

Women & Death – A picture post
In honor of International Women's Day, please enjoy this collection of art depicting Women with Death through the ages. Magdalena Korzeniewska, Danse Macabre, 2013 For more content focusing on the relationship of women and death work please visit Death & The Maiden <3 Life and Death by unknown artist, Oil on copper , 9.7 x 8.8 cm | Collection: Wellcome Library Le grand arcane hermétique suivant Basile Valentin, lithography , from book; Éliphas Lévi. Sebald Beham (1500–1550)


Live on Kaddish Podcast!
The Aramaic word "Kaddish" (קדיש) generally refers to the "Mourners' Kaddish", one of the mourning prayer in the Jewish religious tradition. Kaddish is also the name of a monthly podcast hosted by Student Rabbi Ariana Katz that "focuses on mourning ritual and customs, features first person storytelling and interviews, uses Jewish tradition to contextualize and deepens themes of the show, and holds space at the intersection of life and death." Recently, a mutual friend, the lo


Mother's Day
As some of you already know, this past year I have been working as a hospice volunteer and a death doula. It has been a challenging, wondrous, draining, heart-warming, illuminating time. I can’t say it has been easy. But I can say that it has been beautiful. Through this work,
I have been honored to witness many genuinely raw human moments, sometimes from an intimate perspective and other times merely in passing, as a fly on the wall. Some of the most loving, loaded, and com


Monday Mourning - Gustave Doré
Remembering the life and work of famous 19th century artist Gustave Doré


Death in Photochrom
he vast majority of the images in the photochrom collection are of historical monuments like the Statue of Liberty and natural sights like t


Of flowers and corpses
This weekend, an intense smell enveloped New York Botanical Garden visitors (and another such event just took place in Washington, DC). For the second time in nearly 80 years an enormous rare flower bloomed in the garden emitting the strong and unsettling smell of rotting carrion. The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) belongs to a group of "corpse flowers" or "carrion flowers" as they are aptly referred to, that includes the rafflesias, stapelias and some of the bulbophillu


Thanatography Pop-Up Art Show!
Fourth Annual Pop-up Art Show featuring art installations and vending by: Connie Appletree Anthony Fasano
Robert Kraiza
Rebecca Reeves
Evi Numen Emily Snedden Yates & more Promo table by the Mütter Museum featuring art by David Orr. During the electrifying Music for the Hearing Eye A Concert Atop the Crypts by The Divine Hand Ensemble at Laurel Hill Cemetery Saturday June 4th, 2016 • 6pm • $17/$20 •(Rain date: Sunday June 5th, 2016, 6pm)• Tickets can be purchased online or at


Offering Condolences
One of the reasons it is so hard for people to know what to say is that they aren’t familiar with grief in the same way. They may not have lost someone close to them so they aren’t sure what words would make the person feel better or worse. When you take the time to understand the grieving process, it makes it easier to know what to say. Grief Happens in Many Ways No two people grieve the same way. One person may cry a lot while another may seem stoic. A mother with young chi


Thanatography Thursday Memorial: C. R. Travis (ca. 1860s -1940s)
Through the years I have collected a number of calling cards or cartes de visite of people I wish I could have known. Their likenesses always spurred a certain sense of nostalgia, they seemed so relatable yet always out of reach. And forgotten- the images that were once part of a family's treasures were now amongst a pile of the images of many other strangers atop an antique store. They say that we die two deaths. The first death is that of our physical body,
the second deat


On the Night My Mother Died
On the night my mother died, it snowed. I got the call from the hospital, and drove through the flake-laden darkness to her hospice room for the final time. Death had wiped away all signs of stress, my mom looked peaceful and at least ten years younger. I sat with her body for a bit, eventually moved to gather the flowers and cards and the blanket that had been knitted just for her. I paused at the door for one last look, and then the coroner came to take her away. The rest o