Five Death Things I Found on the Internet this Week

1.Man Killed by Atomic Wedgie

A 34-year-old man who killed his stepfather giving him a so-called “atomic wedgie” last year is going to jail for involuntary manslaughter—and that’s the silver lining.

Brad Lee Davis killed his stepfather last January when he managed to suffocate him inside his own underwear while performing the wedgie. Davis just pleaded guilty to the charges, but it reportedly could have been much worse for him—prosecutors originally tried to pursue first-degree murder charges.  Via Gawker

2. Burying the Dead in Alaska Is More Complicated Than You’d Think

VIA VICE

Bob has been burying the dead for 42 years. “Anything that you can think of, I’ve probably buried it,” he says with a certain even-toned inflection that seems to convey a mixture of callousness and empathy, if there is such a thing. Thirty of those years have been spent burying the dead in Alaska. Victims of ATV accidents, snowmobile accidents, fishing accidents, mining accidents, airplane accidents, moose attacks, bear maulings, exposure—”a person traveling from one village to another in the dead of winter, their snowmobile may fall through the ice, they get wet, get out, curl up next to a tree, and they die. Almost anything you can think of we deal with. We get a lot of difficult cases that you would seldom see down in the Lower 48. I think the first bear mauling that I handled up here, in the early 80s, it just kind of took me aback because I hadn’t been around that. Like what the bear would eat off the human and stuff like that.”

Read more HERE

3.  There was a fantastic article in The New York Times entitled “See Death as a Triumph, Not a Failure.”

Here’s an excerpt:

No longer a triumph, death became a failure — of the physician’s skill, of the patient’s will. It was to be avoided at all costs. The mass death of the Great War, which left so many bodies missing, exploded or rotting on the ground, further undermined the view of the corpse as a meaningful stage of life. Cremation grew in popularity as a way to “cleanse” with fire the last shameful disintegration.

What we have lost is not only a savoring of ephemerality, but also an appreciation of the way that time marks the body. We try too hard to keep the terminally ill alive because we can’t admit to finality.

4.  A dead body fell out into an intersection in New Zealand.

5.  Here’s a nostalgic photo of yesteryear funeral industry … back when funeral directors also doubled as furniture makers.  The “Keep Em Flying” emblem was a WWII poster, so I’m assuming this photo was from the 1940s.