Triple Mourning Ring
No drama, no weepy symbolism, just the names of three family members in gold with white enamel. Memory doesn’t have to be messy.
“ She once told me that she studies as if she were going to live forever and lives as if she were going to die tomorrow.
The Mourners
A series of portraits documenting the ritual of wearing black as a signifier of perpetual mourning. All of the subjects in the series have vowed to wear black every day for the rest of their lives. Photography by Georgia Metaxas.
Flowers sculpted from mouse bones by Hideki Tokushige.
Click on the photo to read original post on Colossal.
UPDATE: also read this very nice Spoon & Tamago post on the work.
Completely gorgeous ad for funeral home services. See? It doesn’t have to be sad or scary. Check out this post on Spoon & Tamago.
Roger Ebert on mortality
About the loveliest meditation on living and dying I’ve ever read. He will be missed. Cheers, Roger!
Memorials for Medical School Cadavers
As many medical students around the country do, students at the Indiana University School of Medicine-Northwest campus hold memorial services when they have finished dissecting and studying their cadavers. The twist is that the cadaver’s relatives are invited to the remembrance ceremony during which letters of appreciation are read, a clergyman offers prayers, and families often cry together. One student said, ““Once you put a name and a face to the body that you’re working with, once you put an identity to it, you connect to it in a really meaningful and powerful way.”
What would anyone think of his/her own memorial?
This Esquire blog posts asks, innocently: What would Eisenhower think of his own memorial? (There’s been a lot of bickering and protesting by Eisenhower’s remaining family: they don’t like Frank Gehry’s proposed design and want something they feel would properly honor Ike.) Which brings up the many thorny questions of ownership of memorial legacies: who is in charge of the editorial direction—the exit image and narrative created in your honor? Would you approve, if you could magically return after death to take a look at memorials created in your name? What if you don’t like the RIP Facebook page, the memorial blog, the unsuitable statue in the park? The short answer is: it doesn’t matter, because you won’t know about it. You’ll be dead, right? But civic monuments to great leaders are another story, dealing with enduring public legacy as well as the personal memories of those who knew and loved the memorialized person. That’s where this one gets very sticky.
Art project: stools made from dead people's stuff
Dutch designer Joost Gehem uses all kinds of unwanted belongings, some of them coming from the estates of the deceased, others coming from repossessed homes, to create new stools. ”135,000 deaths, 32,000 divorces, 10,000 bankruptcies, and thousands of hospitalizations occur each year,” he explains, talking only about the Netherlands. “Many household inventories are left without a home. If heirs and dealers have no interest in the household goods, they usually end up in the local dump.”
So he buys up unwanted items, transports them to his studio (aka the Transformation and Distribution Centre for Abandoned Household Items), then stuffs or grinds them down to fill a simple three-legged stool mold. “Your old inventory gets a fresh new start,” Gehem adds. “The Centre infuses new life into the cycle of collecting and throwing away.”
