Charlotte Friend – TalkDeath

Do Deaths Increase During the Holidays? Why Statistics Don’t Tell us Everything

Charlotte Friend — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 13:39:44 +0000

Content Note: mention of suicide and depression Barbara Walters, Pele, Vivienne Westwood, and Pope Benedict are only some of the people we lost during the winter of 2022, but they’re certainly not all of them. According to the American Council on Health and Science, January and December are the deadliest months for Americans. Some folks might know this intuitively and others might be feeling the weight of grief during the holidays–but what does all of this look like up close? Thinking about the winter months, “there are a lot of factors that go into it, so it’s never surprising to […]

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The Mascots of Halloween: Our Mortality as Decoration

Charlotte Friend — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 12:18:19 +0000

Each year as the end of October draws near, we are haunted by images of our inevitable demise. The rattling bones of a skeleton, decontextualized from our own anatomy, and spooky white-sheet ghosts, representing our soul, adorn front yards across the world. Halloween, at its roots, has always been a holiday centered around death. From the ancient Pagan New Year of Samhain, to the westernized Christian tradition of All Hallow’s Eve, the end of October has been marked by aesthetics of the deceased emblematic of relevant cultural lessons throughout generations. Modern Halloween celebrants often distance themselves from the meaning within […]

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Capturing Death: The Rise and Fall of Post Mortem Photography in America

Charlotte Friend — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 12:13:45 +0000

Since the advent of photography in 1839, the American middle class has used the camera’s ability to document one’s life to cement their place in history. Capturing cherished moments with loved ones in our camera rolls, family albums, and picture frames feels like a primordial human impulse. All media can be seen as a mirror with which society studies and understands itself. Post mortem photography, or taking photos of the deceased, is no different and offers us a quick socioeconomic glance into the culture of a country building itself, its beliefs, and customs from the ground up. Capturing Death: The […]

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