Tag: death

Sky burial is a ritual that has great religious meaning. Tibetans are encouraged to witness this ritual, to confront death openly and to feel the impermanence of life. They believe that the corpse is nothing more than an empty vessel. The spirit, or the soul, of the deceased has exited the body to be reincarnated into another circle of life. The corpse is offered to the vultures.

It is believed that the vultures are Dakinis. Dakinis are the Tibetan equivalent of angels. In Tibetan, Dakini means “sky dancer”. Dakinis will take the soul into the heavens, which is understood to be a windy place where souls await reincarnation into their next lives. Photos | Information

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace

Saturday died in my arms last night. yesterday i had a feeling it would be that day. i just had a feeling. i have never watched something die before. he wouldn’t eat or drink and just wanted to snuggle, and as soon as he stopped breathing, his teeth clenched and his entire body went stiff. i was really confused and am really fucking sad. he had a nice last day, though. after i came home from the darkroom my dad and i gave him a warm bath in the backyard while he nibbled on apples. then i wrapped him up in a little towel burrito and we walked all around the neighborhood and it sounds stupid but i just showed him all these flowers, because i thought maybe he, in his lil rabbit brain, would think they were really pretty or something. i think he did. and i talked to him a lot yesterday, more than usual. told him about when i first met him, told him about a bunch of nice times we’d had together in case he’d forgotten in his old age. i sound retarded being this sentimental about a rabbit but honestly he was one of my best friends. and when someone or something is there almost your whole life, whether it’s a person, or an animal, or even something dumb like a table or a blanket, you feel it when it leaves. i suppose it was time. but it doesn’t make it easier. he has been there almost my whole life. (14 years! he was insane) it’s crazy. fuck. loved that little buddy. so fucking much.