I lived just a few blocks from the city cemetery and the Catholic cemetery. I had relatives in each. As a child, I would pack a bologna sandwich, a bag of chips and some Kool-aid and ride my bike to one of the cemeteries for a picnic. It was always shady, cool and quiet, perfect for a lonely girl to ride her bike and talk to her grandparents she never met. I raised my kids that cemeteries aren’t scary places. It’s where I taught all of them to drive.
I'm so inspired by your project, thank you for sharing this! I wanted to plug this book "On Death and Dying" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She is credited with organizing the five stages of grief but the book that introduces it hold so much more value in the timeless insights it offers about Western relationships with death and even alludes to how technology mediates our fear of death.
Here is a quote from the first chapter I found relevant to our current state of AI affairs:
"...Is our concentration on equipment, on blood pressure, our desperate attempt to deny the impending death which is so frightening and discomforting to us that we displace all our knowledge onto machines, since they are less close to us than the suffering face of another human being which would remind us once more of our lack of omnipotence, our own limits and failures, and last but not least perhaps our own mortality?”
Wow! I had considered the perspective in which we view AI as an extended form of consciousness as another form of "denying" death, so thank you so much for sharing this! This is incredibly insightful and thought-provoking :)
It’s interesting how the fear of death can be seen to fuel consumerist mindset - being so removed from death as a natural progression of life and the obsession of youth encourages people to be actively avoidant and fall for consumerist traps of preventing aging and maintaining youth.
Thank you for this beautiful read. Indeed aging should be graceful, elegant. Death should be grieved and mourned, slowly, deeply. Sometimes, perhaps, the medical advances we've been making- though it has saved countless lives- sometimes result in a superficial preservation of life that harms more than it does good.. Spending our last days at home surrounded by the people we love is truly a lovely way to go.
This is so interesting! However, I can’t help to think our changing relation with religion also has impacted this idea. Since when we knew where our loved ones were ‘going’, it was less scary.
My favourite teacher once told me that you can truly get to know a culture by the way they grieve and how their cemeteries are kept. So he took us to one on our school trip. Totally changed my perspective on the way we grieve in the west!
Here from an insta reel! I’m so glad a read this; It’s comforting to hear about countries outside the west and their traditions and connections to the dead :)
This is amazing. In other countries, cemeteries can be a focal point for activities, much like a park, as I live near a cemetery most people visit like a park to go running and fly kites and have picnics with their dead.
I lived just a few blocks from the city cemetery and the Catholic cemetery. I had relatives in each. As a child, I would pack a bologna sandwich, a bag of chips and some Kool-aid and ride my bike to one of the cemeteries for a picnic. It was always shady, cool and quiet, perfect for a lonely girl to ride her bike and talk to her grandparents she never met. I raised my kids that cemeteries aren’t scary places. It’s where I taught all of them to drive.
I'm so inspired by your project, thank you for sharing this! I wanted to plug this book "On Death and Dying" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She is credited with organizing the five stages of grief but the book that introduces it hold so much more value in the timeless insights it offers about Western relationships with death and even alludes to how technology mediates our fear of death.
Here is a quote from the first chapter I found relevant to our current state of AI affairs:
"...Is our concentration on equipment, on blood pressure, our desperate attempt to deny the impending death which is so frightening and discomforting to us that we displace all our knowledge onto machines, since they are less close to us than the suffering face of another human being which would remind us once more of our lack of omnipotence, our own limits and failures, and last but not least perhaps our own mortality?”
Wow! I had considered the perspective in which we view AI as an extended form of consciousness as another form of "denying" death, so thank you so much for sharing this! This is incredibly insightful and thought-provoking :)
It’s interesting how the fear of death can be seen to fuel consumerist mindset - being so removed from death as a natural progression of life and the obsession of youth encourages people to be actively avoidant and fall for consumerist traps of preventing aging and maintaining youth.
Thank you for this beautiful read. Indeed aging should be graceful, elegant. Death should be grieved and mourned, slowly, deeply. Sometimes, perhaps, the medical advances we've been making- though it has saved countless lives- sometimes result in a superficial preservation of life that harms more than it does good.. Spending our last days at home surrounded by the people we love is truly a lovely way to go.
This is so interesting! However, I can’t help to think our changing relation with religion also has impacted this idea. Since when we knew where our loved ones were ‘going’, it was less scary.
My favourite teacher once told me that you can truly get to know a culture by the way they grieve and how their cemeteries are kept. So he took us to one on our school trip. Totally changed my perspective on the way we grieve in the west!
Here from an insta reel! I’m so glad a read this; It’s comforting to hear about countries outside the west and their traditions and connections to the dead :)
This is amazing. In other countries, cemeteries can be a focal point for activities, much like a park, as I live near a cemetery most people visit like a park to go running and fly kites and have picnics with their dead.
beautiful, so well put