Remixing Grandma's Voice

or How to preserve her stories in the age of the iPod

When I became an adult, I learned some churches used the hymns to teach scripture to members who couldn't read.  In their own way, the songs were a way to store and share information, just like my casette tapes. Like my cassettes, the hymns have become obsolete.

I'd grown up hearing the songs, but I'd never learned to sing them; that crucial information had been lost.  I've been a gospel musician for more than 30 years, yet I can count the times I've heard the hyms on one hand.


When I sat down with my grandmother on July 4, 1990,  I was archiving data, as surely as I would be almost two decades later when I backed up crucial files from my hard drive.

She is doing the talking, but her daughter – my mother  – is in the room. So are her youngest sister and her older brother. For some reason, we'd all come to celebrate Independence Day that year. All in all, three generations sat at the kitchen table, huddled around the recorder.
--

The songs became the bridge to another story. She began to talk of her beloved Papa, who helped teach her to sing.
--

The tape is digitized in minutes. And it only takes minutes to register for the program that will allow an entire family to access this  conversation.

But before I click the mouse, I whisper my hope in a prayer. May this transfer be successful. May this story be saved and given to another generation.

Willie Nelson Gravedigger

A story so outlandish, the police didn't believe it until....

The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
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Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood 17-year-old, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.

"He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it," Adkins said. "So I knew there was some truth to the story."
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Houston police believe the teens disturbed the grave of an 11-year-old boy who died in 1921.

The child was buried at an unmarked cemetery believed to be reserved for black veterans and their families, Adkins said.

Under the law, a person can be charged with abuse of a corpse simply by vandalizing, damaging or treating a gravesite offensively — even if the human remains buried there are not touched, Adkins said.

3 accused of using corpse head to smoke marijuana

"I'm attempting to put myself in a bottle that will one day wash up on the beach for my children,"

After the extraordinary reception to the Beloved Professor Delivering His Last Lecture Jeffrey Zaslow teamed up with Randy Pausch to co-write the new book,

"The Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow)

Zaslow reports that Pausch is finding more difficult to say goodbye to his family  than he did to his colleagues at work.

Zaslow asks "When death is near, how do we show our love?" in  A Final Farwell

For many of us, his lecture has become a reminder that our own futures are similarly -- if not as drastically -- brief. His fate is ours, sped up.
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People wrote about how his lecture had inspired them to spend more time with loved ones, to quit pitying themselves, or even to shake off suicidal urges. Terminally ill people said the lecture had persuaded them to embrace their own goodbyes, and as Randy said, "to keep having fun every day I have left, because there's no other way to play it."
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Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him--

"Well, you also need emotional insurance," the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy's time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.
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Randy also made a point of talking to people who lost parents when they were very young. They told him they found it consoling to learn about how much their mothers and fathers loved them. The more they knew, the more they could still feel that love. To that end, Randy built separate lists of his memories of each child. He also has written down his advice for them, things like: "If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, 'Tell the truth.' If I got three more words, I'd add, 'All the time.' "

The advice he's leaving for Chloe includes this: "When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do." Chloe, not yet 2 years old, may end up having no memory of her father. "But I want her to grow up knowing," Randy said, "that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her."
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As he later explained it: "I am maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying. But at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living."
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And so despite all his goodbyes, he has found solace in the idea that he'll remain a presence. "Kids, more than anything else, need to know their parents love them," he said. "Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen."

The Last Lecture website.

Cross-posted at Business of Life

On the immortality of souls

For nature appears to me to have ordained this station here for us, as a place of sojournment, a transitory abode only, and not as a fixed settlement or permanent habitation. 

But oh the glorious day, when freed from this troublesome rout, this heap of confusion and corruption below, I shall repair to that divine Assembly, the heavenly Congregation of Souls!
--
Now these, my friends, are the means (since it was these you wanted to know) by which I make my old age sit easy and light upon me; and thus I not only disarm it of every uneasiness, but render it even sweet and delightful.

But if I should be mistaken in this belief, that our souls are immortal, I am however pleased and happy in my mistake;nor while I live, shall it ever be in the power of man, to beat my out on an opinion, that yields me so solid a comfort and so durable a satisfaction.

Cicero's Discourse on Old Age

Prayer lady saved by paper boy

The newspaper carrier called  her as the "Prayer lady" because she would leave him tips in letters to which she often appended a prayer.

`I've been praying for you at night whenever the weather's bad, realizing you're out in it delivering our papers,'"

He knew something was wrong when the newspapers piled up outside her door.

"That wonderful, small voice inside me said, `This isn't right.'"

After his route early Sunday, Pitts went home, napped briefly and, with his wife, returned to Blanche and Fred Roberts' home, just outside Marion, Ill.

They repeatedly rang the doorbells but got no answer. Pitts then eased open an unlocked side door and saw the couple about two feet inside, 84-year-old Blanche Roberts helpless looking right back at Pitts.

Her right leg was pinned beneath the body of her 77-year-old husband Fred, who apparently had died last Wednesday evening of a heart attack after mowing the lawn.

"The good Lord was with her. She was not scared, wasn't panicking," Pitts said during a telephone interview. "She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."

Newspaper carrier finds woman pinned by husband's dead body.

Your Odds of Dying

What are your odds of dying?  1 in 1. 

What you will die from is a totally different story.  Mother Pie tipped me to this wonderful graphic in a post
exploring for the first time the idea of the Singularity. 

I've written about the singularity in The Curve of Change, Digital Immortality or The Rapture for Nerds, and How We Are Going to Die,

It's no surprise that some, bedazzled at our technological progress, believe that the same progress can be made with biotechnology.  There is a human inchoate yearning for immortality that believers say points to heaven.  But to that age-old question Quo vadis or Where are we going,  the singularians answer  We ain't  going nowhere, we're staying.

They fail to recognize the very humanness of our nature, especially our susceptibility to boredom.  Even William Buckley,  by all accounts a prodigious lover of life, confessed to Charlie Rose near the end of hhis life confessed that he was tired of life.  The time will come, no matter how long we live, when the will to live is lost and death soon follows.

Up, up and away

This soaring photo is the last one known of the Roman Catholic priest who wanted to raise money to build a worship center for truckers by breaking the 19-hour world record for flying with balloons.

An experienced skydiver, Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off under a column of a thousand helium-filled balloons.  He was equipped with a bouyant chair, a thermal suit, a parachute, a satellite phone and a GPS device.

He disappeared when winds blew him over the ocean.  Fishing boats and rescue workers in helicopters found bits of balloons along the coast.  A week  after his disappearance, the Brazilian navy called off the search

Albert Hoffman, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

Looking quite sprightly at 100, Albert Hoffman, "the mystical Swiss chemist  who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known" died at 102.

NYT obit

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.
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Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books.
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But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”

Telegraph obituary

Hofmann was disappointed when his discovery was removed from commercial distribution. He remained convinced that the drug had the potential to counter the psychological problems induced by "materialism, alienation from nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanised, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in wealthy, saturated society, and lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life".

Father of LSD takes final trip

R.I.P.

Her uncles spat on her grave

Just a teen age girl, she fell in love with a British soldier in Basra.  She met him at the charity for displaced families where she volunteered.  Since she was learning English, she could talk with him without others knowing what they were saying.    She never did more than talk to him four times, all in public.

Rand Abdel-Qader, 17

When her father learned she had been speaking to the soldier at the charity project, he killed her.

Abdel-Qader Ali stood on the girl's throat until she suffocated and then stabbed her, all the time shouting that his honour was being cleansed.
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Because her family considered her impure, Rand was given only a simple burial. Her uncles spat in her grave to show their disgust.

Two weeks later her mother demanded a divorce from Ali, and she now campaigns against honour killings.

She lives in fear of reprisals. "I was beaten and had my arm broken by him," she said. "No man can accept being left by a woman in Iraq."

Rand's friend Zeinab said: "Rand was just a young girl with romantic dreams. She always kept her religion close to her heart. She would never even hurt a petal on a rose."

Incorruption

The body of Padre Pio who died forty years ago and was declared a saint in 2002 is now on display in San Giovanni Rotondo.  While not totally incorrupt, his body was still remarkably well-preserved.  No sign of his famous stigmata was present.

There are more than 250 incorrupt bodies of Catholic saints whose bodies did not decompose in the normal way.

The Illusion of Art at the Louvre

What in the name of all that is holy was the Louvre thinking with this exhibit of a "chaotic pile of tombstones" in the same room with John Paul Rubens series on the Life of Marie de Medicis?

The Brussels Journal finds at least one professor of art calls it The Vampirization of the Louvre

Contemporary art, which is not art, seeks to give itself artistic legitimacy through a forced confrontation with the greatest masterpieces. It vampirizes them in order to affirm itself as true art. The Jan Fabre exhibit in the Louvre adds nothing to Van Eyck, Memling, Rembrandt or Rubens. It does however bring to Jan Fabre the illusion of conversing on an equal footing with them, the illusion, therefore, of being a great artist. [...]

6-year-old leaves hospital after dying

Boy leaves hospital 2 weeks after dying

A 6-year-old boy left an Omaha hospital on Wednesday having survived a fast-moving virus that nearly killed him.

T.J. Pfannenstiel was clinically dead for a few minutes, doctors said, but medical technology and a group of dedicated professionals changed that, his family said. They also credit prayer.

"We ended up watching our son have a heart attack right in front of us," said T.J.'s father, Tim Pfannenstiel, recounting a three-week ordeal.
T.J. had been fighting a virus until two weeks ago, his father said.

"He kept insisting, 'My heart hurts. My heart hurts,'" Tim Pfannenstiel said.

Doctors said the boy's heart was barely beating. His parents rushed him to the Children's Hospital emergency room and minutes later, the boy's heart stopped in the intensive care unit. Doctors kept T.J. alive with a machine -- called the E-CPR -- that bypasses the heart and lungs until the heart is ready to beat again on its own.

Dr. Jeffrey Demare and a team of experts gave T.J. a fighting chance.

"We got here at the right time, the right place, with the right people, the right tools, and we got a lot of help -- prayers, and a miracle happened," said Tim Pfannenstiel.

Siobhan's Miracle at Lourdes

Siobhan Kilfeather was a beautiful professor of English and Irish Literature at Queen's University, Belfast and happily married with two very young children when she was diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer melanoma.  Nine months later, x-rays showed that the cancer had reached her lungs.

She decided to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and her mother-in-law jumped at the chance to go with her.

Siobhán's "miracle" happened one bitterly cold day in the French Pyrenees in February 2000. There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.

With hands outstretched and eyes full of fire, she beseeched the statue. "Holy Mary," she prayed aloud, "you know better than anyone on earth the love a mother has for her children. Surely you won't deprive my babies of their mother. "They need me. I beg you; find it in your heart to give me more time. Let me see them grow up a bit first - then I'll be ready."

Siobhán was begging not for survival, but merely time to see her children grow to an age where they would know and remember her. Constance and Oscar, then aged four and two, and back home in England, were too young to know about the cancer which was already ravaging their mother's body.
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Although she was tired after our flight from London, by evening Siobhán declared she was well enough to walk in a candlelight procession with thousands of other pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Our Lady. Before her illness Siobhán had been a vibrant, energetic young woman. Now she walked painfully slowly and her breathing was laboured.

She took my arm as we struggled to keep up with the procession. Suddenly she turned to me and with complete conviction declared: "I felt a shift inside my body today. I believe the cancer has left me. Mary has answered my prayer. She says I'm to be allowed more time with my children."
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Siobhán certainly never doubted that she had been spared by the grace of God. She never ceased giving grateful thanks for her reprieve and returned to the faith of her childhood with a renewed fervour.

When you have been so close and stared death in the face, life becomes more precious than ever. >Siobhán set about completing all the things she thought would be denied to her for ever.

Her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson tells her story in a soon-to-be  published book previewed in the Daily Mail,

Did Pilgrimage to Lourdes give my cancer-stricked daughter the miracle of seeing her children grow up?

My interview on Marketplace radio

On Marketplace radio yesterday, reporter Curt Nickish has an interesting piece about online obituaries called Another nail in newspapers' coffin about a new site now in beta called Tributes where people can place online obituaries, "keeping the memories alive".

When Jeff Taylor who started Monster.com, he moved help wanted ads from newspapers to the web.
Now he's trying to do the same thing with obituaries after not doing so well with Eons, a website targeted to those over 50.

In browsing through the obit section on Eons, looking for someone to interview, he came across the obituary I had posted about my mother with links to the three blog posts I had done about her.

That is how I came to be interviewed and how my mother's photo is now posted on Marketplace radio.  Interestingly it nothing to do with the work I'm doing or the book I'm writing.

You can hear my lovely voice,  part of the interview here.

Adamant that she would not 'die rich'

Body shop founder Anita Roddick gave away her fortune to charity and  the tax man and left nothing to her daughters.

She described leaving money to your family as "obscene" and cut her two daughters Sam and Justine out of her will in 2005 soon after making a fortune from the sale of The Body Shop.

French cosmetics firm L'Oreal paid £625million for the company, paying Dame Anita and her husband Gordon more than £100million for their 18 per cent share in the business.

Her half of the profit from the eco-friendly, ethical business which she and her husband built up from one shop was donated to the Roddick Foundation, which supports charity causes she espoused.
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Mr Roddick and his family were yesterday away on holiday but the couple's daughters have publicly supported their mother's decision to disinherit them.

Remember husband and father still has half the fortune.

Hitchhiking for world peace dressed as a bride

An Italian woman artist who wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people was hitchhiking from Milan to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace.

Her naked body was found in the bushes of Gebze, Turkey.

"World Peace' hitcher is murdered.

The Bye-Bye Box

This made me laugh out loud.

Daddy Put in Bye-Bye Box

After weeks of being sleepy all the time and never finishing his din-din at night, area daddy Howard Lewis was put in a bye-bye box early Monday morning so that he could go on a vacation with the birds and clouds in the sky.

Daddy, who was tall and strong and liked going to the hospital to play with their fun machines, was put in the bye-bye box at a big, white house where everyone had a party for him even though it wasn't his birthday. According to family sources, Daddy, 36, can't play Chutes and Ladders tonight, but he loved Ryan and his little sister, Rebecca, very, very much, and nothing is ever going to change that.

             

And this too.  Grandfathers Accidently Switched at Hospital

Eulogy to the 'world's coolest mentor'

Christopher Buckley's Eulogy for My Father

One October day in 1997, I arrived from Washington in Stamford for a long-planned overnight sail. As the train pulled into the station, I looked out and saw people hanging onto lampposts at 90-degree angles, trying not to be blown away by the northeast gale that was raging. Indeed, it resembled a scene from The Wizard of Oz. When the train doors opened, I was blown back into the carriage by the 50-mile-an-hour wind. I managed to crawl out onto the platform, practically on all fours, whereupon my father greeted me with a chipper, “We’ll have a brisk sail.”

I looked up at him incredulously and said, “We’re going out in this?”

Indeed we did go out in it. We always went out in it. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, shrieking at him as the water broke over the cockpit and the boat pitched furiously in boiling seas, “Bill — Bill! Why are you trying to kill us?”

Bringing Mourners Online

Would you pay $150 for a user name and password to people who live far away or are housebound so that they can watch the funeral service online?

One crematorium in England is betting that offering a better service to people who are bereaved will be profitable.

Pay-Per-View Funerals bring Mourners Online.

Organ harvesting by Albanians in Kosovo war

Carla Del Ponte  who was the chief prosecutor at the tribunal in the Hague for crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s said Serb prisoners 'were stripped of their organs' which were sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war.

According to the sources, senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army were aware of the scheme, in which hundreds of young Serbs were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Miss Del Ponte provides grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed.

"The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Miss Del Ponte writes.

"The simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero"

"The Medal of Honor is awarded for an act of such courage that no one could rightly be expected to undertake it. Yet those who knew Michael Monsoor were not surprised when he did".

From the remarks of President Bush on awarding a posthumous medal of honor to MIchael Monsoor "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life and beyond the call of duty".    The medal was presented to his parents on behalf of a grateful nation in a ceremony at the White House.

Monsoor was a Navy Seal who on September 29, 2006 made the ultimate sacrifice. 

Mike and two teammates had taken position on the outcropping of a rooftop when an insurgent grenade bounced off Mike’s chest and landed on the roof. Mike had a clear chance to escape, but he realized that the other two SEALs did not. In that terrible moment, he had two options — to save himself, or to save his friends. For Mike, this was no choice at all. He threw himself onto the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his body. One of the survivors puts it this way: “Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, ‘You cannot take my brothers. I will go in their stead.’”

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mike’s life is the way different service members all across the world responded to his death. Army soldiers in Ramadi hosted a memorial service for the valiant man who had fought beside them. Iraqi Army scouts — whom Mike helped train — lowered their flag, and sent it to his parents. Nearly every SEAL on the West Coast turned out for Mike’s funeral in California. As the SEALs filed past the casket, they removed their golden tridents from their uniforms, pressed them onto the walls of the coffin. The procession went on nearly half an hour. And when it was all over, the simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero who will never be forgotten.

From the citation
Although only he could have escaped the blast, Petty Officer Monsoor chose instead to protect his teammates. Instantly and without regard for his own safety, he threw himself onto the grenade to absorb the force of the explosion with his body, saving the lives of his two teammates.

By his undaunted courage, fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of certain death, Petty Officer Monsoor gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

A remarkable man, a grateful nation, may  his sacrifice never be forgotten and may he rest in peace.

"Alone in a room with the body of a deceased person"

An atheist until two  years ago, Jennifer visits a funeral home for the first time since her conversion  to Catholicism

The viewing

Yesterday I found myself alone in a room with the body of a deceased person.

What surprised me about that was that it didn't feel all that different from the last time I went to a viewing before a funeral, back when I was a teenager. Not that I expected a chorus of angels or to hear the voice of God or anything, but I guess I thought it would feel noticeably different to see death face-to-face now that I'm aware of God's existence. But it didn't. It didn't feel different because seeing death so close up, then as now, stripped away any high-minded theories or explanations I might try to invoke and left me only with a certain unmistakable feeling, a feeling that came from some primordial part of my mind.

Yesterday, I was able to put my finger on just what that feeling was. I realized in that moment, standing next to a body in an open coffin in a silent room, that I was aware of something at the very deepest level of my consciousness. It was something simultaneously obvious yet easy to ignore, like the fact that there was a ceiling above my head and a floor beneath my feet. It was something I'd felt before, when I looked at my grandmother in her coffin as an atheist teenager so many years ago:

This is only a body. The soul lives on