of his dying father. The scratchboard work seems appropriate for some of his other images of death - carving images out of the dark.

Sarah's Fearism Storyyyy

There is a war going on. A war between the red team and the blue team. People are being slaughtered like cow.

The blue and read teams are such great enemies. Such enemies that if a blue as seen on red land they could be shot immediately. The same tragic sentence is also true to any red seen on blue land. A hatered so great
that the two teams constantly stay on gaurd, waiting for the other team to prevoke a feud.

. . .

My family and I are on the red team. The red team is known for its extreme scientists. Mad scienctists, recognized for their ingenious knowledge of equations and logic.
My father has the knowledge to move the stars around and realine the entire solar system. My mother can genetically alter anything from a cactus to a dinosour. My brother and sister died in the womb. My parents say my brother killed my sister during a fight over the chromosome that held the answer to some very epic scientific mystery.

Me, well I have the ablilty to solve any equation. My ability to disect and arrange information in my head is so sharp, I can solve problems before they even occur.



As far as my parents know I am at the Jorba College of Extreme Intellect. It's a red team college filled with genious from all forms of science and mathematics. I can alreay solve every equation, there is nothing to learn for me there. There I am stuck with no chance of growth.



Where I really am is the School of Profound Language, deep within the hills of the blue side. The blue team is known for their exquisit linguistics and wit. The blue team is full of people who can speak, write, and communicate with serious eloquence.

I lead a duel life, scared of associating myself to one team. I am afraid to live a life of settlement and stability on the red side, but I am also afraid for my physical life if anyone were to find out that I am a red on the blue side.

I am expecting a child with one on the blue team.

. . .

My parents got a call from the Jorba College of Extreme Intellect today. A government offical followed by a few squat cars arrived at the school today looking for me. "Number 7627. where is number 7627?" a large man in a gray suite questioned the school's executives.

A number! a number in an equation. They knew that I was missing from the equation.

When they could not find me at the institution they went straight to my parent's home. They took my parents into custody, and threathened them with death if I was not found and turned in.

I have two options. One, return home and be arrested and killed. Shame my parents and their fortune. Once the blue side finds out they would kill my child on the way.

Two, stay on the blue side where I have created life, and let my parents die. If either of these options occur I will have created risk for the fate of both teams. I could start an uproar between the two teams putting everyone in serious danger of each other.

Affliation with either group will cause death.

I have created an equation where the only answer is death. Whether it is the deaths of my parents, my child and the one associated, or of many other team members; I have control of the variables. What I choose to be will decide whose fate is on the other side of the equal sign.

. . .

:::A NEWS PAPER HEADING:::

UNIDENTIFIED SHOT SIXTEEN TIMES BY BOARDERLINE SECURITY BETWEEN RED AND BLUE TERRITORIES

Now I am dead, unidentified/unaffiliated with either team.

I created the equation, so I solved. To solve the equation one must die, and in some cases when the cost is too great on either side, you must give your own life to solve it.

Sarah's fearism

Fear of Affiliation
Fear of being juged
Fear of being understood
Fear of no more growth
Fear of the definitive
Fear of being stuck
Fear of and END...or death

Death and Philosophy

I stumbled upon the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's section on death. I have been both intrigued and overwhelmed by it. Here is my relatively brief synopsis/regurgitation of it. To investigate these ideas more fully go HERE. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia brings up six quandaries involving death. 

1) What constitutes a person's death? Because the concept of life is not completely pinned down it is difficult to determine when exactly life ends? Here we must begin to distinguish between the end of a corporal being and the end of a psychological being. These deaths (of the corporal being, of the psychological being) do not necessarily coincide.  

2) Challenges of the harm thesis of death. The harm thesis of death is the fair assumption that death causes a person harm. The Stanford Encyclopedia raises three challanges against this thesis.

a) The first challenge is known as the symmetry argument. Because we do not think of the non-existence preceding our births as being harmful to us it is irrational to consider the non-existence after our deaths as being harmful. 

b) The second challenge is known as the timing puzzle. It is reasonable to presume that death or posthumous events may cause harm only if:

-there is a subject that is harmed.

-there is a harm that the subject incurs. 

-there is a time in which harm is incurred by the subject.

We have to ask ourselves, when is the harm incurred? If it is incurred before we die, then there is a clear subject. However, it is difficult to see how the harm is inflicted onto the subject before the event (death). If the harm occurs after we die then there is no subject that is harmed (because the subject ceases to exist). 

One might be inclined to say that the harm is incurred at the moment of death. However, such a moment is difficult to pin down. As Epicurus has stated "Death..., the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not."

c) The third challenges addresses a variation on the harm thesis known as the posthumous harm thesis. This assumes that harm can be done to a person posthumously. The challenge is known as the immunity argument. This claims that the posthumous harm thesis is irrational because there is no subject to incur the harm posthumously. In other words, death leaves us invincible to further harm. 

3) Support of the Harm thesis would consist of the idea that the harm incurred is not in the form of some kind of pain.

4) What is the misfortune of death? Presumably death harms us by precluding us of certain goods and pleasures. However, we are not necessarily harmed by states of affairs that block our access to goods and pleasures. For instance, I am not a rock star. So my state of affairs (not being a rock star) blocks me from the goods and pleasures of living like a rock star. However, we would not say that I am harmed by this state of affairs. We might tighten our definition of the harm imposed by death by saying that it precludes us of certain goods and pleasures that we would have had. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say with any certainty what goods and pleasures we would have had if only.

5) Are all deaths a misfortune? In this section, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concerns itself with a dispute between Thomas Nagel who says that death is always an evil because continued life always makes good things accessible and Bernard Williams who argues that it is a good thing that we are not immortal since we can not stay meaningfully attached to life forever.

6) Can the harm of death be reduced? Presumably it is possible to adjust our concepts and attitudes in order to make the passing of death harmless. Doing so would require us to alter our desires as to not have any interests that death would get in the way of. However, such a condition would leave us with an "impoverished conception of our interests" and make life basically not worth living.