Death Curiosities – Page 54 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018

A history of dying-and-rising gods

A detailed view of coffin of Peftjanoeneith

[M]y cat, Osiris, is lying at my feet as I type this article. That’s his normal nook while I’m in my office, which doubles as our guest room—the futon behind me is also a suitable sleeping option. Celebrating his eighteenth birthday soon, I’m thankful he’s stayed healthy and vibrant for this long. The same was not the case for his namesake.

On Sunday many Christian faithful celebrated the resurrection of their savior. Yet the story of Christ is an oft-repeated motif in mythological literature. Resurrection tales abound across the planet. This was first brought to broader attention thanks to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, an exhaustive survey on world mythologies that was originally written to show their inadequacies by a skeptical Frazer, yet turned out to influence entire academic departments in the comparative mythology and comparative religion fields that grew from his work.

While much speculation has been offered as to why resurrection cycles persisted, the annual birth, death, and rebirth of the soil provide an important clue. The plants that grow, wither, and die seasonally only to return to nourish us once again makes for a convenient segue to the concept of souls. Frazer consciously linked this fact with the cults of Persephone, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and Dionysus. As he writes,

It remains to see whether the conception the annual death and resurrection of a god, which figures so prominently in these great Greek and Oriental worships, has not also its origin or its analogy in the rustic rites observed by reapers and vine-dressers amongst the corn-shocks and the vines.

Easter Sunday, known as Resurrection Sunday to the faithful, marks the third day of Christ’s burial after his death on the crucifix. Missionary Christianity spread Christ’s story across the planet; over the course of centuries those other resurrected gods were discredited, rewritten, or forgotten. The uniqueness of Christ’s story has been challenged by modern scholarship, notably by tablets such as Gabriel’s Revelation. Frazer just brought that reality to the forefront.

Unlike many older stories, the Christ motif was unlinked at some point from sexuality and regeneration to focus on the soul. This speaks in part to the establishment of Christian ethics, yet the desexualization of Christ did a disservice to our understanding of ecology and the environment. The below figures are all in some way connected to fertility and nutritional sustenance, two necessities for the continuation of life. The Christ story is mainly metaphysical, unchained from the earthly cycles even though those annual renewals provide the foundation upon which the Christian mythology was founded.

Beyond the cited figure in each historical mythology is the theme, which is essentially more relevant to the living than the dead. Sure, we discover emotional comfort by the notion of life beyond the grave, but what really matters is picking ourselves up after deaths during lifetime—divorce; the death of relatives and loved ones; losing a job; watching a child leave the nest. Our character is defined by our response to tragedy and suffering.

As the characters below demonstrate, some achieve greater glory after the tragedy while others are trapped in an unforgiving underworld for eternity. What unites them is the human imagination that dreamed up each figure to communicate a primal idea about how to navigate life.

Osiris

The Egyptian deity of the afterlife, underworld, and dead is the classic tale of regeneration. There are many variations on his theme, but each poem centers around his love for his sister-wife Isis, a jealous brother that murders him, Set, and his son, Horus, who avenges his father’s death. In every variation, Isis copulates with Osiris’s briefly resurrected body before he once again perishes. In one telling, his body parts are scattered across the planet, which Isis has to collect before stitching him back together. The agricultural connection is clear: Osiris was associated with the annual flooding of the Nile River and the crops dependent upon its rising. He was also linked to the positioning of the stars, Orion and Sirius, at the beginning of each new year, another resurrection motif.

Dionysus

The Greeks offer the most famous mythological motifs in the West, unsurprisingly as they’re the basis of our culture. Maybe the drunken god of grape harvest, wine, fertility, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness waking up the morning after was enough of an impetus to make him a resurrected being—sulfites pack a punch. Dionysus was never crucified, but torn to bits by cannibalistic titans; he was somehow reshaped from the remaining heart, which flies in the face of anthropological data that our ancestors were organ eaters. Regardless, mythology is not about facts. Rituals celebrating his prowess remain beloved to this day.

Tammuz

In one of the world’s oldest pieces of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king references Tammuz, an ancient Mesopotamian lord of shepherds, as an ex-lover of Ishtar who was turned into a bird with a broken wing. The scorching Mesopotamian summers needed a hero to resurrect the fertile soil every year—the link between sex/fertility and vegetation, noted above with Dionysus, is another common motif—and that duty fell onto Tammuz, who was also known as Dumuzid. A midsummer month was even named in his honor. Tammuz’s legacy lived behind himself, as gods do. He was incorporated into myths in the Levant and Greece, where he became known as Adonis.

Adonis

Being the mortal lover of Aphrodite is no small task. As his harbinger, Tammuz, was already firmly secure in his sexual prowess, Adonis has echoed through the generations as the ideal lover. Born from a myrrh tree and raised by Persephone, whose own myth centers on the regeneration powers of vegetation, Adonis’s good looks created a feud between Aphrodite and Persephone. Zeus declared that the boy would spend one-third of each year with each of them, then choose where to spend his final third term. He must not have been a fan of Hades, as he chose Aphrodite. Then he was gored by a wild boar, dying in Aphrodite’s arms. Adonis is reborn with gardens planted in his honor each summer, the result of his dying blood mixing with Aphrodite’s tears to form an anemone flower.

Attis

This Geek deity’s story went down over a millennia before the Christ figure appears. His first cult was linked to a Phrygian trading outpost, Pessinos, whose great mountain was thought to be a daemon. Attis’s mother, Nana, became pregnant by laying an almond from a mystical tree on her bosom. She had second thoughts about this motherhood job, though, as upon his birth she abandoned him. Attis was subsequently raised by a he-goat. He fell in love with Cybele, but his foster parents sent him to Pessinos, where he was forced into an arranged marriage to King Midas’s daughter. Eventually, he went mad and cut off his genitals, so that he would not betray Cybele. He too died and was reborn, concurrent with the spring planting and autumn harvest the locals experienced every season.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

March 29, 2018January 21, 2024

How the world of death and funerals has become fashionable through digital culture

‘Tearleading’ – the process of publicly sharing condolences after someone famous has died – has become an internet phenomenon. It’s made grief trendy and has digitised the only one true certainty in life: death

Public mourning: Céline Dion pauses at the casket of her late husband René Angélil – his funeral was livestreamed

By Oliver Bennett

[I]t’s one of the more blood-curdling things about Facebook – the social media death notice. You know the score: the recently deceased star of Top of the Pops, sitcom or stage is commemorated by way of a YouTube video and a deluge of weepy RIPs and “part of my life” eulogies, a phenomenon derided as “tearleading”. The high-water mark for this was who “taught us how to live, then taught us how to die” two years ago.

Of course, entrepreneurs have noticed this spectacle, which writer and psychologist Elaine Kasket brackets as “the data of the dead”. It’s part of a digital-led revolution in dying and death and it’s changing the way we see people pass into the ineffable digital afterlife. “We’re developing an entirely new mentality about death and dying,” she says.

Kasket (yes, she knows) is the author of an upcoming book about digital death called All the Ghosts in the Machine, and has observed a huge rise of interest. “I was at a recent SXSW festival and was introduced to someone who put on a super-serious voice and told me: ‘I’m in the death-tech space’.” As a subject, dying has become fashionable, with investors pouring money into startups, bolstering thought leadership and inspirational TED Talks on “new ways to think about death”.

There are so many new death-tech sites that they break up into different types. There’s the price disruptors like Harbour Funerals, Beyond.life, and Funeral Zone, which offer price comparisons and sometimes, TripAdvisor-type reviews. Derrick Grant set up Willow when a close friend couldn’t afford his funeral expenses and found one-sixth of Britons struggle to pay for a funeral – the average cost of dying is £8,905. He now offers an against-deadline price check to help those who “couldn’t afford to die”: the ultimate poverty. “I found the industry hadn’t changed for 100 years,” says Grant. “People thought you had to pay a lot to do right.” Now it’s becoming more transparent, more open, and partly as a result, says Grant, “funerals have become less funereal”.

Starman: tributes at a Bowie mural in Brixton the day after the announcement of his death

Then there are the planning sites, which include Cake, a US company that has developed an app for end-of-life planning, and the UK’s DeadSocial.org which explains how to prepare your digital estate from the scattered confetti of Instagram, Facebook, Gmail et al. On SafeBeyond, users can create an online cache – including video and audio messages – to be shared posthumously with loved ones which founder and chief executive Moran Zur has called “digital relics” and “emotional life insurance”. My Last Soundtrack will develop your end-of-life Spotify playlist. More than half a million people die every year in the UK, and market analyst IBISWorld says the UK funeral sector is worth £1.7bn. No wonder there’s been significant funding from angel investors in that “death-tech space”.

This stuff enthuses Peter Billingham, a celebrant and “digital death adviser” who founded the website Death Goes Digital. “The world of death and funerals has really been disrupted by digital culture,” he says. “What was stable for hundreds of years has changed enormously in the last five years. We’re more open about death than ever before and technology is helping to reframe what death means.”

Baby boomers, now moving into the death demographic, are leading the way. Milestones include the 2016 livestreaming of funerals, including those of Lemmy Kilmister and Céline Dion’s husband René Angélil; and of course Bowie, who as ever in the avant-garde, favoured a direct cremation, where the body is cremated before the funeral. There’s a growing inventiveness in eco-death options too: recomposition, where the body becomes compost, and aquamation, a kind of a water cremation – even a “mushroom burial suit”. There are death celebrities, notably Caitlin Doughty, a “mortician and activist” who founded “death acceptance” collective The Order of the Good Death, spearheading the “death positive” movement.

But it is the tech spiritualism that is perhaps the most fascinating part of the digital death otherworld. Many readers will recognise the curious and unsettling scenario whereby a dead friend or relative pops up zombie-like on Facebook, perhaps in a prompt to recognise a birthday.

Modern trend: Dave Grohl delivers a speech at Lemmy Kilmister’s televised funeral

This has led to a huge leap in the way we approach the afterlife. In the past, says Elaine Kasket, attitudes to the dead divided into two main global tendencies: cultures of memory, and cultures of care, roughly zoned into west and east: in China, for example, there’s a tradition of believing that one’s ancestors remain active, while here we honour their memory with photographs and grave visits.

“Now, with digital culture the dead are becoming more vocal and socially influential and the West is moving towards a care culture,” adds Kasket. “They are increasingly in the places of the living.” Digital representations of dead persons won’t be confined to cemeteries. They will haunt different spaces: perhaps even become a rights lobby: the “transdimensional”, perhaps. They will be what Kasket calls the “active dead”, and what Billingham calls “present not absent”. Many people have online conversations with the dead on Facebook, which introduced a legacy contact option in 2015, and Billingham says that we’re already seeing the emergence of a new kind of professional: the “posthumous legacy curator”.

There are far reaches of death-tech that encroach upon sci-fi. Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is about creating an eternal posthumous avatar: animated by your digital footprint and given life by artificial intelligence, and is building a database of like-minded people who gain the chance for grandchildren to interact with their unmet great-grandparents. Also in the US, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a computer scientist and specialist in personality emulation, is engaged in a project to create simulations of the dead people so as to keep our loved ones “alive”. These avatars will start on the screen, move into virtual reality and augmented reality, then potentially become life-size simulations. Ahmad, who was inspired to work in the area when his father died, sees it becoming reality between 2030 to 2050. “It’s not if, it’s when,” he says. And to those who say it sounds like Black Mirror: well, go back and have a look at the “Be Right Back” episode.

Open-ended: a woman in ‘Black Mirror’ gets an AI version of her husband after he died

Ahmad thinks that cultures like Japan, with its animist traditions and a neophilic acceptance of robots, will be the early adopters. But he doesn’t see why (bar a few surmountable religious barriers) it shouldn’t take hold everywhere as we become used to it. “It means my daughter will have the chance to interact with my father,” he says. “It will deepen our relationships with our dead loved ones and offer a living memorial that can bring ‘emotional enrichment’.” We’ll be less likely to visit graves, perhaps, and more likely to summon Gran like a digital Doris Stokes.

Of course Ahmad has critics. “People bring up the idea that we need ‘closure’,” he says. “But it goes towards solving the ‘if only I’d said this or that’ problem to an extent.” Still, he concedes there are plenty of legal and ethical issues. What if the simulation were sanitised, with difficult opinions edited out? How should their ageing be represented? Does their voice sound right? Ahmad thinks that the development of digital trusts will emerge, and with artificial voice synthesis, the latter will get better. “But these are uncharted territories. It will affect the way we see identity. Adding emotions may be a challenge.” Will Death 2.0 bring on unintended consequences? It’s a dead cert.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

March 25, 2018March 25, 2018

An Alternative to Burial and Cremation Gains Popularity

An alkaline hydrolysis unit at a funeral home in Windom, Minn. This week, California became the 15th state to outline commercial regulations for the disposal of human remains using the method.

By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

[W]hat do you want done with your body after you die?

It is an unnerving but important question, and for most Americans there have long been only two obvious choices: burial or cremation.

But a third option, a liquefaction process called by a variety of names — flameless cremation, green cremation or the “Fire to Water” method — is starting to gain popularity throughout the United States.

This week, California became the 15th state to outline commercial regulations for the disposal of human remains through the method, chemically known as alkaline hydrolysis.

It may seem markedly different from the traditional means of digging graves or burning the dead. A machine uses a chemical bath to dissolve protein, blood and fat, leaving only a coffee-colored liquid, powdery bone and any metal implants, like dental fillings.

Alkaline hydrolysis has been used to dispose of human cadavers and dead pets since the process was modernized in the 1990s. About 10 years ago, the machines became available for ordinary funerals, and now families are requesting it more frequently. Some are motivated by environmentalism or cost, as cemeteries fill up. Others find the process more comforting than cremation, which recently edged past burial in the United States, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

The California bill was sponsored by Assemblyman Todd Gloria, who represents much of San Diego, after he was contacted by executives from Qico Inc., the company that advertises the process with the trademark “Fire to Water.”

Assemblyman Gloria said that he supported the bill partly to advocate for a constituent but also because he thought that people should have more choices.

“It was definitely new to me,” he said. “I think like most people I don’t talk a lot about death. I don’t think about it a great deal; I probably shy away from it. But when the concept was brought to me, of course I needed to understand it better.” He added, “It’s pretty fascinating stuff.”

Alkaline hydrolysis was patented in the United States in 1888 “for the treatment of bones and animal waste” and modernized by Dr. Gordon I. Kaye and Dr. Peter B. Weber, two professors at Albany Medical College about a century later.

t works like this: An alkali, or salt derived from an alkali metal or an alkaline earth metal (usually sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide or a combination of the two), is combined with water in a specially made machine.

About 65 percent of the human body is already water, while another 20 percent or so is protein, including blood, muscle and collagen, which is found in tissue and bone. The alkali breaks down the body’s proteins and fats. The machine produces sterile brown effluent made up of minerals, salts, amino acids, soap and water, as well as weakened bones that can be crushed into an ash, and any metal in the body.

Bio-Response Solutions is one of the few working manufacturers of such machines in the United States. Joe Wilson, its chief executive, said the field is so new, people do not yet agree on what to call the machines. He sells two models: the High-Temperature 28 and Low-Temperature 28. The first sells for $220,000 and can dissolve a body in as little as three hours; the second costs $150,000 and takes up to 16 hours. Some competitors sell far costlier models. (The number refers to the diameter of the cylinder, 28 inches.)

An alkaline hydrolysis unit at Bio-Response Solutions in Danville, Ind. The company is one of the few working manufacturers of such machines in the United States.

One of his competitors sells a $500,000 model. “It’s a very high-end unit, like a Rolls-Royce,” he said. “And Rolls-Royces are nice but you don’t see many of them around. I watched it for a couple years and finally decided to do a Chevrolet.”

Flameless cremation seems to have caught on among younger funeral directors.

Ryan Cattoni, 28, who graduated from mortuary school in 2010, said that he learned about the method from a trade magazine and thought it was probably “the wave of the future.”

He opened AquaGreen Dispositions in South Holland, Ill., in September 2012, about a year after the state legalized the process. He offers a flameless cremation package covering the paperwork, an urn (filled with powder from the bone) and transport for $1,795. He said that he performs hundreds of them a year. A simple nonceremonial cremation in Chicago can cost as much as $3,000.

The environmental benefits of alkaline hydrolysis are significant. Its carbon footprint is about a tenth of that caused by burning bodies. Mr. Wilson said liquefaction uses a fraction of the energy of a standard cremator and releases no fumes.

Funeral directors thought the machines would be popular for their environmental benefits, but they were surprised to discover other motives.

“When it’s a family that has just lost Mom or Dad, they’re in a more emotional state and they look at it and say it seems more gentle,” said Jason Bradshaw, the president and chief executive of a funeral and cremation service with six locations in the Twin Cities.

One of his customers was Judy Kastelle, 68, a resident of Hudson, Wis., who has found herself averse to burial. Both her grandparents were buried, she said in an interview, and she thought it seemed wrong to put their bodies in coffins encased in concrete.

When her mother, Marcella Okerman, died at 95 earlier this month, Ms. Kastelle had already arranged for flameless cremation.

“I just liked the gentleness, of her kind of being dissolved away,” Ms. Kastelle said. “I didn’t think a lot about that. I knew cremation was the thing, and it just seemed like an option that felt kinder, to me.”

Not everyone feels this way. Some critics recoil, in part because the effluent is released into local sewage systems.

“They say ‘soylent green’ or ‘throw mama down the drain’ or all that stuff,” Mr. Wilson said.

But experts note that the fluid is sterile and contains nutrients, so much so that it can be and is used as a fertilizer. Rick Vonderwell, who manages Tails Remembered, a pet crematory in Delphos, Ohio, uses the effluent at his farm, as do several large universities.

In some places where flameless cremation is available, it has quickly overtaken the alternative. Mr. Bradshaw, who has been offering both services for five years, says that more than two-thirds of families seeking cremation choose the new method when it is offered.

“Burial is dead,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s going to go away. It’s not sustainable. Too many people and not enough land.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

March 1, 2018March 1, 2018

10 People Whose Hearts Were Buried Separately From the Rest of Them

BY Bess Lovejoy

[T]hough it may seem bizarre today, having your heart buried apart from the rest of your body wasn’t uncommon for European aristocracy of the Middle Ages and beyond. The practice arose in part during the Crusades, when high-ranking warriors had a tendency to die in “heathen” places that weren’t seen as desirable burial locations. But transporting a whole body back to Europe made things pretty stinky, so corpses were stripped of flesh and ferried back to Europe as skeletons, with the inner organs (including the heart) removed and buried where the Crusaders had died. By the 12th century, members of the English and French aristocracy also frequently had their hearts buried separately from the rest of them.

Heart burial became less practical and more symbolic by the 17th century, partly as a religious practice associated with the Jesuits and other Counter Reformation groups. (Some scholars think the heart’s powerful symbolism became particularly important while the Catholic Church was undergoing a moment of crisis.) In Western Europe, it became common for powerful individuals, such as kings and queens, to ask that their hearts be buried in a spot they’d favored during life. In more recent years, Romantic poets and other artists also picked up the practice, which has yet to be entirely abandoned.

1. RICHARD I

Richard I, a.k.a. “Richard the Lion-Heart,” ruled as King of England 1189-99 but spent most of his reign fighting abroad, which is how he earned his reputation for military prowess. (He also may or may not have eaten the heart of a lion.) He died after being struck by a crossbow while campaigning in Chalus, France, and while most of his body was buried at Fontevraud Abbey, his heart was interred in a lead box at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen, France. The organ was rediscovered during excavations in the 1830s, and in 2012, forensic scientists examined it—now mostly reduced to a grayish-brown powder—to learn more about Richard’s precise cause of death (some think a poisoned arrow dealt the fatal blow). The crumbling heart was too decayed to tell them much about how Richard had died, but the scientists did learn about medieval burial rituals, noting the use of vegetables and spices “directly inspired by the ones used for the embalming of Christ.”

2. ROBERT THE BRUCE

Robert the Bruce, King of Scots 1306-29, asked for his heart to be buried in Jerusalem. But it didn’t get all the way there—the knight he entrusted it to, Sir James Douglas, was killed in battle with the Moors while wearing the heart in a silver case around his neck. Other knights recovered the heart from the battlefield, and brought it back to Melrose Abbey in Scotland for burial. Archeologists rediscovered what they believed to be the heart in 1920 and reburied it in a modern container; it was exhumed again in 1996, and reburied beneath the abbey’s lawn in 1998.

3. ST. LAURENCE O’TOOLE

St. Laurence O’Toole, the second archbishop of Dublin and one of that city’s patron saints, died in 1180 in France. His heart was sent back to Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where it rested inside a heart-shaped wooden box within an iron cage—at least until 2012, when it was stolen. The dean of Christ Church Cathedral has speculated that the heart might have been taken by some kind of religious fanatic, since it has little economic value, and much more valuable gold and silver objects were ignored. (Weirdly, the thief, or thieves, also lit candles on one of the altars before fleeing.) The item has yet to be recovered.

4. THE PRINCE-BISHOPS OF WÜRZBURG

The prince-bishops of Würzburg (part of modern Germany) practiced a three-part burial: their corpses were usually sent to Würzburg cathedral, their intestines to the castle church at Marienberg, and their hearts, embalmed in glass jars, to what is now Ebrach Abbey. The practice was common by the 15th century, though it may go back as far as the 12th. Their funerals at the Marienberg castle also featured what may be one of history’s worst jobs: a servant was required to hold the heads of the corpses upright during the funeral, which featured the body seated upright and impaled on a pole. The funerals lasted for several days. There were more than 80 prince-bishops; a German cardiologist who made a special study of heart burial says “about 30” of their hearts found their resting places in the abbey.

5. ANNE BOLEYN

According to legend, after Anne Boleyn’s beheading in 1536, her heart was removed from her body and taken to a rural church in Erwarton, Suffolk, where the queen is said to have spent some happy days during her youth. In 1837, excavations at the church uncovered a small, heart-shaped lead casket inside a wall. The only thing inside was a handful of dust (it’s not clear whether it was actually the heart), but the casket was reburied in a vault beneath the organ, where a plaque today marks the spot.

6. LOTS OF POPES

Twenty-two hearts from various popes—from Sixtus V in 1583 to Leo XIII in 1903—are kept in marble urns at Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Trevi in Rome. Traditionally, the hearts were removed with the rest of the organs as part of the postmortem preservation process, and kept as relics just in case the pope became a saint.

7. FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin died in Paris in 1849, and most of him is buried in that city’s Pere Lachaise, but he asked for his heart to be buried in his native Poland. His sister carried it back to their home country, where it is preserved in alcohol (some say cognac) within a crystal urn inside a pillar at the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw. In 2014, scientists conducted a late-night examination of the heart to make sure the alcohol hadn’t evaporated, although their secrecy frustrated scientists who hope to one day examine the organ for clues about what killed the composer.

8. THOMAS HARDY

The English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy wanted to be buried in his hometown of Stinsford, Dorset, but friends insisted that a burial in Westminster Abbey was the only appropriate choice for someone of Hardy’s literary prominence. But when town officials found out that Hardy’s body was destined for the abbey, they threw a fit, and so a compromise was reached—most of Hardy went to Westminster, but his heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard (where it has its own grave marker). A persistent, but unproven, story has it that a cat ate part of the heart when the doctor who was removing it got distracted; a gruesome addendum says the animal was killed and buried alongside the organ.

9. PERCY SHELLEY

When the poet Percy Shelley died sailing the Mediterranean in 1822, local quarantine regulations dictated that his body had to be cremated on the beach. But his heart allegedly refused to burn, and a friend, the adventurer Edward Trelawny, supposedly plucked it out of the flames. After a custody battle among Shelley’s friends, the heart was given to Percy’s wife Mary, who kept it until she died. Her children found it in a silk bag inside her desk, and it is now said to be buried with her at the family vault in Bournemouth, England.

10. OTTO VON HABSBURG

The powerful House of Habsburg practiced heart burial for centuries, with many of the organs buried in copper urns in Vienna’s Augustiner Church. In 2011, Otto von Habsburg, the last heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which was dissolved in 1918), had his heart buried in the Benedictine Abbey in Pannonhalma, Hungary. The rest of him was buried in Vienna. The erstwhile crown prince said he wanted his heart buried in Hungary as a gesture of affection for the country—one half of his former empire.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018

Researchers explore how people with Alzheimer’s disease use end-of-life medical services

[B]ecause people are now living longer and often healthier lives, the rate of some illnesses that are more likely to develop with age has risen. These illnesses include dementia. In fact, the number of us living with dementia was already 47 million worldwide in 2015. It could reach 131 million by 2050.

Dementia is a general term that includes different types of mental decline. The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for 60 to 80 percent of all dementia cases.

As Alzheimer’s disease worsens, older adults may become more likely to have trouble performing daily activities, can develop trouble swallowing, and may become less active. This increases the risk for other concerns like infections. These infections, such as pneumonia, can increase the risk for death. As a result, the cause of death for people living with Alzheimer’s disease is often infections or some other cause, rather than the Alzheimer’s disease itself.

A team of researchers from Belgium recently studied how people with Alzheimer’s disease use medical services during their final months. The goal was to learn more about the best ways to help older adults with dementia at the end of their lives. Their study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The researchers studied information from people with Alzheimer’s disease living in Belgium who died during 2012. They compared two groups of people who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

One group had death certificates that listed Alzheimer’s disease as the cause of death. This was the group who died because of Alzheimer’s disease.

The second group included individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease but with death certificates that listed another cause of death (like infections). This was the group who died with Alzheimer’s disease (but not of Alzheimer’s disease).

The researchers looked at the healthcare resources the two groups used in the last six months of life.

Of the more than 11,000 people in the study, 77 percent had something other than Alzheimer’s disease listed as the cause of death on their death certificate while 22 percent died of Alzheimer’s disease. The average age of these individuals was 85, and most were women.

People who died with Alzheimer’s disease were more likely to have at least one hospital admission and more intensive care unit (ICU) stays. People in both groups had about 12 visits with a doctor during the last six months of their lives.

However, the people who died with Alzheimer’s disease received fewer palliative care services. Palliative care helps keep us comfortable when we are near death or dealing with a serious illness. This included fewer palliative home care services during the last six months of their lives. They also spent fewer days in a nursing home.

People in the study whose cause of death was listed as something other than Alzheimer’s disease were also more likely to have invasive procedures compared to people who died of Alzheimer’s disease. These invasive procedures included being put on breathing machines and being resuscitated (the medical term for reviving someone from unconsciousness or apparent death).

The researchers concluded that older adults whose cause of death was Alzheimer’s disease used fewer healthcare resources than people whose cause of death was listed as something else even though they had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers suggested that recognizing late-stage Alzheimer’s disease as an end-of-life condition could influence healthcare providers to use more palliative care resources and fewer invasive procedures.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

February 17, 2018February 17, 2018

Sinners, sailors and those who died by suicide: The adults buried in Ireland’s cillíní

Deprived of a Christian burial on the basis that they were unworthy, who are the adults in Ireland’s hidden graves?

Historian William Casey shows the site of a 1920 unofficial graveyard (cillín) a few miles from the village of Ballydehob in west Cork.

By Graham Clifford

[A]cross the water the odd light twinkles on Heir Island. It’s an idyllic evening and the retiring sun shoots a last glance at Jeremy Iron’s castle dressed in its unusual orange.

We’re standing by the shore at Skeaghanore West near Ballydehob. Remote and beautiful spots, just like this, are now coveted by those who seek the beauty and solitude of West Cork – but this was once a place where untold sadness lingered.

In Famine times, people from neighbouring parishes would make the long walk to this spot to gather shellfish in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Exhausted and starved, many died once here and are buried in a cillín overlooking the shore.

With local historian William Casey I attempt to get a closer look at the grave, located on a former ecclesiastical site, pulling back the thick coverage of briars and torn bushes.

“You could have hundreds of Famine victims here,” explains Casey.

“Grown men and women as well as children. This was their last attempt to live but when they lost that battle for life they’d be carried here and laid to rest, one after the other.”

Though cillíní are generally recognised as unofficial burial grounds for unbaptised children, records show that adults, such as Famine victims, were often buried in them too.

And it’s shocking to discover why so many Irish adults were deemed unworthy, by the Catholic Church and wider society, of a traditional burial down through the centuries.

Those who died by suicide, sailors, strangers, mothers who died in childbirth, criminals, murder victims, those with mental illnesses or physical deformities, people who died in a duel, excommunicates, were laid to rest in remote cilliní alongside little babies and children.

“Canon law lists ‘Those to Whom Ecclesiastical Funeral Rites Are Denied’,” explains Dr Eileen Murphy, an archaeologist at Queen’s University Belfast, who has studied cillíní closely.

She continues: “While most people buried in cilliní were unbaptised infants we also have examples of older individuals such as a pregnant woman in the cillín at Tonybaun, Co Mayo. Her skull displayed unhealed weapon injuries and I think it is the violent nature of her death that may have necessitated her burial in the cillín. We also have a newspaper account from Co Down of the body of a suicide victim who died 30-years previously and was discovered in 1842.”

Tom Cassidy, Conservation Officer with Limerick County Council, worked on an archaeological survey of Co Galway in the early 1980s.

The foreshore where people searched for shellfish near the site of a 1920 unofficial graveyard (cillín) a few miles from the village of Ballydehob in West Cork.

He says: “Galway has the highest concentration of recorded cillíní in the country. We came across a burial ground near Gort where two adults were said to have been buried. One was a British soldier who met his end during the War of Independence (from 1919 to 1921) and was buried in a cillín so his body wouldn’t be found. The other, we believe, was a man who was killed in a faction fight during a fair in the town. You could see from the stone markers that these weren’t infant’s graves.”

Incredibly some cillíní were still in use up to the early 1980s. Officially there are 1,393 cilliní in the State but most historians believe this figure is a mere fraction of the real number.

Emer Dennehy, an archaeologist now working with Transport Infrastructure Ireland, explains that in some cases mothers and babies who died in childbirth were buried together.

“In some cases it’s recorded that the baby would be buried between the mother’s legs in what were known as ‘tandem burials’. And if the mother died without being ‘churched’ (a blessing given to mothers after recovery from childbirth) then she could be buried in a cillín as well.”

Dennehy carried out one of the most detailed studies into cillíní when she surveyed the hundreds of such burial grounds in Co Kerry. She told me about the logic behind the traditions – especially as they related to suicide victims.

“The thinking which came from the church was ‘if you bury the person who died by suicide in a normal graveyard then they will contaminate it for everyone else buried there’. It was all about fear. They reckoned that only God could decide when you die so these people weren’t welcome. It was considered they, and so many others, ‘died outside the Grace of God’ and the Church completely played on this.”

Understandably, families, so desperately fearful of the stigma associated with suicide, would attempt to cover up the cause of death.

It’s believed this practice continued well into the 20th century so that a conventional burial could be granted.

For many, interment of an adult family member in a cillín was the worst shame to be endured.

Archaeologist Noel Dunne tells of “Mags Kilteel” – discovered by a passing merchant as an abandoned baby in Kildare around the 1890s, she became part of the Broderick family. But when she died, in her mid-20s, she was interred in a cillín rather than with the rest of her adopted family. Forever an outsider.

A range of unsettling practices in cillíní have been recorded. According to folklore some children were buried face down if they were handicapped or illegitimate or when childbirth almost resulted in the mother’s death.

Along the coast, sailors, and other unknown individuals washed up on the shore, were buried in cillíní. Written accounts provided by the National Folklore Collection confirm sailors were buried on the Great Blasket Islands. Similarly, we know sailors were laid to rest at a cillín in Renvyle, Co Galway, as well as in Dooks, Co Kerry, and on Heir Island.

While convicts and criminals would also have been buried in unconsecrated ground Dr Linda Lynch, an Osteoarchaeologist, explains that most would not have been buried in cillín.

“As cillíní are mainly located in rural areas, its less likely convicts would be buried there. It would be more usual for them to be buried near prisons and urban centres – in prison graveyards.”

Like this cillín in West Cork, many such graveyards across the country are left untouched by farmers and landowners who know not to encroach on these places of mass burial.

Buried, too, beneath the thorns, the gorse bushes, the long grass and the ferns are stories of unimaginable pain, suffering and tragedy.

In many cases stones mark out the dimensions of the infant’s grave but what of the larger dimensions, the last resting places of so many adults labelled inferior to those buried in graveyards.

Shunned in life and then in death.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

February 15, 2018February 15, 2018

Writing a ‘Last Letter’ When You’re Healthy

Participants in the Stanford Letter Project working on letters to their family members.

By VJ PERIYAKOIL, M.D.

[O]ver the last 15 years, as a geriatrics and palliative care doctor, I have had candid conversations with countless patients near the end of their lives. The most common emotion they express is regret: regret that they never took the time to mend broken friendships and relationships; regret that they never told their friends and family how much they care; regret that they are going to be remembered by their children as hypercritical mothers or exacting, authoritarian fathers.

And that’s why I came up with a project to encourage people to write a last letter to their loved ones. It can be done when someone is ill, but it’s really worth doing when one is still healthy, before it’s too late.

It’s a lesson I learned years ago from a memorable dying patient. He was a Marine combat veteran who had lived on a staple diet of Semper Fi and studied silence all his life. A proud and stoic man, he was admitted to the hospital for intractable pain from widely spread cancer. Every day, his wife visited him and spent many hours at his bedside watching him watch television. She explained to me that he had never been much of a talker in their 50-plus years of marriage.

But he was far more forthcoming with me, especially when it became clear that his days were numbered. He spoke of his deep regret for not having spent enough time with his wife, whom he loved very much, and of his great pride in his son, who had joined the Marines in his father’s footsteps.

One afternoon, when I mentioned these comments to his wife and son, they looked incredulously at each other and then disbelievingly at me. They thanked me for being kind but stated that my patient was incapable of expressing such sentiments.

I wanted to prove my credibility and to make sure that his wife could actually hear her husband professing his love. I knew he was unlikely to speak to them directly. So I took my huge family camcorder with me the next morning on medical rounds and – with the patient’s consent — recorded an open letter from him to his family. When I gave them the taped letter as a keepsake, both his wife and son were moved to tears.

The experience inspired an idea that has grown into the Stanford Friends and Family Letter Project. With guidance from seriously ill patients and families from various racial and ethnic groups, we developed a free template for a letter that can help people complete seven life review tasks: acknowledging important people in our lives; remembering treasured moments; apologizing to those we may have hurt; forgiving those who have hurt us; and saying “thank you,” “I love you” and “goodbye.”

A letter by a project participant named Harvey Brown, written with the help of his wife, Wanda Brown.

While these may seem intuitive, many people don’t complete these steps before they die, leaving their family members with unanswered questions and regret.

(A video showing people participating in the project can be seen here.)

The letter template, which is available in eight languages, allows writers to express gratitude, forgiveness and regret. In one letter, a participant wrote to his wife, Lily, “I wish I had loved you more.”

Many writers use the templates to express pride in their children in ways they might not do in person. One wrote to a son, Michael: “You are so courageous to change your major and do what it takes to be successful to reach your dreams.” Another wrote, “Life for us was never easy but you overcame obstacles.”

And some apologize. A man named Tyrone Scott wrote to his daughter, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there when you were growing up. If I could relive my past, I would not have let your mother take you away from me.”

The letters can be a chance to let go of grudges. Shirley Jones wrote, “To Harold: You have forgotten to repay some of the personal loans you obtained from us. We are wiping your account cleared.”

So we invite you to use the “Dear Friends and Family” template and write your letter now while you still can.

Those with chronic or serious illness may use the illness letter template; there is also a healthy letter template for those in good health. In working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, I found that some were reluctant to complete the “goodbye” task for fear that it might become a become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I recommend that people write only the parts they feel comfortable with.

Once the letter is written, you can choose to share it with your loved ones right away. You can also store it in a safe place or with a trusted person to be given to your family in the future. Some people prefer to use the letter as a living legacy document and update it over time.

It may take tremendous courage to write a life review letter. For some people, it evokes deep and troubling emotions. Yet it may be the most important letter you will ever write.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!