by Justin Nobel
Nikki Sian-Leigh Aksamit lost her unborn child after a car crash and struggled how to tell her kids what had happened. Her book, "Mommy, what is dead" explains death to pre-schoolers. (Image courtesy of Nikki Sian-Leigh Aksamit)
One day, a car raced through a yellow light and slammed into Nikki Sian-Leigh Aksamit’s vehicle. She was a mother of two and six weeks pregnant. The trauma of the accident eventually killed her unborn child. Her two boys wanted to know what had happened to the baby and Nikki struggled for a way to tell them. Finding no children’s book fit for the task, she wrote her own, “Mommy, what is dead?” Digital Dying recently spoke with Nikki on how to talk to children about death.
How did you tell your kids that your unborn child had died?
Rook, my four year-old, knew right away. “Mom, what’s wrong?” he asked. I said, “The baby died.” He said, “What do you mean it died. Why did it have to die?” I said, “The accident caused mommy to lose the baby.” He was just so full of questions. I was at a loss for words. My husband and I answered him the best we could, but I don’t think he got it. Two weeks later, I wrote out questions and what I wanted the pictures to be with a magic marker and construction paper. It probably took a good month and half to finish the book. Then I read it to him. It was just my scribbles, a way to purge myself, but he got it right away. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Joe Rollino, who once lifted 475 pounds with his teeth, was recently struck dead by a minivan at the age of 104. There are 60,000 plus centenarians in the United States but there are only 75 validated supercentenarians on the planet.
Mighty Joe Rollino was struck by a minvan while crossing the street in Brooklyn, earlier this month. At a nearby hospital, the man considered by some as “for his size, the strongest man that ever lived”—he lifted 475 pounds with his teeth and once pressed 600 plus pounds with a single finger—was pronounced dead. He was 104.
Rollino was a centenarian, a rank reserved for those who live above 100. There may be 60,000 or more of them in the United States. A far more elite status is that of supercentenarian, those people age 110 and up. The concept is so new it is not in most dictionaries, and according to the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), which catalogues and verifies claims, there are only 20 verified supercentenarians in the U.S., and just 75 on the entire planet. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Bubonic plague victims exhibit the classic "buboes" that gave the disease its name. Many who died from plague were buried in mass graves that are disturbingly similar to those being dug right now outside Port-au-Prince for victims of the Haiti earthquake.
Dead bodies from Haiti’s earthquake are being piled into dump trucks and unloaded in mass graves outside Port-au-Prince. This burial method dates back to the Middle Ages but according to the field manual, Management of dead bodies after disasters, produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross, burying bodies in mass graves can be traumatizing for survivors and lead to legal troubles later on, as family members seek to retrieve loved ones. The manual also notes an important misconception, one still being posited by some newscasters in Haiti: “The bodies of people who have died in a disaster do not cause epidemics…In most cases, those who have survived are more likely to be spreading diseases.”
It was fear of disease that led to some of the largest mass graves in history, those dug across Europe during the Bubonic Plague. A particularly virulent outbreak, called the Black Death, killed one-quarter to one-half of the European population in the mid-14th century. Flea-infested rats are believed to have spread the plague from the Gobi Desert to the Crimea, Constantinople and eventually all of Europe. Bouts of plague continued to erupt in the centuries to follow, with one of the last ones occurring in London, in 1665. In The Decameron, a bloody chronicle of the plague in 14th century Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio describes a scene similar to those presently being witnessed throughout Port-au-Prince.
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by Justin Nobel
Frankie Yale was murdered by Al Cappone's gunmen. His Brooklyn funeral was the most ostentatious in mob history, featuring a $15,000 silver casket and 110 Cadillac limousines. One woman bolted from the crowd and spit on the gleaming coffin; Yale’s thugs had murdered her husband while in bed some years earlier.
With a heavy police presence and a bevy of gawking onlookers, a golden coffin was carried through the streets of Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood earlier this week. Inside was the body of 42 year-old Nick Rizzuto, gunned down in broad daylight while standing beside a black Mercedes. His father Vito, considered Canada’s most powerful mafia boss, is presently in a Colorado prison on racketeering charges related to three mob murders.
For Montreal, it was a noteworthy funerary event, but as crime family funerals go, the funeral procession was uneventful and the end for Nick was swift and unexpected. Mob deaths can be much worse. Salvatore Maranzano, a Sicilian-born New York mobster known as the “boss of bosses” was shot and stabbed to death in September 1931 in his Park Avenue office by four thugs posing to be detectives, a murder arranged by Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. Carmine “Cigar” Galante, acting boss of the Bonanno crime family in the late 1970s was showered with bullets in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn with a cigar in his mouth, having just polished off a plate of spaghetti. And then there is the unlucky end of Frankie Yale. Read the rest of this entry »
by Justin Nobel
Catherine de' Medici at a funeral in the 1560s. The Romans first wore black at funerals and for some reason the Western World has followed ever since. Some cultures wear purple or yellow.
“Wear Black in sunlight and you will roast as the Heat VIBRATIONS absorb easily. Hence Black is the most absurd colour for funerals & Hospitals: It attracts all sorts of Dark moods and energies and influences just when you need extra protection…In certain contrasts Black garments act as a Vacuum cleaner for Bad vibrations…MANY WOMEN WEAR BLACK HEAD TO TOE, THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS.”
These words come from Samuel Sagan, who pasted the lines in an email he dropped Funeralwise earlier this week. Sagan, author of books such as Bleeding Sun, Entity Possession and the Atlantean Secrets tetralogy, comes at it from an odd angle but raises a good question: why wear black at funerals? Read the rest of this entry »
