Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

by Justin Nobel

Pope Formosus died in 896. Six months later, his successor, Stephen VI, had his corpse brought to trial for capital crimes. Formosus was found guilty and his cadaver was stripped of its papal vestments, dragged through the streets of Rome and dumped in the Tiber River.

A mentally unstable woman in a bright red coat jumped a barrier and tackled Pope Benedict XVI during Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter's Basilica. Benedict survived the attack but an examination of papal history reveals that strange and horrible deaths are actually quite common. A book has even been written on the topic, The Death of the Popes: Comprehensive accounts, including funerals, burial places, and epitaphs. The following are some of the most disturbing and unknown papal deaths..

Pope Saint Clement I - He was born in the first century A.D., became bishop of Rome and rose to the pontificate during a schism at Corinth. Not much beyond that exists in the written record, but according to legend a riot arose in Rome and a city official named Mamertinus put it down and arrested Clement. The Emperor banished him to Pontus, a city on the shores of the Black Sea, where he was condemned to work in a marble quarry. Clement gained the respect of his fellow convicts and began preaching the word of God. The group took their water from a faraway spring but one day Clement noticed a nearby lamb scraping the soil and took it as a sign that water was below. He dug and sure enough, found a spring. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

The "Serene Urn Compartments" at Nirvana, a luxurious columbarium being constructed in the land-starved city-state of Singapore. Costs will range from $2,988 for a single-urn lot to as much as $26,888 for a double-urn compartment. (Photo courtesy of Nirvana Memorial Garden Pte. Ltd.)

From the outside it looks like a downed spacecraft and on the inside, a Las Vegas casino. There are red carpeted VIP rooms, curved hallways lined with lavender and neon-yellow psychedelic swirls and several statues of Buddha. There are skylights, a café and 40,000 niches. What is it? Nirvana, a “six-star” columbarium currently being constructed in Singapore.

The massive structure will be a luxurious home for the dead in a city-state increasingly short on space. Costs will range from $2,988 for a single-urn lot to as much as $26,888 for a double-urn compartment. “Hallways with sumptuous embellishment and dignity closures remind the visitors of a 5-star hotel, so they can abandon the fear and sadness but instead cherish the memories and remembrance,” reads the Nirvana website.

Singapore is the smallest nation in Southeast Asia, with a land area less than most U.S. counties. The present population is 5 million, and that number is expected to rise by 40 percent over the next half-century.

“It's a spatial competition between the living and the dead,” Lily Kong, a National University of Singapore researcher, recently told the New York Times.

A national law states that bodies must be exhumed after 15 years to make room for new burials. This has led to an entirely new vocation across the country: the grave digger-upper. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Celestis, a Houston-based company, first launched humans, in their cremated form, into space in 1997. Current prices for a Celestis space flight run as low as $695. A spot aboard Virgin Galactic's recently released SpaceShipTwo costs $200,000.

On a stormy December night in the middle of the Mojave Desert, SpaceShipTwo was unveiled. The sleek Virgin Galactic craft, which has been in secret development for two years, can hold six passengers and has windows on the sides and ceiling. By 2012, Virgin hopes it will put the first passenger astronauts into orbit; tickets start at $200,000. The company is billing the craft as the world's first commercial spaceship, but that is not necessarily true. Non astronauts, in cremated form, have been flying through space for more than a decade.

The first craft was an American Pegasus rocket, launched from Grand Canary Island, off the Moroccan coast, on April 21, 1997. The official goal was to put a Spanish satellite into space but bolted to the rocket was a canister with the ashes of 24 people, in separate aluminum capsules. They contained the 1960s drug icon Timothy Leary, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and a four year-old Japanese-American boy who apparently, “loved to talk about the stars.” The post-mortem flight was organized by Celestis, a Houston-based company; the cost for a capsule was $4,800. Read the rest of this entry »