All the Living and the Dead

In Brazil, when the daily death toll spilled over 4,000, nurses on Covid isolation wards filled nitrile gloves with warm water and placed them in the hands of patients to simulate human touch, so they wouldn’t feel alone.

t, each piece six feet by three feet, the approximate size of a grave. Thirty-six years later, it still grows: names honoured on the quilt number 105,000. It weighs fifty-four tons. It’s the largest piece of community folk art in the world.

AIDS Memorial Quil

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying,’

‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals,’ goes the William Gladstone quote, framed on the wall of Mo’s office at Kenyon.

Toni Morrison wrote that anything coming back to life hurts, and I believe her.

A rabbi told me it’s because, unlike flowers, stones do not fade.

It’s a Jewish tradition to place a small stone by the grave every time you visit.

If you die in America, you have to get to the Cryonics Institute within seventy-two hours if you want a perfusion

. In The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, David Wallace-Wells lists recently reanimated organisms: a 32,000-year-old bacterium in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug in 2007, and in 2018, a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for 42,000 years.