Image via the Broadly Gender Spectrum Collection “These dead are hungry. Fuck, Dance, run, kiss, steal, eat decadently, sing, destroy, create. The energy of life, ecstatic life, draws them close, nourishes.” The first line of Contagion Press’s First Protocols of Queer Goetia seems an unusual way to start a pamphlet dedicated to remembering and connecting with the dead. Most memorial bulletins feature vibrant pictures or quotes chosen to represent the lives of those who have died, distributed among a small or large group of mourners. But this is the anonymous author’s favorite line of the b ..read more

Good Death Fellow Olivia Matthews Miscarriages of justice, like we saw with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin and countless others, unfortunately make this play relevant. In a better world, and in a more perfect union, this play wouldn’t exist, but as someone who has always strived to use my art and my platform to speak out against injustice and cruelty, it must exist. In my play, Here Lies Vivienne Greene, the title character is called to smuggle a young Black boy out of her hometown after he is threatened by an angry white mob. Set in 1956, soon after the murder of Emmitt Till ..read more

Photo courtesy of Wake The Order’s 2022 Good Death Fellow, Wake, is a nonprofit based in New Orleans that offers their local community information and resources for meaningful, affordable, and environmentally friendly deathcare. We talk to Liz Dunnebacke, Executive Director of Wake, to learn more about their work, the value and challenges of creating a community deathcare organization, and their Fellowship project, the Death Concierge program. How was Wake founded and could you share a bit about its history? I started Wake in 2020 after many years of interest in end-of-life issues ..read more

Photo by Tiziana Onstead If you’re like me, your TikTok FYP is a mashup of some of the most macabre content on the internet – unsolved mysteries, mortuary horror stories, dark history – and the most hyper-feminine content around – makeup tutorials, shopping hauls, and anything and everything Barbie, Hello Kitty, you get the idea. Smack dab in the center of these disparate genres of content is estate sale TikTok; predominantly young content creators who have all but turned scouring estate sales into an Olympic sport. Typically they frequent the homes – or more specifically mansions – of rec ..read more

Photo by Jason Schmidt Guillermo del Toro on the set of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, 2022. The article contains spoilers for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, available to watch on Netflix, is a rich and imaginative take on a familiar story. Rather than transforming his protagonist into flesh and blood, del Toro uses the concept of a “real” boy to comment on the most universal aspect of the human condition: death. In doing so, he invites us to witness the sheer power of grief, and encourages us to think more broadly about mortality, which no-one can escape. P ..read more

Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy Snapshot of Edna and Major Edna Clyne was nineteen years old and living in Inverness, Scotland, in 1959, when her Labrador Retriever named Major died. He was her first dog. Not the family’s first, there had been others in the house, but the first that had been hers alone. “He was a very special dog,” she told me, “Sometimes I would just sit and talk to him, and I felt that he could understand every word I said.” Her mother used to ask how Edna had trained Major to be so gentle and obedient, and she still laughs about the question, explaining that she had never ..read more

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Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, via Bryn Mawr College Entering a darkened room with a floor of dark, earthy soil equipped with only a flashlight and translucent poncho, you trail others bearing the same. With muffled footsteps, you kneel before a grave, laying down your flashlight as your hand moves aside a small mound of soil big enough to cradle your ear. As you lay your head down you begin to hear a voice… So begins the visitor’s experience of Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation that has exhibited internationally since 2014. Transforming the ..read more

Nikki and Chris Reimer For the last eight years of my brother Chris Reimer’s life, I lived in an urban coastal city. I was trying to become a writer. He lived in the backwater prairie city of our birth, where he was trying to become a musician. In those days we connected in person on the Christmases I could afford to come home, or during brief visits when he came through town on tour. Otherwise, our relationship occurred over email and text. I’d mail books I thought he’d like, and he’d share music files. He died ten years ago, February 2012, the day before my 32nd birthday. He was 26. In the ..read more

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