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Why Blog About Death?

My family – largely descending from Poland – dealt with some extreme stuff before coming over to America. To a 21st century woman like me, hearing my mom describe how my grandparents received post-mortem photographs in the mail of loved ones in their new home-away-from-home always shocked me. But it also moved me. Same for when my mom reverently, if a bit sadly, recounted how her mother prepped her own mother for burial after death. She laid in state in their small house; my grandmother was young, barely 20 years old.

Things we take as normal now could make an Edwardian faint. And modern goths take their witchy side for granted, but the people before us quite had that on lock.

That kind of thing fascinates me. With medical advances, we lose track of death in our natural process. We say, “It can be stopped. It can be bidden to do as we desire.” Maybe one day it will be. But on that day, what value will the past hold?

I love Jung, transhumanism, and Twilight as much as the next Gen Z. Though I wonder, in our pursuit of our origins, far beyond Earth, if they be there, what will all our toil have meant?

Surely the divine wouldn’t leave us out of our universal inheritance, would they?

Whoever they might be. Unanswered radar shouts. Pulsars. The inevitability of physics that seems oddly too close to religiosity.

This is what we are here to discuss. What we leave behind.

Why every moment is special, gracious, critical.

And what that means, for those whom Hell is other people – and Heaven, all the same.

Lest we become ghosts.

The reason this blog was started is not because I’m a keeper of the grotesque, but because I saw on an auction site a mourning pendant made of high-grade gold: lovingly, humanly engraved with a flowery letter “A”. On the other side was an embossed image of a dark-haired girl, staring from the 1890s back at me in 2026. She had rough bangs, freshly brushed, and a white outfit fit for spring, a girlish matching bow flush against her collarbone.

Her gaze intense, her beauty leagues down, I couldn’t deny how I wanted to purchase that charm. This relic was a hefty price. I soon realized the horrors of this new market I was getting into, that of “the oddities.” Was this girl an “oddity”?

Surely, that could not be so. She had parents once. She looked a bit poor, maybe a bit too fiery for her own good underneath that forced Victorian stoicism. I had asked the seller, pleading, “Do you know this girl’s background?” The person, likely an older man, knocked down the price $75. “Low as I’ll go,” he said. There were ~3 days ticking. He replied, “I do not know anything about her.”

My heart sank. I was buying a girl, not unlike today’s child trafficking, it almost seemed.

I clicked off the tab. Ultimately, I decided I could not “own” her; not now. I wanted her story, not her spirit encased in gold. That wasn’t for me to have. She is her family’s.

But that is the thing: the people who buy these artifacts want to hold them as their own, forever. Frozen in time, post-mortems of days-old children in lace-lined caskets. “I collect those!” I’ve seen people say enthusiastically on Facebook.

Working with children before, knowing the reality of part of the condition we will all share sometime: the fragility of a sick child, a moody child, a needy child. No. I will not put these 8 x 10 glossies in plastic and display them for my wonderment.

If I do a research project on your ancestors, or distant cousins, you can have the information. And the physical items that existed because they existed. They will be repatriated to you.

Because just as are you, they were people, too.

To all the Miss As of the world: before and since.