Los Cuatro Ojos

A Few Facts About Death And Dying…

• When an Australian Bushman died, his body was lowered into a grave where a special kind of gravedigger awaited it. This person’s job was to slice up the corpse and hand out bits of the flesh to the mourners. The order in which the relatives partook of the feast was strictly prescribed. A mother ate from her children, and children from their mother, A man could eat his sister’s husband and his brother’s wife. A father, however, could not eat his children, nor children their father.

• Coconuts kill more people in the world than sharks do. Approximately 150 people are killed each year by coconuts.
• The body of Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century, was embalmed with special herbs after his death and preserved in the cathedral in the main square of Lima. His body can still be viewed today, displayed in a glass casket.
• In medieval Japan, it was believed that there was a single hair somewhere on the tail of a cat that could Restore Life to a dead person. For this reason cats were brought into the room of a dying person and placed next to his or her bed. As a last resort, relatives sometimes had the dying person pluck a single hair from the cat’s tail in the hope that this one would prove to be the magic strand.
• Nearly 5,000 Americans under the age of twenty-four commit suicide successfuly yearly. An additional 100,000 tried to. Ninety percent of all suicides are females.