Death Altar

I will be updating, but i had to get this down before i lost it:

Death can be referred to as he, she, or anything in between. In general, in times of benevolence and blessing, Death is referred to as a woman, and in terms of law and sternness, he is referred to in the masculine.

I am currently in an anatomy observation lab, and am very fortunate to be attending a university that actually trains its students and real human cadavers- willfully donated to science, deserving of all kinds of respect, etc.

And I am struck by a couple of things:
First of all, if a body part is soaked in enough preservative to prevent rot, it is actually pretty easy on the stomach to handle (my stomach, anyway)

I can get used to the scent of the preservative, but for some reason the slickness of it on my glove will bug me to no end (that will probably be gone by the end of semester)

muscles can look like tissue paper and still weigh five pounds or more

Navigating a body is very different from working with a diagram, because nothing is labelled or colour-coded for you. Everything looks pretty much the same, unless you are trained to notice the tell-tale differences between different muscle groups


Finally, I am taken aback by how... small they seem. I know that some of the difference is in the lack of fluids- blood, csf, bile, serous fluid, etc, make up a large part of the body's mass, so without all of that the body will be smaller- but there is more to this feeling than that.
For whatever reason, they seem diminished, shrunken, and somehow less than human. Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for these bodies. These people gave their bodies to the university after their deaths so that they might help better a new generation of health professionals, and anyone who would disrespect that would probably end up on the autopsy table themselves if I have anything to do with it. Still, that being said, it feels as if there really is nothing there anymore but a pile of flesh and bones, as if the intrinsic elements that made them human have vacated the premises.

Which, I suppose, is exactly what happened.

Even if you don't believe in souls or an afterlife, most of us will agree that there are certain aspects that define one as human, and deserving of rights. One of those facets is the ability to think and reason. Well, when somebody dies, they obviously aren't thinking anymore, and are otherwise incapable of carrying out any act of will, save for a last will and testament, traditionally passed to a lawyer who enacts it. Even then, most people will agree that the person is in fact gone.

Still, does any of this mean that the corpse is somehow even more empty? that without a soul, or without brain function, the body stops meaning something?

Where do we cross that line? More importantly, should we cross it?

Suddenly Appeared Out of Nowhere
by Ryohei-Hase

This. Is. Important:



No matter your actions
you're still gonna die

Everyone should remember this

I think these are some important words, but none of them are mine:

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. ~Author Unknown

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. ~Mark Twain

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life. ~Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~Mark Twain

If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun. ~From the television show Roseanne

He who doesn't fear death dies only once. ~Giovanni Falcone

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man. ~Percival Arland Ussher


The idea is to die young as late as possible. ~Ashley Montagu

Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own. ~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go. ~Jean de La Fontaine

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ~Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky

There's nothing certain in a man's life except this: That he must lose it. ~Aeschylus,Agamemnon

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. ~George Bernard Shaw

I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back." ~Gladiator, written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, 2000

The goal of all life is death. ~Sigmund Freud

Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. ~H.L. Mencken

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
~Ryokan

God made death so we'd know when to stop. ~Steven Stiles

There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. ~Harvey Cushing

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. ~Stewart Alsop

I intend to live forever. So far, so good. ~Steven Wright

I wouldn't mind dying — it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me. ~R. Geis

Anyhow, it's not so bad.... I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself. ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union, of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the arch-enemy of life, etc.... But let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory for, for it never fights. All is divine harmony. ~John Muir (1838–1914), A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf

Don't take life seriously; it isn't permanent