カテゴリー: Death and dying
Practice of using apartments to store relatives’ ashes has risen as rapid urbanisation and ageing population increases competition for cemetery plotsChina is introducing a law to stop people storing the ashes of their dead relatives in empty high-rise …
The silicon figures are a touching version of what the Hindi language calls ‘smaran’, or remembranceIn the north of Kolkata, near Dum Dum Junction, Subimal Das and his staff of 80 work from an old factory-warehouse. Using clay, fibreglass and silicon, …
In China, marriage and birth rates have hit record lows and many people are living in isolation. Is the Are You Dead? app just a practical response to this – or something more troubling?A few days before Christmas, after a short battle with illness, a …
Some 68,000 people are expected to die alone and unnoticed in Japan this year, police say, as the population continues to age“We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” says Noriko Shik…
Inadvertent poisoning of scavengers across Indian subcontinent is forcing some communities to give up ancient customTraditional Zoroastrian burial rites are becoming increasingly impossible to perform because of the precipitous decline of vultures in I…
Pooja Sharma has dedicated her life to providing a dignified end for thousands of unclaimed bodies lying in mortuaries in India, though she pays for it herself – and it ended her engagementOn an overcast, blustery day, with cars honking in the distance…
In the official telling, fears of malevolent spirits are a vestige of old, unenlightened village ways. But today urban China is rife with superstition about death. Why?On the 11th floor of a suburban Hong Kong tower, an 86-year-old woman lived alone in…
Boatloads of relatives carrying biodegradable urns are saying their farewells over water instead of trying to buy expensive and scarce funeral plotsXiao Hu never expected to make a living from the dead. For years she worked in her family business offer…
Dementia linked to many instances of people dying at home among family but remaining undiscovered for daysOfficials in Japan have warned that dementia and the fraying of traditional community ties are contributing to a new social phenomenon – people wh…