Naming the Dead

They call them "Tent Girl", "Johnny Dupage", and "Homestead". These are among the substitute names given to the unidentified dead, bodies that have yet to be connected to a history, family, or life. There are thousands of them which are known. There are thousands more that have not been reported, or put in the appropriate databases and lists. Determining the true identities of these Does is difficult and time-consuming - most police and medical examiners don't have the time or resources to devote. Enter the Doe Network.

The Doe Network is a product of the Internet age - a collection of individual citizens brought together across great distances for a common cause. They share resources, communicate about cases, and work with law enforcement in the hope that they can find names for the unidentified dead. The first article I read about the Network is archived here. I still cry when I read it. It follows one of the original members, Todd Matthews, in his search for the identity of "Tent Girl", so named for the piece of canvas she was wrapped in when discovered. There is a similar article with more information here.

The second article contains this quote from Matthews:

"The one real fear in life is not death -- the greatest monster of all is the unknown. Particularly when the location of a loved one is the unknown. I see folks with missing loved ones literally writhing in pain."

This gives a little insight into the reasons why so many Network volunteers spend their free time hunched over their computers, scouring medical records and message boards for the smallest clue that might lead to an identification.

The fearism I posted started with "fear of the unknown/unidentified". The Doe Network and what I learned about missing persons was my inspiration for that. My fears about the unknown are largely related to becoming unknown myself - going through life without making a difference, or affecting other people in a significant way. To die without a name is one of the worst things I can imagine. I suspect many of the volunteers feel the same way - or they empathize with those left behind, and feel an obligation to bring closure to long-forgotten cases.

Their obsession with the dead is a help to families, medical personnel, and law enforcement in a very real way. Hopefully our obsession will be a help in its own strange way.

Photo courtesy of Kim Fowles.

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