What Happens To Your Stuff When You Die?

I Take Care Of That.

Inside the poignant, bizarre, and necessary world of tending to the belongings of the deceased.

By Shane Cashman

We park the box truck in the dead man’s yard like a six-ton hearse and knock on the front door. A disheveled middle-aged woman answers, still in her pajamas.

“I forgot you were coming,” she says, leaning out the door to see the truck. Emblazoned on the side: William J. Jenack: Estate Appraisers & Auctioneers.

“I’m a mess,” she says. “My mother’s dying.”

We ask if she wants us to come back another time.

“No, please come in.”

She’s been living in the dead man’s house for the last two years, a white Victorian-style home with blue shutters and ivy reaching up the side. She’d known the dead man, Stanley, her whole life. He was on Broadway and she used to sit in the garden as a little girl and watch him sing show tunes. Before he passed, she promised to take care of his home, which is decorated like Stanley’s still around. His photos hang on the wall; open songbooks are displayed on the piano.

You learn a lot about a dead man rifling through his house – lifting his furniture, clearing his walls, going through his closets, finding out which psalms are dog-eared in his Bible – searching for anything that might be worth selling at auction. It feels like trespassing.

One of the many rooms inside the houses of a seller, Alan. This house was used for storage only and was covered wall-to-wall with items he had picked up in his years working estates.

Sometimes the most genuine reflection of a person’s identity is found in the inscriptions they’ve written in books. Inside one of Stanley’s he wrote a note to himself titled Self Esteem:

I’m a handsome, wonderful human being who deserves a good life. I grabbed a mirror, gave it a big smooch and said, “I love you. You are the man, Yessur.”

Stanley’s neighbor drops by. He’s 85, bent over a cane, and speaks with a thick Ukrainian accent. He came over because he saw our truck. Now he’s asking for Stanley’s address book. But the lady tells him she threw it out years ago.

“You put him in a cemetery or you cremate him?” he asks.

“Cremation,” she says. “His ashes went to North Carolina with his wife.” She died fourteen years ago on Independence Day. She and Stanley never had kids.

The author moves a box of glassware from an estate.

In the garden we’re shown the four-foot-tall cast-stone fountain. Stanley’s house sitter says it stopped spitting water just before he died. We yank it out of the ground. Fat bugs crawl out from underneath.

“Stanley was gonna leave me a fortune,” she claims. “He said I’d never have to work again.”

“What happened?”

“It was never in writing…The lawyer was gonna come to the house on a Tuesday…to put it in writing. Stanley died that Monday. Of course, right? So I mourned the loss of my friend…and the loss of my fortune.”

Before we leave we even take Stanley’s mailbox, almost erasing him from the block’s history. The woman says she’ll call us when her mother dies so we can come get her stuff too.

At the beginning of a pick up in Parksville, New York, the truck was completely empty. Over five hours later, it was stuffed with more to be taken and a second pick up to be scheduled.

As auction gallery furniture movers, we do pickups year-round. My partner, Ryan Wagner, is 29, six-foot-two and 250 pounds. His size is crucial whenever we have to move things like 900-pound hand-carved marble Foo Dogs. Once, on a dare, he pushed the box truck across a parking lot with his bare hands. People tend to watch us move stuff like we’re in a sideshow. See the two men lift, sling, tip, slide, drag, tilt, duck, pivot and coffin things into a truck!

We start in the basement and work our way up through the house. We lift up mattresses, kick aside small tumbleweeds of hair and carry bedframes down the hall. We pack Halloween costumes and wedding dresses into banana boxes. We climb out bedroom windows onto roofs to see if weathervanes are worth anything. We step into decayed barns and collapsed sheds and pull tackle boxes, snow blowers, and tractor parts from the wreckage.

In March we traveled to the home of ninety-year-old Barbara Harris, who lived alone, save for her nurse, in Rock Tavern, New York. She was dying of Parkinson’s and couldn’t afford her farmhouse anymore.

Barbara was still in bed and the nurse led us around telling us what to take – portraits of horses, the dining room table, her rugs, her safe, and the crystal lamps on her mantle.

Four skulls and a few other miscellaneous bones from humans and animals are inspected at an estate. The current owner, Alan, came into possession of the skulls from working on the estates of doctors.

We heard Barbara struggling to lift herself out of bed and into her wheelchair. The nurse ignored the moans coming from Barbara’s room. “Take the stuff and go, go, go,” the nurse said. This was odd, so we stopped and waited for Barbara. “You’re not going fast enough!” the nurse yelled.

Barbara rolled herself into the living room.

“How are you, Barbara?” Ryan asked.

“Horrible,” she said. “I have an aide here who is so bossy. She’s taking everything off the walls.”

“We don’t want you to feel that we’re taking things out from beneath you,” Ryan said, even though we were there to do just that.

“I’m not comfortable with anything with her here,” Barbara said, trying to point at her nurse – her hand just trembled a little above the armrest.

“You can’t pay to heat your house,” the nurse scolded in response. “You’re going to freeze to death in here.”

Barbara wept. Ryan knelt down and put his arm around her.

Maybe the nurse was right, but we didn’t like the way she was talking to Barbara. Ryan asked the nurse to leave until we were done.

I wanted to leave something behind for Barbara, anything she could hide so she could at least have one piece of her old life to hold onto. But there was nothing. All her things, furniture and paintings, were squeezed like Tetris pieces into the back of the truck. We didn’t know it at the time, but a few months later, Barbara would be moved into a senior citizen home.

We left the house empty. Just Barbara and her nurse.

The William J. Jenack Auction Gallery is an aluminum-covered steel frame that looks like a green airplane hangar flanked by mountains in Chester, New York, fifty miles north of Manhattan. It is divided into three large spaces: the Fine Art showroom, the Town & Country showroom, and the sale room set between the two.

William Jenack, 70, and his wife Andrea, a certified gemologist, own the place along with Kevin Decker, who specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artifacts. They appraise and inventory everything Ryan and I bring back to the gallery. Everything is siphoned through to the back and stored away. Large items like grandfather clocks, sofas, armoires, and credenzas stay in one of the four trailers behind the gallery. Works of art are stacked by the hundreds on shelves in the back room. Smaller pieces – angelfish skeletons, vintage dental molds, African masks – are lined up along their own special shelves. Items that aren’t worth much are divvied up into boxes and stored upstairs in what is like a morgue of personal belongings. Single items in the world of auctioneering are called “lots.” They can sell on their own, but the things upstairs are called “box lots” – many bidders love the thrill of sifting through a box lot as if they’re a kind of cardboard treasure chest.

William J. Jenack Estate Appraiser and Auctioneers in Chester, New York holds an average of three auctions every month.

It’s a strange feeling having to tell someone that the things they thought were worth a lot aren’t worth much at all. William, after nearly thirty years in the business, says to this day, “It’s difficult to tell someone that her prized possessions are worth a hill of beans.”

William and Andrea were antique collectors for a decade before William began auctioneering in 1988. In those days, they stored their antiques in a garage, and when they’d amassed enough stuff for a big sale, they’d rent a firehouse or church and hold an auction.

William has walked through thousands of homes in the region, appraising people’s things, while coming to know old-timers who collect esoteric mechanical pencils or Edison light bulbs or vintage silhouettes. These types of collectors tend to drive to the gallery with a trunk full of their prized collections in a fit of downsizing. Inevitably, the same people will then preview the upcoming sales, looking for anything to add back to their collection.

Potential buyers look at the upcoming items in the preview room before an auction.

On auction day, after everything is catalogued, numbered, and put on display, both in the showroom and on our website, we open the showroom for “preview” – when clients observe the upcoming sale the way one would walk through a museum.

At preview I learn about strange world history from clients. We once had an ancient Roman tear catcher for sale. A client taught me that Roman mourners would cry into bottles and place them in the tombs of those they loved. One ninety-year-old Englishman, always in a suit and cap, has told me the same story at every preview for the last four years – how he worked in a coalmine in England during World War II, how he remembers the sounds of the British warplanes flying overhead filled with bombs. “They sounded heavy,” he’ll say. He remembers the engines flying home later with less drag.

Military-themed sales draw good crowds in any economic climate. We lay out carpets, hang chandeliers, line up rows of shotguns and rifles on the gun racks, and arrange swords and daggers in showcases. William shows up with his grey manicured mustache and the charm of a yacht captain about to take his clients for a three-hour tour through Russian icons, high-end cowboy boots, and Nazi paraphernalia. On pickups we come across more Nazi coins and medals and Mein Kampf copies with personal inscriptions than I ever imagined we would – even in Jewish households. My partner Ryan says he knows of Jewish people who buy Nazi memorabilia just to destroy it. I’ve also heard of Jewish people who buy it as proof to refute Holocaust deniers.

A Filipino woman comes in looking to inspect the Indonesian dagger before the sale starts. She must’ve seen it on our online catalogue and couldn’t wait to hold it. There are two in the sale, but she’s interested in the longer blade that’s shaped like a snake. She unsheathes it, holds it up to the light and counts the curves of the blade.

“Seven,” she says and smiles. She stabs the air with the dagger and twists it into an invisible victim. “Seven curves are good. When you twist it in you, all of your belly comes out.”

Another young woman hovers over the showcase. Her hair is pulled back into a bun, nose-pierced, and she is shy around the swords. Some guy jokes, “You don’t seem like the military dagger type.” An older man in a sleeveless shirt with long white hair and a long white beard, inspecting a Nazi air force officer’s dagger, intervenes. “You never know,” he says. “I have a neighbor and she can put an axe through the center of that picture over there.” His name is Mark Bodnarczuk, and another gentleman at the sale tells me that he is “the sword expert.”

Bodnarczuk laughs. He says he doesn’t need any more swords, yet here he is. His collection started piling up five years ago with a Union Civil War sword. He says it’s a disease. He picks up the three-foot sword of a German Imperial officer – a highly regarded status symbol for pure Aryan members of the Third Reich’s armed forces. Now it’s being passed back and forth between me – I was raised Jewish – and Bodnarczuk, a pleasant man with faded crescent moon tattoos on his arm, who looks like he’d pal around the Renaissance Faire. It’s important for Bodnarczuk to come to the sale in person to feel the blades, see if the scabbards fit, and “look in the nice little red eyes of the lion” on the handle of the Imperial sword.

However, Bodnarczuk came today specifically for the Civil War artillery sword. It is heavy and made of brass with a wide blade that’s just over two feet long. “The idea with these swords,” he says, holding the handle against his chest so the sword points out, “was when you were on your back on the ground, and the cavalry’s coming at you, you’d hold the sword up and hit the horse in the chest.”

Guns and antique military paraphernalia were the featured items at the August 21 auction. During the preview time, potential buyers inspect every aspect of the lots to ensure they know what they are bidding on.

A crowd begins to form around the Nazi memorabilia. Some people turn away quickly, like they see someone urinating in public. But there are plenty who’ve come strictly to hold – and bid on – the Nazi swords. Tom Coulter, 72, is an avid collector of German World War II memorabilia. He’s here for the German paratrooper gravity knife, which looks like a small, plain wood handle that’s missing a blade. But the hand guard doubles as a secret button. Earlier, other men asked to see the gravity knife and none could figure out how to open it. Coulter turns it upside-down, clicks the hidden button, and out slides the ten-inch blade. “Gravity,” he says to anyone listening.

William says the appeal of Nazi memorabilia is in the craftsmanship, and collectors are excited by “the whole heraldry of owning something that was involved in that time.” It’s legal to sell Nazi paraphernalia in some military shows and auctions in the United States, but it’s illegal to sell certain Nazi items on eBay. It’s also banned in France, Israel, Austria and Germany.

Coulter tells me to grab the American trench knife – basically a pair of brass knuckles welded to a twelve-inch blade – and the German gravity knife.

“Which one would you want to fight with?” he asks.

My fingers are slipped through the brass knuckles of the trench knife. It’s heavier than the gravity knife.

“The trench knife,” I say.

He points to the gravity knife. “This is practical,” he says. You can cut yourself from your parachute tangled in a tree with it. However, he says pointing to the trench knife, “This is to kill somebody. The back end is for cracking skull. The knuckles are for punching face and this is for stabbing.”

Coulter, who was a marine in Vietnam and had one-third of his lungs removed thanks to Agent Orange – you can hear the damage in his voice – says his house is stuffed with Gestapo rings, German helmets, swords, Luger pistols, and a small painting of a church steeple by Adolf Hitler. He’s traveled the country, and even to Europe, to purchase many of these items. He only visits our gallery when we have a good deal of Nazi pieces in a sale.

Avid collector and former Vietnam veteran Tom Coulter holds a Nazi military dress dagger that was up for auction. Coulter explained that shiny knives and swords were meant for dress only as reflections could draw the eyes of enemies in battle.

“No American stuff?” I ask him.

“Well, they’re just not unique,” he responds. “I have American stuff. I have my Marine bayonets. They’re nice, sure, but the Germans carved eagles into everything.”

“What would you say if someone came over to your house and saw all the swastikas and felt uncomfortable?” I ask.

“I’d say, ‘every weapon is a hate item. They’re all hate items.’” He says it’s for the love of history.

The Nazi daggers are beautifully crafted, but it is hard for me to divorce them from the black and white photos of the Holocaust that are also in this sale – naked prisoners with theirs hands over their genitals standing like skeletons behind barbed wire, and men shoveling human bones into a brick crematorium.

The sale begins and most people follow William into the middle room where he takes his place at his podium. It looks like church. The weapon collectors loiter behind in the showroom, inspecting the weapons one more time, squinting down the barrels of rifles like telescopes. The guns and swords are the headliners of the sale, though it will be a few hours before they’re up for bidding. Weapon-lovers never seem eager to sit through the bidding on pottery, costume jewelry or vintage seltzer bottles.

William auctions off a mechanical baby in a crate. It’s a two-foot glass-eyed doll that was an advertisement for a soap company in the 1940s. All of its limbs used to move, like a baby stuck on its back, but now only one arm and one leg work. “I hope somebody plugged it in for ya,” William says. “He lights up…and he turns his head.”

It goes for $450.

Another item for sale is a vintage Ku Klux Klan panoramic photograph, dated 1925. Hundreds of men and women and children in white robes and pointed hoods stand in front of the nation’s capitol. Not too far in the background, sitting on window ledges, are black children watching the scene. When the photo sells for $225, William looks at it and says, “I haven’t seen that many dunces in one place in a long time.”

A box lot of doll heads sits on a table waiting to be sorted and sold at a future auction.

William auctions off two hundred lots in two hours before reaching the portion of the sale where certain people are leaning forward, white-knuckled on their bidder number paddles, hoping to win their guns and swords of choice.

Mark Bodnarczuk stands. Tom Coulter pulls his Vietnam vet hat down low. As the auction goes on, others side-glance, trying to see who they’re bidding against. Then there are people like Sal Vargetto who rushes in near the end of the sale, bids on two shotguns, wins, runs into the preview room, takes them off the rack, aims them at the ceiling and pretends to shoot with a long, unlit cigar hanging from his mouth.

Bodnarczuk doesn’t get the brass Civil War artillery sword. It goes for higher than he is willing to spend. But he does buy a Japanese sword. Coulter wins the gravity knife, and I see the Filipino woman leave smiling with the Indonesian dagger in her hand.

The next day we clean up and begin to organize a new sale. There are now antique Russian menorahs in place of the Nazi swords.

What doesn’t sell after a few tries is either donated or brought to the dump – the great American intestine. Everything that winds up here at the Orange County Transfer Station is flattened, cubed and shipped out on trucks heading for the landfill behind it. I’ve seen Darwin’s On The Origins of Species and Suzanne Somers’ Fast & Easy cookbooks destroyed in unison here.

The filled box truck is driven into an enormous shed with a cement floor. There are beat-up American flags on the wall and gnarled teddy bears tied to the grills of dump trucks – things employees have pulled from the trash. The shed has its own atmospheric pressure and smells of thick, hot rotting. A mist falls from the ceiling so the place doesn’t spontaneously combust. There are smashed pianos and old refrigerators and dead televisions and shattered glass and old dirty mattresses, which the man operating the excavator grabs with the claw of his machine and uses as a broom to make way for our new pile of trash.

The dump weighs the box truck on our way in, and subtracts the weight we lose on our way out. Our last trip here was with Barbara Harris’ unwanted stuff. By now we had gone back one last time to clear out her old barns in the backyard. Most of it was in such bad condition it went right to the dump. In five minutes we threw out 3,500 pounds of her life.

Trucks line the parking dock outside of the William J. Jenack auction house.

There’s a sign at the weigh station when you leave that reads, Thank you for your garbage.

We sweep out the box truck before a new pickup. A trumpet player is dead. His family rented a giant dumpster for everything that won’t be going to auction. His place must be emptied, no evidence left of him whatsoever, to stage the house for sale.

I find his résumé in his office desk. He played with the band on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. He played with Sinatra and Buddy Rich. I find studio recordings of him on cassette. I put them in his stereo and let his trumpet echo through the empty house and out the open doors into the street where his neighbors walk by. They do a double take as if their old neighbor is back from the dead to perform one last time.

Once we’ve packed all his sellable stuff in the box truck, we climb into the big dumpster. We jump up and down on his trash to make sure it doesn’t overflow.

It’s a 55-and-up gated community. The neighbors aren’t amused. Chances are we’ll be back soon for them too.

Complete Article HERE!

Emptiness and Filling Out Forms:

A Practical Approach to Death

Dying with compassion means having a plan in place for those left behind. A practitioner recounts how she navigated the process with her dharma friends.

By Rena Graham

As a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, I am constantly reminded that we never know when death might approach, but for years, I’d avoided dealing with one of the most practical aspects of death—the paperwork. I was not alone: Roughly half of all adults in North America do not have a living will. Then recently, I suffered a near-fatal illness that left me viscerally aware of how unprepared for death I was, and I made a pledge with two of my friends to get ready to leave our bodies behind for both ourselves and the people who survive us.

Bridging the end of December 2017 and the beginning of January 2018, I spent a month in a Vancouver, British Columbia hospital with a bacterial lung infection that had also invaded my pleural cavity—the first time I’d come down with a severe illness. After ten days in an intensive-care unit, I was moved to a recovery ward where I suffered a relapse. I spent my 62nd birthday, Christmas, and New Years with strangers in the hospital.

One night in the ICU, while I was partly delirious and falling in and out of sleep, I had a vision of a deceased friend reaching out to me. From what felt like disengaged consciousness, I looked down at my body on the hospital bed and realized I wasn’t ready to die. I hadn’t studied my lama’s [teacher’s] bardo teachings to navigate the intermediate state between death and rebirth, and did not want to take that journey without a road map. It didn’t matter whether this was a drug-fueled hallucination or an actual near-death experience. The important thing is that I rejected death, not out of fear, but through a recognition of the dreamlike nature of reality. After this experience, I felt that my attachment to this life and the things in it had diminished. I no longer wanted to ignore what came next. I wanted to be prepared. 

When I told my friends Liv and Rosie about this vision, we agreed to study the bardo teachings together once I’d had a couple of months of recuperation. By March, however, our plans shifted. Rosie had heard about a man (I’ll call him Ben) who had died on Lasqueti Island, an off-the-grid enclave in Canada’s Southern Gulf Islands that a local cookbook once described as “somewhere between Dogpatch and Shangri-La.” He had left his closest friends without any instructions. They had no idea if he had a family or where they might be.

“And he left an old dog behind!” Rosie said, “Can you imagine?”

“Not the bodhisattva way to die,” I replied, referring to the Buddhist ideal of compassion. I  also imagined what mess I might have left, had I not made it. 

Promising they would never leave others in such a quandary, Ben’s closest friends created a document called the Good to Go Kit, which detailed information required for end-of-life paperwork. (It is now sold at the Lasqueti Saturday market to raise funds for their medical center.)

“I’ve been wanting to make a will for 20 years,” said Liv, who would soon turn 70, “but research throws me into information overload, which adds to the emotional overwhelm I feel just thinking about it.”

“What if we did this together instead of studying the bardo?” suggested Rosie, who was in her early 50s.

Writing a will, figuring out advanced healthcare directives, and noting our final wishes didn’t have the mystical lure of bardo teachings, but we set that aside for a year while we took on this more practical area of inquiry. 

To use our time wisely, we set several parameters in place. We decided to meet one weekend a month to allow time for research and reflection between meetings, and we chose to keep our group small for ease of scheduling and to allow us to delve deeper into each topic.

 “I’d like this to be structured,” said Liv, “so it doesn’t devolve into a social event.”  

Rosie and I agreed but we knew better than to believe there didn’t need to be some socializing. She offered her place for the first meeting and said she’d cook. 

“We’ll get our chit-chat out of the way over dinner,” she said. “Since we can all be a little intimidated by this process, we have to make it fun.”

Later in March at Rosie’s garden suite, we sat down to dinner and Liv passed out copies of “A Contemplation of Food and Nourishment,” which begins with the appropriate words: “All life forms eat and are eaten, give up their lives to nourish others.” The prayer was written by Lama Mark Webber, Liv and Rosie’s teacher in the Drikung Kagyu school. (I also study with Lama Mark, although my main teacher, Khenpo Sonam Tobgyal, is in the Nyingma lineage.)  Turning our meetings into sacred practice seemed the obvious container to keep us on topic.

After dinner, Rosie rang a bell, we said a refuge prayer and recited the traditional four immeasurables prayer to generate equanimity, love, compassion, and joy toward all sentient beings.  

We traded our prayers for notebooks and reviewed our Good to Go Kit. Rosie smiled at the expected question of pets—including the name of the person who would be caring for the pet, the veterinarian and whether money had been set aside for their expenses. The form also asked whether we had hidden items or buried treasure.

Liv laughed and said, “People still bury strongboxes in their backyards?”

My answer was more prosaic: “Storage lockers.”

Rosie, Liv, and I are all single and childless. We are all self-employed and independent and have chosen Canada as our adopted homeland, meaning we have no family here. So we considered what roles friends might play and focused on those who were closer geographically than sentimentally. 

Pulling them in to act on our behalf seemed like such a “big ask” as Rosie said, but it was time to get real about our needs. The three of us shared our feelings about involving friends outside the dharma versus those within. 

When I was in the ICU, my friend Diane visited on several occasions and later told me she remained calm until she reached her car, where she cried uncontrollably. In marked contrast, my dharma friend Emma calmly asked what I needed and didn’t make much of a fuss. My Buddhist friends tend to view death as a natural transition from one incarnation to the next, while other friends may see it in more dire terms: as a finality or even failure. For end-of-life situations, asking non-Buddhist friends for limited practical support seemed kinder for all involved. 

We started to familiarize ourselves with the responsibilities of someone granted power of attorney for legal and financial proxy and enduring power of attorney for healthcare. Months later, we agreed our network of “dharma sisters” would be the perfect fit. While we hope to maintain our ability to make decisions for ourselves, should we require long-term care, we felt the baton could be passed between a dozen or so trustworthy women. We have since spoken casually about this with a number of these women and have made plans to organize a get-together and discuss our plans in greater detail, offering reciprocal support for what the Buddhist author Sallie Tisdale calls “the immeasurable wonder and disaster of change.” 

We concluded our five hours together by dedicating the merit and reciting prayers of dedication and aspiration. Long-life prayers for our lamas were offered, a bell rung, and heads bowed. Without the need for further conversation, we made our way into the chilly spring evening, silently reflecting on our new endeavor.

The next meeting and those following included menus and discussions that varied widely. Our research grew monthly with documents from government agencies, legal and trust firms, and funeral homes. None of which felt specific to Buddhist practitioners, until Rosie told us about Life in Relation to Death: Second Edition by the late Tibetan teacher Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. This small book is out of print, but I purchased a Kindle copy. In the introduction, Chagdud Tulku, a respected Vajrayana teacher and skilled physician, reminds us that “[t]here are many methods, extraordinary and ordinary, to prepare for the transformation of death.” A book of Buddhist “pith instruction,” it includes in its second edition appendices that above all I found most valuable. These include suggested forms for “Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care,” “Advance Directive for Health Care (Living Will),” “Miscellaneous Statements for Witnesses, Notary and Physician,” and “Letter of Instructions.” It even includes a wonderful note for adding your ashes to tza-tsas, small sacred images stamped out of clay. We loved that idea, though we couldn’t imagine asking friends to go to that extent to honor our passing. 

We decided to use a community-based notary public to draw up our wills, but with further research, Liv realized she could also hire them to act as her executor, rather than use her bank. She found someone experienced and enjoyed the more personable experience. In contrast, Rosie and I’ve decided to pay friends now that we’ve found ways to simplify that process for them. 

Memorial Societies are common in North America and help consumers obtain reasonably priced funeral arrangements. Pre-paying services at a recommended funeral home allows us to leave funds with them for executor expenses, should our assets be frozen in probate. End-of-life insurance “add-ons” we like include travel protection—should we die away from home—and a final document service to close accounts and handle time-consuming administrative tasks. 

In her book Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, Sallie Tisdale says, “Your body is the last object for which you can be responsible, and this wish may be the most personal one you ever make.” Traditionally in Tibetan Buddhism, the edict is to leave the body undisturbed for three days after death so your consciousness has time to disengage. Tisdale states that American law generally allows you to leave a body in place for at least 24 hours and that while a hospital might want to give you less time, you might be able to negotiate for more. 

We then turned to the thorny topic of organ donation, with Rosie and Liv both deciding against. Knowing someone would soon be taking a scalpel to your cadaver would not enhance the peaceful mind they hope to die with, while my view was just the opposite. Besides gaining merit through donation, that same scalpel image provides great motivation to leave the body quickly.

While reading Tisdale’s chapter titled “Bodies,” I began entertaining thoughts of a green burial, but after months of discussion, I ended up where we all started: with expedient cremations. Rosie wanted her ashes buried and a fragrant rose bush planted on top. Liv and I were more comfortable in the water and decided our ashes would best be left there, but not scattered to ride on the wind. We selected biodegradable urns imprinted with tiny footprints. Made of sand and vegetable gel, they dissolve in water within three days, leaving gentle waves to lap our remnants out to sea. 

By getting past the practical and emotional aspects surrounding death, Liv has found herself in a space of awe. 

“There’s a wow factor to dying that I can now embrace,” she said. 

Rosie no longer worries about who will care for her in later years. Without that insecurity, she’s left with a yearning to be as present for the dying process as possible. And I have found that my understanding of life’s importance as we reach toward enlightenment has been heightened. 

Our small sangha still meets monthly and is now studying bardo teachings in our ongoing attempt to create compassionate dying from compassionate living. As we have continued with our arrangements, we’ve reflected on what we gained from our meetings. We feel blessed for the profound level of intimacy and trust we now share. We have a deeper regard for other friendships and feel enveloped by an enhanced sense of community. And we all feel more cared for.

As Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche wrote in Life in Relation to Death: “Putting worldly affairs in order can be an important spiritual process. Writing a will enables us to look at our attachments and transform them into generosity.”

Complete Article HERE!

Struggling to die in peace:

A family fights to turn off a pacemaker

In 2010, the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, the American Geriatrics Society and other prominent groups issued a statement indicating that the deactivation of a pacemaker, an implantable device used to speed up slow heart beats, is ethically permissible.

By Jennifer Friedlin

For the past month, my mother and I have been advocating for the deactivation of my father’s pacemaker. Yet despite my parents having taken every measure to ensure that they would control the ends of their lives, two months since a severe stroke destroyed whatever quality of life my father, who was already suffering from advanced dementia, had left, his heart continues to beat against my family’s wishes.

In 2010, the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, the American Geriatrics Society and other prominent groups issued a statement indicating that the deactivation of a pacemaker, an implantable device used to speed up slow heart beats, is ethically permissible. Reaffirmed last year, the statement says, “Legally, carrying out a request to withdraw life-sustaining treatment is neither physician-assisted suicide nor euthanasia.”

Nevertheless, the team of medical professionals at Parker Jewish Institute for Health Care and Rehabilitation has given us the runaround. Most recently, my mother and I met with my father’s team of medical professionals to discuss moving my father into hospice as well as deactivating the pacemaker so that my father could live out his days naturally. During the course of the meeting, my mother, who is my father’s proxy, made clear that this would be my father’s wish.

According to the law, the request is my mother’s prerogative. In 1990, in Cruzan vs. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the Supreme Court ruled that a competent patient could refuse life-sustaining treatments, including nutrition and hydration. This case gave rise to advance directives so that a proxy could carry out the patient’s will. In a later case, the Court affirmed the right of competent patients to refuse therapy.

The medical team agreed to hospice, but has so far refused to carry out the request to deactivate the pacemaker. We have had several long conversations with the medical team, and, while they seem to agree with our desire to give my father a dignified end, they offer confusing explanations as to why they will not carry out my dad’s wishes.

At one point, a staff member told me that because a pacemaker does not prolong life, we should leave it. But my father’s pacemaker is working 53% of the time to correct his condition, known as bradycardia, which can result in heart failure. I fail to see how this device is not prolonging my father’s life or, at the very least, interrupting the possibility for his natural demise.

We are certainly not the first family to confront the medical community’s refusal to deactivate a pacemaker. Katy Butler, author of “The Art of Dying Well,” has written extensively about her efforts to give her father the death he wanted by deactivating his pacemaker. Butler also uncovered other horrors, such as cardiologists recommending pacemakers for elderly people with advanced dementia.

Much of the motivation, Butler noted, seemed to stem from the financial rewards of treating people, even the terminally ill. Simply put there’s no money in death. And yet in its current design, at $450 a day for room and board alone, institutions like the Parker Institute rake in millions annually from people whose lives are being maintained artificially. The medical system could quite literally bankrupt healthy family members to keep a dying one alive.

Although estimates vary, each year approximately 400,000 people — half over age 75 — get implantable cardiac devices, including pacemakers. Primary care doctors, cardiologists, and elder care attorneys should inform people about how these devices can affect their end of life and encourage them to include their wishes in advance directives.

Yet, even if they do, they may hit the same wall of refusal my family has faced. It seems that despite the legal rulings and the ethicists’ writings, doctors are committed to keeping pacemakers ticking.

It’s unfair to the terminally ill and their families that this view prevails. The refusal to deactivate means the sick family member is denied a dignified death, while the need for constant advocacy leaves family members feeling like they are making an unseemly demand.

As the debate about healthcare builds in the run up to the 2020 presidential election, I hope that the candidates will discuss reforms to improve end of life care. There should be dignity in death for the terminally ill and no healthy person should be forced into bankruptcy to keep a loved one alive against his or her will. There are certain people we should spare no expense to keep alive, in our family’s opinion my father is not one of them.

Complete Article HERE!

Apes and Monkeys Have an Awareness of Death

Performing Grieving Rituals and Mourning the Deceased, Study Suggests

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Researchers say non-human primates exhibit an awareness of death.

Non-human primates like monkeys and apes appear to have an awareness of death in the same way humans do, scientists have said. After analyzing over 200 years worth of research into how primates deal with death, they found common behaviors emerged—including carrying their dead, defending the deceased from threats and exhibiting a grief-like response.

There are many stories about apes and monkeys grieving for their dead. For example, a BBC documentary in 2017 appeared to show a group of langur monkeys grieving for what they believe is a dead baby—even though it was actually just a robotic spy monkey.

The same year, scientists observed a chimpanzee using tools to clean the body of a deceased group member. A female sat down with the dead male and used a firm stem of grass to clean his teeth. The practice, researchers say, suggests chimps may have a more sophisticated response to death than we currently know.

Andre Gonçalves from Japan’s Kyoto University and Susana Carvalho from the University of Oxford in the U.K. say there is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence relating to they way non-human primates deal with death—but a review of the literature to find specific characteristics and behaviors has been lacking.

“For the past two centuries, non-human primates have been reported to inspect, protect, retrieve, carry or drag the dead bodies of their conspecifics and, for nearly the same amount of time, sparse scientific attention has been paid to such behaviours,” they wrote in a study published in Biological Reviews.

In their analysis of 240 reports, Gonçalves and Carvalho showed that specific responses emerge among different non-human primate species. Often this involves carrying the dead around—especially mothers and their dead babies. Species that are unable to grasp objects—such as lemurs and tamarins—are observed trying to carry their dead even though they lack the ability.

A chimp cleaning the teeth of a deceased group member.

They also found that group members defend the bodies of the deceased and returning to the body or site of death: “Such places may hold residual information about the event which can arouse curiosity or emotional distress,” they wrote. This behavior tended to happen when an adult died, rather than a juvenile. The researchers speculate this could relate to attachments, with members needing to re-categorize from living to dead—a behavior they say is essential to the grieving process.

In one anecdote about a family of chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall, a mother named Flo died before her son Flint had become fully independent. After her death, Flint would stare at the nest they shared and returned to the site of her death. He exhibited signs of clinical depression and stopped eating and interacting with other group members. Eventually his immune system became too weak and he also died.

In another case, an adult male howler monkey was observed staying close to the corpse of a female for five days after her death, “suggesting close proximity between these individuals in life.”

“Considering all these findings and given their cognitive abilities, we argue that non-human primates are capable of an implicit awareness of death,” Gonçalves and Carvalho wrote.

They say more research will be needed to confirm whether non-human primates are aware of death—and to what extent they are. “It’s not an all-or-nothing ability,” Gonçalves said in a statement. “Awareness of death includes things such as animate/inanimate distinction, or the sensory and contextual discrimination of living/dead. The concept of death is something we humans acquire between ages three to 10. We can infer that non-human primates have some aspects of death awareness but, thus far, only humans conceptualize it at a higher order.”

The researchers also say further investigation could help shed light on the evolution of our own funeral practices: “Given that there exists a considerable gap in the fossil and archaeological record concerning how early hominins might have interacted with their dead, extant primates may provide valuable insight into how and in which contexts thanatological behaviours would have occurred.”

Complete Article HERE!

What to Know When Choosing Cremation

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Americans are increasingly choosing cremation over burial, making it the new norm for end-of-life practices, a funeral industry report finds.

Demand for cremation — the disposal of a body using flame or heat — continues to outpace that for traditional burial, says the National Funeral Directors Association’s 2019 report on cremation and burial. The cremation rate surpassed 50 percent in 2016 and continues to increase, the association found. It is expected to rise to 79 percent by 2040.

The burial rate, meanwhile, is projected to drop to just 16 percent over the next two decades, which means that cremation “is no fading trend,” the association concluded.

Cremation is growing in popularity for several reasons, including cost, the association found. The median cost of a basic cremation — without visiting hours, a memorial service or any other trappings of a traditional burial — is about $2,400. By comparison, the median cost of a burial with a coffin and full funeral home services is about $7,400.

Cremation has generally become more culturally acceptable. The association’s research found that the proportion of people age 40 and older who feel it is important to have a religious aspect as part of a funeral has declined, to 35 percent in 2019 from about half in 2012.

As cremation becomes more popular, more funeral homes are starting to offer it, said Kurt Soffe, a funeral director in Murray, Utah, and a volunteer spokesman for the funeral directors association. Mr. Soffe said his funeral home has offered cremation since 2002. The association says about one-third of funeral homes now run their own cremation equipment, and more are expected to do so in the next five years to meet demand.

Options other than standard cremation are also starting to emerge. Twenty states now permit a process called alkaline hydrolysis, according to the Cremation Association of North America, but its availability is still somewhat limited. Sometimes called “flameless” cremation, the process uses a mixture of pressurized water and chemicals to dissolve the body.

And Washington State recently approved legislation allowing “above ground decomposition,” or composting, of human remains. The resulting soil will be returned to families, just as ashes may be returned after cremation. A company called Recompose is expected to begin offering the service in Washington as soon as next year.

As cremation and other alternatives eclipse traditional burials and funeral services, funeral homes are becoming more flexible in their offerings to remain competitive. Mr. Soffe said his funeral home, for example, had arranged a service for a man who had been a Harley-Davidson enthusiast. Before the cremation, Mr. Soffe said, the man’s body was displayed for viewing dressed in his motorcycle gear.

Here are some questions and answers about cremation:

What does the price of a cremation include?

A basic cremation — called “direct” cremation by funeral homes — generally includes pickup and transportation of the body, filing necessary paperwork, the actual cremation and the return of the ashes to the family, said Joshua Slocum, executive director with the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Some funeral homes have their own cremation equipment, but others use outside contractors. If an outside provider is used, Mr. Slocum said, consumers should be careful to review the fees to be sure they are not charged twice for similar services.

Rates vary by location, he said, but a reasonable rate for a direct cremation is $800 to $1,200.

Don’t be pressured to buy a coffin. There’s no need for one if someone is being cremated, AARP advises.

The Federal Trade Commission says that no state or local law requires the use of a coffin for cremation and that the funeral home must inform you that alternative containers — such as those made of unfinished wood or even cardboard — are available.

Must I hold a memorial service before or after a cremation?

No. Add-ons like visiting hours or a memorial service are entirely up to you. “You can do everything, or nothing, before the cremation,” Mr. Slocum said. Families sometimes organize their own informal memorial gatherings after the cremation without involving a funeral home.

Are cremation prices available online?

The federal Funeral Rule requires funeral homes to provide prices for all services, including cremation, upon request by telephone or in person. But the rule, which took effect in 1984, doesn’t address online pricing. Consumer advocates are pushing for the rule to be updated to require funeral homes to post their price lists online.

The F.T.C., which enforces the rule, was scheduled to review it this year, but whether that will happen is unclear. Earlier this year, the commission said that the 10-year review period it uses was not mandatory, and the commission could change timelines if it chooses.

A commission spokesman didn’t respond to a request for an update on the review’s status.

One state, California, requires funeral homes with websites to include pricing information online, or to list services and note that prices are available upon request.

Complete Article HERE!

What People Actually Say Before They Die

Insights into the little-studied realm of last words.

By Michael Erard

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.

Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.

To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth. MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest.

MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate.

Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with the dying. Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to fade.”

I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. W. Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. Bush) were widely reported in the media, but she said they should properly be seen in the context of a conversation (“I love you,” the son had said first) as well as all the prior conversations with family members leading up to that point.

At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures. She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”

It’s still the interactions that fascinate me, partly because their subtle interpersonal textures are lost when they’re written down. A linguist friend of mine, sitting with his dying grandmother, spoke her name. Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and died. What that plain description omits is how he paused when he described the sequence to me, and how his eyes quivered.

But there are no descriptions of the basics of last words or last interactions in the scientific literature. The most linguistic detail exists about delirium, which involves a loss of consciousness, the inability to find words, restlessness, and a withdrawal from social interaction. Delirium strikes people of all ages after surgery and is also common at the end of life, a frequent sign of dehydration and over-sedation. Delirium is so frequent then, wrote the New Zealand psychiatrist Sandy McLeod, that “it may even be regarded as exceptional for patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness.” About half of people who recover from postoperative delirium recall the disorienting, fearful experience. In a Swedish study, one patient recalled that “I certainly was somewhat tired after the operation and everything … and I did not know where I was. I thought it became like misty, in some way … the outlines were sort of fuzzy.” How many people are in a similar state as they approach death? We can only guess.

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

After her father died, Lisa Smartt was left with endless questions about what she had heard him say, and she approached graduate schools, proposing to study last words academically. After being rebuffed, she began interviewing family members and medical staff on her own. That led her to collaborate with Raymond Moody Jr., the Virginia-born psychiatrist best known for his work on “near-death experiences” in a 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life. He has long been interested in what he calls “peri-mortal nonsense” and helped Smartt with the work that became Words on the Threshold, based on her father’s utterances as well as ones she’d collected via a website she called the Final Words Project.

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.

Smartt says she’s been most surprised by narratives in people’s speech that seem to unfold, piecemeal, over days. Early on, one man talked about a train stuck at a station, then days later referred to the repaired train, and then weeks later to how the train was moving northward.

“If you just walk through the room and you heard your loved one talk about ‘Oh, there’s a boxing champion standing by my bed,’ that just sounds like some kind of hallucination,” Smartt says. “But if you see over time that that person has been talking about the boxing champion and having him wearing that, or doing this, you think, Wow, there’s this narrative going on.” She imagines that tracking these story lines could be clinically useful, particularly as the stories moved toward resolution, which might reflect a person’s sense of the impending end.

In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general. (However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)

Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people’s fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients.

End-of-life communication will only become more relevant as life lengthens and deaths happen more frequently in institutions. Most people in developed countries won’t die as quickly and abruptly as their ancestors did. Thanks to medical advances and preventive care, a majority of people will likely die from either some sort of cancer, some sort of organ disease (foremost being cardiovascular disease), or simply advanced age. Those deaths will often be long and slow, and will likely take place in hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes overseen by teams of medical experts. And people can participate in decisions about their care only while they are able to communicate. More knowledge about how language ends and how the dying communicate would give patients more agency for a longer period of time.

But studying language and interaction at the end of life remains a challenge, because of cultural taboos about death and ethical concerns about having scientists at a dying person’s bedside. Experts also pointed out to me that each death is unique, which presents a variability that science has difficulty grappling with.

And in the health-care realm, the priorities are defined by doctors. “I think that work that is more squarely focused on describing communication patterns and behaviors is much harder to get funded because agencies like NCI prioritize research that directly reduces suffering from cancer, such as interventions to improve palliative-care communication,” says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a program director in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life.

Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife), it takes a big step toward building a corpus of data and looking for patterns. This is the same first step that child-language studies took in its early days. That field didn’t take off until natural historians of the 19th century, most notably Charles Darwin, began writing down things their children said and did. (In 1877, Darwin published a biographical sketch about his son, William, noting his first word: mum.) Such “diary studies,” as they were called, eventually led to a more systematic approach, and early child-language research has itself moved away from solely studying first words.

“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

5 Lifesaving Tips for Suicide Loss Survivors

By R. Jade McAuliffe

As a trauma and traumatic loss survivor I’ve spent a lot of time grieving, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the fallout following my sister’s suicide.

I struggled to stay alive inside that desolate grief space, even after surviving two suicide attempts of my own and twice witnessing the wreckage of both my sisters’ traumatic and unexpected deaths.

After all I’d put my family through in the past and everything I’ve experienced since, how in the world could I consider checking out… again?

It was the pain. 

Within seven months of my sister’s suicide, my marriage dissolved and I was once again a single parent.

To make matters worse, I had to draft and file the paperwork myself because we couldn’t afford attorneys. This was my lowest point and, for awhile, I feared might have a nervous breakdown or end up hospitalized.

I didn’t, though. I forged on, one moment at a time, and cared for my kids as best I could and vowed to honor myself and the pain of the loss, in every way possible

The following are five tips which saved my sanity and, very possibly, my life.

I hope some of these support you as well.

1. People won’t know how to support you. Always validate yourself.

Platitudes. Oh, the platitudes…

People fear grief and loss, so when approaching someone in significant pain, they often fumble in their attempts to offer helpful consolidation.

To make matters worse, suicide is still stigmatized, so survivors are often guilted, blamed or shamed for their losses, either overtly or covertly.

This, of course, only adds insult to injury and is completely unfair. Unfortunately, it tends to be the norm for suicide loss survivors, so make a promise to yourself: Grieve authentically, in spite of ignorance, and don’t allow anyone to judge or dictate when your time of mourning “should” be over (especially you).

Grief, when honored and companioned, can actually bring lost loved ones closer, and validating your own experience is the first step to empowerment.

You aren’t to blame for your loss, and you don’t ever have to “let go” of or “get over” it either. You likely won’t anyway.

Grief is only proof you dared to love, and love isn’t something from which people “recover.”

Love is yours to keep…
so keep it close, nurture, and cherish it.

Forget about moving on, and concentrate instead on connecting to this love in its new form and, by all means…
take your sweet time.

This isn’t a race and there is no finish line. You’re still in a relationship, albeit a different and altered one. This time, though, you can make it whatever you want it to be.

2. Your body knows how to heal: Follow its lead.

Nobody knows what you need more than you do. You live in your body, and now is the perfect time to gently and mindfully follow its lead.

Grief requires lots of quiet solitude, so use this time to rest and reconnect, with yourself and your lost loved one.

You might need more sleep, or need to nap during the day because you’re unable to sleep at night. Follow your body.

If it wants to sob and shake, don’t resist. If you feel enraged, go ahead and scream, smack a floor pillow with a plastic bat, or throw some old dishes into a garbage can and listen to them shatter. (This is strangely satisfying.)

Honor your body’s specific requests.
It knows exactly what it’s doing, and it will lead you, slowly and eventually, to a place of healing and relief.

Be sure to eat (something) throughout the day, and drink a lot of water. Grieving requires stamina and energy, and this will help you go the distance.

3. Silence can be deadly: Grieve out loud.

The more you hold back, push down, or minimize your grief, the more you’ll become prone to depression, anxiety, and/or suicidal thoughts.

It isn’t mainstream knowledge, but the people most at risk of attempting suicide are suicide loss survivors trying to navigate the wreckage.

If you’ve made past attempts, lost other family members to suicide, or battle depression or unresolved trauma, you’re at even greater risk, so take this very seriously.

The body desperately needs to express itself and suicide grief hurts. Give yourself permission to mourn like a superhero!

Give voice to the good, the bad, and the ugly, and bring all of your feelings to life. Make them big.

Share them out loud with someone you trust (and also your lost loved one) and/or write them all down on paper, uncensored.

Don’t minimize, hold back, or purposely omit anything. Tell your story and tell it often. Repeatedly hearing your own suicide loss story while communicating the feelings associated with it (especially fear, betrayal, and anger) will eventually help you integrate the loss.

Express yourself creatively if you feel led and your energy allows. Sometimes words alone don’t do our feelings justice.

Get it all out. You feel that internal pull for a good reason. Again, follow the prompts of your body.

4. The grief journey is lonely: Make your connections count.

Unfortunately, suicide grief is heavy and messy, and it’s a road we must ultimately walk alone.

No one can know exactly what you’re going through, and it can been exhausting trying to explain yourself and your feelings to others.

People might drop out of your life after suicide loss, and it isn’t uncommon to lose family members too. Everyone and everything is reorganizing around the loss, and this can be one of the most difficult and painful parts of the grief journey.

Guard your heart and steer clear of people and things which might drain or upset you, especially negative media, toxic people, and anyone who tries to minimize your experience.

Your energy is probably at an all-time low now, and nothing will deplete it faster than exposure to another’s anger, fear mongering, and/or anything even potentially upsetting.

Choose wisely, and spend time with others who accept you and your current reality without trying to rescue or fix it.

You aren’t sick, and you don’t need fixing. You’re grieving, and you only need to be seen, heard, and validated.

Supportive people might be hard to find, but they’re out there. I found many online through coaching and support groups. Be relentless in your search, and connect with those who help you feel safe, accepted, and connected.

Connection is the key to survival.

5. Accept your current reality as much as possible, even though it sucks.

I know the “why’s” are killing you, and you’re beating yourself up for words said and unsaid, missing “the signs,” or not being more supportive.

You did your best in the moment, and beating yourself up won’t bring your loved one back. Trust me, it’s also the quickest route to your own demise. We can’t change the past, no matter how often we replay it.

Your loved one made a split decision and didn’t ask for your permission. You didn’t get to choose or say goodbye.

You’ve been shaken like a snow globe, and now you’re doing all you can to survive this experience. Give yourself a break. Give yourself a lot of breaks.

Don’t expect to keep up with things as you did before your loss. Your body and brain are processing and integrating, and it will take a significant amount of time to feel any sense of normalcy again.

Go easy, and above all else, let go of anything not completely necessary for survival. (The cleaning? It can wait.)

I know it’s difficult, but ask for help with chores you can’t do now. Solicit child care so you can have blocks of time when nobody needs you. (Schools, churches, and work friends might know of people who can help.)

Give yourself permission to grieve, in your own way, and for however long it takes.
You didn’t ask for this and you didn’t deserve it either.

You deserve to live the rest of this life on your own terms and in your own way.

You get to decide now what that life will look like going forward.

I know our experiences are different and if you’ve lost a parent, child, or spouse, my pain in no way rivals yours. I get that.

Still, within this vast and lonely wilderness, I hope you feel a quiet kinship anyway and know, without a shadow of a doubt…

you always have a silent partner in me.

Complete Article HERE!