Deathternity talks about all things death related. There are 1 million+ owned graves in cemeteries in America that people will not use. Cemeteries do not buy graves back. I would encourage people to begin thinking about either selling or buying these graves at a deep discount to what your cemetery charges. Or you can donate unused graves for a tax deduction. If I can help you with this please contact me here, email me at deathternity@gmail.com, or call me at 215-341-8745. My fees vary.
10,000 Obituaries of EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE and FASCINATING LIVES
The New York Times Book of the Dead—the groundbreaking book-and-website package that features thousands of the most influential, notorious, and interesting New York Times obituaries of all time.
On sale October 18, 2016–wherever books are sold!
The book, which features 300 obituaries, includes a webkey that provides exclusive access to this website.
Enjoy this free preview and order your book today for complete access.
Mark Twain
End comes peacefully at his New England home after a long illness.
Marilyn Monroe
FIRST SCENE PUT HER IN LIMELIGHT
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.: Leader of Millions in Nonviolent Drive for Racial Justice
Annie Oakley
Markswoman Who Astounded Circus Crowds Was Born in an Ohio Log Cabin. WON PLAUDITS OF KINGS.
Harry Houdini
Magician, Conscious to Last, Loses Fight for Life in Detroit Hospital.
Isadora Duncan
Dancer Is Thrown to Road While Riding at Nice and Her Neck Is Broken.
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Suspense and Celebrated Film Director, Dies at 80
Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra, Yankee Who Built His Stardom 90 Percent on Skill and Half on Wit, Dies at 90
Prince
Prince, an Artist Who Defied Genre, Is Dead at 57.
About the Book & Website Package
The New York Times Book of the Dead features
more than 300 obituaries in the book—all hand-selected by veteran Times
obituary editor William McDonald—including tributes to Abraham Lincoln,
Jesse James, David Bowie, and Harper Lee, PLUS exclusive online access
to thousands more.
This website allows readers to explore 10,000
obituaries from the Times archive and search them by name, theme, dates
and more—something no other resource provides.
About the Editor
William McDonald has been the obituaries editor for the New York Times since 2006. He joined the Times
in 1988 and has held positions at the paper’s Metro, National and
Culture desk. He was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for
National Reporting in 2000 for the series, "How Race Is Lived in
America".
The author, Elizabeth Meyer, photographed in Trinity Church Cemetery. Helayne Seidman
It’s the place New York City’s elite are dying to get into:
Frank E. Campbell, the illustrious funeral home that has waked everyone
from Rudolph Valentino to Biggie Smalls, John Lennon to Joan Rivers,
Walter Cronkite to Heath Ledger.
At Campbell, confidentiality is key, and even in death — that great
equalizer — celebrities are supposed to go out with more elegance and
style than the rest of us. Jackie O, for example, was embalmed in her
apartment so that the press wouldn’t get a photo of her in a body bag.
Instead, she was removed from her Fifth Avenue apartment building in a
casket.
“High-five figure services were regular,” says Elizabeth Meyer, a
30-year-old socialite who spent five years working at Campbell. “But we
had some six-figure funerals as well. There’s no right or wrong — it’s
what you want to spend.”
In her new memoir, “Good Mourning”
(Gallery Books), Meyer writes about the strangest services and corpses
she pulled together — and things at Campbell, or “Crawford,” as it’s
called in the book, aren’t as chic as you might think. Modal Trigger“Rich
people rarely die in the summer,” Meyer writes. “I guess parties in the
Hamptons kept them living it up. Winter? We were booked solid.”Helayne Seidman
There was the room she converted into a replica of Bungalow 8,
replete with palm trees and a DJ, so mourners could properly send off an
infamous party boy. His family buried him in his favorite things: a
Snoopy T-shirt and bright green sneakers, a bottle of absinthe in his
hand.
On the guest list: royalty and rockers, socialites and designers. “It
all felt a little empty,” Meyer writes. “My fears were confirmed when I
saw guests coming out of the bathroom with red noses. Suddenly it made
sense why the family had asked if the upstairs bathroom had marble
countertops.”
There was the tour bus parked outside for guitarist Les Paul; the
$100,000 Ferrari placed next to the casket of a millionaire car
collector, who was buried with a black Ferrari jacket and a gold chain.
(Names have been changed, but identifying details remain.)
There were the two women who called for the same husband, each
completely unaware of the other. Meyer was at a loss; her boss, on the
other hand, had seen just about everything. He called one widow, then
the other, explaining that two identical phone calls had come in about
the same man.
“These people, I tell ya,” Meyers’ boss said. She asked if the widows
were surprised. “Even when they don’t know, they know,” he said.
He had two wakes for two families, though the widows rode to the cemetery in the same car.
Then there was the phone call from the son of a socialite who had
just passed away and was about to be embalmed at Campbell. Meyer didn’t
know she was there.
“I have a favor to ask,” he said. “I need . . . my sister and I . . .
we need . . . Can you tell me that my mother’s brain is in her head?” Modal TriggerThe author was asked by socialite Martha “Sunny” Von Bulow’s son to check to see if her brain was in her head.AP
Meyer ran downstairs to check the autopsy report. The brain had been listed as still in the body. She raced back to the phone.
“Yes,” she told him. “The autopsy report says that the brain is —”
“No, no, no. Not the autopsy report . . . I need you to physically see the brain. I’ll hold.”
Meyer ran back down to the embalming room, where she flipped through
the file and realized who this corpse was: the infamous Sunny von Bulow,
whose husband, Claus, had been tried twice for her attempted murder and
had since fled the country.
“The only way to see what, exactly, was left was to cut open her
skull,” Meyer writes. The embalmer “started to cut with extreme
precision while I braced myself for an eyeful of brains.”
Instead, balled-up pieces of Bounty paper towels fell out. Meyer freaked.
“Take it easy,” the embalmer said. “It might be in her stomach.”
“Her stomach? Why would her brain be in her stomach?”
“Sometimes after an autopsy, they take all the organs and stick ’em
in a bag, then sew it up in the stomach. It’s just what they do.”
The bag was there, but the brain wasn’t. Her son took the news remarkably well, and Meyer never heard about it again.
“Before working there, I’d probably seen three dead bodies in my
life, all at wakes,” Meyer says. “And they all looked like they were
supposed to in America — beautiful and sleeping. Which is ridiculous.”
Meyer grew up in wealth and privilege on the Upper East Side. She
went to school at Trinity (current yearly tuition averages $45,000),
where she met her best friend, Ali Hilfiger, daughter of designer Tommy.
After graduation, Meyer attended NYU while partying all over the world.
Then her beloved father died. He’d been sick for five years with
lymphoma, but Meyer never believed he wouldn’t make it. She threw
herself into planning his funeral and walked a few blocks from the
family’s apartment to Campbell, where someone immediately tried to sell
her a $90,000 bronze casket.
My fears were confirmed when I saw
guests coming out of the bathroom with red noses. Suddenly it made
sense why the family had asked if the upstairs bathroom had marble
countertops.
Meyer declined. “But I did buy a beautiful and costly mahogany casket
for my dad,” she says — and then had him cremated. She refuses to blame
the funeral industry for taking advantage of those overwhelmed by
grief, though she herself fell prey.
“Would my dad have preferred a clean, non-ornate casket, and that I
donate the rest of the money to charity? Yes. But at the time I thought:
This is the last thing I can ever buy him.”
Her father was an entertainment lawyer, and famous people packed the
room at Campbell. At that moment, she realized that unlike most of her
friends in attendance, she’d actually been raised and loved by her
parents — not nannies or sundry household staff.
“It should have been my father,” one friend told Meyer at the wake. “It’s not fair.”
Meyer spent much of the next year lost, mourning her father and
thinking constantly about working at Campbell. She’d never had an
interest in death or the funeral industry until he died, and her mother
was horrified: “But Elizabeth,” she said, “you could work in fashion!”
So Meyer did what girls in her circle do: “I took a job at a PR
company,” she says. “I did a nonprofit in South Africa — one of my
passions had always been doing charity work in Africa — and then one of
my friends said, ‘You know what? The funeral home makes complete sense.
It’s charity work, and it’s on the Upper East Side.’ ” Modal TriggerThe Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on the Upper East Side.Google Street View
Meyer walked herself over and asked for a job; she pitched herself as
a party planner with social connections no one at Campbell had, and she
was hired. On one of her first days, she showed up in designer clothes
and $600 Gucci shoes, and jumped at the chance to help with removing a
body from a luxury co-op.
No sooner was the body on the gurney than it excreted waste all over Meyer’s new shoes.
“I definitely had a throw-up-in-your-mouth moment,” Meyer says,
laughing. Before that, she didn’t know that most dead bodies leak. “I
tried really hard to wash those shoes — I was too embarrassed to take
them to shoe repair.”
She threw them out and bought a pair of Aerosoles.
“No matter how much you read about dead bodies, it’s about going in
and smelling,” Meyer says. At Campbell, smelling salts were used in the
embalming room only some of the time — “like if a body came in and had
gangrene,” she says. “That smell is just beyond.”
Yet there were perks and quirks. Families would spend tens of
thousands on floral arrangements and leave them behind; Meyer would take
them home. Summers were blissfully slow: “I guess parties in the
Hamptons and trips to Martha’s Vineyard were enough to keep the
clientele living it up,” Meyer writes. “Winter? We were booked solid.”
As her boss explained, “it was the total opposite in lower-income
areas, where the heat seemed to stir up trouble on the street and could
be dangerous for the elderly. But [we] didn’t get that kind of
business.” Modal Trigger
At Campbell, Meyer was both in and out of her element: The clientele
were people she knew, who lived very similar lives and had similar
tastes, while the employees were largely working-class and
outer-borough.
Despite her obvious empathy, Meyer can seem tone-deaf when it comes
to how the other half lives: After the crash in 2008, Campbell took a
hit and tried to incentivize their employees by offering expensive
dinners and trips to Cancun. “Cheap perks felt desperate,” she writes.
She was really put off when the company treated the staff to a retreat
in Montauk.
“I had never been a fan of the Hamptons — the two-hour drive through
traffic just to see the same people I ran into on Fifth Avenue was not
appealing,” she writes. “I was much happier to hole up in my family’s
house in the Berkshires . . . Montauk was even farther east that the
Hamptons, and not worth it, in my opinion.”
Yet Meyer was so good at her job that she was promoted, and even when
the funeral home lost a cadaver — a UN ambassador’s body had gone
missing while in transit from New York to Africa — Meyer writes that it
was she who tracked it down, in the middle of the night, sitting in
storage at Charles de Gaulle.
Here, she was an asset: She’d been through that airport enough times
to know where they could be keeping a body. But at the funeral home,
tensions were mounting, and rumors began spreading that Meyer was having
an affair with her boss, who had mentored her and defended her.
“Even he knew it was ridiculous,” Meyer writes. ‘The guys I went out
with were twenty years younger, ten times richer, and a hundred times
more attractive . . . an overweight, graying family man was hardly the
guy I was trying to bag. Mom had suffered enough already.”
So she quit. Modal TriggerMeyer says that cremation is on the rise, and costs much, much less.Shutterstock
Today, Meyer has started her own private consulting firm
and has things she’d like to share, things the industry doesn’t
typically publicize. For example: You can buy a casket online at Costco,
and in New York you can bring your own casket into any funeral home and
they’re not allowed to charge you.
You don’t have to embalm a body unless you’re having an open-casket
wake, and you don’t have to pay for drainage, either. The idea that a
funeral is at least a $15,000 affair is untrue; it can be done for much,
much less, and cremation — which is on the rise — is often the cheapest
option.
“Especially with cremation — you don’t have to do a funeral home,”
Meyer says. “You can just do dinner in a restaurant and Mom’s in the urn
— she can come along.”
Most importantly: “If I could give one piece of advice, especially to
people in New York, it’s to look into prearranging a funeral for
yourself or your loved one,” she says. Fifty percent of people who are
planning a funeral are doing so for the first time, hobbled by grief and
trauma.
“I always compare it to weddings,” Meyer says. “Funerals are the
ultimate celebration. You can have more than one wedding, but you’ll
only have one funeral.”
The Dog of the Day Site? I’m Obsessed, and Here’s Why
Photo
Cali, the Dog of the Day star
on Dec. 15. “She follows us around all day,” her owner writes. “She
also likes to lean on us, which I have heard is a habit of golden
doodles.”
Bogie
is athletic. She likes to walk, about four miles a day. She loves
tetherball too, though she broke her leg in a recent game. Bogie can be
shy and doesn’t always do well in group situations. She enjoys chewing
on the head of one of her friends, who is a cat.
I discovered Bogie at Dog of the Day,
a website that publishes reader-submitted biographies and photographs
of endearing pooches. The site, along with its taxonomic brethren Cat of the Day and Pet of the Day,
was founded in the late 1990s by Karen Watts, a Belmont, Mass.-based
graphic designer and illustrator, and her husband, Paul Watts Jr., an
information technology specialist. They were two 30-somethings with a
computer and a dream: to build a website “that people would visit every
day that was not pornography.”
A
friend introduced me to Dog of the Day in 1998, when I was staring at
the cubicle walls in my first corporate job. The charming canine stories
and photographs guided me through those dark years, to a happier job
and happier days. And the thanks I gave the website? I forgot about it,
like a half-filled journal left to gather dust in the better times.
That
is until one day late last year, when that same friend and I were
sighing over a recent wave of bad news — personal, geopolitical — and
she paused and asked me: Whatever happened to Dog of the Day?
Absolutely
nothing, thank God (or Dog). The site and its siblings look much as
they did at the turn of the century. And each day’s homespun story of a
beloved pet, whether from Wailuku, Hawaii, or Turner, Me., or most
anywhere in between, is as lovely as those I remember.
As
I’ve fallen in love with Dog of the Day in a new phase of my life,
though, and reached out to talk to Ms. Watts, I’ve realized that what I
like best about her site — its deep, seemingly easy reserves of
animal-inspired goodness — is in fact an enormous labor for her, one
that offers a window as much onto the complexity of human relationships
as onto the simplicity of animal ones.
Take
factionalism, in this age of it. Each day, Ms. Watts says, Dog and Cat
of the Day duke it out for traffic stats. One day, virtuous Dog triumphs
(hurray!). The next, treacherous Cat claws its way back on top. The
only rule in this ancient struggle is that Pet of the Day — a sort of
D.M.Z. where Ms. Watts attempts to interest readers in such charmers as Spike,
a porcupine from Edmonton, Alberta, who “has no idea what a threat is
and therefore his quills are always laying flat on his back” — never
wins.
With pets, as in politics, ours is a two-party system.
While
Ms. Watts navigates the partisan shoals of Cat and Dog (she won’t take
sides, though she did say she has a “sadly genetic” cat allergy), her
inbox forces her to confront other, even more dispiriting aspects of the
human condition.
NYT Living Newsletter
Get lifestyle news from the Style, Travel and Food sections, from the latest trends to news you can use.
Take Queen Lizzy,
a Rottweiler/Labrador mix from Butte, Mont. Her owner found Lizzy at a
shelter, a year after losing her previous dog to cancer. The pre-shelter
story of Lizzy — starved, abused, locked outside — raises some of the
biggest questions and perhaps answers them, too. “I don’t know who could
hurt her,” writes Lizzy’s owner, who also doesn’t think “that’s for us
to figure out. She is now in a loving, warm safe home forever, and she
seems to know it too!”
Rescue
stories like Lizzy’s are common. Yet some of the most dramatic tales
involve not humans who have gone bad, but pets. One owner submitted the
story of his dachshund who had the habit of sleeping on the owner’s bed.
One night, the dog ate his owner’s toe. “I’m guessing he had some
neuropathy or something,” Ms. Watts said. “It was just too awful to
publish.”
The tale of Mancha the llama,
savaged by another pet, was also a tough editorial call. It eventually
ran with a disclaimer (“This is an exceptionally sad story”) and on a
weekend, so that “anyone who viewed it didn’t have to get weepy at
work,” Ms. Watts said.
The
saga of Mancha — so strong, yes, but also so lucky — reminded me to ask
Ms. Watts about how she handles submissions for deceased pets. Many
readers of her websites are children (teachers have reported that puppy
stories are helpful in coaxing otherwise shy children to read aloud; and
then there’s the appeal of geography lessons along the lines of
“Yesterday’s dog is from Slovenia. … Can you find Slovenia on a map?”)
With an eye toward such young audiences, Ms. Watts restricts memorial
posts to Sundays, when there is a better chance a parent or guardian can
field questions about why “doggies don’t live as long as people do.”
Her
three sites also have a large contingent of elderly fans, many of whom
have been forced to leave their homes and their beloved pets. It turns
out that these readers are one of the main reasons Ms. Watts largely
retains the fin-de-siècle look of the websites. “We want to keep it
simple, for people in nursing homes or people on modems,” she said.
In
between the young and the old, of course, are those of working age,
which raises inevitable, if lighthearted, questions about the sites’
impact on economic productivity. Thursdays and Mondays are the
highest-traffic days, Ms. Watts said, and there are telltale spikes most
weekday mornings at the start of United States and European working
hours. Ms. Watts argues — and what would Karl Marx make of this? — that
she builds “happier workers, because people who are overwhelmed by
things can just come and look at a bunny.”
In
the spirit of her friendly websites, Ms. Watts tries to answer everyone
who contacts her, even if it’s only to explain why a submission isn’t
suitable. For example, she occasionally receives a touching story
accompanied by an image of what she presumes is the pet, lying on an
identically colored piece of furniture. “We can’t tell if there’s a dog
in that photo,” she’ll reply politely.
Then
there are the rules about what, or who, is eligible for nomination. You
can’t nominate a co-worker, however beastly, as Pet of the Day. You
can’t nominate a younger sibling, no matter how strong a case you make.
You’re not allowed to nominate a wild or zoo animal, though Ms. Watts
once made an exception — who wouldn’t? — for Takara, a killer whale that meant the world to a cancer patient.
It
seems that with her sites, Ms. Watts isn’t trying to distract us from
the sadness of the world. Rather, she is suggesting we see life’s trials
as surrounded by unconditional love, of the sort we find in the stories
she curates for us.
It’s
hard to know what more we could ask of a website, or of its co-founder,
whose husband, Paul, died suddenly in May 2015. As the online universe
of pet-related diversions continues to expand, Ms. Watts is carrying on
the work the couple started nearly two decades ago, and remembering.
When we spoke, she described Tigger,
a tarantula that appeared on Pet of the Day. “My husband did not like
spiders,” she said. “That’s why it was good there was two of us. We did
it together.”
Mark Vanhoenacker is the author of “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot.”
