"Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it."

A Certain Kind of Death

"Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

OK. I need to explain this one. I watched this movie a few days ago but I didn't feel like it would be a good idea to post it on my birthday (yesterday), particularly because I didn't have time to explain. A Certain Kind of Death  is a documentary about people who die without next of kin. It is about what happens to them, what happens to their bodies, what happens to their stuff, what happens to their assets. Its a rather morbid movie that I would recommend to no one but neither would I say that its message is not worth thinking about. How do people get to be old enough to die of old age and have NO ONE who cares about them, no one even who knows who they are, neighbors that don;'t have a clue even who the coroner's office might contact for information? This movie is a testimony to the possibilities for disconnectedness that exists in American society. today You literally CAN die in social isolation here.

The people featured in this movie have literally arrived at that place that the Ghost of Christmas Future pictures for Ebenezer Scrooge in the Christmas Carol - a picture of a desolate forgotten grave. In the final scenes of A Certain Kind of Death you see the cremated ashes of hundreds and thousands of "unclaimed" former people poured into a single hole in the ground outside the crematorium with nothing for a marker but a small metal plaque indicating the year that all of them were buried there. They were dust and to dust one can literally see them returning, wondering if at any point in time in between they were anything else but dust. 

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol,

Question for Comment: Is the network of people you care about and who care about you rubust enough for you or is it something you would like to work on? How would you begin if you were to set it as a goal to achieve a richer, deeper, more pervasive sense of connectedness in your life?