death

Sometimes there are words.

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

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Mark Margolis as Uncle Tio

And sometimes, there are not words.

This week, I’ve completed the posts for episodes 507 and 508 over at Rewatch Breaking Bad, though the posts will not publish until mid-July.

These episodes were the last ones my very excellent work friend got to see. Cancer stole her from us in early 2013, just a few months before season 5b, as they called it, began to air.

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Oh, how she loved this show. I think she loved it even more than I did, which is saying a LOT. Sometimes, in the wee hours of the night when we were working together, we would speculate, posit theories, imagine the most insane and crazy storylines, and consider the vastness of the Breaking Bad universe.

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We would talk about the show that existed, moments that happened, what our favourite scenes and lines were. The two of us could speak many of the lines out loud from memory. I knew exactly which lines to say to her which would leave her giggling, and she knew which lines to say for me.

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I remember one time when the phones were quiet, we spoke for an uninterrupted by phone calls hour, just about the clouds in some scenes, and the weather in Albuquerque, and how it always seemed to put on a show, for the show. We talked about how Albuquerque had become a character of the show and how it gave the show such a unique look.

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I also remember we talked about Mark Margolis and how amazing his acting was, because his character Uncle Tio was unable to speak but you saw everything you needed to know in his eyes, and he had this bell that he would ring.

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We both loved the character of Mike, especially the scene that began with him shorting out electricity with helium balloons. We talked about a spin off show that could involve him. There had already been some talk about a spin off on the podcasts – which we had both listened to.

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We both loved Jesse as a character. We loved where season four had taken his character. We loved his involvement in the major capers of season 5a. We also loved his outfits.

The final eight episodes were so perfect, she would have loved every single minute of them. She would have loved to discuss each episode with me. How much I would have loved to discuss them with her!

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How deeply thrilled she would have been to see Better Call Saul, the spin off show that appeared after Breaking Bad ended. She would have particularly loved the Mike Centric episode – Five-O – which will hopefully land Jonathan Banks a nomination for best supporting actor when the Emmy nominations are announced on July 16th, and hopefully he will win his first Emmy award at the 67th Emmy Awards due to be held in September this year.

My friend is greatly missed, by me, and by many others who adored her.

About Snoskred, death, Sad Snoskred, television shows, things to remember

Truly Great Blogs #1

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From time to time, in my internet travels, I somehow stumble upon a blog that makes me laugh and cry at the same time. A blog that involves truly beautiful writing on a difficult subject. A blog that makes me start thinking. A blog that starts conversations with family and friends..

Today I will like to mention one of these blogs –

But Before You Click –

I will like to add a note that sometimes you will see images of the dead on the blog I am about to link to. They will not be gory images, at least thus far I have not experienced that at all. The images I have experienced have all been people at peace.

If you click through now, there may be images of the dead on the page you land on.

You have been warned!

It is up to you if you want to click through.

Confessions Of A Funeral Director.

Also, if you read the blog via a feed, you will not see images in the feed and you will usually be given plenty of warning that the post contains images, so you can choose whether or not to click through.

Sometimes I do click through if I see such a warning, sometimes I don’t. I like that it is my choice, unlike a recent Youtube incident where I suddenly found myself viewing very disturbing images of some of the Air Asia plane crash victims. Thanks so, SO much for that, Youtube, I will never unsee that no matter how hard I try.

This blog is thought provoking in a multitude of ways. I interviewed to be a funeral director once and I still feel a bit drawn to that area, though I am not sure how well I would deal with some of the sights and smells.

If you decided not to click through, here is an article on the blog which does not contain any images of the dead however it does contain one image of a couple in the process of dying – Couples that Died Together: Five Stories

(For what it is worth, I would just as strongly label and advise people if I were sending them off to view images of spiders, because that is something I cannot stand to look at, and I would never, ever, never, post an image of a spider on my blog!)

About Snoskred, death, Linkage, Snoskred Faves

In Lieu Of Flowers

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

apricot

I respectfully decline this concept.

Every time someone special in my life has passed, the flowers that people brought to their funeral made me smile and remember the happy times, rather than focusing on the sad time of losing them.

It is my opinion that there are two groups who “In lieu of flowers” serves. The funeral directors who used to have to organise the flowers (which at some funerals could be a huge task!) and charities who get the donations.

This concept does not necessarily serve the people who are grieving a lost loved one. If the loved ones are against cut flowers, then perhaps this concept serves them well. Even so, there are many options which do not involve cut flowers. I once sent an amazing flower garden via Teleflora who have a great range of plants you can send which can be planted in a garden.

A year and a bit ago, I went to a funeral of someone I considered a great friend. The announcement said in lieu of flowers. I said, hell no. I am going to take a beautiful flower arrangement so that my friends daughter would have beauty to take home with her. I went to my local florist and I asked for apricot roses, and she had some absolutely gorgeous mini roses, so there were a lot of flowers.

People gave me the side eye when they saw my flowers. That is what upsets me the most about telling people in lieu of flowers. All of a sudden, if you bring them, you are the world’s biggest a**hole. Well, I DECLINE THAT!

On this occasion, the funeral director was super lovely, and told me there would be a time in the service where I could take my flowers and put them on the casket. As I was the only one with flowers, I was the only one that got that special moment, to go up and touch her coffin and say a proper goodbye while one of her favourite songs played, to say goodbye to someone who made my times at work extra special, to someone who I looked forward to seeing, and whose passing left an enormous hole within me and within my workplace.

At the end of the service, the coffin disappeared, not to be seen again. The flowers did re-appear, in the arms of exactly the person who I had intended them for. It made me so happy to think that she got to take them home, and I hope they put a smile on her face, like flowers always do for me.

About Snoskred, death

My Shit List

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

ss5

Sunrise at Sandy Beach in Hawaii – I’ll be using some of my Hawaii images over the next few months, FYI.

Thanks to Boob In A Box – incidentally one of my favourite recent blog finds – for this one. :)

10 – The fact that Breaking Bad is over for good. It was finished with such perfection, it better win some Emmy love next week.

9 – There is a front end loader constantly running just one street away from me during the day at the moment, and I am losing my marbles. What few marbles I had left, anyway.

8 – My recliner needs welding. If one of the cats sits on top of it, I can’t get balanced right! But to get welded, it has to be carried out into the shed.

7 – Taylor Swift leaving gyms in New York in totally not gym appropriate outfits, with obviously empty handbags on her arm. Tom and Lorenzo (my favourite celebrity fashion bloggers btw) have nicknamed it Taylor Swift’s Empty Bags Tour.

6 – Male movie stars who refuse to groom their eyebrows. Hey, dude, I paid good money to watch you on the big screen, the least you can do is make sure your eyebrows are not taking over your face and/or temples. All of you somehow manage to not have a monobrow, what is so wrong with tidying the rest up? I’m not at the point of naming names but you’re driving me in that direction!

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Thanks to Darylisms Tumblr for the gif – I searched high and low for one photo that would do proper justice to the well groomed eyebrows of Christian Slater and none of them did, but this gif image does. :)

5 – People on Facebook when someone they do not know passes away in an accident. I want to bang my head so hard. Here is an example of some recent comments when two people died in a head on collision near where I live. This little example will supply us with numbers 4 and 3 as well.

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Why do the beautiful peoples lives have to be taken away from them, indeed? What about the not beautiful people, or is that more ok?

4 – My heart goes out to – I sincerely hope your heart remains in your chest pumping blood around your body which is where it belongs. Since when did this become the new meaningless thing everyone says when they cannot come up with something real to say? Peoples, when you hear a politician say this, remove it from your personal list of things to say to those who are grieving. Your thoughts can go out, your prayers can go out, your internal organs should go nowhere, ever. Unless you are donating them to someone else.

3 – Rip? Rip what? It is R.I.P. – there are dots in between the letters for a REASON, people. You can’t take a moment to put in full stops for this person you are writing a tribute to? You couldn’t maybe use the whole words, like Rest In Peace?

2 – The media and their apparent lack of care for anyone who might not want graphic images on the front page of their newspaper. Yes, some of the papers here in Australia and around the world published unedited images of bodies and body parts after the MH17 tragedy. Disgusting.

Media Watch did a good piece on this and I will put a link to the *transcript* here. If you click through you will NOT see any images but there are links on the page to the graphic images and they are all clearly labelled, and the video itself does contain the images. If you are lame like I am, you can cover your eyes but still listen. :) Link to Media Watch MH17 episode.

1- {rant mode on} Paul Mercurio in those manipulative Insuranceline ads. Sorry people but the ads are so terrible they are not to be found anywhere online. I am very lucky this is the case because if I put the ads here and you watched them, you’d want to dead me.

Seriously Paul, what were you thinking? You were in Strictly Ballroom, dude. You are not wearing a gold sparkly jacket in these commercials – they have you in the most ugly and ill fitting shirts I have seen in a long, long time on a man in the world. Was there a mirror where you filmed this? If so, how did you allow this fashion crime to be committed?

If you had the sparkly gold jacket on, maybe I wouldn’t resent it quite as much.

Okay, that is entirely not true. You could be dressed in sequins from head to toe and I would still be mad as a cut snake.

The levels to which you have sunk – to now be the face of ads trying to convince elderly people not to “be a burden” to their families by purchasing “final expenses insurance” so that their families do not have to find money for their funeral..

Even worse, I know this advertising works amazingly well. :( Those people who buy it would more than likely be better off putting aside the money they’d pay for the premiums each week and leaving that to their kids. But they don’t want to be a burden so they’ll pony up the cash and by the time they do eventually go on to greener pastures they’ll have paid 3x what they would have paid up front for a funeral or via a pre-payment plan with their local funeral company.

I hope they are paying you big money for this, Paul. Any respect the majority of Australians might have once had for you has long since evaporated with us having to sit through these terrible ads over and over and over again.

{end rant} – Sorry that was long but those ads have been irritating me for a very, very long time now. Even worse they are on Foxtel which I am PAYING for. Like Pay TV! Why are there ads – very long and obtrusive ads – on my Pay TV?

Well, that feels better.. anyone else want to play?

If yes leave me a link in the comments. ;)

And pop over to Boob In A Box – and leave a comment with a link to your shit list post as well. :)

Annoyed Snoskred, death, negative thought, wrong world

Just in case something happens..

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

This post is sure to seem odd. I don’t usually post about my health and a vast array of other inappropriate subjects. For the last three weeks I have had some kind of evil flu which does not seem to go away. Whenever I get the flu I am reminded of the one time I got pneumonia in 2003 right before Christmas – summer, in Australia, hello? But I went to the dentist with wet hair, and my dentist was in Glenelg, and the day I went it seemed like there was a breeze right from the Arctic blowing up the middle of Jetty Rd.

A few days later I could hardly breathe and I honestly thought I was going to die. Plus, back then I was a smoker and I couldn’t smoke, so not only did I feel terrible but I was the crankiest person anywhere ever. I remember begging the other half to get me Garlic Prawns from Marcellinas in the middle of the night – and so worried about me was he that he actually did it. I believe that was about 4am. Marcellinas was open till 5am.. ;) and the garlic prawns were spectacular.

I could not sleep lying down. We had a waterbed (still do) and I could not sleep there – I felt like I was drowning whenever I lay down. I made a makeshift kind of bed on the sofa bed which involved a lot of pillows and spare matresses so I could be sitting up when I was lying down. Days disappeared while I hovered in some kind of delirious state. I remember nothing of it.

When I did eventually wake up, I was craving a cigarette. I went out into the backyard and I tried to smoke, but I could not. That was when I gave up smoking for good.

In the middle of the night last night I woke up and I thought – what if something happens to me? Will they know what to do with me when I am gone? I don’t want to be buried and decompose. I don’t think I would like that. On the other hand, I really don’t like the idea of cremation – what if I am actually still alive but in some kind of death like state?

However all us ladies are prepared to sacrifice comfort for fashion and I am no exception to the rule. I would like to be cremated and turned into a diamond. Impossible, no? No, it is actually possible. It’s called Lifegem. And though I thought I must have mentioned this before a search of my blog shows that I have not. It amazes me because this is like fundamental to the core of me now, this is what I have decided I want done after a long struggle of not knowing what I want done, and I have not even mentioned it to you guys?

Well, what I really wanted was to be cremated and put on the mantelpiece but the other half refuses. He thinks it would be spooky, and he says we don’t have a mantelpiece. He is right, we don’t. However, would it be so difficult to create one just for me? He also thinks I will live longer than he will. Over my dead body. I refuse to be the last one standing.

Anyway, I’ve had a nasty flu, and I have said nothing about it because I don’t want to bore people with that shiznit and I wouldn’t have said anything but it explains why out of the middle of nowhere I am talking about what to do with my remains. So now you know, and there you go..

And Adelaide people, I miss Barnacle Bills. Seriously, you don’t know how good you have it. Go get a two in one snack pack and eat it for me, will you?

adelaide, death, growing up, health

Another Saturday Night..

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Another couple of West Wing episodes. And whoa, is about all I can say. This possibly blog won’t make a lot of sense to non-WW fans.

A few weeks ago Sephy was in the middle of the 2nd season, and I said to him something like, an episode will come to you as a surprise and you’ll know what I mean by that when it happens. The episode I was talking about in that case was 18th and Potomac, where they just out of nowhere, completely out of the blue, kill off a much loved character. In the episode after it, there is a point where the killed off character makes an appearance as a ghost, kind of, which also is much unexpected.

Tonight’s episode was another one of those but on a larger scale. And when they go into the funeral service, you see all the faces of people who seem to have gone their separate ways, doing their different jobs, some still at the whitehouse and others not, and the only face missing was Sam. I kept expecting to see him but he didn’t show up. Apparently he shows up next week.

There’s still a big gap between where my DVD box sets ran out and the show as it is today, and I am really looking forward to finding out how the show gets from there to the show I saw tonight.

death, television shows, The West Wing

A confession..

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

This may turn out to be the lamest post ever on this blog but I’m going to admit it.

The last few nights, at midnight, after the other half has gone to bed, I’ve been secretly bawling my eyes out. And the reason why is..

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They’ve been re-running the episodes where Dr Mark Greene dies.

What is it about Anthony Edwards that makes him so capable of creating characters who, when they die, you just can’t help but cry? Is there anyone reading this who did not shed a tear when Goose was killed in Top Gun? If there is, probably you didn’t see the movie, right? And that was a short movie, ER was 177 episodes.

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It’s not just about the character of Dr Greene, it was about the history of the show. I was a fan of the show from the beginning and to watch the relationships build between Dr Green and people like Carter was a thing of beauty. And I guess because I knew the show so well, I recognised a lot of the things they did during these final Dr Greene episodes, the passing of the baton from Dr Greene to Dr Carter, the scenes which were in the pilot where Dr Carter said the exact same things to a new medical student that Dr Greene had once said to him so many years before. The little things that mean a lot.

So when they played all these episodes the first time, it was on channel Nine (we call it Nein here) and really they messed it up, they played episodes out of order, they would play a new one one week, and the next week just grab any old episode to drag out the season. It didn’t really have much impact on me. In fact I didn’t manage to catch all the episodes. So much did I miss, that I thought the pay tv people were playing them out of order! But I have checked, and they are in order.

Anyway, I don’t think any of this will make much sense to someone who wasn’t a fan of the show, or to people who didn’t like Dr Greene as a character. And it’s not like it’s making me sad when the show itself isn’t on. And it’s just tv, and this is just a character and not a real person, and terrible things happen to people every day, and stuff. But I figured I would mention it, try to get it out of my system or something.

What I loved most about Dr Greene as a character was his compassion, his patience, and his passion. So I’m sad that they killed him off when he decided to leave the show. And I didn’t really watch much of the show after that happened. But I have some of the DVD’s – seasons one and two, which are just incredible writing wise and acting wise etc – and also contain George Clooney and Julianna Margulies and all the other good cast members, and you could tell they were all enjoying what they were doing as far as making this series. They’re so cheap now, I might collect the rest of the series, up until his departure anyway.

So goodbye, Dr Greene.. when that song by Iz cuts in at 2:56, that is when I haz a sad.

Sorry the video is not the best, I had to replace it when the previous one was taken down. :)

death, television shows

Not sex, death actually..

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

I blogged about politics, then religion, now death! At this rate anyone regularly reading this blog will surely never return.. :)

Well Death is a fact of life apparently. So we’re told. A while ago I asked people what song they wanted played at their funeral and nobody replied :( it was back in the early days of the blog, so probably nobody was reading. In fact probably nobody’s reading now.. so I’ll get no replies again.

If Morten Harket can’t attend and sing a song personally and Lukas Rossi is unable to arrive and sing something then I probably would pick a song by them on CD, played at the right moment.

We’re probably not supposed to talk about death because it is morbid and we’re all busy pretending it won’t happen to us but it probably will so unless you want your relos choosing songs you never liked and celebrating your life in vaguely inappropriate ways, you might want to make some kind of plan for the festivities you won’t be attending yourself, well you sort of will.. see how difficult this is to speak about? I’m like majorly uncomfortable typing this because I don’t want to offend anyone who recently lost someone they love.

Should I somehow merit a shrine by the side of the road I’d request a huge, fuck OFF sparkly pink glitter cross. Well I don’t really want a cross, but it seems to be what everyone else has. But why do I have to be a sheep? Can I instead request someone take one of the plane models on top of my bookshelves and cover it in sparkly pink glitter instead? If not, a triangle, I think. That shape seems to speak to me. Both the above would be fine, too.

As far as flowers go, I demand flowers thank you No In Lieu of Flowers here. I have always been partial to apricot colored roses. But not an insipid pale apricot rose, *real* apricot. Don’t confuse apricot with cream. *please* ;)

But as far as what to do with the remains, that is one I have been faffing on for years.. I don’t really like the whole cremation idea but the burial thing is also far too creepy. But then, I found this – the chance to be turned into something sparkly is far too good to be true though it does involve cremation. As my other half firmly refuses to put my remains into an urn on the mantelpiece (He says we don’t have a mantelpiece. This may be true, but sheesh, create one, it’s not hard! ;) It’s like my last request, be a bit reasonable!) so I can watch him playing the xbox while reclining on the couch for all eternity, I would like to be made into bling instead.

So what are your intentions for the celebration of your time here on Earth? And what do you think happens in the afterlife? Me, I don’t know. I like to think we all come back again in another form. But wherever I am going, I hope I can still listen to A-ha songs.. will I have ears? I’ve had a lot of trouble with the ears I have now, could I get some that work properly next time?

death