Illegal to Die – The Weird Side of the Internet

Illegal to Die – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

There are thirty thousand laws on the books in the United States, and we’re talking federal here. Add state laws, and we could be north of a million. And some of them are wacky, like for a very long time it was illegal to play golf on Sundays in the city of Albany. There are blue laws and maybe some red and yellow laws, but there’s one law we don’t have anywhere in the U.S. and with our collective health, it’s a dan good thing. Because in the Norwegion town of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, you are legally prohibited from dying.

Longyearbyen, which just sounds like a tough place, literally the words “long year” has four months of darkness, a deep freeze year round temperature, and the possibility of getting attacked by a polar bear is you take a stroll out of town. It’s a rough place. Maybe these tough people don’t believe in death?

No, actually, it’s more practical. It’s cold, very cold. Never gets above permafrost. So when a body gets buried, it doesn’t thaw. No decomposition. And you know what else doesn’t decompose? Viruses. Bacteria. All perfectly preserved for when the temp starts climbing and the perma- ain’t so perma.

They got two-thousand people in Longyearbyen, and yeah, they die. But when they know someone’s about to kick, they make them leave for the mainland.

Of course, they could and do just cremate folks, and that would be a lot less extreme than outlawing dying, but I’m willing to bet I wouldn’t want to get into a hard drinking contest with these people, nor an arm-wrestling match, so I guess I got nothing to say about it. Let them but the big goodbye under the mahogany gavel, if that’s what they make them with.

I would like to know how they send tickets to God. Awful lot of postage. And warrants have to have the right address; you can’t just send them to the Vatican.

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