Tagged: death

Helen Keller famously wrote that "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."  She continued: "To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."

The death of a Berkshire County man who died in a canoe accident on the Housatonic River is being ruled an accident.

The Berkshire County District’s attorney’s office has called the death of 21-year-old Rupert Norris Vonbockbrader of Alford a “tragic accident.”

    It has been said that in the long run, we are all dead.

But for some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office.

Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy—which they drank.

From Mozart to Hitler, Rest in Pieces is a book that connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death. Bess Lovejoy is a writer, researcher, and editor based in Seattle.

   Michael Hainey was 6 years old in 1970 when his Uncle came to their home one morning, to tell Michael and his brother that their father was dead. Bob Hainey was just 35. He was the night editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. Bob Hainey had died of a heart attack on a North Side street - as one of the obits put it - while visiting friends.

Over the years, Michael Hainey grew up to be a journalist himself - he's now the deputy editor of GQ - and began to wonder about some of the small differences in the obits between newspapers, and about some of the obliqueness in the accounts of his father's death that he grew up hearing from his uncle and mother.

So, he set out to find the story himself. His new book is After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story.