We Want Your Stories!

Hi Friends of The Civilians,

Our “Let Me Ascertain You” series returns to Joe’s Pub on Saturday, May 17^th at 7pm. We’re hoping you can help us with our next installment: “F*cking and Dying.”

If you didn’t notice, we’re a bit obsessed with sex and death at The Civilians and this cabaret explores what happens when those fixations collide. We will look at the duality of human nature and our competing sex and death drives - our instinct for life, love and reproduction against our instinct toward death, aggression, and repulsion...and we need your stories!

If any of you or anyone you know might have good stories about sex or death or tales where the two collide -- please send details our way!

We’re looking to hear stories about…

- Wild coming-of-age sex stories or sexual explorations

- Sex addiction or Nyphomania

- Auto-erotic fetishes

- Dominatrix work

- “Terror sex” following disaster or trauma

- Sexual encounters near or connected to dying, funerals

...or of course necrophilia 

Please send us a brief summary of your story or shoot any questions you might have to projectmanager@thecivilians.org and if we think your story might work for us, we’ll be in touch about setting up an interview. Any and all leads are helpful. We’re looking forward to hearing your stories. For more information click here. 

Yours,

The Civilians

Photo Credit: Antoine D'Agata 

Be The Death of Me, Part IV

This is our fourth and final episode of our Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me Series. These interviews are part of an ongoing investigation about death, dying and whatever comes after that. We talked to more than a hundred people so far, and many of these conversations centered on how we remember and how we memorialize those that we’ve lost. Maybe you’ve passed an entirely white bike chained up somewhere and wondered what it was. And maybe you guessed that it’s a memorial for a cyclist killed in that location. We talked to Jessie, one of the people who makes these public memorials. She’s one of the co-founders of the New York City Ghost Bike Project, performed here by actor Megan Stern. Jessie connected us to Lizi, a mother whose son was killed on his bike in Queens, performed by Indika Senanayake. And as our final piece in this series about endings, we have an actor performing an interview we did with another actor. To close, Brad Heberlee plays Everett. Interviews for this podcast were conducted by Elsa Carrette, Ian Daniel, and Leonie Ettinger. To get the latest about our next topic, be sure to subscribe!

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Be The Death of Me, Part III

Here’s episode three in our new podcast series Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me. What you’ll hear are excerpts from a larger ongoing project about life, death, and whatever happens after that. As part of this investigation, our team spoke to those who work every day in matters of life and death — people who spend their days in the places that witness the demise of our bodies. We’ve put three of those stories together for this episode. To kick things off, here’s actor Peter Friedman performing a man named Leonard: he’s a doctor of internal medicine. Then Danielle Davenport performs an interview we did with Sara, a child life specialist in the general pediatric unit at NYU Hospital. Keith Randolph Smith closes out this episode with his performance of Rocky, who is the co-founder of The Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, which it turns out is the nation’s first minority-run volunteer ambulance corps. Since 1988 the Bed-Stuy ambulance corps greatly improved emergency care in the Bed-Stuy community and to this day it continues to train young people and adults in life-saving skills. The interviews for this podcast were conducted by Micharne Cloughley, Dan Domingues and Meridith Friedman.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Be The Death of Me, Part II

We’re back with the second episode of Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me. For this Civilians' project we took a prismatic look into the end of life and talked with a cross-section of New Yorkers - ER nurses, priests, funeral directors, vampires, shamans, crime-scene cleaners, and many ordinary people dealing with the extraordinary experience of loss. In this episode we share three of those stories. Actors Gardiner Comfort, Jennifer Morris, and Jeremy Shamos perform.

The interviews for this podcast episode were conducted by Matt Dellapina, Meridith Friedman, and Donnetta Lavinia Grays. We encourage you to subscribe if you haven’t already, and if you’re feeling extra generous write us a review. It makes a big difference! Until next time.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Be The Death of Me, Part I

We’re starting up a new series here at Let Me Ascertain You taken from a couple of live events we did recently about death. The show called Be The Death of Me is about facing that final curtain and maybe what lies on the other side. A small army of artists spent six months interviewing all sorts of people here in New York City. A cast of 33 brilliant actors performed these pieces at the Irondale Center in our home neighborhood of Fort Greene Brooklyn. And over the next few episodes, we’re going to share some of these stories with you.

Most people, it stands to reason, have some fear of dying - but not everyone does. As you’ll hear in this episode, some are planning on doing what no man or woman has done before: escape it altogether. Stephen Plunkett performs Father Sebastiaan, a local vampyre and fangsmith. Mia Katigbak performs an interview we did with a medium named Therese. Matt Dellapina performs our interview with Futurist/Techno-Philospher Gray Scott.

Interviews for this podcast were conducted by EllaRose Chary, Ian Daniel, and Leonie Ettinger. If you haven’t yet, please make sure you've subscribed so you can hear upcoming episodes in this Be The Death of Me series.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Futurist Gray Scott

Our Project Director Ian Daniel interviewed Gray Scott, a futurist/neuro-technology-philosopher, as part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale Center in Ft. Greene Brooklyn.  Details HERE.

Gray is also the editorial director of SERIOUS WONDER.com the online futurist philosophy, technology and consciousness magazine produced by his media company SERIOUS WONDER MEDIA™ based in NYC.

Learn more about Gray's work HERE.

Check out some excerpts from Gray's interview:

Uploading your consciousness is going to happen.  Everyone is uploading every single moment of their life, like what they had for breakfast, on social networks. That's the first stage of uploading consciousness.

I do think there will be consciousness factories so that just like on your cloud server you will back up your consciousness, however, we will do it more like a brain to computer interface--like a headband you wear.  And every day you download everything that happened to you in your computer and it all just goes into this cloud, and if you’re in a car accident or die of old age, they can replicate that consciousness into a machine.  You literally just jump from body to a machine without a separation.

I think what we are going to see in the future is an organism that is part machine and part organic.  So you could take your stems cells and literally grow a brain.  And if we could learn how to upload our consciousness into the substrate of an organic brain then we have a whole other scenario--even if our physical body dies, that consciousness goes on forever as long as the machine works.  You still have to maintain the machine but if we can capture that essence of who you are, who I am, then we potentially could live forever, and we could go anywhere in the universe.  We don’t need to breathe, a machine doesn’t need to breathe.  As long as you have a power source and we can do that with solar, as long as you’re plugged into a star, we’re talking. You could choose to leave earth and go explore deep space for eternity as long as you’re close enough to a star for energy.

Isn't the drive to create artificial intelligence, isn't it a cry against death?  I don't want to die so I'm going to create an artificial representation of myself in case I do.  I mean it's a very deep psychological process.  

Personally, I'm greedy and I want to live forever. I do. Because it's heartbreaking and inefficient to only live 80 years.  It’s such a short time, I feel cheated.  All of the work that you do throughout your life, all the preparation that you do for your intelligence, for your body. Think about how many times you go to the gym or think about how many meals you've cooked for yourself and just to have that swept away in one moment.  That bothers me.

Thanks so much to Gray and Ian for sharing. To hear more of Gray's interview come to "Be The Death of Me" June 28/29.

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE.

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Psychic Medium

Our R&D Group Coordinator, EllaRose Chary, interviewed Therese Relucio, a New York based Certified Psychic Medium (Intuitive Consultant).  Learn more about Therese's work HERE, and also be sure to check out her development group HERE.  
This interview is part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale in Ft. Greene Brooklyn. Details HERE!

Therese Relucio

Check out some excerpts of Therese's interview below:

I remember seeing my first spirit when I was three years old. I was actually born in the Philippines, but I remember seeing it - I was still in the Philippines at the time and I remember seeing a male spirit outside of my window on my second floor so I know that it was definitely a spirit. And I pointed it out and I remember nobody else being able to see the same spirit, so from then, from that first memory, I remember seeing a lot of other spirits coming through. 

I was not scared until probably about 9 or 10 when I started seeing, um, a spirit that was laying in bed with me, a male spirit that was laying in bed with me, smiling at me all the time and I would see him for probably a year, two years straight no matter what house I lived in. Um, yeah, and it was scary only because he was smiling at me and not saying anything. It was a little bit creepy, but um, as it turns out, as I got older, I realized that that was my spirit guide.

Yeah, so a spirit guide, I say spirit because you know, uh, depending on what you want to call it—you could call it ghost if you want—but a spirit is just basically a soul that is not in, that is discarded, meaning not in—not in a physical body.  So they're not human, they're not in a physical form. But a spirit guide, you can relate it to something, some people say a guardian angel, you know, someone that is there to protect you to guide you. That's what a spirit guide is. They guide you towards your direction, towards your life's purpose.

I mean really I've always believed that we're on earth to learn things. So earth is like a boarding school for our souls. When we die and when we pass, we're just going back to where we came from. That's it. There’s nothing unnatural about it, it's just a euphoric process and we go back to where we came from. 

Thanks so much to Therese and Ella for sharing. 

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE

Announcing "Be The Death Of Me" at the Irondale Center June 28th and 29th

If you've been following our blog, you already know that our awesome team of interviewers and researchers have been exploring every pocket of NY to uncover some of the most unusual, beautiful, and powerful stories about death, dying, and the afterlife. Over the past 5 months we've conducted over a hundred interviews! For excerpts from some of those interviews, click HERE!

Make sure to catch "Be The Death of Me" June 28th and 29th at 8pm at the Irondale! Details HERE 

We're super excited to officially announce the launch of Be the Death of Me, an installation performance piece that offers the audience intimate encounters with matters of life and death in New York City. The audience will navigate their experience inside the atmospheric Irondale Center, housed in a historic church in Fort Greene Brooklyn.

Through a dynamic variety of settings and formats, the audience encounters real stories gathered from a wide cross-section of New Yorkers - everyone from ER nurses to priests, funeral directors to vampires, shamans to crime-scene cleaners. Through this myriad of perspectives, Be the Death of Me uncovers hidden worlds inside New York - places inhabited by those that witness the demise of our bodies as well as those that imagine what may or may not happen to our souls on the other side of life

Here are a few more excerpts from some of our interviews:

"And one thing with arterial embalming, you have an artery right here and they cut open and make an incision and then they get these tongs and they pry out your artery, which is like a big, thick red licorice rope."

-Brandon, Former Embalmer

"The reason people deep down, I think would spend a million dollars on a mausoleum is a real need to be remembered, and to be remembered for, like, as powerful a person as you were."

-Allison, Cemetery Tour Guide/Historian

"Some people just lose their minds and they’re not there anymore, y’know. How do you stab two little kids? It’s almost like writing the prequel to Hannibal Lecter. Who was this guy before he was this animal? That’s what makes it interesting too, you gotta be a little bit morbid. Morbid and compassionate". 

-Crime Scene reporter

We get to the intersection. Cops were already there. There were a lot of empty cop cars there, with their headlights on, their light bars, the blue and the white lights lit up. And I see one officer and he has his flashlight on his shoulder and he’s like waving me this way and he’s like, “You wanna run.” And I started to explain to him, “EMTs never run, that’s just something on TV. What if I get hurt, what if I trip, then you got no EMT.”

-Part-time EMT

Here's our creative team. A special shout-out to our AMAZING team of interviewers and researchers!

Directed by:
Steven Cosson

Cast Includes: Aysan Celik, Donnetta Grays, Daoud Heidami, Nina Hellman, Daniel Jenkins, Trey Lyford, Caitlin Miller, Garrett Neergaard, Stephen Plunkett, Brian Sgambati, and Colleen Werthmann.

Project Director:
Ian Daniel

Project Manager:
Meridith Friedman

Dramaturg:
Micharne Cloughley

Artistic Assistant:
Leonie Ettinger

Set Design:
Mimi Lien

Lighting Design:
Lucrecia Briceño

Sound Design:
Ken Travis

Costume Design:
Chloe Chapin

Projection Designer:
Jeanette Yew

Associate Director:
Mia Rovegno

Associate Dramaturg:
Deepali Gupta

Interviews and research by: Leila Buck, Elsa Carette, Isabel Carey, EllaRose Chary, Chris Cragin Day, Matt Dellapina, Dan Domingues, Jesse Goldman, Donnetta Grays, Ben Gullard, Nina Hellman, Kevin Hourigan, Rachel Karpf, Alex Kveton, David Trevor Lawson, Rachel Lerner-Ley, Carly Mensch, Stephen Plunkett, Victoria Pollack, Alex Rosenthal, Joey Sims, Jay Stull, and Piper Werle.

"Be The Death of Me" June 28th and 29th at the Irondale!  Details HERE 

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Near Death Experience

One of our artistic collaborators, Rachel Lerner-Ley, recently interviewed David Bennett, a public speaker, teacher, and author, who survived two near death experiences and stage IV lung cancer. He recently published a book about his experiences, Voyage of Purpose, which you can learn more about HERE. Also be sure to check out David's personal website HERE!  This interview is part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale in Ft. Greene Brooklyn.  Details HERE 

Check out a few excerpts from what David shared: 

In 1983, I was the chief engineer of the research vessel Aloha. And, uh, we were early-March off the California coast. We were two miles off the coast. We tried to beat a storm in so that we could get into the harbor. The captain decided to put a small rubber boat called a Zodiac that we used to retrieve our submarines in the water. So, I, you know, I got in the boat.  We just started heading for shore. Well, we fell off a twenty-five foot wave that a surfer would be envious of. We just fell off of this thing like within a few seconds: Boom! And it folded that Zodiac in half like a peanut butter sandwich. I was in the bow. It catapulted me into the water, and like I said, I was trained as a diver so I'm used to being in the water. But this is nighttime so there was no way of telling what was up or down. I was being tossed and tumbled like a rag doll.

And I never made it to the surface. I drowned. I found myself in this absolute darkness at first. But it was calm, and it was peaceful. And I just had come from this very violent, loud, you know, horrendous environment to this sudden calm, peace, but absolute darkness. Nothing existed. But it didn't feel like I was alone. And I was comfortable. And I was warm. The California coast: the water comes off the North. It's really cold. I wasn't cold anymore.

And then I saw this light. We've all heard about the light, you know, Hollywood's pretty good. They've overdramatized that quite a bit. I saw this light and it was millions upon millions of fragments. And they were all moving and coalescing and working together. And as I got closer, it was like this, there were waves of love that were just wrapping me, enveloping me, and transforming me, this light with love. Just pure love. They were welcoming me home. I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional kind of situation. I was thrown from one family to the next to the next. So, I never had a sense of family, but these beings that were with me they were more of a family than anything I had ever experienced here in life. 

Well, as I was reviewing my life and you're experiencing your life from all these different experiences.  I saw that a lot of times with things in life that were done with loving intention were the cause of some of the greatest ripples because every time we interact with someone we create kind of like these ripples that cascade outward through the people and beyond. And I saw that whenever we did something with loving intention, it created the greatest ripples. So the things that I thought were important like becoming chief engineer had hardly any significance. But when I would do something with loving intention, it created this huge ripple. 

Thanks so much to David and Rachel for sharing. Make sure to catch "Be The Death of Me" June 28th and 29th at the Irondale!  Details HERE 

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: The Cemetery Explorer

Our collaborator, Alex Rosenthal, recently interviewed Allison C. Meier, a young writer with a penchant for for exploring cemeteries and researching their occupants. She leads tours of New York City cemeteries through Atlas Obscura. Learn more about Allison HERE, and check out Atlas Obscura HERE!

Allison C. Meier

Check out a few excerpts from Alex's interview with Allison below:

I try to get lost, basically, when I'm exploring a cemetery. I don't know, you could have sort of a checklist of famous people when you're going through a cemetery, which I think is totally fine, but I think like getting lost and experiencing the place is what I usually try to do. Like some, you know, you come across like, for example, a tombstone in Green-Wood just says like "Grandmother" on it, it's like half shifted in the ground, and you're like "Who was Grandmother? Why didn't she have her whole name on it?" And you do a little bit of research, you find out it was the woman who had the affair with the reverend, the Quaker church of Brooklyn preacher, but then you realize, oh, she was like totally ignored in her death.

Allison leading a tour through Woodlawn Cemetery, viewed from a mausoleum.
(photograph by Ronny Preciado)

You can't really build on top of–aren't supposed to build on top of a cemetery. So sometimes they actually just move the gravestones as if that's like totally fine. Like at Green-Wood, there's a Dutch cemetery that used to be somewhere else in Brooklyn, and in theory they should have dug up all of those people and put them with their right headstones again, but as you can imagine, like digging up 200-year-old graves and trying to...it just...so, there's a lot of skeletons under the ground. Like during construction under the city it's not unusual to find skeletons. I know there's a potters field behind the New Museum, and when they were doing construction there they found some skeletons. And like Washington Square Park,  Madison Square Park, and Bryant Park all used to be Potter's fields.

One of Allison's tours in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery.

If you want to be buried in New York city, you need a lot of money, or a family member who already has a plot, or you just get lucky with immediate internment, otherwise you're probably going to be buried in New Jersey. The reason we have the big cemeteries in the outer boroughs is because the ones in Manhattan filled up. I don't know if someone is going to like build a cemetery island or like underground burials or, yeah, everyone could go to space. It would be very expensive. I'm sure they would love it. The moon would be a perfect graveyard.

Thanks to Allison and Alex for sharing! Don't miss BE THE DEATH OF ME June 28th and 29th at the Irondale (details to follow soon)!

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Father Sebastiaan, Vampyre

Our Artistic Intern, Leonie Ettinger, recently interviewed Father Sebastiaan, a self-defined Vampyre, Fangsmith, and author of occult literature, on his thoughts about death and dying for our new project.  

Father Sebastiann is one of the co-founders of The Sanguinarium, a social network for the Vampyre subculture and created The Endless Night Festival, one of the largest Vampyre gatherings in the world. To learn more about him, click HERE 

Check out a few excerpts from Leonie's interview below. 

What exactly is a Vampyre?

Vampyres are energy beings. They are not a blood drinking physical entity because blood is useless for Vampyres. Instead, they need to leach life force of other human beings because they don't have a body to generate their own. The Vampyre is not about death - like a zombie or demon or death itself. The Vampyre is about life and a cure to death.

The human body is like an embryo to the Vampyre, a place where he lives within like a human in a spacesuit. Immortality must be earned, practiced and refined through mediation, energy work, validation and interaction with the Ancestors ('undead'). If successful, the Vampyre will survive death as an 'undead'. At this time, the 'undead' do not want to be known to the “mundane world”. They are in between life and death. However, when they reveal themselves to the mundane world they appear as magickal friends, angels, spirits, faeries, and more recently some say even aliens.

The grandson of an orthodontist & nephew of a dentist, he also hand-carves custom fangs. 

What do you think happens when we die?

My belief is that when you die, your energy is released into the universe and recycled. The church tells you that if your physical body dies, you die. That makes sense but what happens if that's not the case? What happens if your body dies and you avatar continues? The internet will eventually become something like the Matrix. Our bodies will be useless and our consciousness will be inside the computer. So does that make us energy? Yes. You become immortal and the technology becomes the God - not God. This is a fear and why Vampyres have been given such a bad rep throughout all the centuries.

Can we really achieve immortality?

The only thing that is going to keep the human race alive and give immortality to everybody is that we get off the planet as soon as possible and in the largest numbers possible. We need to colonize Mars or Venus, and then get out of our solar system, and spread out as far as we can into the universe. I want to collect a bunch of people, use the Vampyre as a metaphor, live an amazing life, and reject death. 

Father Sebastiaan's Fangshop established in 1995 is located in the East Village NY

Thanks Leonie and Sebastiaan for sharing! Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. Stay tuned for details about our upcoming performance on June 28 and 29th!  

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: Crime Scene Cleanup

Our Artistic Project Manager, Meridith Friedman, recently spoke with Doug Baruchin, owner of Island Trauma Services, a New York based Crime Scene Cleanup Company. With over 25 years of experience, the staff of ITS are experts in Crime Scene and Trauma Scene Cleanup Service. You can find out more about Island Trauma Services, Inc. HERE.

"We usually know what happened. Um, we'll get a call saying, oh this was a homicide,  and sometimes I'll look on the internet to find out, ok, homicide in Queens or Brooklyn or New York City, just so I have an idea of what I'm going to see before I walk in. Because no matter how many times I do this, walking across a threshold every time is a little bit of like, you know, what am I going to see. 

I remember the first one that I did was an elderly man. He was about 78 years old, and he put a pillow in front of his face and shot himself on Easter. And I remember thinking, you know, my God this is what you hear about. Suicide rates increase around the holidays. And I remember seeing this scene, and this poor man who was alone, I don't know why he was sad, maybe he lost somebody, but it got me. That I took home with me. 

I do know that New Yorkers, especially Manhattanites, are very resilient. And very, I can handle this. I've had several people come into the scene with me in New York City. Other people, “I can't go in that room; I don't want to be reminded.” Some New Yorkers I found were very curious, even about somebody they were related to. “So this is where they died, what is this stuff?” This is a conversation I never want to have with somebody. “Oh, this is, you know, probably his blood, this is where his head was.” 

Doug with a fellow ITS technician

I look at the people in Newtown, and how they all came together and supported each other and that's just...beyond anything I've ever done. We actually did call the school to offer to go up there and help them out for free, because it's just, you know, anything you can do to help somebody like that get back together is a huge thing. One of the hardest things to do is to move past what happened while everything is still there. You'll never go into that bedroom again and look at it the same way, but until it's at the very least cleared out, you can't really move past anything."

Thanks Doug and Meridith for sharing! Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. Stay tuned for details on a June performance date!

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps

Our Literary Associate, Micharne Cloughley, recently spoke with Commander Rocky Robinson who founded the Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps. This inspiring volunteer run organization saves lives every day through both their ambulance service and extensive medical training programs. You can find out more about the Bedford Stuyvesant Ambulance Corps HERE.

Check out a few excerpts from that interview below. 

Co Founder and Executive Director Rocky Robinson

No volunteers…

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, and there’d never been a volunteer ambulance corps in the so-call ghetto, because nobody would volunteer. So I didn’t really have anybody, believe it or not my first group of volunteer was recovered alcoholics and drug addicts, people like that, but I said you know what, that’s where the hurt is. Try to help these people. You made it and when I was really young I used to smoke pot, so I understood. So then I changed my whole focus, I went over to Bedford Avenue, and talked to some of the guys and girls there, and they said yeah we want to learn CPR, we want to learn first aid, and I said well I’m starting an ambulance corps."

No ambulance…

"I didn’t have my ambulance. So now, here’s a guy, running through a community, and he’s going to start a volunteer ambulance corps, and he don’t have an ambulance. So now you’ve got this big black guy, me, and this little Puerto Rican, his name was Joe, he was the only one that would follow me."

Daniel Bishop's documentary, Bed Stuy-Do or Die,
chronicling the incredible story of BSVAC

But real life…

"Well we were the first ghost busters. We used to put the oxygen tanks on our back, trauma kits in our hands, scanners, and we used to run, to the injury, on foot, but guess what, everybody would laugh except one person. The person that we were running to, that blood was spilling out on the gutter, and once we put on the pressure bandage, there was not a life threatening situation anymore, but if nobody knew what to do he would have bled out right there."

On saving lives…

"And I’m gonna tell you something, there’s no greater high than saving a life. When you bring somebody back from the dead! Are you kidding me? You arrive on the scene, and there’s a kid laying in the street, 5 or 6 years old, he’s not breathing, not circulating, and you get down there… you open up the airway and you breathe and you, for a couple of … And then you hear that kid say ‘I want my Mommy’, before a couple of minutes, he was dead! That is so good and I’m still a junkie but I’m a life saving junkie now."

The BSVAC team

Please donate to the Bedford Stuyvesant Ambulance Corps HERE!

Thanks Micharne and Rocky for sharing!  Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY for a performance coming up in June. 

All photos taken from:  http://bsvac.org/contact.html 

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: Hart Island

Our Associate Artistic Director, Ian Daniel, recently interviewed an ex-inmate from Rikers Island prison about burying coffins of unknowns, infants, and adults on Hart Island in the Bronx. The interviewee chose to remain anonymous so we will call him Tim.

The potter’s field at Hart Island is the largest cemetery in the United States. Read more about it HERE

Aerial View of Hart Island

NYC's Department of Correction manages Hart Island and uses inmates from Rikers to dig the graves. The public is not allowed on Hart Island, however, family members who can prove their relatives have been buried there can set up visits. 

Wikipedia says,"The dead are buried in trenches. Babies are placed in coffins of various sizes, and are stacked five coffins high and usually twenty coffins across. Adults are placed in larger pine boxes placed according to size and are stacked three coffins high and two coffins across. The potter's field is also used to dispose of amputated body parts, which are placed in boxes labeled 'limbs.' No individual markers are set except for the first child to die of AIDS in New York City who was buried in isolation."

Inmates in 1991 burying coffins holding babies Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Here are some excerpts from Ian’s interview with Tim: 

Ian: When were you in prison?

Tim:  In my adolescence. I was on Rikers for burglary and a stolen car. They used to use adolescents on Hart Island and I believe now they don't do that anymore, they use the adults now. We'd ferry over from there, be there all day and we'd be digging huge ditches, this was a long time ago. The caskets were plain wooden boxes, you know no names, some kinda marking on it, it wasn't that high, not very deep at all but it was long. It was a lot of caskets that went in there.

Ian:  Did you see bodies?

Tim:  Every so often you'd see one of the boxes open and you can see the body in there. I remember once a body was so gross, decomposed, just a horrible sight, scary to look at, cause then you gotta go eat lunch over there which is a little weird to do that shit over there, you know? Some of those guys would joke when we'd stick them in the hole and they'd say, “That was your father I just buried,” “This is the guy we used to get high with," crazy shit like that, and when you could see into the casket they'd say, “Oh that looks like your brother that I knew up on 125th street.”

Ian:  Who's buried there?

Tim:  Most of the time these people are found on the street or they have no money to be buried. So it’s always something like that...a lot of homeless people, people that have no identity, they have no family, or if they do, they don't want anything to do with them. If your brother dies and you don't have any money then he'd end up there.  A lot of stillborns, miscarriages, forgotten souls, that's why it's sad, it just a big lonely graveyard.

Ian:  How did seeing all of this affect you?

Tim:  When I saw all those caskets…it's funny cause my brother died but I never knew him, he died just after being born of pneumonia  and I used to always think about that especially when a baby was being buried. I was thinking about my baby brother and about my mother and father who died and that was just a little weird for me back then.  My parents said they only wanted five kids and he was the fifth but he died then a year or so later they had me so if he had lived they probably wouldn't had me. 

Infant coffins on Hart Island Photo: Stan Grossfeld  

To learn more about Hart Island we recommended that you check out The Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization assisting families to relocate those who disappeared in the greater New York area HERE

The Department of Correction recently created a database of Hart Island burial records to help you determine whether someone has been interred on Hart Island, using basic information, such as name, date or location. Check that out HERE

Thanks for sharing, Ian. Check back here every Thursday for an inside look into our investigation in death, dying, and the afterlife for our upcoming performance.