The Morthouse

I focus on human, not animal, death on this site, but this was too human not to post.

Cat burial scene, 1925. Weir, Québec. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

mediumaevum:

Funeral scene with mourners

from 

Brabantsche Yeesten

by
Jan Van Boendale (c.1280-1351)

Thanks to Order of the Good Death on FB for tipping me off to the existence of this picture.

pukomuko:

Willie M. (“Wimp”) Stokes Jr. lies dead in his Cadillac car casket,1984. (via T.A. CRIME COLLECTION: “Willie ‘Wimp’ in His Cadillac Car Casket” (1962) « THESE AMERICANS | T.A.)

This reminds me of that amazing child-funeral scene in Barry Lyndon, with plumed sheep pulling the hearse.

From Smithsonian Libraries: Illustrated Catalogue of Undertakers’ Hardware and Trimmings with separate price list. James M. Shanahan, New York City, 1869.

Via this board by Trini Wenninger on Pinterest.

This photograph was taken by Christine Spengler.

anonymousinblackandwhite:

Girl at Catholic Funeral Procession in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, ca. 1970s.

(via glassseyes)

I had no idea JFK was exhumed and reburied.

life:

Five decades later, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains one of the few utterly signal events from the second half of the 20th century. Other moments — some thrilling (the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall), others horrifying (the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Challenger explosion) — have secured their places in the history books and, even more indelibly, in the memories of those who witnessed them. But nothing in the latter part of “the American century” defined an era as profoundly as those rifle shots that split the warm Dallas air on November 22, 1963, and the sudden death of the 46-year-old president.

Here, on the 45th anniversary of JFK’s March 1967 reinterment, when his remains were moved from his initial resting place to the permanent grave site and memorial at Arlington, LIFE.com offers a gallery of photographs (some of them never before published) from the deeply fraught funeral held mere days after Kennedy was killed.

While both ceremonies — the state funeral in ’63, and the reinterment three-and-a-half years later — were marked by sorrow, the rawness of the emotion evident in 1963 is still striking, and rending, today.

xmorbidcuriosityx:

the-collection-of-oddities:

These items are a personal favorite of mine. I’ve always wanted to own one. They are Victorian tear catchers, usually used by a widowed bride. Upon the day of the funeral, the widow would collect her tears into this small vial, and all the tears she cried in the first year over the loss of her husband, she would capture in this vial she would wear upon her neck. And on the anniversary of his death, she pours the preserved tears atop his gravesite. It’s beautiful, tragic, and prolongs the suffering for ritualistic purposes. However, it’s quite poetic. If I were ever to lose someone close to me, I would do this. 

Wow. I’d never heard of this before - a quick Google reveals that it is also called a lachrymatory. Bizarre, but beautiful!

(Source: theodditiesblog)

Photograph by Andreas Larsen Dahl. De Forest, Wisconsin, ca. 1880. Source: Wisconsin Historical Society.

Funeral wreath of Caroline Keyser Preus, the wife of Lutheran minister Herman Amberg Preus.

timetravelteam:

W. Eugene Smith
The Wake
1950

Andreas Larsen Dahl, Funeral Party around Casket. Deerfield, Wisconsin, ca. 1874. Source: Wisconsin Historical Society.

A funeral party is assembled around a casket in front of an upright-and-wing frame house. Two older men on the left, one identified as Lars D. Reque, stand with bibles while several women wearing Norwegian-style patterned shawls are standing close to the casket. This is another house insured by the Hekla Fire Insurance Co., which sold to many Norwegian-American households in south central Wisconsin.

Source: sphenoid05 on Flickr.

defrag:

Dorothea Lange, Funeral cortege. End of an era in a small town, 1938

(Source: rrosehobart, via cabbagingcove)