The Final Words Project of Lisa Smartt
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For Lisa Smartt, it began with the death of her father, Mort Felix. A clinical psychologist and a rationalist, Felix was, in the words of Smartt, “a cigar-chomping New Yorker whose definition of the Divine was corned beef on rye with slaw on the side and a cold glass of cream soda. He placed his […]
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Cremation By The Numbers
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For more than 20 years, the Cremation Association of North America has been tracking deathcare numbers. The next annual report will be released in May — if it’s like the last few years, cremations will continue in what has been called a Rapid Growth Phase. In 2002, the cremation rate in the United States was 28.2%. The […]
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Dr. Maureen Keeley Explains the Language of the Dying
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In their classic, Final Conversations — Helping the Living and the Dying Talk to Each Other, Drs. Maureen Keeley and Julie Yingling write: “Death and taxes are the only guarantees in life, and yet taxes are far easier to talk about. Death has become a taboo topic in our society.” Taboo, that is, until it […]
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The Runaway Corpse of Abraham Lincoln
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The Case of the Runaway Corpse is a perennial favorite of Perry Mason mystery fans. Written by Erle Stanley Gardner, it features fraud, murder, alcoholism and a traveling corpse as key story elements. How is it that the burial of President Abraham Lincoln contains all of these sordid components plus a ring of unscrupulous counterfeiters? […]
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