A matter of life and death, again and again

By Jack Cameron Stanton

FICTION
Should We Stay or Should We Go
Lionel Shriver
Borough Books, $29.99

Is life, no matter its quality, sacrosanct? In 2018, Aurelia Brouwers, a 29-year-old girl, caused controversy by ending her life legally in the Netherlands. Her case was anomalous: she did not suffer from a terminal illness, rather struggled with a history of mental illnesses, suicide attempts, self-harm and psychosis.

Assisted-dying remains a fiercely contested area in global euthanasia laws, belonging to the interdisciplinary branch of ethical discourse known as bioethics, which debates the value of human life. With the advances in modern medical knowledge, the global average life expectancy has increased to 72.6 years, up from 65.3 in 1990, as estimated by the United Nations.

And the transhuman movement, which advocates the research and development of human-enhancement technologies, theorises that near-future breakthroughs will extend human lifespans indefinitely.

In Should We Stay or Should We Go, Lionel Shriver, best known for We Need to Talk about Kevin, confronts the issue of assisted-dying and euthanasia when her protagonists Kay and Cyril Wilkinson propose “that we get to 80 and then commit suicide”. They are not suffering unbearably when they make the decision; in fact, they’re in their mid-50s, and in excellent health. Their reasoning is simple: humans were never meant to live beyond 80, and they ought to die on their own terms, before they succumb to the entropy of their biological clocks on borrowed time.

The novel’s departure point is March 29, 2020 – the day of Kay’s 80th birthday. After the “giddy, mind-racing rush to capitalise on time remaining”, the world has unexpectedly changed. Brexit reignited Cyril’s fierce anti-leave sentiment, and coronavirus turned Britain into a ghost land. As a result, Kay and Cyril appraise the lethal pills before them and begin to soliloquise about death in a corollary of Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be”. Problem is that as octogenarians, they remain in good health, not the mindless or stupefied walking corpses they feared they would become.

From here, Shriver disrupts the narrative with multiple scenarios that imagine what Kay and Cyril do next. Using this non-linear structure, Shriver creates a novelistic thought experiment, a network of possibilities, with each chapter reverting in time to choose a different path.

Kay goes ahead, Cyril backs out, and soon has a stroke that imprisons him inside his own body. Advances in medicine produce a magic pill that reverses ageing and allows people to live at optimal youth indefinitely. Their children, aghast that their parents planned suicide, and had squandered their inheritance, subject them to a cruel assisted-living home. Kay succumbs to dementia, and her family grieves as if she’s already dead.

For a while, banal subplots and dialogue about the burden the old place on Britain’s health system ride the coattails of a clever structural design. Cyril finally gets around to penning his memoirs, in which he writes at length about Brexit, the NHS, and why any responsible person should end their own life before becoming “fiscally ruinous”.

Kay and Cyril die many times, but never die. Each chapter resurrects them at a particular point in the preceding narrative and allows them to choose a different path. The result is that we feel trapped in a time-warp, reliving moments ranging from the banal to the dramatic. There’s something cavalier, even irresponsible, about the idleness with which Kay and Cyril discuss their exit plan, as beholden to a kind of botched utilitarianism, in which their deaths will alleviate the strain on a healthcare system clogged by senescent bed-hogs.

For me, euthanasia or assisted-dying becomes a complex moral dilemma when the person who wants to die is experiencing unceasing, terminal, and/or unbearable pain in life, and wishes a dignified death that involves a physician’s help. Stripped of this urgency, Kay and Cyril seek to end their lives merely to escape middle-class malaise, and this lack of high stakes, combined with a structure that relies on iteration, undermines the perspicuity its protagonists aim to convey.

What’s more, the structure, at first nifty and whimsical, soon wearies, and the result is an uroboric cycle during which every death is hypothetical, every decision temporary.

Should We Stay or Should We Go promises to explore mortality at a time when growing technological capacity to keep people alive has stretched the “sanctity of life” ethic to the verge of collapse. Although the premise compels, Shriver’s novel is weighed down by the snobbish longueurs of two well-off oldies who, despite their fears of death and dying, find their immortality by coming back to life chapter after chapter.

Complete Article HERE!

Canadian researchers build end-of-life predictor tool to support palliative care

The RESPECT calculator predicts frail people’s survival to assist caregivers in deciding about end-of-life care and services.

By Mallory Hackett

Understanding the trajectory of someone’s death to provide appropriate end-of-life care is a complicated process that the researchers from Project Big Life, a Canadian health calculation research group, hope to make easier with their Risk Evaluation for Support: Predictions for Elder-Life in the Community Tool (RESPECT).

The RESPECT calculator predicts frail people’s survival to assist caregivers in deciding what type of care and services they may need at the end of their life.

“Knowing how long a person has to live is essential in making informed decisions about what treatments they should get and where they should get them,” Dr. Peter Tanuseputro, physician-scientist at Ottawa Hospital, investigator at Bruyère Research Institute and a developer of RESPECT, said in a statement.

“As a person gets closer to death, the balance shifts from having curative care as the primary goal, to care that maximizes a person’s quality of remaining life.”

TOP-LINE DATA

In its validation study, the RESPECT calculator predicted a six-month death probability of 10.8% for the older adult cohort used in the study. The probability of death ranged from 1.54% in the lowest risk group to 98.1% in the highest risk group.

Survival time varied from 28 days in the highest risk group to over 8 years in the lowest risk group.

The top predictors of mortality were declines in a person’s ability to carry out activities of daily living, such as hygiene, using the toilet and mobility. The researchers found that these factors were more indicative of a person’s deterioration than chronic diseases they have.

METHODS

The researchers used population data over a six-year period derived from the Resident Assessment Instrument for Home Care (RAI-HC), a multidimensional clinical assessment used for care planning in the home setting in Canada. They collected data from more than 491,000 older adults between 2007 and 2013.

The majority (65%) of the cohort was female, and the average age was 79.7 years.

In addition to the data collected from the RAI-HC, which includes nearly 400 measurements, the calculator considered predictors such as physical functioning, cognitive impairment, sociodemographic factors, biological diseases, self-reported measures of health and recent symptoms.

THE LARGER TREND

Nearly every country in the world is experiencing a growing population of older adults, according to the United Nations. In 2019, there were 703 million people worldwide 65 years or older. That figure is anticipated to double to 1.5 billion in 2050, meaning that one in six people in the world will be aged 65 years or over.

The aging population places pressure on countries’ elder support systems, requiring new models to be created to care for this growing population segment, the U.N. says.

Digital health is poised to help end-of-life care with players like Papa, Spacetalk and Lively creating solutions for seniors. There’s also been a number of M&As in the space including Connect America’s acquisition of Royal Philips’ Aging and Caregiving (ACG) business and Amedisys’ purchase of Contessa Health.

ON THE RECORD

“The RESPECT calculator allows families and their loved ones to plan,” Dr. Amy Hsu, investigator at the Bruyère Research Institute, affiliate investigator at The Ottawa Hospital, and faculty in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa, said in a statement. “For example, it can help an adult child plan when to take a leave of absence from work to be with a parent or decide when to take the last family vacation together.”

Complete Article HERE!

Planning Death Has Gone Digital

— Inside the Apps That Prepare You for Loss

Since the start of the pandemic, more people are downloading apps that help users process grief.

By

Lucy Clay, 26, was at work when her phone buzzed with a message from her mother. Her dad was seriously ill, and doctors had raised the possibility of discontinuing treatment. Lucy was thrown into a cycle of anticipatory grief – and she turned to technology to help her with the waves of anxiety that she was experiencing, and to prepare herself for the next stage of her father’s palliative care. 

“It’s been incredibly comforting to know that there is a resource that you can access anytime you need it, day or night,” she told Observer. “When things are really bad, I can’t bear the thought of having to explain what is happening. There’s no substitute for having a human sit with you in the horror, but sometimes the silence of technology is a welcome alternative to the well-intentioned friend.”

For Lucy, who is herself a funeral director, the idea of death is a part of everyday life. Yet her career could never prepare her for the reality of caring for a terminally ill parent. After all, losing a loved one is an overwhelming experience. Family members and friends are often expected to deal with the vast administrative burdens that come with death at a time when they desperately need to grieve. And although death eventually comes for all of us, a surprising number of people have no real plan in place for when the end of their life approaches. Data suggests that although 90% of Americans think that talking to their loved ones about end-of-life logistics is important, only 27% have actually done so.

Enter the end-of-life industry. Over the last few years a plethora of apps and services, like those used by Lucy, have sprung up that promise to ease the process of planning for death. Whether it’s noting what healthcare that you’d like to receive, recording memories so that a curated legacy is left behind, or uploading important documents, there are plenty of options on offer. Some target a specific aspect of the death planning process, such as Safe Beyond, which allows users to record messages for the people that they leave behind to access after they pass. Others, such as leading end-of-life planning app Cake, offer a more rounded approach, guiding individuals through everything from writing a will to planning an eco-friendly funeral.   

Lucy now uses a range of apps that provide solace in an incredibly difficult time and help her to understand how best to manage a parent’s end-of-life journey. For her, the timing of technology’s increasing popularity when it comes to grief and end-of-life care was crucial. She describes the experience of looking after an extremely sick parent as feeling forgotten about – services and contact with care teams was limited due to COVID restrictions, and she found herself finding comfort, information and community in digital spaces instead. It’s a pattern that’s been seen across the industry, as online apps and services have seen a boost in their subscriber base over the course of the pandemic.

Liz Eddy launched end-of-life planning app Lantern in 2019 after struggling with the death of several family members. Months later the pandemic hit, and Eddy found that the app was flooded with users, an increase of 450% within two months. 

“It was bizarre timing,” she says. “Obviously, we had absolutely no idea that the pandemic was coming, but within a month of launch we were starting to hear about COVID.”

What surprised Eddy the most about her inflated user base was that most new sign-ups weren’t people approaching the end of their life, or even at an age when individuals usually start to consider making plans for their death (only around 14% of Americans under the age of 30 currently have a will). In fact, the Lantern team found that the majority of new members were between the age of 25-45, a much more significant proportion of their user base than they had seen pre-pandemic.

“People are aware of their mortality and the need for pre-planning, but very few people actually do it,” she explains. “Something like COVID gives people an immediate reason… it’s a reminder of how unpredictable life can be.”

Someone who is finely attuned to how important technology can be when life takes an unpredictable turn is David Kessler. David lost his twenty-one-year-old son suddenly several years ago and found himself embroiled in a logistical nightmare when trying to close his late son’s bank account. He discovered Empathy, an app that claims to streamline end-of-life bureaucracy and promises to automate some of the more complicated aspects of the post-death process. David, who now works as a grief expert, was so impressed by how technology could reconfigure end-of-life planning and processing that he ended up joining the Empathy team, where he now works as the Chief Empathy Officer.

“There’s no denying that COVID has made grief a more prevalent topic,” he says. “Loss has no demographic. It affects everyone at some point in their life… technology can’t promise to take the pain away, but it can hold your hand through the process whilst also offering guidance in the often unknown terrain of grief.”

In a world where much of our lives take place online, it seems only natural that death should find its own digital niche. The pandemic has boosted an already burgeoning industry, causing younger generations to reflect deeply on what they want to leave behind. Mark Taubert, a palliative care doctor who has been working throughout the pandemic told us how apps can prompt his patients to think about preferred places of death or make their wishes known ready for when they are too unwell to communicate. He describes the relationship between technology and end-of-life care as deeply complex, acknowledging that the way that we manage grief is influenced by the people around us, society, and our own experiences – and that the pandemic has been crucial in prompting us to consider how technology might play a part in both life and death.

“Technology can nudge us into asking the right questions about what we’d want towards the end-of-life, but it can’t help us answer those essential questions,” he says. “There are sites, videos, and apps that talk very openly about choices we might face at the end of our lives, and it seems like these are prompting people to take control and actually tell their clinicians what they would and wouldn’t want. I hope that technology pushes us further into that openness and peer-supported patient empowerment.”

For Lucy, who is now living with her parents so that she can play a more active role in her dad’s care, the support of her colleagues and family has been crucial, but she says that without technology she would have felt “a whole lot more lost”.

“Technology and apps help me sit in the waves of anxiety that come with knowing that someone you care about is suffering,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’d do anything just for some rest from the distress. In a time when most of my usual relaxation and distractions techniques have failed me, technology has helped me to find solace.”

Complete Article HERE!

Pagan BURIAL RITUALS of ancient Russia

By Georgy Manaev

From ancient times, different peoples living on Russian territory practiced a wide variety of burial rites. There were the Slavic kurgans, the underground house tombs of Altai, the above-the-ground burials of Siberian peoples, and many more.

When Christianity came to the Russian lands in the 10th-11th centuries, it meant changing or outright erasing the Pagan traditions previously active among the many different peoples that inhabited the territory of modern Russia. With the development of the Russian state, Christian Russians conquered and subdued the lands to the East – the Urals, and then Siberia.

Christianization of the newly conquered territories was an inseparable part of the process of conquest. And Christian burial rites slowly replaced indigenous ones. Still, archaeological and historical sources managed to preserve a wealth of information about how the various peoples of Russia buried their dead before Christian burial rituals started prevailing. Let’s take a brief look at the variety of these indigenous burial rites.

Above-the-ground burials

An above-the-ground burial found in a Russian forest
An above-the-ground burial found in a Russian forest

It appears that above-the-ground burials were practiced among the peoples of Russia long before Christianity. Russian folk tales have preserved echoing mentions of such rituals. Baba Yaga, the evil witch, lives in a hut standing on chicken legs deep in the forest. This hut has no windows or doors, and Baba Yaga has a “bone leg” – apparently, here the tales describe an above-the-ground burial, a carcass interred into a wooden casket, placed on wooden pegs.

A
A “hut on chicken legs,” in Russian folk tales – the house where Baba Yaga, an old witch, lives. Notice the similarity between the hut and the above-the-ground burial

The Mokshas, a Mordvinian ethnic group living in Central Russia, are known to have practiced burying their shamans this way. Later, during Russia’s christianization, most such gravesites were destroyed, but the burial practice itself remained in use in Siberia for centuries to come, as the Russian state was slow in conquering and controlling Siberia.

The Moksha women in traditional clothes, circa 1900
The Moksha women in traditional clothes, circa 1900

The Nenets people are the largest ethnic group of Siberia. In their view of the afterlife, a human’s soul after death continues the way of life it led during its lifetime. So, it was very important for the Nenets people to bury their dead fast. On the next day after death, the body was transported to the graveyard site using deer.

The Nenets graveyards were usually located on hilltops. After the body was brought there, it was placed inside a wooden casket along with tools, weapons and other things the deceased might need in the afterlife – all these things were bent or broken beforehand so that they could be used in the afterworld. The deer that transported the body were sacrificed at the place of the burial. But it was not a burial in the strict sense, because the Nenets didn’t bury their dead – the frozen northern land did not allow digging deep holes, so the casket was covered with brushwood and left on the site. The villagers didn’t maintain the graves either – the bodies were left to decompose naturally. If infants or children died, their bodies were hanged in sacks on the tree branches, a kind of ‘sky burial.’

Ethnographer V. Vasilyev and a Yakut above-the-ground burial in Yenisey region, Siberia, 1905
Ethnographer V. Vasilyev and a Yakut above-the-ground burial in Yenisey region, Siberia, 1905

The Buryat people, who live in the Baikal region and nearby, also practiced above-the-ground burials. They dressed their dead relatives in their finest clothes, laid them on the ground with weapons, tools and elements of horse harness, and then covered them with earth, stones or brushwood. They tried to place the body where wild animals are found, so that the soul could quickly go to its ancestors.

The Altai house-tombs

The excavation of a Pazyryk burial. Logs of the underground

In the 1990s at the Ukok plateau in the Altai Republic of Russia, vast burial grounds were discovered by Russian archaeologists. The barrow-type burials, or kurgans, as they are called in Russia, belong to so-called Pazyryk culture – the ancient Scythian society that inhabited the territory in the 5th-4th centuries B.C.

The most notable find was the so-called ‘Siberian Ice Maiden’, a tattooed shaman woman buried with six sacrificed horses and a lot of treasures. But it was just one of many burials where the body was astonishingly well preserved because of the waters that inundated the burial sites and then froze, preserving the graves’ contents embedded in ice.

The scheme of Pazyryk burial chamber: the state of the burial when it was discovered (L), the reconstruction of the burial chamber (R).
The scheme of Pazyryk burial chamber: the state of the burial when it was discovered (L), the reconstruction of the burial chamber (R).

The Pazyryk kurgans were indeed houses made for the dead. A full log cabin was placed underground, with a separate room inside for housing the body. Fully dressed, it was placed in a log casket, and around the casket, the belongings needed for the afterlife were placed – horses, harnesses, carpets, weapons, and even carts and chariots. Of course, only noble and wealthy Pazyryk were buried in such an expensive and complicated kind of way.

Slavic kurgans

An ancient kurgan in Teplyi Stan, Moscow
An ancient kurgan in Teplyi Stan, Moscow

A kurgan is a type of tumulus (burial mound) constructed over a grave. Mostly, kurgans were constructed for the wealthy and noble people – warriors, princes and so on, and were usually just small steep hills formed over the gravesite. Kurgans spread into much of Central Asia and Europe during the 3rd millennium BC.

“The funeral feast over Oleg the Prophet,” by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1899. Note the relatives of Prince Oleg mourning on top of the freshly created kurgan, while Oleg’s warriors and friends drink and mourn below.

There are still a lot of Slavic kurgans in Central Russia, but all of them are now just kurgan sites – during the long history of their existence, all visible kurgans have been looted in search of treasures. Still, we know how kurgan burials were performed.

A group of kurgans near the Meglino Lake, Novgorod region, Russia
A group of kurgans near the Meglino Lake, Novgorod region, Russia

A kurgan could be constructed quickly by bringing a mass of earth together and surrounding the foundation with stones or wooden logs. The body of the deceased was dressed in the best clothes, and a funeral feast was held, along with the cremation of the body. The remains were then interred inside the kurgan and covered with earth and stones. Along with the body, weapons, armor, household utensils, money, and other items could be interred. No tombstones or other signs were placed atop Slavic kurgans.

Dolmens

A dolmen near Zhane river, Krasnodar region, Russia
A dolmen near Zhane river, Krasnodar region, Russia

Dolmens, ancient megalithic tombs, are so old that we don’t even know the cultures they originated from. Dolmens date back to 3000-2000 B.C. In Russia, most are located in the North Caucasus.

Created from sandstone and limestone, dolmen tombs usually have four walls and a roof. A hole is cut in one of the walls, most likely for placing the body inside the closed chamber. Stone stoppers would then be used for closing these holes. Dolmens could have been covered with earth kurgans, also.

No traces of kurgans or human remains inside the dolmens were found, because of the very old age of the structures. But we can be sure they were used as tombs: they are astronomically oriented, with some clearly used as family crypts, and others as sanctuaries.

Complete Article HERE!

2,000-year-old Roman coffin unearthed in UK, enlightens on funeral rituals

Inside the casket was the remains of a body laid to rest in a prone position, and another body was laid at the feet of the first.

Remains of a roman bath in Bath, Somerset, UK

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

A 2,000-year-old Roman stone coffin containing the remains of two people has been discovered in Sydney Gardens in Bath, UK, shedding light on ancient funeral practices.

The coffin, or sarcophagus, was unearthed during ongoing excavations at the site as part of restoration work.

The coffin, said archeologist Kelly Madigan, is a “rare glimpse” into the funeral practices that were common 2,000 years ago.

The coffin was made from Bath limestone and was found in a grave approximately two meters long, 60 centimeters wide, and 50 centimeters deep. The north-facing angle of the coffin suggests that it was a Pagan burial, according to experts.

Inside the casket was the remains of a body laid to rest in a prone position, on its chest, and another body was laid at the feet of the first.

Also found alongside the coffin were small red and blue beads, and a pot, possibly used to offer food as part of the Pagan burial ritual.

“Having a human skeleton directly associated with a coffin is a rarity and to have this one associated with a probable votive offering and nearby human cremation, allows a very rare glimpse into funerary practices in the region almost two millennia ago,” said Magidan.

Sydney Gardens in Bath is a former 18th century pleasure garden currently undergoing building conservation and landscape work which previously led to the discovery of a Roman wall.

A license obtained by the excavation team from the UK Justice Ministry will allow the archaeologists to handle and manage the human remains, and will require that the bodies be reburied within a legally certified burial ground by 2026. 

While further tests and analyses are being done, however, the remains will be kept in an undisclosed safe and private location.

“I’m beyond excited to find out the results of the assessment which is currently ongoing in our labs and hope that it in turn lends itself to an interesting analysis phase where we can delve deeper into just who the people we found in the coffin were, where they were from and their health and welfare,” said Madigan.

Complete Article HERE!

How To Stay Famous After You Die.

AI Scientists Have An Answer

By Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD

If you are a young public figure, and will die an unnatural death, then I have good news for you! You will most likely be remembered for a long time after you die. Conversely, if you are older, are not a public figure, and will die of a natural cause, then the odds that you will be forgotten over time are strong.

Remembering those who have passed on from this life has been an important theme throughout human history. Our ancestors used to remember those who died by sharing their memories with the next generation in the form of stories and ballads. They would sit around a fire and exchange memories and hope they would be passed through generations after them. Later when the printing press was invented, humans began to store, collect and spread information on a massive scale. The printing press made it easier to collect and preserve memories of the deceased because it is easier to store written pieces of information. Today, the developments in communication technologies such as the internet have changed how we create, store and retain memories. The internet also allows us to analyze memory through large-scale data in a quantitative framework.

Being remembered after death has been such an important concern throughout history that civilizations such as the Romans considered damnatio memoriae, or being erased from the public’s memory, as one of the severest punishments imaginable. At some point, many of us might have wondered how we will be remembered after passing on from this life too.

The h-index, the number of research papers with the same number of citations is one of the common ways to evaluate academic performance. It is a very important number in academia. The mean and median H‐index for all peer reviewed papers at the time of promotion to Professor in the JHU School of Medicine is 25 and 23 respectively. In computer science and math, scientists do not cite each other as often as in biomedicine and there are very few young computer scientists with the H-index of 100. So it is natural to follow them on Google Scholar and learn about their research. One of the scholars I follow is Jure Leskovec (h-index = 117) the co-author of the famous node2vec and an authority on graph neural networks (GNNs).

So imagine my surprise, when I saw the paper by Robert West, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts titled “Post-mortem memory of public figures in news and social media” in my Scholar feed. I don’t know any of the authors personally but based on their work, they are extremely credible, and productive. In this paper the authors identified trends and analyzed how people are remembered in news and social media one year before and after death. It technically answers a question how long will your name last in people’s memory after you die. We know what you needed to do in ancient Greece to make it last (hello, Achilles!) but what about today? So, if you ever wondered how you can stay famous after you die, then this paper is for you!

Robert is an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne where he also leads the data science lab. Jure is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is also an investigator at nonprofit research organization Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Meanwhile, Christopher is professor and chair of the linguistics department at Stanford University.

Despite their varying backgrounds, the trio have a few things in common: they are experts in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

In this short but fascinating paper, the three scientists tracked mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) one year before and after death. The tracked people died between 2009 and 2014. They then looked at the spike and decay of attention after death and modeled the two as the interplay of communicative memory, which is “sustained by the oral transmission of information” and cultural memory, which is “sustained by the physical recording of information.”

In order to track mentions, they combined the Freebase knowledge base with online news and social media compiled through Spinn3r, an online media aggregation service that tracks mentions from a complete set of all 6,608 English-language web domains indexed by Google News as well as media posts from Twitter. For each of the 2,362 people, the scientists tracked the frequency with which they were remembered in the two medias on a daily basis during the year before and the year after death. This allowed them to quantify the spikes and decay of attention that follow the death of public figures. 

The analysis of mention frequencies revealed that for most public figures, a sharp increase of media attention followed immediately after death, whereby mention frequency increased by 9,400% in the news and by 28,000% on Twitter in the median. The average mention frequency then declined around one month after death and eventually decayed slowly to the pre-mortem level. These two stages are consistent with the two components of collective memory: communicative memory, which dominates early on and decays quickly, and cultural memory, which dominates starting around two weeks after death and decays slowly.

Based on the study, the researchers concluded that artists remain more present in the collective memory because they tend to leave a legacy that can long survive them, whereas leaders, athletes, etc who are noteworthy for the actions they take during their lifetime, are of decreased interest once they cannot replicate their actions anymore. This is most pronounced for leaders. Artists also stand out with respect to cultural memory, while no notability type stands out with respect to communicative memory. Ceteris paribus, an unnatural death, also increased the rank with respect to the short-term mention. The effect of age at death also was significant. For instance, on Twitter, the post-mortem boost was monotonically and negatively associated with age at death. Likewise, the increased short-term boost associated with unnatural deaths was more pronounced in the news than on Twitter.

Separately, the study also revealed that Twitter users pay less attention when an old public figure or leader died. Deaths of these poor souls were boosted more by the news both in the short and long-term. Additionally, the researchers noted that future studies may also add language, tone and attitude towards public figures one year before and after death to see if the study would come to a different conclusion.

To conclude, the researchers found that the largest post-mortem boost in English-language media attention can be described as an anglophone of any gender who was already well-known before death and died a young and unnatural death. So, try and get famous before you die if you want to be remembered for a long time!

And if you are interested in ways to avoid dying prematurely and gaining some time to become famous, consider finding more ways to live longer and attending the 8th Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference organized by University of Copenhagen and Columbia University. I am sure that one way to become famous in late life is to set a longevity record, currently held by Jeanne Calment (122.5).

Complete Article HERE!

The mourner’s Kaddish

— A prayer for the living

By Moshe Meirovich

In the words of Ben Sira, the second century B.C.E. Jewish apocryphal sage: “We are all destined to die. We share it with all who have ever lived and all who will ever be.”

This is a fact of life. Yet, with each death we enter a mourning period that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004) has so eloquently described as five stages of grief:

  • Denial;
  • Anger;
  • Bargaining;
  • Depression;
  • Acceptance.

Likewise, rabbinic scholars centuries ago comprehended the need to ‘concretize the abstract’ by embracing the grieving process even while standing at the grave of a loved one.

At the very moment when the heart is broken, Judaism mandates the public recitation of the Kaddish prayer thereby aiding the mourner to begin to move beyond denial by confronting death head-on.

The Kaddish, at this time of emotional upheaval, ever so slowly addresses the grieving process by encouraging the mourner to begin to accept a new reality with the ubiquitous reminder: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and helps those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:19)

In the ancient Aramaic prayer, the Kaddish asserts: “Yitgadal V’yitkadash Shmei Rabbah.” Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God throughout the world created according to the divine will.

These words underscore the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For My plans are not your plans, nor are My ways your ways declares the Lord. But, as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways and My plans above your plans.” (Isaiah 55: 8-9)

Poignantly, the psalmist reminds us that even though we may not comprehend God’s inscrutable will, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no harm for Thou art with me.” (Psalm 23:4)

Hence, with the recitation of the Kaddish, the mourner publicly declares there is indeed hope and redemption beyond this moment of unbearable pain. Step by step, the Kaddish provides the mourner with a ritual to traverse the stages of grief that will surely follow while embraced by a community of family and friends who provide comfort in the house of Shiva (seven days) where Kaddish will be recited, thereby sustaining the mourners in their quest for healing.

Moreover, in the words of an anonymous author, we discover an additional purpose in reciting Kaddish: “… if there is one thing I beg you to take to heart, it is this: Say Kaddish after me, but not for me. Kaddish is the unique Jewish link that binds the generations of Israel. The grave hears not the Kaddish, but the speaker does, and the words will echo in your heart …” (“Jewish Reflections on Death” by Rabbi Jack Riemer)

Thus, the Kaddish not only connects one generation to another; it also ‘jump-starts’ the grieving process in the midst of a caring and loving community, so that the mourner can again begin to experience a measure of hope, even in moments of despair.

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