Is the cemetery dead?

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

[I]N 1831, ARCHITECT Jacob Bigelow built a radically new kind of cemetery at Mount Auburn in Cambridge. It was much larger than its forebears, located on what was then the suburban fringes, and designed to create a romantic space of death that also served as a horticultural, sculptural, and even recreational place. Mount Auburn and the many cemeteries that followed were a rousing success, making the American cemetery a major tourist site for much of the 19th century.

However, in the 20th century, Americans medicalized and privatized dying and death, creating a death taboo that isolated cemeteries. The dying were put in hospitals or nursing homes, visiting hours were moved to funeral homes, and cemeteries were professionalized and standardized. While Mount Auburn remained a popular spot with locals because of its natural and artistic beauty, even it could not retain the cultural prominence that it and the other great urban cemeteries, like Green-Wood in New York and Spring Grove in Cincinnati, had had in the previous century.

Today, American funerary practices are undergoing dramatic and sudden change. This year, cremations surpassed burials for the first time on record. By 2030, cremation may reach 70 percent. That’s shifted the locus of the rituals associated with death from cemeteries to corners of the world that hold particular meaning to the departed or their survivors, from backyards to bodies of water. At the same time, social media are changing the way we deal with grief — once a deeply private affair, it has increasingly become a public process online.

As customs change, cemeteries are trying to keep up.

Events such as the Run Like Hell 5K in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery and the beer baron tour in St. Louis’s Bellefontaine show how these places are becoming more accessible to the public. Hollywood Forever’s Life Stories where a family can submit photographs for a remembrance video suggest their new digital savvy. And, at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, a family can scatter their loved one’s ashes, something cemetery operators have opposed including for decades.

In 2014, Mount Auburn Cemetery began offering “natural burials” that do not include embalming and other popular procedures. It was an iconic moment, for an esteemed, yet very traditional institution to adopt a practice popularized by the contemporary death reform movement. But it was actually not so contradictory. Cemeteries, even ones as august as Mount Auburn, have been trying to adjust and renew their connection to the broader public even as reformers either question the very need for a cemetery or convince them to adopt such reform measures.

Cemeteries face a sort of life-or-death crisis. The increasing popularity of cremation has meant that cemeteries are no longer critical to storing remains, while mourning on social media has removed the necessity of cemeteries as a primary place to mourn. Public mourning also has re-emerged with the widespread acceptance of roadside shrines, ghost bikes (white bikes placed on the roadside where a cyclist died), memorial vinyl decals for the back windows of cars, and memorial tattoos. While zombies roam the big and small screen, real death has returned to our streets, building walls, vehicles, and even bodies.

While these new practices relocate mourning and remembrance out of the cemetery, other trends, such as natural burial, provide new opportunities for cemeteries. Natural death advocates promote the practice as a more environmentally sensitive mode of burial that eschews embalming, hardwood caskets, and steel or concrete vaults as pollutants. Reformers have succeeded in getting widespread notice, though relatively few Americans have chosen green burial thus far.

Green advocates have often met cemeteries halfway. Some cemeteries offer natural burial adjacent to conventional sections, but have to maintain their whole cemetery without pesticides and herbicides. As a result, cemeteries such as Mount Auburn see an opportunity to offer consumers choices.

Confronting death is painful and upsetting. We lose a person we love in an act of finality which has no comparison. Yet how we did things before may not be how we will do them in the future. Consumers just need good, unbiased information, and a willingness to overcome any family hesitancy about unconventional choices.

Cemeteries can embrace change — even radical change, as the founders of Mount Auburn demonstrated. The signs of successful adaptation are mixed so far. But there are glimmers of hope.This fall, Mount Auburn will host Death Salon, a festival of alternative approaches to death and mourning, including lectures and a demonstration of green burial. That Death Salon is coming to Mount Auburn suggests cemeteries can remain beautiful, natural, historic, and artistic places, even as they embrace new practices that allow them to attract new lot-owners and reconnect them to a broader public.

Complete Article HERE!

Die like a dog

Pet dogs often have a peaceful death that forestalls protracted suffering and pain. Why can’t we do the same for humans?

Cris Cristofaro holds his dog Dino as his beloved pet is sedated during an in-home euthanasia on 9 May 2012 in New York City.

By Joseph Pierre

[I] killed my dog last year. Mika was a shelter mutt, so she was around 10 or 12 years old; I can’t be sure. Twelve dog years would have put her at around 80 human years, which is a pretty good run. But what’s strange about having a dog is how quickly they age relative to us – they start out younger than we are, catch up for a time, and then pass us by, declining into their twilight years, all in the space of a decade or so. As witnesses to that accelerated timeline, having a pet means that we often end up experiencing their eventual demise and learning something about death in the process.

Mika was a great dog. Obviously abused before ending up at the shelter, she had scars on her head when I rescued her and, whenever I took a broom or rake in my hand, she would cower in fear. She was easily overwhelmed when other dogs came up to sniff her, and would often growl defensively. But with time she grew to be less apprehensive and almost pathologically affectionate, if there is such a thing with animals, demanding to be petted by anyone who happened to be near. She was a great companion watching TV on the couch during my single years, and she helped me win the attention of the woman, a veterinarian, who would eventually become my wife. In fact, my wife has often joked – and maybe it isn’t a joke at all – that she would never have gone out with me in the first place if I hadn’t had a dog.

For whatever reason, the way I’d always pictured the proper death of one’s dog was like a scene taken from the 1957 Disney film Old Yeller (1956): after years of steadfast companionship, when man’s best friend no longer derives joy from chasing rabbits and can barely lift his head, his owner has to muster the resolve to get out the rifle to put him out of his misery. Although an oddly bucolic fantasy for someone living in Los Angeles, at least part of it was no doubt influenced by how I’d learned to think about death as a physician.

In human medicine, we’re used to implementing any and every life-saving intervention right up to the very end. As a medical intern 20 years ago, I remember thinking about the futility of that approach with patients in pain and suffering from multisystem organ failure, sustained only by machines and a regimen of some 30 or 40 medications, and unlikely to ever make it out of the hospital. What was the point? Whatever happened to quality of life? But those reservations be damned, we never gave up, and among the interns who transferred care to each other from shift to shift, the dictum of patients ‘not dying on my watch’ was something to which we all held fast.

As long as there were no ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders in the chart asking us to withhold ‘heroic efforts’, we rarely considered doing anything less to prolong life, and financial cost was never part of the equation either. As far as hastening death, that was never even mentioned. After all, the original Hippocratic oath states: ‘I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.’

[W]hen Mika, who’d had hip dysplasia from the start, developed increasing difficulties walking and was in obvious pain much of the time, my wife and I put her on medications and even tried acupuncture, which helped for a while. But one day, at the start of our morning walk, she ambled to the end of the driveway, sat down, and refused to go on despite me pulling the leash. It was the same the next day and the next, so I stopped trying. It was at that point that my wife first brought up the possibility of putting her down, but that seemed ridiculous to me because between Old Yeller and my experiences as a human doctor, I envisioned Mika struggling through the pain, fighting for her last breath to the very end. In other words, it didn’t seem right to think about letting her go because she hadn’t yet suffered enough.

As a veterinarian, my wife viewed things altogether differently. To her, putting our dog to sleep didn’t represent throwing in the towel as it seemed to me, but a compassionate way to preempt unnecessary but inevitable pain and suffering down the line. As she saw it, we owe this option to our pets as stewards of their care, especially given that animals can’t understand pain or decide for themselves just how much suffering they are willing to tolerate.

Indeed, the American Veterinary Medical Association Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals (2013) acknowledges that ‘there is no consensus on when it is appropriate to let [a] life go’, but notes that: ‘Euthanasia may be considered to be the right course to spare [an] animal from what is to come … if medical intervention would only prolong a terminal condition, or if current health conditions cannot be successfully mitigated.’

When we were dating in the years before we got married, my wife would often come home from a long day at work and say: ‘I killed my patient today.’ This, I came to understand, was a kind of self-reproachful statement of defeat as well as a starkly factual statement that reflected how she’d actually administered the medications that ended a dog or cat’s life that day, typically with tearful owners and their bawling children huddled around.

This strange admixture of guilt from failing to save a life, along with the resolve to be the agent that takes it, comes with the territory in a veterinary clinic where euthanasia is a daily occurrence. Although euthanasia literally means ‘good death’, it was totally foreign to me in my training as a physician. Human doctors might feel guilty losing a patient in the end, but that guilt is almost always tempered by the reassurance that while we might have lost the battle to cancer, nature, God or whatever, we did everything we could in the process. Being a physician means that doctors must sometimes admit defeat, but in doing so, we don’t go on to be the hand of death.

[A]s time went on, medications and acupuncture had less of an impact on Mika, and her hind legs would often give out so that she would walk only a limited distance before collapsing. She seemed to be slipping cognitively too, and one day even fell into the swimming pool while we were away at work, requiring rescue from a neighbour. In what seemed like a short amount of time, her muzzle turned fully grey, and she would often sigh heavily with a distant look in her eye. Finally, she began to lose control of her bowels, with increasingly frequent accidents around the house.

And so, discussions about euthanasia became more about ‘when’ than ‘whether’.

The difference in attitudes towards euthanasia for animals and human beings is understandable. After all, people have been killing animals without remorse for food, to avoid becoming food ourselves, and for sport long before we began domesticating animals or keeping them for companionship. Whereas traditional Judeo-Christian and Islamic teachings include strong proscriptions against murder and suicide for humans, religious doctrine questions the animal soul. And while euthanasia is used as an ethical means to preempt suffering in veterinary medicine, it’s not unusual for some owners to simply abandon their pets by the side of the road, put puppies in garbage bags, or refuse to pay for life-saving medical procedures based on both economics and expediency. No wonder the expression ‘die like a dog’ has historically referred to the most miserable of ends.

In 2009, US legislation that would have allowed physicians to be compensated by Medicare for providing voluntary counselling to patients about options for end-of-life care was defeated due to political uproar over ‘death panels’. And yet, as I discuss in the World Journal of Psychiatry in 2015, human euthanasia is being increasingly considered and sanctioned both in the US and abroad. As life-extending medical advances over the past 50 years have fuelled growing concerns about prolongation of suffering and loss of autonomy, the euthanasia movement of the 1930s has gained momentum, evolving into the modern ‘right to die’ and ‘death with dignity’ movements that challenge us to consider what constitutes a ‘good death’. Today, some form of voluntary active euthanasia – death by administration of a lethal dose of medication to avoid pain and suffering – is legal in several states in the US, as well as in Japan and parts of Europe including Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Still, if the historical divide between our attitudes towards euthanasia for humans and for animals is narrowing, the devil in the details of cultural sanctioning involves who can actually administer, or is willing to administer, the medications that end life. With existing legislation to date, the sanctioned individual – whether a physician, family member, some neutral third party, or the person seeking to end their own life themselves – varies by jurisdiction. Although ‘death with dignity’ is increasingly supported in many parts of the world, often neither doctors nor patients seeking death want to ‘push the plunger’ and take responsibility for being the hand of death. In this sense, euthanasia remains a hot-potato issue in human medicine.

Consequently, we now find ourselves debating a range of possible end-of-life care options, including passive euthanasia (withholding life-sustaining interventions including food or water), physician-assisted suicide (providing the means for a patient to end their own life), and active voluntary euthanasia (administering a lethal medication to a patient). Palliative sedation is an increasingly popular option within medicine, which involves administering medications that are intended to relieve suffering through sedation and pain control to the point of possible unconsciousness. Although death is a potential side effect, palliative sedation avoids the moral objections of suicide and euthanasia through the ethics of the so-called ‘double effect’, which argues that death is an acceptable outcome if unintended and in the primary service of relieving suffering among the terminally ill. Pushing the envelope of what it means to die a ‘good death’ for humans even further, my colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have been investigating the use of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin to relieve anxiety and depressive symptoms and to find meaning at life’s end.

[A]fter hemming and hawing for weeks, my wife and I finally decided to pick a date to have Mika put down. We asked a veterinarian friend to perform the euthanasia in our home. On the agreed day, it was my wife who put off making the call until I couldn’t take it any longer, and had to prod her to do so. The vet came to our house, started an intravenous line, and filled a syringe with Euthasol as we sat on the floor by Mika’s bedside, petting her with long strokes and saying our tearful goodbyes.

When we were ready, I asked if I could push the plunger, and the vet allowed me to place my hand with hers as we did it together. I was worried that Mika might show signs of discomfort, but seconds after the medication went in, she simply took a single, long, deep breath, and then let it out slowly for the last time.

‘Good dog,’ I told her. ‘Good dog.’

It was a good death. We should be so lucky.

Complete Article HERE!

Dog visits funeral home for 1 last goodbye to beloved owner

After her owner’s sudden death, Sadie was showing many signs of grief — until she had the chance to say goodbye.

May said this photo has “not only helped (Baelieu’s wife) with this ongoing grief process, but it has also brought her a great deal of joy in this difficult time.”

by Danielle Wolf

[S]adie the dog proves that humans aren’t the only ones who grieve the loss of a loved one.

When the man who raised her from a puppy, Andy Baelieu, died from a sudden heart attack, the 13-year-old mixed-breed dog was right by his side. “After the paramedics could not revive and save Andy, Sadie laid down beside him and was snuggling his hand,” Jeremy May, president of Elements Cremation, Pre-Planning, & Burial, located in Langley, British Columbia, told TODAY.

“During the 10 days (between Baelieu’s death and funeral), Sadie started showing signs and symptoms of grief,” said May, who helped organize Baelieu’s memorial service.

“Grief is not a human emotion. Love is not a human emotion. These are emotions we share with other animals,” Barbara J. King, anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary and author of “How Animals Grieve,” told TODAY.

King defines pet grief as “some kind of really altered behavior that suggests distress, such as social withdrawal, altered feeding or sleeping habits, or distressed vocalizations and body language, which persists for a while.”

Sadie certainly fits that description. After accompanying her best friend to work every day for more than a decade, she tirelessly waited by the window for Baelieu to return home. After his sudden death, she couldn’t sleep on her own, stopped eating and swiftly lost 10 pounds.

According to King, many studies have shown that dogs grieve for each other, but “the really important thing to understand is that when a pet mourns one of us that it’s because they have the emotional capacity that comes from their own relationships (with other animals in their species).”

Having Sadie involved in Baelieu’s service was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision. “From the moment Andy passed away, (Baelieu’s wife, Julia, knew) that Sadie was going to be there,” said May.

On the day of the funeral, Sadie, accompanied by Baelieu’s wife, was the last one to enter the room. The dog put her two front paws up on the casket and looked inside at her deceased companion.

“There was this unbelievable sense of emotion and power in the room because everyone knew the importance of Sadie to Andy,” said May.

After seemingly getting the closure she needed, May said Sadie “calmly walked out, went home and ate two meals and started to heal and go back to her way of life.”

King speculates that Sadie’s sense of peace may stem from two places. First, Sadie could be taking her cues from her remaining owner: “It is very possible that the funeral was closure for the wife and Sadie may have picked up on a certain closure that she felt.” Second, “maybe the dog, seeing her owner quiet, smelling differently and clearly not in a living state, had a moment of realization,” said King.

The idea of having pets at funerals isn’t a new concept. May said an increasing number of people are prearranging for their pets to attend services, a practice he finds very important.

“This is not the first nor will this be the last time this happens,” he told TODAY. “I would encourage all funeral homes to care more about closure than they do about carpets.”

Complete Article HERE!

I Embalm Dead Bodies For A Living — Here’s What It’s Like


 
By Annie Georgia Greenberg

[T]he building that houses Milward Funeral Directors in Lexington, Kentucky has been around for 193 years. It’s a three-story maze that starts with a light-soaked, stone-floored entrance hallway. The hallway is home to an awfully regal cage of tiny, yellow-breasted finches, and they greet you as you walk in through the funeral home’s front doors. Even when they’re out of sight, you can hear their occasional, lively chirps, particularly if you’re in any of the nearby pastel-hued rooms on the first floor. Say, the powder blue chapel, the pink viewing room, the green family meeting room, or the front office where office associate Elaine Kincaid has found a way to answer the ever-ringing phone with a pressing sense of compassion.

By contrast, it’s nearly pin-drop-silent in the upstairs casket showroom, where, if you were preparing to bury a loved one, you would arrive to find a selection of 30-plus casket models in every variation of wood and steel. Should you be cremating your loved one, there’s an adjoining hall where you could select an urn, each one of them unique in presentation and name — “White Orchid” for the porcelain vase and “Solitude” for the simple, gold rectangle. You could also turn loved ones’ cremated remains into jewelry, a keychain, a bench or, in the words of Miranda Robinson, Milward’s youngest mortician, “pretty much anything you want.”

Like Milward funeral home, Miranda Robinson is polished and professional. Yet, at 30-years old, she both embodies and defies the stereotypes often associated with morticians. Yes, she has a fascination with death and dying. Yes, she loves the skeletal system, owns a black cat, and displays a ouija board on her apartment’s living room table — but she’s anything but morose. In fact, her bubbly Kentucky drawl is often interrupted by a burst of up-swinging giggles, even while discussing death. She used to be a cabaret performer and closely follows RuPaul’s Drag Race. Her most-used word is “lovely” and her retro-feminine personal aesthetic matches that same description.

At around 5 feet, 4 inches tall with an obvious flair for vintage, Miranda pays almost as much attention to her own presentation as she does to those on her embalming table. Robinson clips in hair extensions that she curls every morning. Her arms, which remain covered while at work, are decorated with tattoos. One of them is of a bottle of embalming fluid.

Still, at first blush you’d never guess that Robinson works with the dead on a daily basis. And, perhaps, you’d never guess how many women her age are actively entering the field, either. Frustrated by nursing school and looking for a change, Robinson shifted gears from aiding the living to preserving the dead, and enrolled in mortuary school in Cincinnati, Ohio. In doing so she joined the ranks of young women now outnumbering men in the mortuary education system. In fact, the National Funeral Directors Association reports that, “While funeral service has traditionally been a male-domination profession…today, 60% of mortuary science students in the United States are women.”

Once a male-dominated industry, after-life and funeral care is now becoming not only a budding, female-centric space but also one ripe for disruption. And no one knows this better than Miranda. “Even in mortuary school, I was taught that [funeral service] was still a different, difficult field for women.” She explains, “Women, so I’ve heard, were expected to wear skirts and heels still, so it seemed, before I got into the funeral home, that [the] funeral service [industry] hadn’t come a long way for women… but now that I’m here, I feel like I’ve made my mark and I’m really seeing women in funeral service emerge.” They’re emerging and they’re excelling, bringing with them calm, care, and attention to detail that may have long been lacking.

While embalming, Miranda says she feels like “both an artist and a scientist,” because her work combines aspects of both. Made prevalent during the Civil War, when bodies of fallen soldiers were shipped back home for viewings and funerals, embalming is a technique used to preserve the deceased by replacing a portion of their blood with chemicals (including formaldehyde). The body is also made up to look as it did in life — lipstick and all. But, while this method may long be favored in the United States, a new wave of green burial options seeks to challenge the traditional funeral industry. In fact, for the second year running, cremation is now more popular than burials, and the National Funeral Directors Association only expects this trend to continue.

That’s because green burials, alternative and eco-friendly practices are popularizing. Some of these green practices, like home funerals and vigils, pre-date the popularization of embalming, while others like bio-urn cremation (when the body’s cremated remains are buried and grow with the seeds of a plant) or aquamation (a proposed way of breaking down a body using water rather than fire) are brand new. Whether the increased options in funeral care signify an impending end of the traditional funeral industry that Miranda is a part of is a matter that may only be answered in time. For now, what it does mean is that this freshly energized attention to death care is bringing light to a space that, despite touching every single life on Earth, has largely been kept in the shadows.

Ultimately, it is not the method of end-of or after-life care that concerns women like Miranda, but rather the instinct to talk about death in a meaningful way, early and often. Miranda loves her job because what she does helps bring peace to grieving families. She explains, “The most beautiful thing about my job, is taking the loved one into my care from a removal, especially when family is gathered, just that intensity of how much they love that person. It’s an absolute honor to be in the worst possible moment in someone’s life. To be there and for them to look at me and just me to try to at least give them some answers, to try to give them some peace in that moment.”

And while it may seem strange to light up while talking about death, it’s a conversation everyone will someday need to have, regardless of personal preference or spiritual beliefs. Miranda has this conversation every day — at work, at home, with her 1,859 instagram followers — and in doing so helps to de-stigmatize a topic that’s long been off-limits.
As a mortician, Miranda believes that viewing the body is of the utmost importance. As she puts it, “I think it’s important to see the body because you face the reality of what’s actually happened.” But, it’s the trend toward personalization, transparency and increased discussion around death and dying that continues to be a universal priority for many women working in both alternative and traditional funerals.

For Miranda, part of this conversation means addressing the details of her own funeral. And, of course, she can’t imagine anything more fitting than a traditional embalming. Ever the enigma, while her choice to embalm may be traditional, her last look will be anything but. Robinson would like a “glitter casket” with a leopard interior. Dark brown extensions will be clipped and curled, her lips will be painted in the bright red pigment Ruby Woo by Mac. Years from now, when that day comes, Miranda may very well lay on the table that she works alongside every single day at Milward Funeral Directors, in the storied embalming room that she considers sacred. Perhaps somewhere beneath her in the entry hall, the finches will be singing.

Complete Article HERE!

How to survive Mother’s Day when you’re grieving

When a previously innocuous holiday becomes painful

‘As I face my second Mother’s Day without my mum, I explore how to get through this day without her.’

By

[I] flinch every time Mother’s Day is mentioned: every time I open an email, hear a radio or TV ad, or walk past advertising with promotions on flowers and high tea.

Mothers give us life and love. They have a hard job; they deserve to be celebrated. It’s just difficult to celebrate when your mum has gone and it feels your guts have been ripped out while your life has been simultaneously turned upside down and shaken all over the floor. When reminders of this well-marketed holiday pops up in my day, mostly I want to hit something.

Grief is a response to loss that most of us have faced, or will face soon enough. But like many aspects of mental health, it’s something we don’t seem that good at talking about. Everyone responds to grief differently, and your own response can change on a day-by-day basis. It can be a numb or raw, a staid or sobbing pain that settles in your bones, without the schedule or process you expected.

When an insidious illness wore away at my beautiful mother, the grief scrubbed me raw. Every hope I had for her was torn into tiny shreds. When she died, six terrible months after being diagnosed, this new grief was coupled with relief that her suffering was over.

I didn’t think I was feeling what I should. I felt guilty both that I was able to go to work, to laugh, to love, and conversely, that I wasn’t as strong as I thought. I learnt that grief wasn’t a tidy bundle of pain that faded in a month or two: it’s a messy, unpredictable, illogical state that, 16 months on, can still feel fresh. It’s getting used to a new way of life; I relate to CS Lewis’ visceral description in A Grief Observed: “The death of a beloved is an amputation.”

As I face my second Mother’s Day without my mum, I explore how to get through this day without her.

Let it out

Are you worried that if you let it all out you’ll start behaving like a recalcitrant, screaming toddler who throws their toys out of the pram because they can? I’m more of a puddle of chocolate and tears on the floor myself, but either way, it’s OK if you’re not “fine”. Find some space and time to be alone, to process and be sad in your own way.

Talk

The counterpart to the above is, when you’re ready, to find someone who understands your pain. It might be a colleague or neighbour who’s also experienced grief, one of your mum’s friends, or it might be a support group, psychologist or Lifeline (13 11 14). Grief can feel isolating but reach out to the ones you love too: talking is hard but it helps.

Honour her memory

When a well-meaning friend suggested this for my first Mother’s Day without my mum, I thought “You really don’t understand. I don’t want to do something nice. This is the one holiday I want to POKE IN THE FACE.” But some people might find it comforting to create a new routine or ritual – to buy themselves some flowers, to visit their mum’s favourite restaurant, to talk to your kids or friends about her.

Be good to yourself

Now’s not the time to reach for numbing substances like alcohol or drugs. If you can summon the energy, nurture yourself with healthy food, sleep and exercise.

Show gratitude

Stay with me here. It can feel like life has let you down but at the same time, I’ve got the stark realisation that I was so lucky to have my mum in my life for so long. What’s more, my mum was spectacular; smart, loving, strong as steel. This hurts so much because I love her so much. Recently a friend told me he wasn’t that sorry his difficult mother was gone, and I was knocked out of taking for granted some of the foundations of my life.

Take a moment to thank the world, or your mum, for everything she was and did for you. Then take a moment to think about the other people in your life, and be grateful they are still here.

When I asked another friend who lost her mum to sum up grief, it wasn’t the emotional response I expected. She said: “It’s a reminder to enjoy life.”

Complete Article HERE!

How to deal with death as part of life

Everyone must figure out their own way to handle the fear of death.

[S]ince he watched his mother drop dead, Richard Bridgman’s fear of death has left him emotionally paralyzed.

It was right around Thanksgiving — nearly 45 years ago — and Bridgman was sleeping overnight on his mom’s living room couch.

“In the middle of the night, she walked into the room and said, ‘Richard, I’m dying,’” recalls Bridgman, who tried to reassure his mom that she’d be okay. But his mother, who had a heart condition, was suffering a massive heart attack. “She looked at me and fell over on her head. I didn’t know what to do. She was dead.”

Death haunted much of Bridgman’s early years. His stepfather died when Bridgman was 15. His father, an alcoholic, died when Bridgman was 17. And Bridgman was 26 when his mom died before his eyes. Now, 72, and long retired from the bill collection business he once owned in the Springfield, Ill., area, he has spent most of his adult years trying to cope with — if not overcome — his immense fear of death.

“Death became an obsession,” he said. “No matter where I went or what I did, death was always in the back of my mind.”

Most people prefer not to think about death, much less plan for it. In a tech-crazed world, where time is commonly measured in 140 characters and 6-second sound bites, life would appear to be dissected into so many bite-sized morsels that discussion of death doesn’t even seem to fit into the equation.

“Everybody has a fear of death, no matter what culture, religion or country they come from,” said Kelvin Chin, author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death” and founder of the Overcoming the Fear of Death Foundation and the non-profit turningwithin.org. “Fear is simply an emotion caused by the anticipation of unhappiness.”

But wait. What if death isn’t actually unhappy? What if it simply — is? For Bridgman, whose fear of death was overwhelming, that simple question was a critical step in learning to emotionally deal with death. That question was posed to him by Chin, who he discovered via a Google search. Several supportive phone consultations with Chin — combined with a simple meditation process that Chin teaches — have helped to keep Bridgman’s fears under control.

“I spent so much money on psychiatrists and psychotherapists — none of them did any good,” says Bridgman. But Chin steered Bridgman towards meditation. “Meditation is better than medicine,” Bridgman said.

Everyone must figure out their own way to handle the fear of death. One expert, who overcame her own fear through years of attending to the dying, says death is rarely the terrible thing that most folks fret about.

“Death is usually a peaceful process,” explains Donna Authers, a professional caregiver, motivational speaker and author of the book “A Sacred Walk: Dispelling the Fear of Death and Caring for the Dying.”

“Very few people die screaming. They just go to sleep.”

But it took Authers years to learn the lesson that death need not be frightening. As a child, death haunted her. When she was two years old, her father was killed in World War II. Her mother, who had remarried, died on Authers’ fifth birthday. “Instead of a birthday party, I woke up to the worst day of my life,” she said. Her grandfather committed suicide when Authers was 15.

It was Authers’ grandmother — while dying from cancer — who taught Authers the most critical lesson in accepting death’s inevitability. Authers brought her grandmother home to tend to her during her final days. But her grandmother could sense her granddaughter’s terrible fear.

That’s when her grandmother took her by the hand and, unafraid, reminded Authers, “Death is part of life. You, too, will be where I am someday, and you can’t face death with fear,” she said. That changed everything. Seeing her grandmother bravely face death caused her own fears to dissolve. “I was no longer afraid of death and dying,” recalls Authers.

Authers ultimately left her job as an IBM marketing executive to become a caregiver. Through the years, she has found that faith is the most important quality among those who face death without fear. “People who have faith in something don’t grieve like those who have no hope,” said Authers.

Increasingly, however, Chin has found that Millennials — more than any other demographic — fear death the most.

“It’s the downside of social media,” said Chin. “The bombardment and speed of communication leads to an overload that can trigger a fear of death.”

Perhaps even the world of politics can play a role, suggests Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College and author of “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.”

In times of political upheaval— particularly when people are reminded of their mortality — the fear of death increases even as they tend to be attracted to political figures who promise them more security, said Solomon, who has conducted numerous experiments on this issue.

“When people are reminded of their own mortality, in an effort to bolster faith in their own view of reality, they become more hostile to anyone who is different.”

Even then, says Solomon, perhaps nothing alleviates a dying person’s fear of death more than love.

A terminally-ill grandmother he knew was distraught at the prospect of death. No doctor and no medicine could help her. Then, she received a short phone call from her granddaughter, begging her for her cupcake recipe. “No one can make them like you,” her granddaughter said.

“That call did more in five minutes than anything else could have,’” says Solomon. “It reminded the grandmother that she will live on in the memories of the people she loves. That was all she needed to know.”

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How young children understand death – and how to talk to them about it

Some big questions.

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“Mummy, what happens after we die?” Many parents have been asked this kind of question, and it is often difficult to know how best to reply. Should you be open about your own beliefs – whether they are religious, agnostic or atheist? And is it OK to sugarcoat? Recent research in developmental psychology provides some advice.

Death is a fascinating subject to many children, as shown, for example, when they come across a dead animal or plant. Their observations and questions show a healthy curiosity as they strive to make sense of a complex world.

Yet to many parents, death is a taboo subject for children. But children’s questions actually provide an excellent opportunity to encourage their inquisitiveness and to support their learning about, for example, biology and the life cycle. However, there are situations when you need to show great sensitivity.

What children know

Most preschoolers do not grasp the biological basis of death and tend to believe that death is a different state of life, like a prolonged sleep. At this age, children often say that only old and ill people die. They also think dead people feel hungry, need air and can still see, hear or dream. To gain a mature, biological understanding of death, children must acquire knowledge of a few key facts about death.

Typically, between the ages of four and 11, children gradually come to understand that death is universal, inevitable and irreversible, follows the breakdown of bodily functions, and leads to the cessation of all physical and mental processes. That is, by the age of 11, most children grasp the idea that all people – including their loved ones and themselves – will die one day and remain dead forever.

However, some young children will understand these components sooner, and here experience and appropriate conversations are influential. For example, those who have already experienced the death of a loved relative or pet, and those with more experience of the life cycle through interacting with animals, tend to have a better grasp of the death concept.

Another predictor of relatively early understanding is parents being better educated, irrespective of the child’s intelligence. This suggests that parents can and do help their child’s understanding of death by providing appropriate opportunities and clearly explaining the biological facts during the primary years.

Religion and culture also play an important role in shaping children’s beliefs. During their conversations with adults, children often encounter biological facts but also “supernatural” beliefs about the afterlife and spiritual world. Developmental psychologists have discovered that as children grow older and grasp the biological facts about death, they typically develop a “dualist” view that combines biological and supernatural beliefs.

For example, ten-year-olds may recognise that dead people cannot move or see because their bodies have stopped working, but at the same time believe that they dream or miss people.

Honesty and sensitivity

Recent research on children’s understanding of death has a number of implications for how best to discuss this complex and often emotionally charged subject.

The most important thing is to not shy away from the topic – don’t ignore a child’s questions or try to change the subject. Instead, see them as an opportunity to nurture their curiosity and contribute to their gradually gaining a better understanding of the life cycle. Similarly, listening to what children ask and say about death will enable you to gauge their feelings and level of understanding, and to work out what requires explanation or reassurance. An oversimplified message can be uninformative and patronising, and an overly complex explanation might add to confusion and possible distress.

For example, offering detailed information or graphic details about how someone died or what happens to dead bodies may cause unnecessary worry and fear, especially in younger children. For some children, the idea that a dead person continues to watch over us can be reassuring, but for others it might be a source of confusion and distress.

Another key aspect is to be honest and avoid ambiguity. For example, telling a child that a dead person is “asleep” could lead them to believe that dead people can wake up. Research has shown that children who understand the normality, inevitability and finality of death are likely to be better prepared for, and better able to make sense of death when it happens. Indeed, children with such understanding actually report less fear of death.

Being honest also means acknowledging the uncertainties and mystery of death and avoiding being dogmatic. It is important to explain that there are some things that nobody can know, and that it is normal to hold apparently inconsistent beliefs simultaneously. However strong your religious or atheist beliefs, acknowledge that others may hold very different views. This approach will encourage tolerance of others’ beliefs, support children’s naturally strong drive to make sense of the world and inspire an appreciation of its wonder and mystery.

Perhaps the most important thing is to acknowledge that sadness is normal, and that it is natural to worry about death. We all feel sad when a loved one dies but we gradually overcome our sadness as life goes on. To ease concern, you could offer realistic reassurance. Point out, for example, the likelihood that they and their loved ones will continue to live for a very long time.

If a child is coming to terms with the loss of a loved one, or is dying herself, great sensitivity is required. This does not mean being less honest or open. Children manage their anxiety and fears better when they can rely on truthful explanations about the death of a loved one. For children who know that they are dying, it is important to provide them with opportunities to ask questions and express their feelings and wishes.

Whatever the circumstances, children try to fill in the gaps in their knowledge if truthful information is kept from them. Often their imagination can be far more scary, and potentially far more damaging, than the reality.

Complete Article HERE!