Let’s Plan Your Death, Anarchists. Free Zines Added, Updates on The Death Project..
Fantastic seeing so many inside the Anarchist Death Project. We added two more zines for you!
You’ve been exploring the Library, downloading things, poking around your jurisdictions and finding out what the state and its institutions actually say about your body, your people, and your dead self. Fantastic. Before you begin downloading advance directives, appointing agents of death, deciphering your disposition laws, and filling out living wills, you need to know what you are trying to protect.
And before that, it helps to understand what happens if you protect nothing at all.
Your graveyard accomplices have created two new zines for exactly this…you can read versions of these for free in the portal or you can pick up our smooth copies in the shop. Here’s a bit on the two new zines added toda, pictured above..
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New Anarchist Death Project Zine 1: Start Here: Before the State Decides Who Speaks for You:
There is already a plan for what happens if you cannot speak for yourself, and another for what happens when you die. You did not make either of them. The state already has hierarchies determining who may speak for you, control your body after death, bury you, inherit from you, and be recognized as family. Then there is all the authority the state, institutions and death industry merely assume. Procedure masquerades as law, custom as requirement, and people surrender choices nobody had the right to take from them.
If you have read the book that began this massive project, How to Bury an Anarchist, you know exactly how ugly this can become for many of those on the margins. Fíona’s tragic writing on beloved Seattleite Indigo Greene is one brutal example of what can happen when the life and family a person actually made collide with those the state recognizes after death. Start Here shows you where to begin before getting it all done in our ‘Paperwork of Dying’ portal.
Find where the state intends to put authority over you. Seize it before death puts it beyond your reach.
New Anarchist Death Project Zine 2: Brainstorm Your Death:
This one begins by throwing the forms out the window.Before witnesses, doctors, funeral directors, next of kin and all those little boxes waiting to be checked: What do you want? Who belongs near your death? Who has no claim on you? What is your dead body to you? Who may touch it? Which name belongs to the life you actually lived? Would you like to remain somewhere or disappear? What would you hate to have somebody else decide once you could no longer object?
For many of our accomplices, the stakes are serious. Chosen family can be displaced, identities disregarded, estranged family takes authority…the nightmares are endless, and again many of them our talked about in How To Bury an Anarchist. Surely you all know someone whose actual life has been disregarded after death. Well, we aren’t having it and neither are you! Brainstorming Your Death will help you figure out what nobody gets to alter simply because you died.
The point is not to emerge with a polite little funeral plan; it is to discover what becomes indispensable once you imagine somebody else deciding it for you. For us, that sovereignty matters as much as refusing the state and death industry any authority over our dead.
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Both zines are free inside the Anarchist Death Project. They can be found in the Paperwork of Dying / End-of-Life Forms section and tunder START HERE in Countries & Territories pull down menus. Read them, download them, print as zines.
Or get them together in the bookshop Ours come straight off the presses in vibrant color on satin, for those wanting durable, press-perfect zines ready for giving to others, stocking in shops, etc.
Choose a version, use both, whatever you do, protect yourselves, yeah?
More updates coming today on new books, stay tuned.
XXX,
Bacchus Editions