Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

Purchase

"The Antiquary's Last Will and Testament" from The English Dance of Death, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

Preamble

Memento Mori

By Lewis H. Lapham

Learning how to die, as Michel de Montaigne once rightly said, is the unlearning of how to be a slave.

The Afternoon Meal, by Luis Meléndez, c. 1772

Essay

Last Meals

By Brent Cunningham

The choice of the final meal contains a curious paradox: why mark the end of a life with the stuff that fuels it?

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

C. S. Lewis was sixty-four, John F. Kennedy forty-six, and Aldous Huxley sixty-nine at the times of their deaths—all within an eight-hour span on November 22, 1963.

Voices In Time

c. 500 | Persia

To the Dogs and the Birds

The Zoroastrian way of death.More

Voices In Time

1833 | London

One or Two Heartbreakers

Some goodbyes are harder than others.More

Voices In Time

2012 | Moscow

Offering a Solution

Dmitry Itskov explains Neohumanity.More

Charts & Graphs

Average Life Expectancy

Will you live longer than a Founding Father or a wife of Henry VIII?

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Color photograph of American writer Mary Roach leaning on door.

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Black and white photograph of French writer and film director Marguerite Duras.

Contributors

Black and white photograph of American Red Cross founder Clara Barton.

Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Black and white photograph of former American Marine Guy Gabaldon.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714