Happy Death Club

But I think in the end I would like to know that
it’s my time, like an animal tapping into some ancient knowledge lost to humans, and walk very deep into a forest, and simply sit down and listen to the birds. And after perhaps some hours or centuries I wouldn’t be me any more but would be part of the forest, slipping seamlessly into something bigger as day slips into night

Death is certainly often painful for those left behind, but what if we’re all wrong? What if dying really is an experience ‘of exquisite sweetness’, lifting us to some higher plane of consciousness? What if there really is nothing to fear?

The walls close in. I pretty much spent every day convinced I was going to die for no apparent reason. But I didn’t die. Sometimes you just carry on breathing, and that’s the most you can do, and it’s enough

Gypsy-Rose’s story reminds me that, if we put aside the ways in which true crime resonates with us, or the positive impact it has had, the genre has skewed reality to the point where we forget that there are real people and lives at the centre of each story. Things are rarely black and white

There are a number of theories on why so many people become obsessed with true crime. A study by the University of Illinois that set out to understand why women are the predominant consumers of true crime suggests
an evolutionary reason: that as the likelier victims of murder, reading about true crimes makes women feel more informed should they find themselves in a dangerous situation

This is the uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of true crime: people’s real tragedies turned into ‘content’ for TV, podcasts, or online forums.

Elisa Lam; Maura Murray; Brandon Lawson; Asha Degree; Brian Shaffer; Tara Calico; the Panama girls, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon; the Delphi murders, Abigail Williams and Liberty German. These names are familiar to anyone interested in true crime and internet mysteries. JonBenét Ramsey’s fame is so intense as to be familiar even to those with no interest in true crime. Each one is a human being, someone deeply loved and missed. Each one has also become the source of hours upon hours of entertainment for public consumption

Prayer and ritual work because of faith, and faith works because of belief, and we all believe in something. You have to grab peace where you can find it, whether in public or private, casually or with the formality of ritual, and if that’s by parading around in a flower crown with a gold plastic skull in
the centre, maybe that’s okay

I start to see death everywhere because death is everywhere

Canadian film writer Kier-la Janisse genders the conversation brutally, beautifully: ‘The [horror] films I watch align with my personal experience in that every woman I have ever met in my entire life is completely crazy, in one way or another.’47 This sentence strikes a chord with me. I always felt, even before I experienced bereavement, that my emotions were too big, too loud, too colourful to really be socially acceptable.