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War Crimes, Mourning, and the Quest for Closure

“A double exposure including: a) current day scene From My Lai-Quang Ngai photo by Binh-Dang and b) American ‘Huey’ helicopters during My Lai Massacre on March 16,`968 in My Lai, South Vietnam.”

03/08/2018

For whatever reason reading Jared Afrookteh’s post, “How do we view death in fiction?” reminded me of a class I took a couple years ago called War Crimes and Genocide. I remembered being shocked by all of the atrocious crimes that have occurred throughout history and in the world. I struggled to wrap my head around the events. Massacre in My Lai, genocide in Bosnia, torture in Abu
Ghraib… It is all overwhelming and devastating to learn, as the details behind
each of the aforementioned events, and many more, showcase an unbelievable
amount of abuse and dehumanization that I would have never imagined.  And
I also felt a great amount of guilt for having no idea that any of these crimes
had ever been committed.

One of the most appalling war crimes that I learned about was American massacre in My Lai, Vietnam. That may have been the first time I had heard of Americans being the perpetrators committing a crime against humanity. I guess at the time I had always believed that Americans would never commit such atrocious crimes. How could a country representing
peace, freedom, and justice for all completely abandon their moral values and
massacre a community of innocent people? What concerns me the most amidst
growing knowledge of catastrophic death and violence is the fate of the
survivors. How do they reconcile their loss? Often times we see the
establishment of monuments, museums, and other memorabilia to commemorate the event that occurred and the losses people have had so their lives and experiences will never be forgot.

However, does this truly bring closure?

 

Communities and loved ones may be left without any knowledge of the identity of the offender. Or they may have issues with learning of what happened to the body, as it may be disfigured or missing, which ultimately leaves loved ones without a tangible memory of what they’ve lost. This may also disrupt
traditional burial rituals and require the loved ones of the dead to search for
answers in the hopes of obtaining some form of closure. Or if the perpetrator
is known, it would be ideal to receive a genuine apology or some form of
reparations for their loss, but unfortunately this does not always happen.

For the villagers in My Lai, American Lieutenant William Calley, the man known for leading the massacre in 1968, was convicted for the crime but his sentence was reduced from life in jail to three and a half years, and on top of it all, as
of today, he has failed to make a formal apology or pay reparations to the
survivors. In another case, the Rape of Nanking, government officials of Japan
chose to deny and ignore the fact that their soldiers, killed, raped, and
tortured thousands of Chinese citizens. Even with cries of frustration from
particularly female survivors, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has been reluctant to
admit any fault and instead focuses on closing the chapter so that it can be
forgotten and future generations of Japan can no longer be connected to that
devastating piece of history.

I think this issue is very interesting but I still have limited knowledge on the specific practices that occur in response to mass death, but I’m looking forward to discussing this in class!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ghosts-my-lai-180967497/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/14/shinzo-abe-japan-no-new-apology-second-world-war-anniversary-speech

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Posted on March 9, 2018 by in grief and mourning, mass death

Coco: How Pixar uses Mexican culture to talk to kids about death

Posted on March 9, 2018 by | 1 comment

Miguel and Hector duet in a scene from Coco

This past Friday night, my Disney-obsessed best friend dragged me to watch Coco with her at Harland Cinema. Okay, okay, you got me, she didn’t have to drag me; I totally wanted to go because I, too, am Disney-obsessed. Coco is about a boy named Miguel and his family in Mexico celebrating ‘Día de Muertos’ – day of the dead – which is the night when souls can cross over from the spirit world to visit their living relatives. In the movie, Miguel flips the script and is sent to the Land of the Dead while he’s still alive to learn about the value of family. This animated movie is intended for a young audience, so I was pleasantly surprised that, besides being visually stunning, it successfully presented some mature topics with nuance and wisdom. These intense themes range from spousal resentment to old age and dementia, but for class we’ll focus on death and the concept of staying connected with those that have left this world.

In the world depicted in Coco, a person’s soul lives on in the Land of the Dead after they die. Each year on Día de Muertos, a bridge is constructed between the spirit world and the living world. Souls whose families remember them fondly can cross over this bridge to see their descendants once again. If a soul is not remembered fondly, and therefore not pictured on anyone’s ‘ofrenda’ – a ritual altar where the living place offerings for their ancestors – then they are not allowed to cross the bridge. This was the case with the soul of Miguel’s great-great-grandfather Hector, who was said to have abandoned the family and was ripped out of the photo with his wife and now elderly daughter Coco. The only problem for Hector initially was that he missed out on seeing Coco each year, which was devastating for him. However, his true problem arose due to Coco’s failing memory; when the time comes that everyone who remembers a soul during his/her life has died, the soul suffers “the Final Death”, disappearing from the Land of the Dead forever.

I find this concept to be the most intriguing part of the movie. Mexican culture very clearly embraces death as a natural part of life, as indicated by its festival to reconnect with deceased loved ones. However, the Land of the Dead in the movie is vivacious and doesn’t feel very different from Miguel’s living world. Yet the presence of this ominous final death shows that even cultures which encourage acceptance of human mortality still have a fear of death. This stirs up the question about what it is we are actually afraid of: is it the fact that the souls disappear into the unknown after their Final Death? Many fears stem from the unknown, such as nyctophobia (fear of the dark), or xenophobia (fear of foreign people or situations). Such can be said about a fear of death. However, there is a discrete point at which the souls in Coco experience the Final Death, which is when there is nobody left in the living world who remembers them. This suggests that perhaps fear of Final Death really is about a societal terror of being forgotten. With the rise of social media has come an increase in the prevalence and desire to live in the public eye. For people who prioritize fame in life, surely being remembered after death is also of serious concern.

Regardless of what property of death is so scary, Coco does an excellent job of creating a platform for parents to talk about death with their kids in a more approachable way, and to introduce them to a culture which has a healthy relationship with mortality.

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How Do We View Death in Fiction?

Posted on March 8, 2018 by | 2 comments

The question of how death is handled and viewed in the horror industry popped into my head earlier this week as I eagerly awaited the release of The Strangers: Prey at Night (a sequel to one of my favorite scary movies). As a horror buff, I’ve read many articles detailing theories on why we enjoy horror movies (see reference below for a decent summary), but no one seems to really delve into how the deaths themselves are viewed in horror, or in fiction as a whole.

Why are we okay with reading a 500-page book or sitting through a 2-hour movie, bonding with and exploring various characters — only to have them killed off at some point. I realize it’s hard to equate fiction and reality, but it’s interesting to me that we can separate them so easily with something so universal and personal as death. Fiction can evoke emotion or instill ideas into consumers, so I believe it important to compare and contrast death in fiction and death in reality.

Separating Fiction and Reality

Most horror fans are aware (either consciously or unconsciously) of the “fakeness” in film. This is most apparent in campy B-movies such as Thankskilling, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, or Stippers vs Werewolves. These movies either have outlandish themes or poor production values such that we can easily say to ourselves, “This is a movie.” Other horror movies accomplish this awareness by having supernatural or comical overtones (see Rosemary’s Baby and Scream, respectively).

However, some movies, such as The Strangers, lack anything major that’s outside of reality. It features a relatively realistic set of characters, plot, and setting and has a paranoia-inducing ending. When I left the theater, I was scared by the realness of it, but even then, I can’t say I felt anything about the character’s deaths nearing how I feel when I hear of a death on the news or such. This isn’t a unique sentiment to scary movies. Non-horror movies such as Me Before You, A Fault In Our Stars, and Les Misérables are all seen as super-sad, relatively realistic, and dealing with death. Many people (myself included) bawled my eyes out during these movies, but I don’t think many could say they “grieve” the characters.

Where’s the Dividing Line?

I mourn the losses in the Parkland shooting, but I can’t say I sobbed upon hearing the news that day. Conversely, I cried in the the theater for fictional deaths, but I can’t say I mourn(ed) them. How can we be moved by fiction without further grief; why does the world grieve over complete strangers? I know some things that don’t always play into the second question — time (be it in the past or the present) and proximity (be it local or international). So what factors truly play in?

As discussed in the article below, there has been research done that compared disturbing documentaries dealing with death and horror movies. The results are surprising to me. Many people couldn’t handle the documentaries but could easily swallow the horror movies. I would be very interested to see the results in a study exposing people to a documentary played off as a movie or a movie produced as a documentary. Do people’s reactions change based only on the idea that something is real or not? Is the primary factor that creates the distinction between a “real” death and a “fictional” death the knowledge of which is which?

Reference article that sums up most of the theories regarding attraction to horror (I disagree with some claims made, but it’s the best summary I found):

https://filmmakeriq.com/courses/psychology-scary-movies/

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Dying in the Age of Social Media

Posted on March 1, 2018 by | 2 comments

Death is typically a private affair, with those in the US even making a private industry regarding the process of dying. People who are experiencing long and drawn out deaths are often hospitalized or placed into hospice care or into a nursing home. Death is distant for those who are alive, with the dying being handled by professionals. This is the way things have been in modern history in Western society. However, this may be changing. Recently, social media has become more popular than ever, with millions using sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube. This has created public connections in areas that have always been respected as private, such as death and dying.

The surge of social media usage has not escaped those who find themselves in the process of dying. In fact, some of these people have capitalized on this market and have shared their stories and experiences in a non clinical setting. This has allowed a community to develop within the internet of those who can understand and empathize one another’s experiences. Having someone to talk to who is going through the same thing is perhaps easing the way for individuals who find themselves dying.

This phenomenon has also provided a surge in autopathography, or ill people who are writing their autobiographies, including their documentation of illnesses. The openness of these people who are dying is providing physicians and therapists with valuable information regarding their thoughts and feelings during their last days. While people may be reluctant to share their deepest thoughts with medical professionals, they often find it much easier to share with strangers who know what they’re going through. This can assist these professionals in treating the dying in all aspects of their lives, not just the purely physical symptoms.

The use of social media in death is also allowing families and friends more time and ways to grieve. As their loved ones are immortalized with profiles, blogs, pictures, and videos, they can revisit these things at their leisure and take comfort in knowing that they’re always there. Similarly, it provides distance, because while mementos kept in a home are constant visible reminders of what they’ve lost, having the ability to look at social media kept by loved ones after they’ve past requires the effort and the conscious decision to look at it.

However, this publicization of death has come with a drawback in that the dying are focusing more on publishing their experiences. This has raised concerns that they are possibly withdrawing from friends and family, in favor of virtual friends and robbing the family of the chance to say goodbye. While this is certainly a possibility, after all, death is about the living, not the dead, I think it is selfish to deprive people from access to those who understand the intimate details of their illness. If death is about those left behind, then the least we can do is make dying about those who are actually dying.

http://theconversation.com/how-the-digital-age-has-changed-our-approach-to-death-and-grief-38207

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Waiting to Die

Posted on March 1, 2018 by | 2 comments

There is an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where Dr. Meredith Grey has a patient have a close call with death. Yet when she delivers the happy news that her patient has survived to the family, she is met with groans and disappointment. When I first watched this episode, I remember being appalled. How could beating death not bring about anything but celebration?

But after re-watching that episode, I realized that the family had every right to be disappointed. The woman had been fighting an illness and had previously had many ‘close calls’ with death, which left her exhausted and drained. She wanted to die and her family wanted to let her go, but medicine kept bringing her back. My question changed when re-watching this episode, and I wondered: when does our fear of dying become less of a fear and more of something to look forward to? And is having nine lives worse than having just one?

https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/67084000/jpg/_67084239_euthanasia-spl.jpg

Looking forward to death is not just a plot twist in a TV show or something new for patients being sustained solely by medical advancements. Traumatizing injuries such as paralysis from the neck down or illnesses that deteriorate a person’s body such as ALS have lead to excruciating mental and physical pain for many patients. Yet medical advancements have allowed for patients conditions such as these to live on, with severe side effects such as suffering and keeping the person ‘trapped’ inside of their failing body.  This balance between medical advancements and patient comfort has initiated a discussion on assisted suicide, bringing up the debate of if patients have the right to die.

The argument for allowing a patient to die, or giving their physician the right to assist them if they are physically unable to, is one that focuses on giving patients the right to die with dignity. Being brought back to life multiple times by having ‘nine lives’, having drug after drug pumped into your system or feeling your  body deteriorate while still mentally cognizant of it is a terrible fate. These treatments can turn the will to live into a preference to die, showing that saving body at all costs does not solve everything. It is necessary to let patients have the option to die because it gives them the option of quality of live over quantity of life.

Although some argue that letting a patient die by their own choice, or assisting in their suicide, is against the Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm”, I believe it is the opposite. Allowing or helping a patient die when there is no hope of getting better is a way of reducing pain and suffering.  Once a patient has been labeled as having no hope for recovery or given a warning that they will die in however many months, I believe that the patient should have every right to organize their death on their own timetable.

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From Heathers to 13 Reasons Why: Romanticizing Suicide

Posted on March 1, 2018 by | Leave a comment

The 1998 film Heathers follows the life of Veronica Sawyer, the witty and contemplative protagonist who is disillusioned with the shallowness of high school and her ultra-popular, conventionally beautiful, and wealthy friends: the “Heathers.” The film became a cult classic for its use of sardonic, dark humor to illuminate issues of teen-bullying, sexual violence, and apathy.  Heathers was certainly subversive for its time, but concerningly enough, still provides relevant commentary on society today, particularly with media portrayal of suicide.

In the movie, following the “suicides” of several students in the school, Ms. Fleming, the school’s guidance counselor, gathers the student body in an assembly to publically mourn and express their feelings while local news reporters broadcast the event.  It’s a thinly veiled exploitation of the emotional vulnerability of the students and of the tragedy itself, and Veronica doesn’t hold back on pointing it out:

“These little programs are eating up suicide up with a spoon.  They’re making it sound like it’s a cool thing to do!”

Twenty years later, it seems that Veronica’s important criticism has still fallen on deaf ears: mental illness and suicide continues to be romanticized in the media.  One such example is Netflix’s show Thirteen Reasons Why, which, as the title states, details the protagonist’s “reasons why” she committed suicide through a series of tapes she recorded before ending her life.  The show has been criticized in many aspects: it overlooks the sensitive nuances of mental health and simplifies Hannah’s suicide as a consequence of the actions of 13 people.  It fails to show viewers that therapy and/or medication can be extremely helpful and successful.  Most disturbingly, it shows the graphic scene of Hannah killing herself.  The viewer see everything: the cuts she makes, the agony she is in, and the blood.  Lots of blood.

Because it is well known that media portrayal of suicide has a strong influence in the public psyche, reportingonsuicide.org details guidelines on how to carefully discuss suicide.  It is emphasized to not describe the suicide method and to not glamorize the suicide, both of which 13 Reasons Why blatantly does.  Some have gone as far to say that 13 Reasons is a “suicide revenge fantasy,” in which Hannah gets to live on through her tapes and make her tormenters fully face the guilt and consequences of their actions.  What the show doesn’t show: weeks or months later, when the school moves on and forgets, and Hannah is still gone.  The devastating consequences it will have on her family and close friends for years and years.  The alternative life where she received proper professional help and slowly moved past feeling defined by her trauma.

Does this mean that we should completely refrain from discussing suicide?  Certainly not – Selena Gomez, co-producer of 13 Reasons, may have had the right intentions with raising awareness about suicide and mental health, but failing to consult mental health professionals resulted in a dangerous show that is far from a model of how to thoughtfully address mental health.  With that said, shows like Crazy Ex Girlfriend and Bojack Horseman are breaking ground with much more nuanced and honest depictions of mental illness; Crazy Ex Girlfriend displays therapy in a positive light while also exploring the mundane and difficult work that comes with addressing mental illness (and also handles a suicide attempt in a very non-sensationalized manner).  Bojack Horseman doesn’t shy away from the ugliness that wraps around the protagonist’s depression, self-loathing, and self-destructive decisions, while still portraying him as a painfully sympathetic character.  While these shows are certainly not perfect (and sometimes walk a fine line between provocative and problematic), I hope that future producers and directors look to them, and not shows like 13 Reasons, when tackling mental health and suicide in TV and film.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/does-13-reasons-why-glamorize-teen-suicide-w476303

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/still-very-25-years-later-the-bleak-genius-of-em-heathers-em/359828/

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: suicidepreventionlifeline.org

Emory Resources:

Student Counseling Center (mental health concerns): 404-727-7450

Respect Program Hotline (24/7 sexual/interpersonal violence support): 470-270-5360

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Be Right Back

Posted on February 23, 2018 by | 1 comment

Black mirror is a popular Netflix original anthological series that examines the dark aspects of modern society with countless casts and stories, from political satires to future dystopias. Despite the vast palette of styles, the show centers around a common theme: technology changes, but people don’t. To relate this to burial and the process of dying, consider season 2, episode 1 of the series. “Be Right Back” begins with one of the most realistic couples the show has featured. Ash and Martha are clearly very much in love. The episode focuses on Martha’s bereavement after Ash’s sudden death.

      Martha practically sleepwalks through Ash’s funeral until her friend recommends that she try an experimental service that reconnects the living their deceased loved ones. The service uses algorithms to create a memory bot using online data such as photos, videos, and texts written by the person who had passed. This essentially creates a tailored “version” of the deceased loved one.

      The service offers different levels of interaction. The first is through texting. After trying the service, Martha began to receive texts from this version of Ash, in which the bot simply mimicked Ash’s texting habits and humor. The second is through calling. Martha sent the service samples of Ash’s voice, and the service used them to call Martha as Ash. Finally, the service could create a real life replica of a loved one. The creepiness of the concept is masked by Martha’s grief, and she soon has a walking, talking clone of her dead fiancé.

      Martha quickly became frustrated with all the subtle but important ways that the android was unlike Ash, particularly in that it was cold, passive, and emotionless. So she locked it in her attic. To Martha, the bot was not quite Ash, but too much like him to let it go. This led to a grief that spanned decades.

       Surprisingly, Martha’s unhappy ending didn’t dissuade computer scientist Eugenia Kuyda from repeating the experiment. After her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, suddenly passed away, Eugenia was overwhelmed with loss. As she grieved, Eugenia found herself looking through the thousands of text conversations between her and Roman. This inspired her to use the ever improving artificial neural network, allowing artificial intelligence to “learn” as a human brain would, to use Roman’s messages as the basis of a memorial bot.

      The prototype worked. Roman’s friends and family, (and now the public,) can communicate with the Roman memorial bot. Eugenia and other friends of Roman have said that the responses actually do sound like things that their loved one would say. As soon as the bot was created, Eugenia asked it, “Who’s your best friend?” to which Roman responded, “Don’t show your insecurities.” Immediately, Eugenia thought that it sounded like him.

       Unlike the Black Mirror episode, Eugenia believes that the memorial bot has helped, rather than hurt, her grief. She likened it to “just sending a message to heaven. For me it’s more about sending a message in a bottle than getting one in return.” The grieving process is different for everyone, and if a memorial bot system was available to the public, it may help many people overcome the deaths of loved ones.

Memorial bot article: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot

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The Three Faces

Posted on February 22, 2018 by | 2 comments

Since taking a course on The Philosophy of Religion with Dr. Wendy Farley, I have developed an interest in studying death and suffering. Naturally, I began to pay more attention to how death appeared in every day life and how we (as mortal beings) interact with the idea and consequences of death. The first topic related book I picked up thereafter was The Sacred Art of Dying: How World Religions Understand Death, and I would often read the book behind the coffee shop counter on a slow afternoon. Though it has been two years since I have read the book, I clearly remember author Kenneth Kramer, in his introduction, depicting death in three faces: physical death, psychological death, and spiritual death.

He describes physical death in a way that matches the medical and biological death we have studied in class. There is irreversible l­oss of brain waves, damage to the central nervous system, and cessation of cardiac and respiratory function (Kramer 1988 p.11). Psychological death is “the life of quasi-consciousness, living, as if having already died,” and spiritual death is “the transformation of old patterns, habits, roles, identities and the birth of a new person” (Kramer 1988 p.11). The latter two faces of death left me much to ponder. While I was comfortable and familiar with physical death, Kramer’s framing of psychological and spiritual death was jolting and new to me. The book focused on spiritual death and explained religious aspects of death such as attitudes and rituals. (Super recommend the book for anyone interested!)

Reading about spiritual death inspired me travel abroad to study suffering and Buddhism more closely—but that’s a story for another time. Presently, I contemplate the face of psychological death and its meaning. is I wonder if some cases of severe depression can qualify as psychological death. Kramer describes psychological death as a “reversible termination of one’s personal aliveness,” “a kind of emotional death” and “a lessening of aliveness” (Kramer 1988 p.18-19). Say we assume depression is indeed a form of psychological death. Narratives regarding depression and mental health often share stories of numbness, apathy, a lack of will, loss of interest and pleasure in activities, hopelessness and more. These symptoms and experiences of illness fit into the characteristics of psychological death Kramer describes. Suicide ideation could be seen as the desire to experience physical death if perhaps a person already felt psychologically dead. The notion that psychological death is reversible might also speak to the treatable aspect of depression through medications, counseling, psychoanalysis, meditation, and other forms of therapy. I do not know if psychological death is something widely accepted or discussed, but I do think it is an interesting way to frame mental illness.

 

Reference

Kramer, K. 1988, The Sacred Art of Dying: How World Religions Understand Death. New York: Paulist Press.

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What Would You Do?

Posted on February 21, 2018 by | 2 comments

Equality.

A term flaunted in many public circles, political campaigns, and social justice movements. In these instances, “equality” refers to fairness and justice in life; the act of viewing all people without bias or discrimination. Our society is obsessed with rallying behind crusades that foster impartiality in every aspect of life…but what about death? Is there equality in dying?

With current advancements in artificial intelligence, it is no surprise that self driving cars are on the horizon.  In an effort to gather information about how humans make decisions, researchers at MIT created the “Moral Machine.” This database contains a variety of what-would-you-do scenarios involving car crashes and vehicular manslaughter in attempt to create an algorithm for decision making based on how humans act in life-and-death situations.  For example:

This scenario incites intense debate over what the car should or should not do. If the car continues in a straight path, one woman and her unborn child will die. However, if the car is programmed to swerve, five people will die. If only provided with the number of deaths, many people would choose to have the car continue straight, saving the most lives. But what happens when we place value on those lives? When the victims are women and children, versus criminals, how do we decide which lives to value more and which deaths to value less?  That is the heart of what the Moral Machine aims to uncover.  By categorizing people into different groups based on their social value, we assign significance to individual deaths. After perceiving the criminals’ role in society, many people may change their minds and program the car to swerve, taking a greater number of lives but saving (arguably) more important or worthy ones.

The dilemma in the various circumstances boils down to the modern perception of death and the processes to follow. Our society has cultivated an environment that fights against death. People do not want to die “before their time” and thus are bred to accept death only when they feel that their life is complete or that they have nothing more to give. These personal sentiments are subconsciously broadcast into situations like the self-driving car, where knowing the demographics of a person ranks them on a scale ranging between “worth-saving-at-any-cost” to “not-a-huge-loss.”  It sounds gruesome but it’s true. 

Additionally, our determination of what the car should do originates in the process after a death. We can justify the decision to kill the five criminals if we consider that the pregnant woman and baby would be heavily mourned and grieved whereas the convicts probably would not.

Inadvertently, we place values on life and death based on our culture’s view of death and the proceedings to follow. Death and life seem to have an linear relationship; the more we value someone’s life the more we value their death. Is this a true embodiment of equality though? Can equality be extended to the grave? And lastly, what would you do?

 

To see other related scenarios, click here.

References

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

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Lonely Deaths

Posted on February 14, 2018 by | 2 comments

Source:https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sLNXt9DmC_U/hqdefault.jpg

I was on snapchat, after the horrid update, and I went to the discovery section because it was  too frustrating  to figure out the actual snapchat part. I like to browse through the magazines and journals that discuss everything from beauty tips and lifestyle content to world news. I came across this one post in particular that struck me. The article was titled, “Cleaning up After the Dead.”

Those who know me well  understand why I was  drawn to a title like this. For those who don’t, I have a never ending interest when it comes to dark and unanswered things, such as death. However, this article was not about death. The bigger picture  focused on one of my least favorite topics: relationships.

As the world becomes, debatably, more progressive, relationship status is not as important, especially in Japan where one was supposed to find a spouse at a young age and start a family. Well, the people of Japan, and society internationally, have decided that a relationship is not a priority. People are living longer and accomplishing more due to the advancement of biomedical technologies which has shifted our values. I know I do not want to get married anytime soon; there is too much for me to see and do in the world-alone.

I come from a small town in Maryland where a lot of the girls set out to find a boyfriend in high school, follow him to college, and then get married after graduation. This has happened to a handful of my, high school friends. I am not criticizing them, it is just interesting how societal values can change, but even with international communication, some communities stay the same. Anyways, this is not the case in Japan. More men than women are choosing to stay single for longer or even opt out of marriage and the relationship lifestyle forever.

Source: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5aYyl-PG-w/maxresdefault.jpg

This is great, but unfortunately it takes an eerie turn. Men are dying alone and while that is already sad, their bodies are not discovered right away. It can take up to four months to figure out a tenant is dead. If they are living alone, nobody notices their absence until their neighbors  distinguish a foul scent, their mail piles up, or they are behind on rent.

Yes, their bodies do begin to decompose into the floor and maggots find their way into the housing. This happens so often that a new industry has opened in the Japanese economy for crews thats specialize in cleaning up after lonely deaths. Landlords can and often do purchase insurance, lonely death insurance, so they will not have to pay much to have the apartment cleaned for a new tenant.

Shocking, right? I guess it is good for the economy; it is just sad that when an individual chooses themself over others, they suffer a lonely death where their body sits and decomposes until someone else’s life is affected by the death. Basically, the moral of the story is: find a significant other!

Sources:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5aYyl-PG-w/maxresdefault.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sLNXt9DmC_U/hqdefault.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/01/24/feature/so-many-japanese-people-die-alone-theres-a-whole-industry-devoted-to-cleaning-up-after-them/?utm_term=.407b10da438e

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