In my book "The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die," there is a picture from Maryland in the 1920's of such a "death wedding," complete with flowers, attendants, a bride in a bridal dress and a groom in a closed coffin.
Years of printing the pictures after each birth, death, wedding, baptism, holiday.
Although most popular in Eastern Europe, "death weddings," as folklorists call them, also took place in Britain in the 19th century.
Like death, weddings and moving, a ski trip wields awesome power to threaten anything in its path: the bonds of marriage, the positive balance in a bank account, the patience of those who are asked when we are going to get there, and those flat land muscles that wake up arguing against another day on the hill.
Imams or various mosque officials regularly preside over major life rituals (births, deaths, weddings, etc)., but shamans, herbal healers, or other local specialists are often summoned to treat serious illnesses and other forms of adversity.
Her column, "Dot on Roxbury," usually ran on the same page as "Dorothy Dunne," and, in its faithful chronicling of births and deaths, weddings and christenings, it read a lot like Deuteronomy.
Written and directed by Paul Zimet, the Talking Band's artistic director, "Imminence" follows several generations of a likable, unremarkable family, charting deaths, weddings and midlife crises and setting these brief, intense disruptions against geotectonic cycles and flare-ups.
Attending Catholic school from preschool through college, we marked the passage of time with the lighting of candles in Advent or the silence of Good Friday services; we celebrated major milestones -- births, deaths, weddings -- within the walls of the parish, more central to our identity than our neighborhood or hometown.
Despite the whooshing camera work, the crashing edits and the hairpin turns in Anders Thomas Jensen's screenplay, "After the Wedding" relies on whipped-up familiar ingredients — a birth, a death, a wedding, a funeral, a man, a woman, another man, another woman — to pique the audience's interest rather than rock its world.
A few days later, Rosenberg received a call from a jeweller, who informed him that Marjorie had ordered a gift for him before her death — a wedding ring.
This could be a death, a wedding, a birth, falling in love etc. Think of what you felt then and write it down, try to be as detailed as you can.
