Elly McCabe

“Mrs de Winter’s obsession with her insures that Rebecca will triumph over anonymity and effacement. Even a bullet through the heart, and burial at sea cannot quench her vampiric power. Again, one is reminded of Plath’s embodiment of amoral, anarchic female force – I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Death will come for us all and yet medicine still sees it as a defeat. No wonder that legal physician-assisted suicide has caused such an uproar within medical circles. Research has shown that even in jurisdictions where it is legal, confusion about its ethics, processes and procedures abound. Why? Because physician-assisted suicide allies the doctor with their enemy, namely death. Health professionals generally don’t seem to have the training and skills to assist in the dying process and most don’t appear to want them. Research has shown a strong connection between the death attitudes of health professionals and the quality of end-of-life care that they provide. For example, nurses low in death acceptance tend to have negative attitudes towards end-of-life care and cultivate poorer relationships with terminal patients. Death anxiety among healthcare providers negatively affects their attitudes towards family members of the dying. Further, death anxiety has been shown to stop relevant health professionals from initiating discussions about advance care directives. This, of course, makes it extremely difficult to ensure that the wishes of the dying are adhered to when the moment comes.”
― Rachel E. Menzies, Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society

“What if the Hand of God decides to choke you to death on your next portion of Parma ham?”
― Kevin Toolis, My Father's Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die

“We seem to have all the power and control in the world over our information, and at the same time no power or control at all. Our digital information could either be indelible, affecting how others see us and how people will remember us for evermore, or it could vanish, eliminating any evidence that we ever existed and rendering us victims of a twentyfirst century Dark Age. And while the era of information might have dangled the tantalising prospect of perpetuity in our faces, death has always found ways of defeating our fantasies of immortality. Everlasting life has always been an illusion, a mirage in the desert, and the digital age may not change that as much as one might expect.”
― Elaine Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data