Claudette is born in 1950 and dies in an accident in 2000. If the accident had not occurred she would lived until 2035. We think of this as a misfortune because her life has been cut short — she has lost 35 years.

But it’s equally true that Claudette might have been born in 1915 and enjoyed another 35 years of life in that way. Why don’t we regard this as equally tragic? “We feel uncomfortable with the idea that her late birth is as great a misfortune for Claudette as her premature death,” writes philosopher Fred Feldman. “Why is this?”

Lucretius wrote, “Think too how the bygone antiquity of everlasting time before our birth was nothing to us. Nature therefore holds this up to us as a mirror of the time yet to come after our death. Is there aught in this that looks appalling, aught that wears an aspect of gloom? Is it not more untroubled than any sleep?” Why are we more troubled at a lost future than a lost past?

The last great auk in the British Isles was killed because its keepers feared it might be a witch. In 1840 five men discovered it asleep on the Scottish island of Stac an Armin. From John Alexander Harvie-Brown’s Vertebrate Fauna of the Outer Hebrides (1888):

It was Malcolm M’Donald who actually laid hold of the bird, and held it by the neck with his two hands, till others came up and tied its legs. It used to make a great noise, like that made by a gannet, but much louder, when shutting its mouth. It opened its mouth when any one came near it. It nearly cut the rope with its bill. A storm arose, and that, together with the size of the bird and the noise it made, caused them to think it was a witch. It was killed on the third day after it was caught, and M’Kinnon declares they were beating it for an hour with two large stones before it was dead: he was the most frightened of all the men, and advised the killing of it.

They threw the body behind the hut and left it there.

When the last heath hen, “Booming Ben,” died in 1932 on Martha’s Vineyard, local newspaper editor Henry Beetle Hough wrote an obituary for the species: “There is a void in the April dawn, there is an expectancy unanswered … We are looking upon the utmost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction.”

See I Think That I Shall Never See …

F.W.H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a future life, questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she supposed had become of her soul. The mother replied: ‘Oh, well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn’t talk about such unpleasant subjects.’

— Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” 1943

Let’s hope this isn’t true — Francis Joseph Baigent’s History of the Ancient Town and Manor of Basingstoke (1889) records the story of a woman who was buried alive twice. Baigent cites two sources, an undated tract from around 1675 and a book published in 1786, The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death. Mrs. Blunden, the wife of a local malt trader, was “a fat gross woman” who in July 1674 drank so much poppy-water (opium) that she fell into a deep sleep that arrested any apparent breath or pulse. The apothecary declared that he supposed she would never wake, and her husband left for London on business, directing that she be buried on his return. But the woman’s relatives noted that the weather was warm and that the body would not last four days, so they buried her on the following day, a Wednesday. Now the tract reads:

The Friday following toward the evening some of the Scholars of the Town being at play in the Churchyard near her grave, they fancied they heard a kind of hollow voice, as it were under ground, to which laying their ears and listening more attentively they plainly heard somebody say:

Take me out of my Grave,

which words the complaining voice repeated several times, intermixing them with fearful groans and dismal shriekings.

The boys reported this to several people but were dismissed. They returned to the chuchyard on Saturday and heard the voice again, “if not with so distinct yet with a louder accent,” and that afternoon the clerk finally exhumed Mrs. Blunden. “And now surveying her body, they found it most lamentably beaten, which they concluded to proceed from the violence she did herself in that deplorable an astonishment, but upon the most diligent scrutiny they could not apprehend that she had the least breath of life remaining, and therefore they again let her down into the grave, intending on the morrow to send to the Coroner.”

Guards were set to watch the resealed grave, but as the night was wet they abandoned their post, and “on the morrow morning at their return to the grave, they found she had torn off great part of her winding sheet, scratched herself first in several places, and beaten her mouth so long till it was all in gore blood.”

A number of citizens were indicted for their negligence, but a town doctor testified that he had held a mirror to Blunden’s mouth before her burial and could see no sign of breath, so “only the Town had a considerable fine set upon them for their neglect.”