Baking Recipes from Gravestones

The Washington Post writes about Rosie Grant, who bakes from recipies so important to the women who loved them so much they had them engraved on their gravestones. "They're to die for," she says. Baking delicacies by the deceased has become somewhat of a hobby for Grant. It’s unusual, to be sure, but fulfilling. “Cooking these recipes has shown me an alternative side to death,” said Grant, 33. “It is a way to memorialize someone and celebrate their life.” Before she stumbled upon her first recipe, she had never heard of cooking instructions on graves. It is not a commonplace sentiment for a headstone, she said, but there are certainly a sprinkling of them out there. And once she got a taste, she made it her mission to find more.

The Art of Dying: Peter Schjeldahl 1942-2022

Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl has died, and in remembering him, many people referred to his 2019 essay, "The Art of Dying," written after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Of course, as it could only be, it is a meditation on life, on memories of the past, on appreciating the pressent, on some regrets ("I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them"), on acceptance.

[When I got the news from the doctor] I was at the wheel of my first brand-new car since 1962, a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on. I wanted for nothing. I want for nothing. The other night, I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester, with two hundred thousand miles on it, dirty and falling apart. (That’s diseased me now, I suppose.) But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street.

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here. Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.

"Nature Has Its Way of Ending Life. I’m Changing the Manner and the Time" -- Voluntary Assisted Death

From Rachel Handler in New York Magazine's The Cut: A few weeks ago, my partner Adam’s grandpa David called to let us know he was proceeding with his plan to have a peaceful, dignified death. David had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s ten years earlier, and in the last two years, as his mobility and quality of life had slowly declined, he’d been openly considering what is commonly referred to as voluntary assisted death (VAD)....On that Wednesday morning, we spoke for about 20 minutes, and I peppered him with questions about the logistics and decisions behind his planned death. I recorded the conversation, because I knew that Adam would someday want to hear it — he’d told me earlier he was worried that without me (obsessive, exhaustingly curious) by his side in Chicago, he (calm, normal) would forget to ask all of the questions he wanted to ask of David....I found his decision to die on his own terms fascinating, brave, terrifying, devastating, infuriating, and awe-inspiring. Selfishly, I wanted to understand everything about that choice. Some coomments from David: I started the process two years ago. I didn’t know whether or not I’d need it. That’s why we buy insurance; you may never need it, but if you do, you’ve got it. But it changed when my eyes no longer worked and I couldn’t control my fingers. That’s when I said, “I have to go.” ... I’m not the least bit scared. I’m scared if I don’t do it — that’s my fear. That’s why I am calling the people I know to say good-bye. I want them not to be scared for me. I’m not happy I’m doing it. It’s contrary to my belief about life, which is so precious, so unique, so wonderful. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to leave this wonderful world, leave you and Adam, and what life’s about. But I don’t want to end up like people I’ve watched die. It is brutal. That’s where I’m going. And I have a choice not to do it. I have a choice to be remembered as being alive, and not looked at with pity. Climbing the hill of life is challenging but marvelous. The way down is slippery. Literally. It’s easier to walk up than down. Even though gravity helps you. I have these conversations so people like you can process it and not feel sorry....I don’t want to let Mother Nature dictate me. I’m challenging Mother Nature. How presumptuous of me. Who am I not to allow her to do her thing? But when I see friends, what they’ve gone through in their dying days … I’m just preventing that. The burden on individuals and on society. Consuming medical attention that the young people are entitled to. I’ve thought this through for two years. I’m very comfortable with what I’m doing.

An Assisted Death Machine is Being Tested in Switzerland

From the Washington Post:

People wishing to end their lives in Switzerland — one of a handful of countries that give the option — could soon have access to a new method: a 3-D-printed pod that its creator says can painlessly end someone’s life in a matter of minutes. Real-life participants will start trying the coffinlike “Sarco” during trials set to begin in early 2022, the capsule’s creator, Philip Nitschke, told The Washington Post this week. A legal analysis commissioned by his nonprofit, Exit International, recently concluded that use of the pod will not violate Switzerland’s assisted suicide laws, he said. At the push of a button, the pod becomes filled with nitrogen gas, which rapidly lowers oxygen levels, causing its user to fall unconscious within a minute, Nitschke said. A person does not suffocate or experience distress, he said, but rather dies of oxygen deprivation after they’ve fallen asleep. In theory, the capsule can be towed to a place of someone’s choosing, said Nitschke, who described the machine as a “stylish and elegant” way to die.

My Grandfather’s Death Party Was a Final Gift to His Family: Sara Harrison

From the NY Times;

Death is, famously, one of the few certainties in this life. It’s also a reality that doctors, patients and families tend to avoid. The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death notes that today death “is not so much denied but invisible.” At the end of life, people are often alone, shut away in nursing homes or intensive-care units, insulating most of us from the sounds, smells and look of mortality. 

Not so for my grandfather. Though he didn’t rush headlong into the hereafter, he didn’t want to wait for his faculties to fail one by one. He wanted to die with a modicum of independence, with hospice care. On an unseasonably warm Los Angeles day in May 2011, a cast of characters — his children, grandchildren and friends — assembled at his home, ready to play their part in the last act of his life....We listened to classical records and told stories and took turns cooking dinner. But just as Coleridge’s vision faded, interrupted by a person from Porlock, our reverie was splintered by closed-door meetings with hospice nurses and conversations with doctors, who could attest my grandfather had a sound mind and a failing body and was eligible for end-of-life care. 

However perverse it may sound, that death party — as my sister and I came to call those five days — remains one of the most profound experiences of my life. For a brief moment, at my grandfather’s party, I got to slow down the inevitable, to be with the people I grew up with, in the place we held sacred and dear. Amid that joyful reverie, I had time to sober up and confront the simple reality that my grandfather wanted to die and that everything would change.