Christians have been protesting since a ban was imposed earlier this year on a traditional burial area next to a revered Hindu temple in Katmandu. The Supreme Court has temporarily lifted the ban, but the dispute continues.

From nytimes.com

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The former beauty queen stared into the camera, but this was no pageant or performance. She looked frail and thin, and her hair was rumpled. But Eva Markvoort smiled weakly.”Hello to the world at large,” she said in the video. “To my blog, to my friends, to everyone. I have some news today. It’s kinda tough to hear, but I can say it with a smile.” Propped in a hospital bed, Markvoort sat surrounded by her family. “My life is ending.”

Read the rest here at CNN.com

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In a letter penned to the grieving Elizabeth Hubbart, his brother John’s stepdaughter, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A man is not completely born until he is dead.” He was trying to make her feel better about the death of her stepfather by saying that, as a soul now freed from his body, he was just getting started. What Elizabeth thought of as a life completed, Franklin portrayed as a mere rehearsal for the “real life” that is immortality. God gives bodies to all of us wandering souls for a little while, to experience pleasure, learn some tricks. Eventually, these bodies become painful or sad or just too gross to maintain, and are shuffled off while we get back to the business of being eternal. For Franklin, then, life is never done.
I can see how this sentiment might be comforting to a believer, but for those of us living on the other side of faith, the question of what constitutes a completed life is still an open one. Aristotle thought of life as a sum of its total actions that couldn’t be judged until those actions came to an end. This might be reassuring to those hovering about the frustrated middle of their lives, harshly judging their progress. Not to worry, says Aristotle — it ain’t over till it’s over. And it isn’t really over until you’ve been judged by other people at a point when you can no longer prepare a defense, be reformed, pay restitution, be rehabilitated. Judgment completes life.

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As its title announces, Myths About Suicide also seeks to debunk the myriad ways that suicide is stigmatized by ignorance, disgust, contempt, and callousness.

Is suicide cowardly, as commonly held? No, says Joiner, because overriding the survival instinct requires confronting the fearsome and painful prospect of death. Is it a moral defect? No, because it occurs in a state far removed from measured consideration and balance. Is it a young person’s disorder? No: In the United States, for example, the majority of suicides are men over 50, he says.

“We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, nor rash; that it is not caused by breast augmentation, medicines, ‘slow’ methods like smoking or anorexia, or as some psychoanalysts thought, things like masturbation,” Joiner writes. Indeed, he argues that most mental-health professionals are barely less benighted than the general public about suicide, a function of their own fear, ignorance, and a failure of training, amounting to what he sees as a failure in their medical duty to care.

But his own analysis sometimes glosses over painful subjects. While he is careful to acknowledge that characterizing suicide as selfish stems from “trying to reason about the suicidal mind from a nonsuicidal place,” he devotes little attention to a related element: suicide’s intense focus on the self. Is it fatally distorted, or appropriate to the intractable agony of a suicidal person’s life? For some critics, Joiner sometimes sees issues so intently through the lens of his theory that he doesn’t deal with such major concerns.

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Here in the Sinaloan capital of Culiacan, Espinoza also specializes in painting religious imagery on the opulent mausoleums that serve as the final resting places for hundreds of traffickers slain in Mexico’s raging war on drug cartels.

The audio slideshow on Espinoza is here.

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Dr. Jack Kervorkian as portrayed by Al Pacino. Brilliant. Will I watch it on HBO? Probably.

There’s a superb review on the Los Angeles Times.

In the HBO film “You Don’t Know Jack,” there is something both familiar and unsettling in the man’s visage when it first comes into view. It’s hard to place precisely, but after taking in the obstinate rhetoric, the throwback glasses and the wan smile, we think we know this guy. Oh yeah, Dr. Death, the man with the mortally friendly bedside manner.

Or maybe not. The makers of the film, a biopic about Jack Kevorkian, the physician who became notorious for assisting over 130 suicides, would argue that even though many know of him, they don’t really understand him.

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Through an unusual bequest in her will, the late Bea Arthur will remain an animal activist in her death.

Don’t laugh. I wouldn’t want to cross Maude in life or death!

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The result is her most nuanced and unsentimental novel to date. This is a book that does not depend on big, noisy plot developments, topical issues or deliberately withheld secrets to create suspense. Rather, its power grows from Ms. Miller’s intimate understanding of her characters (for once, the men are as keenly and sympathetically portrayed as the women) and from her Chekhovian understanding of missed connections, lost opportunities, and closely held memories that mutate slowly over time.

The novel caught my eye because of discussions of the possibilities of death being a harm, especially for those who remain. And in this case, for those who are somehow associated or connected with each other.

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