Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro was posting details about drug traffickers to Twitter and a social media website called “Nuevo Laredo en vivo”. Her body and severed head was found last September, one of 46 journalists killed in 2011 according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mukarram Khan Atif was number two. The second journalist killed so far in 2012, that is. He was gunned down while praying at a mosque in Shabqadar, in northern Pakistan. A terrorist group called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility. Atif worked for a Pakistani TV channel and served as a stringer for Voice of America. “We have been warning him to stop his propaganda against us in the foreign media,” said a TTP spokesman. “He did not include our version in his stories.” The spokesman warned there were several more journalists on their hit-list.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 895 journalists have been killed since the group began counting journalist deaths in 1992. In 2011, 46 journalists were killed, including the well-publicized deaths of two of the West's most talented war photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, killed while covering the uprising in Libya. But amidst the barrage of deaths occurring each day across the world's hot spots, many journalist deaths go unnoticed. Here are some of the more haunting ones from 2011...

Rafiq Tagi, freelance journalist in Azerbaijan – On November 19 Tagi was returning to his home in Baku, the capitol of Azerbaijan, when an unidentified man ran up behind him and without saying anything stabbed him seven times. Tagi underwent surgery for a damaged spleen but was recovering well and in stable condition when on November 21 he suddenly died. He was 61. Just ten minutes before his death doctors had checked on him and found him to be fine. His colleagues suspect foul play. In May 2007, he was convicted of inciting religious hatred and sentenced to three years in prison in connection with an article he published in an independent Azerbaijani newspaper. It stated that Islam was hampering the country's economic and political progress. Last October, he published an article criticizing Iranian authorities for their theologically based policies and suppression of human rights. The Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan denied involvement in Tagi's death. But the Iranian cleric, Mohammed Fazel Lankarani, published a statement saying that Tagi had received a “just sentence”.

Other Great Reads: What's the proper etiquette for a funeral?

Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, social media user in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – Castro's headless body was found along a road near Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican city on the Texas border and drug trafficking hot spot. She worked at a local newspaper there but also posted details about drug trafficker movements and drug gang lookout locations to Twitter and a social media website called “Nuevo Laredo en vivo”, using the pseudonym, “La NenaDLaredo” (The girl from Laredo). Her severed head was found on a large stone piling, with a note beside it that read: “Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites, I'm The Laredo Girl, and I'm here because of my reports…” It is uncertain how her killers discovered her identity. According to CPJ, it is the first time a journalist has been killed directly because of something published to a social media site. She was 39.

Other Great Reads: Narco lives means narco-wives and narco-tombs

Hadi al-Mahdi, Iraqi radio host – Al-Mahdi was shot in his Baghdad home by an assailant using a pistol with a silencer. He had spent 18 years in exile and returned to Iraq in 2008, to live with his wife and three children. He hosted the show, “To Whomever Listens”, which aired on independent Radio Demozy. The show covered social and political issues and he often criticized politicians, including the former prime minister Ayad Allawi, and the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Mahdi regularly organized pro-democracy demonstrations via Facebook and publicized threats that he received. During Arab Spring protests Al-Mahdi and four other journalists were picked up by security forces and driven to the headquarters of the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, according to a Washington Post article. There they were beaten, given electric shocks and threatened with rape, then asked to sign a statement saying they were not tortured.

Growing fearful of his safety, about two months ago Al-Mahdi stopped his radio show. He told a friend that he believed Prime Minister Maliki had assigned mercenaries to stab him on the street. The week he was killed he had been preparing for a pro-democracy protest in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. “I will take part in the demonstrations,” he wrote, in a post on his Facebook page left just hours before he was killed. “The political process embodies a national, economic, and political failure. It deserves to change, and we deserve a better government. In short, I do not represent any political party or any other side, but rather the miserable reality in which we live.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced some 3-4,000 widows, 1,000 more come from deaths that occur on American bases and suicides. American Widow Project is reaching out to them.

Taryn Davis married the love of her life and was about to finish college, then she got the worst news of her life. Her husband Michael had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. There was no organization dedicated to addressing the concerns of military widows, so she founded one: American Widow Project. Digital Dying spoke with Taryn about losing her husband, the stigma of the word widow and why becoming one can actually lead to happiness.

Explain the stigma of being a widow?

People look at us like we're handicapped. The word widow used to make me think of a 90 year-old woman on a rocking chair living outside a cave. Our society has put such a horrible stigma on the word that people don't even like to use it. I was 21 when Michael was killed. I never thought of a college student as being connected to such a word. After many nights of crying and figuring out how the hell I was going to get through this I realized the biggest thing was just accepting that title. Death and grief and sorrow are all things connected to the word widow but that word also represents Michael's sacrifice, it represents my sacrifice and it represents my survival.

How'd you find out Michael was going to war?

Michael and I met in marching band at Texas State University, I played the clarinet and he played the trombone, we were little geeks. His junior year he said was joining the Army. What I knew about the war was what I saw on the news before I watched shows like The Simpsons. It totally blindsided me. He had showed me what love was. It was scary to see him go off. Even his family was saying, ‘How about the Navy? How about the Air Force? Why infantry? Why Army?' He said, ‘I want to feel a challenge in life. I want to feel passion for something and I think taking the hard route is the way to do it.'

When was the last time you saw him?

Michael surprised me on R & R. We spent a lot of days just sitting with his family by the river, or on the patio with a Dos Equis and their dog. About a month and a half later, on May 21, 2007, Michael was killed. I had talked to him that morning. He didn't tell me what was going on and I didn't ask but he had to get off early so I knew they must have been about to go on a mission. I know this sounds cheesy but I told him I loved him more than life itself. He said, ‘That's really sweet babe, I love you too.' …And then I was a widow.

How'd you find out about his death?

I was at my parent's house and the phone rang, it was my neighbor. He couldn't tell me why but he said I needed to go home right away, there were people who needed to talk to me. I just kind of dropped the phone. It was a 10 minute drive, the longest 10 minutes of my life. I saw them standing next to an unmarked car. They gave me a line every military wife knows. I just started dry heaving. I started screaming that there was no God. I had this Johnny Cash-June Carter idea of our love and I was just waiting to die. I thought, Johnny Cash died really soon after June, let's get this going.

Other Great Reads: President Obama and the History of Condolence Letters

What led you to start American Widow Project?

After Michael died people were constantly at my house. I was handed a booklet called Day's Ahead, really not an appropriate title. You don't have time to yourself until after the funeral. Like with planning a wedding, you focus so much on the wedding then the wedding is over and you realize you don't have anything to do. And instead of being left with a new husband you're left with an urn. There are support organizations. In World War II, a 19 year-old widow started an organization called Gold Star Wives of America. They are now a 501(c)(3) but really work on the legal issues. There is another organization called TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors). These resources are for any type of loss and involve going to seminars with thousands of family members. They have helped many people, but for me, as a 21 year-old widow, the last thing I wanted to do was be sitting in a plastic chair with l,300 people and having some counselor tell me what to do. We're really the first and only group that focuses exclusively on today's widows.

How do you contact the widows?

We've reached out to some 920 widows in the past three or four years but there's more, at least 3-4,000 widows from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and at least 1,000 more widows from deaths that occur on American bases and suicides. We've been trying to get the names of the spouses of the deceased from the Department of Defense but it has been tough. We don't have a PR company, it's really just me. Our facebook page has 25,000 people, a lot of woman share their stories there or through other social media and when they're ready attend one of our events. We use text messaging to let people know about events and we have a 1-800 line. I have had non-military widows call too, people just wanting to talk. No matter how you lost your spouse, grief is universal.

Other Great Reads: How to Deal With Grief After a Death

How has becoming a widow actually inspired you?

Widows have this tool no one else has. To know that life is short, that life can be taken away at the drop of a dime. Most people don't recognize that until it's too late. We try to turn the tables, tell people they have this knowledge. Our widows have gone on to write books, go back to school, get pilot licenses after their husbands have been shot down in helicopters, do all these amazing things. It's kind of crappy knowledge, that you have to lose your soul mate to gain it, but use it to your advantage. Use it to follow your dream. Use it to push outside your comfort zone and do the things you're scared to do. Knowing that tomorrow might not be there makes you love the people you love harder and try things you may have been putting off. Michael and I had always wanted to travel, we never even had a honeymoon. After he died I vowed to once a year take a once in a life time trip. I've backpacked across Spain, done England, Ireland, parasailing, skydiving four times, surfing. The moment you put yourself outside your comfort zone is the moment you truly start living. And for widows, grief and pain can be a comfort zone.

What's the future of the American Widow Project?

I want this to be an organization that will be there if God forbid there is another generation of war widows. People always ask me, ‘What are you going to do after the war ends?' I tell them, ‘I'm still going to be a military widow.' That's the most important time, we'll be out of the public's eye. Widows are going to need more support than ever.

Up until the early 19th century British females convicted of treason were burnt at the stake. Sticks and straw were piled up to the level of the calves, then lit.

The last criminal hanging in Britain was in 1964 but according to an opinion poll taken after the recent riots 65 percent of Brits are in favor of bringing it back. “I want hanging, or some form of execution, brought back, for criminals who kill police officers in pursuit of their crimes and terrorists who kill in pursuit of their political aims,” said Brian Binley, a British MP. Although his words seem extreme, it was just 200 years ago that England executed men convicted of treason by hanging drawing and quartering. And although the US is criticized as the only first world nation that still enables execution, historically cruel and unusual forms of execution were common across the world.

SUICIDE MACHINES AND OTHER DELIVERANCE CONTRAPTIONS

Hanging drawing and quartering was one of the most brutal old ways of execution. The criminal was tied to a wood frame, dragged behind a horse to the place they were to be killed, put in a noose and hung until they were almost dead. Then they were laid out upon a table, disemboweled and castrated. The criminal was still alive at this point and their entrails were burnt right in front of their eyes. They were then beheaded and their body cut into quarters. Females convicted of treason were burnt at the stake. Sticks and straw were piled up to the level of the calves, then lit. First the legs would burn, then the hands, torso, forearms, breasts, upper chest and face. Usually victims did not die until the head caught fire.

In China, a form of execution known as ling chi was practiced until the early twentieth century. The criminal was tied to a wooden frame set in a public space and flesh was then methodically removed by slicing it off with a knife. Usually, the arms, legs and breasts were cut. Then the victim was beheaded and stabbed in the heart. The practice, known also as slow slicing, lingering death or death by a thousand cuts was reserved for especially severe crimes, such as treason or killing one's parents. Not only did the punishment serve to publicly humiliate the criminal and provide them with a slow painful death, it even served to punish them in the afterlife. The Confucian principle of filial piety looks down upon the altering of one's body, thus a victim of ling chi would not be whole in the afterlife.

CHINESE FUNERAL CUSTOMS

One of the cruelest and most creative means of execution ever developed has to be the brazen bull, common in Ancient Greece. It was a giant hollow brass bull with a door on the side just large enough for a man to enter. Once locked inside the victim would be set on fire. In the head were a series of tubes and stops designed to amplify his screams and make them sound like the roar of a bull. The device was conceived by a 6th century brass worker named Perilaus of Athens and offered to Phalaris, Tyrant of Agrigentum, as a gift. Upon giving the gift Perilaus told Phalaris that the victim's screams “will come to you through the pipes as the tenderest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings”. This so disgusted Phalaris that he tricked Perilaus into entering the bull, deciding that the invention's creator would be its first victim. “I loathed the thought of such ingenious cruelty, and resolved to punish the artificer in kind,” stated Phalaris. “When he was inside I closed the aperture, and ordered a fire to be kindled. ‘Receive,' I cried, ‘the due reward of your wondrous art: let the music-master be the first to play.'”

And the list goes on. The breaking wheel was a medieval device in which a criminal was stretched between the spokes of a cart wheel; as it spun, a heavy metal bar delivered furious blows to the body. Flaying, a very ancient form of execution, involved removing the skin from the body with a sharp knife. Necklacing, practiced in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s and 1990s, involved placing a rubber tire filled with gasoline over the arms and chest of the victim then setting it on fire. Scaphism, an Ancient Persian execution method, involved strapping a person across a rowboat then forcing them to ingest milk and honey until they developed severe diarrhea. Honey was then rubbed over the body to attract insects and the boat was left to float on a stagnant pond in the sun.

“The defenseless individual's feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed (and increasingly gangrenous) flesh,” reads a website devoted to cruel forms of execution. “Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock.”

Condolence letters arose during the Civil War. With no relatives around dying soldiers were attended to by their comrades. They watched them die, dug their graves and wrote letters to their families explaining their deaths.

In 2009, two weeks into his second tour in Iraq, Army Specialist Chancellor Keesling committed suicide. His family decorated a wall in his Indiana home as a tribute to him. They placed his uniform and the flag from his burial service, leaving a space for the expected condolence letter from President Obama. But it never came. A dated policy disallowed soldiers that committed suicide from receiving them. Keesling's father wrote President Obama and the Army chief of staff requesting the policy be changed. His son's suicide was a result of what he was exposed to during war, he said, not because he was weak. Earlier this month, President Obama reversed the policy. “It is simply unacceptable," said the president, "for the United States to be sending the message to these families that somehow their loved ones' sacrifices are less important.”

HOW TO DEAL WITH A SUICIDE

Condolence letters arose during the Civil War, a time when the deathbed was a sacred place. “Family circle closed round its loved one to offer comfort and reassurance,” says Civil War enthusiast Mark Dunkelman, in an essay on Civil War condolences titled, With a Trembling Hand and an Aching Heart. “The war irrevocably disrupted those conventions.” With no relatives around, dying soldiers were attended to by their comrades. They watched them die, dug their graves and wrote letters to their families explaining their deaths. The letters followed a formula: offer sympathy, discuss money matters, give details of the passing.

Some were more creative. The 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, a regiment from Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties, lost 232 men in the war. The families of every single one likely received a condolence letter but only about a dozen still exist. One is to the family of 22 year old Private Edward Shults, of Ellicottville, New York. He died at the Odd-Fellow's Hospital, in Washington, D. C. on the morning of February 15, 1863. “I thought you might be gratified to hear more of the circumstances of his sickness and death,” read the condolence letter, written by an attendant named Andrew Kemmisen. “It was painfully interesting to hear him pray and sing and shout…[we] did all we could to sooth his pathway to the grave; but we trust he had a friend that was better to him than father or mother, brother or sister.”

BURYING THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS OF BYGONE WARS

Over time the tradition was formalized and the condolence letter became an official note sent from the Office of the President. But letters went the other way too. After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy received an estimated one and a half million condolence letters. Most were destroyed, but 15,000 made their way to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts, where they sat, untouched, for more than four decades. Recently, they were revealed to the world again, in a book written by New Hampshire historian Ellen Fitzpatrick entitled, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation.

“There were letters from dairy farmers,” said Fitzpatrick. “There were letters from children. There were letters from Republicans. There were letters from Native Americans on reservations. There were many, many letters from African Americans. Some of them were just scrolled on a little scrap of papers in pencils. Some of them were written on elegant stationary.” She divided them into three categories, letters that talked about the day of the assassination and how people responded, letters that reflected on politics, society and general views of the presidency and letters in which people tried to console Mrs. Kennedy, often reflecting upon their own experiences with grief and loss.

The youngest writer was a seven year old named Tony Davis whose letter simply said, “I'm sorry he is dead.” One of the most moving letters was also from a youngster, a 14 year old named Tommy Smith who had seen the President and his wife in Dallas just before the assassination. “Dear Mrs. Kennedy,” it began. “I know the grief you bear. I bear that same grief. I am a Dallasite. I saw you yesterday. I hope to see you again. I saw Mr. Kennedy yesterday. I'll never see him again. I'm very disturbed because I saw him a mere 2 minutes before that fatal shot was fired. I couldn't believe it when I heard over the radio 5 minutes later. I felt like I was in a daze. To Dallas, time has halted. Everyone is shocked and disturbed. My prayers to you, a sympathetic, prayerful, and disturbed Dallasite, Tommy Smith.”

As has happened with Osama bin Laden, revenge often begets killing, which can lead to more revenge and more killing. One of the most incredible stories of revenge killings comes from the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

He killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 2001, earlier this month we killed him, ten days after that his followers attacked recruits at a paramilitary training center in Pakistan, killing 80 men.

“We have done this to avenge the Abbottabad incident,” said a Taliban spokesman.

The men who lost their lives in this revenge killing were part of the Frontier Constabulary, an ill-equipped force that has been given the challenging task of confronting Pakistan's Al Qaeda element. The group receives US funding. The men had just completed a six month training and were about to go on break. They were gathered at the training center's main gate and were in the process of filing into minivans for the return trip home to their families, many bore gifts. They were in high spirits, said one recruit. Some were seated inside the vans, others were still loading luggage atop the vehicles. The two suicide bombers wore explosive vests packed with ball bearings and nails and detonated their devices one after the other. At least ten vans were destroyed, showering the scene with shards of metal, glass and blood. “I cannot forget the cries of my friends before they died,” one 21 year old survivor told reporters.

LEARN ABOUT THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF GRIEF

And if he truly does not forget, will he too seek vengeance? Will there be another blast sometime in the not too distant future, and more bloodshed? Revenge may be sweet, but it is also bitter and bloody and as of late, an increasingly common topic in the news.

In Libya, the bound and gagged bodies of Colonel Qaddafi's internal security officials have been turning up in morgues as well as ditches on the side of the road. Many people suspect rebels may be settling old scores. In the past several decades numerous Libyans were jailed without trial, others died in prison or were murdered outright by the government. Many people still remember the killing of a Benghazi man named Mohamed al-Hami in 1996, after murdering him security forces reportedly crucified him then paraded his body around the city in the back of a pickup truck. “The killings,” noted a New York Times article from last week, referring to the gagged and bound bodies turning up across the country, “appear to be rooted in revenge.”

Last Sunday in East Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets on mourners attending the funeral of a 16 year old Palestinian boy said to have been shot in the stomach by a Jewish settler during a dispute. As mourners marched to a mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, they chanted, “God is greatest” (Allahu Akbar) and “With our blood and our soul, we shall sacrifice for the martyr.” In an attempt to quell the possibility of revenge, Israeli forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd. Israel has been on high alert for vengeance killings recently, last week marked the 63rd anniversary of Israel's occupation of Palestine.

READ ABOUT MULTICULTURAL, OR "ADAPTIVE" FUNERALS

Revenge killings take place in the US too. Earlier this month in New Orleans, a 26 year old named Derrick François knocked on the front door of his good childhood friend, Chandrick Harris, whose mother answered the door. She didn't think twice about letting Derrick in. He proceeded to her son's bedroom and shot him dead. It was revenge; just the day before, Derrick's younger brother was murdered by a man he believed to be connected to Chandrick.

One of the most incredible stories of revenge comes from a 2008 New Yorker article by anthropologist Jared Diamond which tracks a complex case from the highlands of Papua New Guinea. It began when a pig from one tribe trampled through a garden belonging to someone from a rival tribe. When the garden owner demanded compensation the pig owner refused, so he assaulted him. The epic revenge saga that followed lasted over four years and left 17 people dead. Diamond juxtaposes this story with that of his late father-in-law, a Polish Jew named Jozef whose entire family was killed during World War II. When Jozef returns as a soldier to his village he is led to the man who had been in charge of the group that killed his parents. Handed a pistol and encouraged by those around him to seek revenge, Jozef cannot bring himself to do it, an action he regretted till the day he died: “Every day, still, before going to sleep, I think of my mother's death, and of my having let her murderer go.”

Digital Dying spoke with Islam historian and death expert Leor Halevi to see if Osama bin Laden's corpse was handled correctly and find out just what awaits him in the afterlife.

Osama bin Laden's body was placed on a flat board and slid into the sea, was that the proper thing to do? Will he attain bliss on the seabed or rot in purgatory? And what of those 72 virgins promised to all martyrs, will bin Laden get them? To find out, Digital Dying spoke with Leor Halevi, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University whose 2007 book, “Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society” explores everything from funerary wailing and corpse washing to the torture of the spirit in the grave.

Bin Laden's body was washed and covered in a white sheet, a prayer was said then the body was slid overboard, was this the right way to handle the corpse according to Islamic tradition?

One of the bizarre things about all this is bin Laden died in battle but—the burial at sea aside—he was apparently granted more or less the funeral ceremony that pertains to ordinary Muslims who experience death in ordinary circumstances. In Islamic law, the type of burial one gets depends on how one dies. The burial prescribed for those who died on the battlefield is not the same as the burial dictated for people who die ordinary deaths. The rituals are actually totally different. Someone who dies in battle does not have to be buried in a shroud, and no one has to say a prayer.

READ ABOUT CALIFORNIA'S BURIAL AT SEA BOOM

So did the US mess up, was their burial an insult?

I think it is clear the US did not try to humiliate him in burial. In fact, they have insisted that they did it properly, so even though maritime burial is very, very unusual, it's obvious that no slight was intended. But that doesn't mean that people might not take offense and view it as something not normally done for Muslims.

What's actually happening to bin Laden's spirit right now at the bottom of the sea?

For Muslims, his fate in the afterlife depends on what type of death they believe he died. The state of his body is irrelevant, theologically speaking, for those who believe he attained martyrdom. Martyrs are given new bodies in paradise the moment they die, and they enjoy a blessed existence. Muslims can gain the status of martyrdom not only through death on the battlefield, but also by dying in horrible ways: in childbirth, for instance, or due to a building collapsing on top of them. People who die in these ways also get new bodies in paradise. But the spirits of Muslims who die an ordinary death are more or less stuck with their bodies until the resurrection. And they can have a pretty miserable time in the grave. Just think of what happens to bodies in death, they decompose, bacteria get them. It's not very nice. But if Muslims live a sinless life then the torture of the grave, as this punishment in the afterlife is known, does not really apply. Even if they died an ordinary death, their sojourn in this period between death and the resurrection is far more pleasant.

READ ABOUT HOW DIFFERENT RELIGIONS DEAL WITH DEATH

If martyrs get new bodies immediately upon death, then it seems it would not matter where you buried them?

That's a good question, and it depends if you ask from an emotional, a political or a theological perspective. So, theologically speaking, it wouldn't matter, but in other respects, I think it would.

Will bin Laden get the 72 virgins?

Someone who considers bin Laden a martyr might take that as a corollary. But Muslims who do not consider bin Laden a martyr would disagree. How bin Laden is ranked in the afterlife will depend, of course, mostly on politics and ideology. But the recent disclosure that he died without a weapon in hand will also play a factor in discussions about this issue.

What's the history of burial at sea within Islam?

Burial at sea is connected to the sea voyages in the Middle Ages, and discussion in Islamic law goes back to the 8th century. There was a fairly robust commerce in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in premodern times. Merchants traded silk, slaves, ceramics, gold, mostly luxury goods. In Baghdad, ships arrived from all parts of the world bringing coveted foreign wares. Voyages across the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean could take several weeks and even months. Sailors tried to hug the coast, but that was not always possible. They were sometimes out at sea for months. If someone died on board, keeping a corpse could become unbearable. Something had to be done. Do you try to hang on to the decomposing corpse? Do you dump it? Tow it? Store it in a compartment? These questions all came up. That's why medieval jurists addressed the eventuality of burial at sea.

Sir Edward Downes, a British conductor, and his wife Lady Joan Downes traveled to Switzerland to end their lives with the assisted dying group Dignitas in 2009. Other “death tourists” have followed, igniting a continent-wide debate on assisted suicide.

In July of 2009, Lady Joan Downes, the wife of famous English opera conductor Sir Edward Downes, sent a letter to her family explaining she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and would not be seeking treatment. “It has been a happy and interesting life and I have no regrets,” the letter stated. A few weeks later she and her husband traveled to Zurich, Switzerland where they paid $11,000 to end their lives in an apartment operated by an assisted dying group called Dignitas. The couple took an antiemitic to prevent nausea then drank fruit juice spiked with Nembutal, a central nervous system depressant which brings on drowsiness and sleep. Their breathing became shallow, they entered a coma and within half an hour they were dead.

Twenty three Britons traveled to Switzerland to die at Dignitas last year, one of four places in Switzerland where sick people can end their lives. And 400 a year do, about one-third of them foreigners. A British law against assisted suicide carries with it a prison sentence of up to 14 years. But change is in the air. “The current law does not match the requirements of the 21st century,” Pauline Smith, the end-of-life care lead for Britain's West Midlands region, stated a few weeks ago. “If you can afford to go to Switzerland that's fine but if you can't, you are stuck within a system that doesn't really allow you to talk about it, never mind have access to it.”

Even family members who help pay for a loved one's trip to Switzerland to die are culpable under the current law. Last year, the British Home Office released a statement to travelers: “Section 2(1) of the Suicide Act 1961 makes it an offence in this country to aid, abet, counsel or procure somebody to commit suicide…we believe that the offence under section 2(1) is committed even where the suicide occurs abroad.”

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland but illegal across much of the rest of Europe (only the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium allow it), which has led to a boom in “death tourism”, people traveling to Switzerland to die. As of 2008, 840 people had ended their lives with Dignitas and hundreds more have died at Switzerland's three other assisted dying facilities. Some Swiss politicians worry that their nation's bucolic image is being tarnished, they aim to stem the flow by heavily taxing death tourists, or making assisted suicide illegal. “We have no interest in being attractive for suicide tourism,” the Swiss justice minister told reporters in 2009.

Critics claim Switzerland's assisted suicide law is weak and that the industry is unregulated. Under Swiss law, assisted suicides can only be prosecuted if it can be proved they are “motivated by self-interest”. Dignitas has faced criticism over everything from their fees to their means (for a time, helium was used instead of Nembutal ingestion, but was stopped because it caused shaking and twitching) to the sometimes sordid places where people die.

One law proposed by the Swiss cabinet last year calls for an outright ban on assisted suicide. Another is more moderate, allowing assisted suicide to continue but demanding tighter regulations. Patients would need to obtain two medical opinions proving their illness was incurable and probably fatal within months. Doctors would also have to verify that the dying person had the mental capacity to declare their desire to die and that they had held this wish for some time. Assisted dying groups would have to provide better records, a measure meant to stop groups from profiting on patients desire to die. Critics also want assisted suicide to be restricted to the terminally ill and not be available to chronically or mentally ill individuals. “Assisted suicide is a death project,” explained one Swiss official. “I support life projects.”

Daniel Gall, a French voice-over actor, traveled to Switzerland to be with his 81 year-old sister who said she could no longer face the Alzheimer's she was suffering from. She, and her 86 year-old husband, died in a Dignitas apartment in January of 2008. Gall was appalled by the setting and came away feeling queasy about the idea of assisted suicide for the non-terminally ill. “It seemed like a factory,” he said. “It was an awful, ugly place…Everyone should have the right to decide about his death. But it shouldn't be possible to help people who are not sick die. Assisted suicide should be a last resort.”

Hunger strikes have become a powerful method of political protest, occasionally strikers actually succeed in starving. Santhara, the Jain practice of fasting to death, is done for religious purposes.

Dorothy and Armond Rudolph, both in their nineties, were recently evicted. The Rudolphs, who had met at church in 1941 and were living at an assisted living facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico decided to stop eating and drinking in order to hasten their deaths. “Life is miserable,” Dorothy told reporters. “You name it, I've had it.” Armond was suffering from spinal stenosis, a painful narrowing of the spine; both were in the early stages of dementia and had increasing mobility problems.

The facility told police the Rudolph's were attempting suicide and terminated the couple's lease. Their children moved them into hospice care, where they carried out their intentions. “It's not suicide,” said son Neil Rudolph. “It's controlled death. They have the right to stop eating and drinking.” Last week, Dorothy and Armond both died. Fasting to death is an uncommon way to go in the US but that's not the case in other parts of the world, where the practice occurs as either a sanctioned religious act, or a defiant political one.

Jainism, a religion with millions of followers in northern India and sects worldwide, advocates non-violence toward all living things. All life has karma, Jain philosophy holds, and consuming even say the seeds of a strawberry or the bacteria in water is akin to murder. Devout Jains eat a strictly vegetarian diet, destroying as little life as possible. The surest way to reduce one's consumption of life is through the process of Santhara, or fasting to death.

The Press Trust of India reports that 240 Indian Jains carry out Santhara each year. The practice dates back to 250 B.C., according to rare Jain manuscripts preserved at the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, a museum in the Indian state of Gujarat. A 2,000 year-old Jain scripture called the “Samadhi-maran-payanna” states that between 250 B.C. and 700 A.D. there were 24 cases of Santhara. From 700-1650 A.D. there were 35 cases, from 1800-1992, 37, and from 1993-2003, there were 350 cases.

One highly publicized recent case was that of Vimla Devi Bhansali, a 60 year-old woman from the Rajasthan city of Jaipuir who was suffering from an incurable brain tumor as well as liver cancer. A Jain, she desired to end her life by Santhara—“I want to give up my body before it gives me up,” she declared. Bhansali fasted for 13 days and on the 14th, she died. While suicide is regarded as a hasty act of desperation and considered immoral in the eyes of Jainism and illegal by Indian law, Santhara is not. “Santhara is a spiritual concept where a person tunes his or her soul with the divinity before voluntarily relinquishing one's body,” said one Indian scholar in a 2006 Express Indian article.

Political fasting deaths are not always so elegant. In pre-Christian Ireland, hunger strikers would lay themselves down to die upon the doorsteps of their offender's homes, a custom known as Troscadh or Cealachan. The early 20th century suffragist Marion Dunlop, who was imprisoned for throwing small stones through a window on London's Downing Street and refusing to pay the resulting fine, carried out a hunger strike in prison and eventually had to be force fed. Gandhi engaged in several hunger strikes, protesting British rule of India. In 1981, Bobby Sands and nine other Irish republican paramilitary prisoners died in a hunger strike protesting Britain's treatment of Northern Irish prisoners. Imprisoned Cuban dissident and poet Pedro Luis Boitel died after a 53 day hunger strike in 1972. More recently, Cuban psychologist Guillermo Farinas has carried out nearly two dozen hunger strikes in protest against various forms of censorship by the Cuban regime, including a strike in 2006 against internet censorship.

One of the most politically charged fasting deaths of the last century was that of Rasaiah Parthipan, aka Lt. Col. Thileepan. Born in Jaffna, Sri Linka he joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in their fight against Indian colonization and became one of the group's leaders in the Jaffna peninsula. On September 15, 1987 he began fasting, declaring he wanted Tamil prisoners released and India to stop policing and colonizing his country. He died 12 days later.

“I am confident that our people will, one day, achieve their freedom,” Thileepan stated before dying. “It gives me great satisfaction and contentment that I am fulfilling a national responsibility to the nation.”

Mohamed Bouaziz's self-immolation in Tunisia brought about dramatic political change. The practice has roots with Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Quakers in America and Christians in Siberia.

On December 17, 2010 a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouaziz set himself on fire, just weeks later the country's government was toppled. Seeing a human body erupt in flames is just as disturbing today as it was in 1963 when Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc sat still in Saigon while fellow monks doused him in gasoline and set him ablaze, an event which inspired copy-cat self-immolators around the world. But the practice by no means began there.

JAPAN'S MUMMY MONKS RISE AGAIN

The first incidence of self-immolation can be traced to first century China, when an official trying to induce rain during a drought set himself ablaze. The practice appears more prominently with the story of Sati, a Hindu goddess of marital felicity and longevity. Sati's father was a powerful king named Daksha, who had grand designs for his daughter. But Sati had become utterly devoted to the Hindu God Shiva. As she grew older marriage proposals rained down from rich and valiant kings but Sati pined for nobody but Shiva. To win his regard she fled her father's palace and hid in the forest, where she lived an austere life, eating only one bilva leaf a day. Eventually she even gave that up.

Noticing her incredible resolve, Shiva agreed to marry her. Sati returned home elated but her father was furious. The wedding was held but Sati's father cut her off from the family. He hosted a party and invited all the Gods but Sati and Shiva. She went anyway, thinking his omission a mistake, but she was received coldly by the king. Enraged and humiliated, Sati recited a prayer, requesting that sometime in the future she be born to a father she would be able to respect. Invoking her yogic powers, she then set herself on fire.

Just as happened in Tunisia, revolt was the result. The maddened Shiva created a pair of ferocious creatures that murdered virtually everyone who had been present at the party, Sati's father was decapitated. And as has happened with Mohamed Bouaziz, Sati's actions were imitated. References to self-immolation are peppered throughout Hindi and Buddhist texts, but one of the most interesting examples actually comes from Christianity.

HINDU FUNERAL CUSTOMS

The Soshigateli, or self-burners, were devout Russian Christians who regarded death by fire as “the only means of purification from the sins and pollution of the world.” Between 1855 and 1875 groups of soshigateli numbering 15 to 100 burned themselves in large pits or dry buildings filled with brushwood. “About the year 1867 no less than seventeen hundred are reported to have voluntarily chosen death by fire near Tumen, in the Eastern Ural Mountains,” says Charles William Heckethorn, in his book, The secret societies of all ages and countries. These Christians were actually mimicking a form of self-immolation called “fire baptism” practiced by a 17th century Russian sect of Christianity known as the Old Believers.

A year after Quang Duc's self-immolation, a Tamil laborer named Chinnaswami set himself ablaze in India to protest against the encroachment of the Hindi language. A year later, with Hindi set to replace English as the official language of India, five more Tamils followed in his footsteps. In 1965, an elderly American Quaker woman set herself on fire to protest America's occupation of Vietnam and several months later a Quaker man, disturbed by the war, set himself on fire outside the Pentagon. Just days afterward a Catholic man who had once trained for monastic life assumed the lotus position and set himself on fire in front of the United Nations—North Vietnam celebrated the event, issuing a stamp in his honor. Over the next few years cases of self-immolation followed in Malaysia, Japan and Czechoslovakia. Recently, a gruesome wave of self-immolation has spread among women in Afghanistan, often committed in response to spousal abuse.

And what is it like to watch one burn? Perhaps the most poignant words come from award-winning American journalist David Halberstam, who watched Quang Duc burn in Saigon: “Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh...Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.”

Immediately after Lenin died his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Red Square, in the center of Moscow. Two-thirds of Russians now think he should be buried.

In the passenger seat of a car parked outside a home in Costa Mesa, California police recently found a mummy. The body belonged to a female special education teacher, down on her luck. A local real estate agent had encountered the teacher in a park and upon hearing that she had nowhere to live, offered the woman her car to sleep in. The teacher indeed began sleeping in the car, only at some point she died. The frightened real estate agent did not tell authorities about the body. Instead, she covered it up with a blanket and some clothes and placed a box of baking soda in her car to mask the smell. When police found the body the teacher had been dead for ten months and was completely mummified. She weighed just 30 pounds, “little more than skin and bones,” according to one news article.

In a suburban California town like Costa Mesa, a preserved corpse is clearly an unwanted addition to the landscape, but this isn't always the case. Perhaps the most famous modern mummy in the world is that of the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, preserved in the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, in the center of Moscow. Lenin survived several assassination attempts, including one that lodged a bullet in his neck. He finally died of a massive stroke on January 22, 1924. Within weeks the government had received more than 10,000 telegrams, from all over Russia, asking that his body somehow be preserved for future generations. A prominent pathologist embalmed Lenin's body with a mixture of glycerine and potassium acetate while a renowned architect was given a mere three days to design and build a tomb to accommodate all those who wanted to say goodbye to Lenin. The tomb was built from wood and placed in Red Square, near the Kremlin Wall. More than 100,000 people visited it over the next six weeks.

In 1924, the tomb was upgraded, and again in 1929, when a stone mausoleum was constructed. In October of 1941, with Moscow in danger of falling to invading Nazi troops, Lenin's body was evacuated to Tyumen, in Siberia. After the war, the body was returned and the tomb reopened. The embalmed body of the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin shared a spot beside Lenin from the time of his death in 1953 through October of 1961, when Stalin's body was removed as part of de-Stalinization and buried outside the walls of the Kremlin. In 1973, Lenin's mausoleum was rebuilt once again.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991 the government discontinued financial support for the upkeep of Lenin's body. Since then private donations have supported a team of embalmers who follow a strict protocol to keep the body in a presentable state. The sarcophagus must be kept at a constant temperature of 61̊ F and a humidity of 80 to 90 percent. Every 18 months the corpse is removed for a special chemical bath whose ingredients were kept secret until after the fall of the Soviet Union, the chemicals are now known to be potassium acetate, alcohol, glycerol, distilled water and quinine. One major problem over the years has been the dark spots that have formed on Lenin's skin, especially his face and hands. The embalmers treat wrinkles and discoloration with acetic acid diluted with water and use hydrogen peroxide to restore coloring. Damp spots are removed with disinfectants like quinine or carbolic acid. But the presence of Lenin's body in Red Square has become increasingly problematic in the past two decades, opinion polls show that two-thirds of Russians believe his body should be removed from the mausoleum and buried. There is also a more vocal contingent now calling for his burial.

Last January, some 50 people dressed as mummies gathered in Moscow's Red Square to call for Lenin's body to be buried in a “humble grave” at the Volkovskoye Cemetery, in St. Petersburg. The group identifies themselves as Orthodox monarchists. They rallied beside the large crowd that had gathered to celebrate the 85th anniversary of Lenin's death, but remained peaceful. “There will be no crowd standing and chanting slogans,” one protestor said. “The mummies will be quiet, just the way mummies should be.” Nevertheless, about two dozen mummies were detained by the police.