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How to help a dog who is grieving the loss of a loved one

We ask the experts for their advice

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For dogs, the loss of a human or another pet can have a traumatic impact on their lives. Much like humans, dogs grieve the absence of someone they love so it’s important we know how to help them.

Dogs experiencing a loss can show signs of confusion, fear or depression. If it’s the loss of their owner, you may notice dogs trying to figure out where that person has gone. If it’s another pet who has died, your dog may spend more time in their bed or favourite space, often with the hope that their friend may return.

A recent news story highlighted this sad truth when a dog owner shared heartbreaking images of her dog regularly returning to the bed where his best canine friend once slept. The dog left the same space for his deceased friend to sleep in night after night, despite him passing away a year before. Tugging on the heart strings of many, it created a discussion around how dogs grieve.

Claire Stallard, Behaviour and Training Manager at the Blue Cross tells Country Living: “The loss of a person or another pet may have a huge impact on your existing pet’s behaviour.

“Not only might they experience grief themselves due to the absence of a family member, they are also likely to pick up on the subtle changes in your behaviour too during this difficult time.”

What are the signs your dog is grieving?

Some dogs may show visible signs of grief, while others may completely withdraw and mourn quietly.

“Dogs’ ability to form strong social attachments with us and each other means they can have difficulty coping when they are suddenly separated from their companions. If their owner is grieving, the change in their behaviour and their normal routine can also have an impact,” Lisa Hens, RSPCA dog welfare expert tells Country Living.

“This varies greatly depending on the individual dog, and some owners report that, when one dog dies, the remaining dog seems very affected and may stop eating, for example. While others report that the remaining dog seems unaffected,” Lisa says.

Some of the signs that will indicate a change in your pet’s behaviour include…

  • Losing their appetite
  • They might cry a lot or be searching in areas where they expect the deceased family member to be
  • They might be wanting your attention more than usual
  • More time sleeping
  • Changes in apetite
  • Loss of interest in going for walks

How do I know if my dog has separation anxiety?

“Sadly, many dogs simply don’t know how to cope when their owner isn’t at home. Some dogs will bark or destroy things to show their feelings. While, others will simply sit there quietly, feeling worried,” Lisa from the RSPCA tells Country Living.

“This can happen on a day to day basis, not just after loss, and research suggests that 8 out of 10 dogs find it hard to cope when left alone, and worryingly half of these won’t show any signs, which means you may not always know if there’s a problem.”

What can you do to help your dog?

“Try not to worry too much about your pet’s behaviour during this time and try to stick to their familiar routine as much as possible. Losing a family member can be a difficult time for everyone, our pets included, but grieving is a natural behaviour. Like us, they can recover and move on in time with the support and care of their loving owners,” Claire says.

Remember, always talk to your vet if you are overly worried about your pet’s health and behaviour.

Some of the practical ways you can help include…

  • Be observant for any change in their behaviour
  • Try to keep to their normal routine as much as you can
  • Be patient, as it will take time for them to adjust to their new situation
  • They may need more quality time with you

Should you get another dog?

If it’s a family dog who has died, it can be tempting to get another one quickly so that your surviving pet has a companion. “Try not to rush into this decision too quickly, and if you do decide to get another pet, take things slowly, making sure the introductions are carried out carefully,” Claire explains.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Resting in Peace…

Death doula Jane Whitlock on end-of-life care, grief, and the importance of telling our death stories

Jane Whitlock

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When her husband got sick with kidney cancer and died four months later, Jane Whitlock, having had no experience with death or grief, found that the guidance and spiritual care provided by hospice just wasn’t enough. Resolving to find her own purpose while answering for the gaps she saw in end-of-life care, she followed her intuition and became a death doula.

A death doula, or end-of-life doula, is someone trained to provide holistic care to a dying individual. There is no nationally standardized certification program, which means there are multiple training options—a process that involves a set of training classes and documented hours of direct client support, plus whatever specific assessments a particular certification program requires. Death doulas represent a growing movement toward redefining our typical approaches to death.   

A death doula’s role is as nuanced as each individual who occupies that role, and Jane Whitlock sees herself first as a companion. She provides comfort and support to the dying individual and their “tribe”—as she often refers to the circle of family and friends—through a time for which most people may not be spiritually prepared. Through intentional connection, she deciphers how she and the tribe can best serve the dying person. She abides by the slogan, “Death: it’s a collaborative event!”

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

The Growler: Why do you believe death doulas are important?

Jane Whitlock: A doula helps ask the big questions so this process is as spiritually comforting as it can be. Think of your deathbed and how you want to feel—at peace, right? So, how do you get there?

A doula also gives you some sense of what’s coming and can support you through these tough situations that you may not be prepared for. You haven’t been here before and often don’t have any bank of knowledge to draw from.

Cultures have evolved to include how we care for people who are dying and have died, and while some intact cultures can trace their beliefs back very far (to the Buddha, for example), Americans don’t have those deep ties.

Since the Civil War, the standardization of funeral homes, embalming, and the medicalization of end-of-life have removed death from the home. We no longer know how to care for people who are dying, how to have home vigils, how to mark significant transition points (leaving a body for the last time, a body leaving the house).

How can our modern standardized systems shift to accommodate what death doulas have to offer?

It would be amazing if hospitals employed doulas! Wouldn’t it be great if you could transfer someone who has died to a room to clean them up, bring the family in, and have someone guide them through rituals of saying goodbye and nurturing the body?

I think a lot of times this seems like a white lady movement—like, we want to cover everything in crystals and candles and aromatherapy or whatever. I push pack against that because there are so many other ways of experiencing death. This movement needs to be more inclusive, to change a whole bunch; being a death doula is a teeny, tiny door, and there is a lot of growth ahead.

What characteristics make an effective death doula?

You have to be able to empty yourself out, to be hollow and free of judgment, of any preconceived ideas about what should be happening. You have to listen without thinking and really be with someone when they’re suffering without trying to fix it. An effective death doula is someone who is calm, quiet, and vulnerable. It’s really so much about vulnerability.

I volunteer at a hospice and often have to practice that whole “soft belly” thing, to stop before every room and become wide open. Even when someone doesn’t want to see you, you have to think, “It’s not about me.” You just kind of clear your energy, go into the next door. You have to fight being defensive in order to just be vulnerable.

 

What are some ways to go about changing our death culture?

It really starts with your stories. We don’t tell our death stories; we tell our birth stories and our family stories, but we don’t tell our death stories. It would be great to just listen to a bunch of stories about how it happens, maybe know just some weird and messy stuff, too. What was it like? What would you have done differently? What went well? What surprised you?

There’s this guy, Dr. Allan Kellehear, who says our inability to talk about death is a public health epidemic. He refers to the AIDS epidemic and how you couldn’t shut a bathroom stall without a poster on the back teaching about prevention and safety. Wouldn’t it be great if we took that type of vast approach to shifting death culture?

Another maverick in the field, Suzanne O’Brien of Doulagivers, says there should be someone on every block who knows the end-of-life basics so that when somebody in your community is dying, they are supported.

Who do you think is the best at approaching death?

Well, the Buddhists, hands down. They’ve got the saying: “We are of the nature to get old; we are of the nature to suffer; we are of the nature to die.” Imagine if that’s how we started every morning—we wouldn’t be so shocked by death! There are people who think that aging is some kind of radical punishment or who feel entitled to live in a full healthy body forever. That’s just not our nature.

I would say that to prepare for death, you have to get your spiritual house in order, whatever that means to you. Life is finite, super fragile, and you are not entitled to anything! So, spend your time wisely and be grateful.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Toronto death doula helps take the fear out of dying

By Christine Sismondo

“Everyone dies and that is OK.”

Those six words are something of a mantra for Kayla Moryoussef, a Toronto “death worker” who has spent the last six years immersed in death and dying. As the program manager of the Toronto Home Hospice Association’s “Death Café” initiative, she holds sessions for people to talk about death (more about that later) and, in addition, works to help people experience a “good death.”

What might make a death good? That probably depends on the person, but one of the main things Moryoussef works to get people to let go of is fear.

And she’s not alone. While it’s still a relatively niche corner of the death care industry in Canada, there are an increasing number of people with “death doula” or “end-of-life-worker” practices and, like Moryoussef, most are participants in the “death-positivity” movement.

“It’s not that we should celebrate the fact that people died,” says Moryoussef, who works with Toronto’s Home Hospice Association and has a practice called Good Death (www.gooddeath.ca) through which she runs “Death Café” sessions in Toronto. “But we should accept the fact that people die and, even though it’s not a good thing, it’s an OK thing that’s a part of life. As soon as we recognize that, it becomes less scary.”

In a nutshell, the theory is that we’ve lost touch with death, which used to be more a part of life than it is now. Prior to, say, 100 years ago, people often died at home and, if they lived in small communities, neighbours and family dealt with a lot of pre- and post-mortem issues. As it became more “hands off,” it also became distant, invisible and shrouded in mystery. As a result, we’ve become more afraid of it. Some people use euphemisms, like “passed,” others speak in hushed tones, as though something shameful has happened. At death cafés, people learn to talk about it more openly, in hopes of getting past the fear and awkwardness.

“People get together to talk about dying and death,” says Moryoussef. “They’re not support groups, they’re not grief and bereavement groups, they’re literally just open forum events, although, since we realize that certain populations have different needs, we started to make some population-specific, so we have LGBTQ cafés and, in November, we’re having our first death café for people with chronic illness and chronic pain.”

Death cafés (or “death salons,” as they’re sometimes called) are one of the most successful components of the death positivity movement, says Dr. Katherine Arnup, retired professor at Carleton University and author of “Family Perspectives: Death and Dying in Canada,” a report published by the Vanier Institute of the Family.

“I just looked at the most recent stats, and there have been 9,261 death cafés in 65 countries,” says Arnup, pointing out that this is pretty good given that they only started eight years ago. “I’ve been to a few and it can actually be kind of fun, with a lot of laughter surprisingly. I mean, 65 countries is pretty impressive and there are other ones like “Death over Dinner” and “Death at a Bar,” you know, those kinds of things.”

There’s obviously a demand for a different conversation about death and dying than the one most of us have been having, but public and private sessions aren’t all that death workers offer. Moryoussef has been called upon to join families sitting in vigil and help dying people settle on a “legacy” — usually letters, gifts or memoirs that are to be given to loved ones, post-mortem. This, along with dying at home (when possible), is all part and parcel of the philosophy of the good death. Some death workers even help families who want a home funeral clean and preserve the body.

There are some parallels between this and the big midwifery resurgence (circa 1960-1990s) that saw feminists objecting to a medical system that tended to keep women in the dark and gave them few choices. The modern midwifery movement worked to rectify that by giving women information, encouraging them to be active in making a birth plan and, in some cases, even empowering themselves to choose to deliver at home, instead of the hospital.

So, since birth and death — the only two inevitabilities of life — arguably faced many of the same problems, why didn’t we notice that the death care industry needed some changes, too?

Dr. Arnup says demographics played a big part in the shift in attitudes toward death.

“I don’t like the stuff around the Baby Boomers so much, how you see claims that Boomers changed everything, from the way we eat to the way we die,” says Arnup. “But I think there’s something to be said for the fact that, just because there are so many of us, some have a sense that we can do anything and control things. Certainly some Boomers pushed for medical assistance in dying, which is now the law of the land, and they’re also the people who are supporting hospice.”

Boomers aren’t alone in wanting to avoid the indignities of, say, a protracted death in a hospital, but the sheer number of people in that demographic who hope for pain-free deaths, surrounded by friends and family and, ideally, in their own home, is starting to reshape the industry by supporting alternatives like Moryoussef’s.

And, as she says. It’s still sad — for everyone. It’s not a celebratory moment. But since letting go is a natural part of life, it’s also OK.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Can We Talk … About Death?

Some recent, intriguing examples of how the conversation is evolving

By Ann Oldenburg

When the former TV news anchor spoke at Georgetown University at an event titled “The Healing Power of Communication” in August, 2019, she said she wished she had talked more to her late husband, Jay Monahan, about his impending death before he succumbed to colon cancer at 42 in 1998.

“It was just terrible,” Couric said. “After nine months of trying desperately to figure out some way to manage it, he lost his battle — and it was devastating.”

She explained that she’s writing her memoir and recently had drinks with Monahan’s two doctors to “revisit” those days.

“I told them how guilty I felt about so many things about Jay’s illness and that we never really discussed, you know, even entertained the idea that he might die. I was so afraid to give up hope, and make him give up hope, that we never discussed the alternative, which I really regret,” Couric said.

For example, she said, “He never wrote a letter to our girls” — daughters Ellie, 28, and Carrie, 23.

“I honestly believe that we, as a species, will do better if we come to terms with our mortality earlier in life.”

The fine line between maintaining hope and offering a reality check is tricky territory, said Dr. John Marshall, oncologist and director of Georgetown’s Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers, who was interviewing Couric at the event.

“As soon as we enter that world, we see the light go out,” Marshall said. “We don’t like doing that. So the balance of being on point and brutal, if you will, and factual, versus that maintaining of hope…”

“It must be a dilemma,” Couric responded. “For me, I erred on the other side — trying to protect Jay from information he had a right to hear.”

So, which is more important: knowing the reality of your situation or maintaining hope?

Most of us don’t want to hear bad news, especially this kind of bad news. And most of us don’t want to talk about it, or plan for it. And yet, in recent years, the thinking about this is beginning to change as our aging population starts changing its views of death. More hope, less grim reaper?

Is Dying About Control?

HBO’s documentary Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America, released Aug. 14, 2019, explores some of the ways Americans are finding meaning as life ends. And all of the ways show that the key is taking control of as much, or as best possible, of the end of life.

The documentary includes new types of urns, personalized obituaries, eco-friendly caskets, drive-thru funeral viewing, living wakes (which force people to say things to each other while still alive), space burials, green burials (in which the body is wrapped in biodegradable material in a shallow grave), memorials in an underwater “reef vault” and a seriously ill man who opts to take advantage of physician-assisted death to end his life peacefully and surrounded by family.

It’s all part of a $16 billion U.S. funeral industry that is being disrupted.

“The baby boomer generation has had a greater degree of control over their lives than any other generation before them,” Alternate Endings filmmaker Matthew O’Neill told Axios in an Aug. 10, 2019, article. “It’s because every topic that’s taboo — be it sex, be it drugs — it’s all on television and it’s all being talked about. And death is the last taboo.”

Is Dying About Hope?

The film was released around the same time as the book A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death by Dr. BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger was on The Washington Post’s Top 10 bestsellers list. The book includes practical advice (take your favorite quilt to the hospital) and wisdom (“love” is what matters most in the end).

Miller, too, addresses the idea of hope.

“I honestly believe that we, as a species, will do better if we come to terms with our mortality earlier in life,” he said in an interview on the Today show Aug. 5, 2019. “Get used to exercising hope within the framework of life being short and precious.”

Boomers do seem to be getting better about not only facing death, but also embracing it. The Conversation Project, Death over Dinner project, Death Cafes — all have been propelling us towards a more open view of death for nearly a decade. Remember how Swedish Death Cleaning became “a thing” two years ago?

Maybe It’s About Hope and Control

De-stigmatizing death. Having a “good death.” Those are the goals.

The United Kingdom’s Academy of Medical Sciences installed “The Departure Lounge” in a London mall in May. It was designed to look like a departure lounge at an airport, complete with all that baggage we have, with the idea of getting people to talk about death. “Why can’t we say the ‘D’ word?” the website asks.

Packaged versions of the pop-up installation are now being offered to community groups across the UK to start a national conversation about death and dying.

As a student in Georgetown University’s new Aging & Health master’s program, I was treated to a guest lecture in our first semester by Becky Hsu, an assistant professor at Georgetown, who spoke to us about the Chinese concept of a “good death.”

Hsu explained that she had spent time in China with a woman who had already bought the outfit she wants to wear for her death: pants, shirt, shoes, earrings and purse.

The woman has an embroidered pillow picked out for her head to rest on. She had a portrait taken that will be displayed at her funeral. All of these things are neatly wrapped in a cardboard box that she proudly shows off to friends and family.

Explained Hsu, “It’s a happy thing.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Is there greener life after death?

An alkaline hydrolysis device

By Tom Jokinen

In Winnipeg in a January blizzard, there are few places as toasty and sheltered as a crematorium. I know this because I worked in one. When the cremation chamber, or retort, is firing at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit (900 Celsius), the work space is balmy, like a ski lodge. The noise of the powerful gas jets is buffered by the stone and steel of the machinery. When the gear is running, all you hear is a low, soothing rumble. It’s peaceful. I used to read Eudora Welty short stories while the body burned, stopping regularly to monitor temperatures and stoke the remains with an iron hook passed through a small, eye-level porthole in the oven door. The process is conducive to reflection.

Cremation seems clinical: fire, ashes. But in fact there is enormous spiritual heft behind it. We talk about the cleansing power of fire. As a funeral rite it goes back to the Bronze Age at least. “Fire,” writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, “magnifies human destiny, it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano.” Man “hears the call of the funeral pyre” not as destruction but as a road to renewal. This is overstating the case, as French philosophers do, but it still scans. Now try saying the same about a chemical process.

Last week, I read a story about a new process called alkaline hydrolysis. In a nutshell, it’s like cremation without the fire: The body is immersed in chemicals in a cylindrical device that looks (judging from the photo, as I’ve never seen one up close) like a large telescope with an Instant Pot lid. The chemicals break down the soft tissue, which is flushed away, leaving behind bones and any non-organic residue such as tooth fillings or artificial hips. The device is called a Resomator, a Doctor-Whovian commercial euphemism for what is basically a body-dissolving machine.

Industry licensing bodies such as the Bereavement Authority of Ontario are not sure what to make of alkaline hydrolysis. Is it safe to just flush the liquefied organic material into the city sewage system? Are there health risks? Is it dangerous or just very, very creepy? Is it any creepier than cremation – or burial for that matter? For now, though, its main selling point is that alkaline hydrolysis is considered greener, or less carbon-intensive, than other methods.

According to the Ecology Action Centre, the average cemetery buries 4,500 litres of formaldehyde, 97 tonnes of steel and 56,000 board feet of hardwood per acre. A single cremation, which intuitively (and emotionally) seems so clean and efficient, uses as much fossil-fuel energy as an 800-kilometre car trip. Sulphur dioxide and mercury are released into the atmosphere, up the flue. That warm feeling on a January day in Winnipeg comes at an ecological cost.

Meanwhile, hydrolysis uses one-eighth the energy spent in cremation. There is no embalming, no casket or container. Even with cremation, there is always a container of some kind, including, in my experience, very expensive hardwood caskets with brass trimmings. So alkaline hydrolysis is marketing itself thusly: your green alternative.

When you’re dead, there are few options for what happens next. I don’t mean spiritually – that’s between you and your God or His/Her metaphysical substitute. I mean with the body. We all leave a remainder. Some more than others. You can bury it, sink it in the sea, leave it in the trees or on hilltops to be devoured by carrion birds – known technically as excarnation, a natural process of removing the flesh before earth burial (in Tibetan and Comanche cultures, known as sky burial) – or most commonly you can burn it. In Canada, the cremation rate varies by region, but in 2018 more than 61 per cent of the dead in Ontario and Manitoba and more than 71 per cent in Quebec were cremated. The national cremation rate is expected to rise to 76.9 per cent by 2023, according to the Cremation Association of North America.

For the funeral industry, cremation has always been a shoe that pinches. It’s an industry based on the pricing of intangibles: the meaning of life and death, ritual, the concept of “closure.” It has been able to translate the emotional turbulence of death into product (caskets, vaults, embalming) and real estate (cemeteries), but over the past 50 years has watched as a cultural revolution changed everything. Religion loosened its hold, and fewer people felt bound by tradition. Cremation was cheaper. People moved around – for work, for relationships – and the idea of a permanent resting place lost its appeal. Postmodernism struck the funeral industry: Meaning and ritual came down to personal taste.

So the industry reinvented itself. Funerals became “celebrations of life,” and funeral directors became event planners like those who booked weddings (and the cost of weddings, they noticed, was skyrocketing). If cremation was on the rise, it could surely be monetized: urns shaped like golf bags, garden watering cans or basketballs, depending on the hobbies of the dead in question. Cemeteries focused on marketing columbaria, the small, above-ground vaults for urns.

I once met a cemetery salesman who assured me that scattering human remains was illegal (not true) and that he himself once stepped on a human bone on a beach in British Columbia (unlikely, as most crematoria process the remains to a fine, biologically inert powder). His sales pitch was simple: Only the industry knows how to handle what we all leave behind – the rest of us are not equipped. It’s a powerful message. As Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, found out, people will pay to avoid dealing with death and will subcontract what is basically an existential puzzle (what’s to become of me?) to a professional.

But it’s possible to be too clinical. We like at least a little meaning with our rituals, especially the death rituals. “Belief in a future state,” writes Bertram S. Puckle in Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development, a 1926 text, “presupposed a material existence after death, with corresponding material necessities. Food must be provided, weapons and clothing, and a supply of charms with which to ward off evil influences.” And so even today people are buried with iPhones or cremated with a blanket from home. This is not superstition. It is about doing the right thing, even if the thing is a complete mystery. Alkaline hydrolysis is maybe too much like a chemistry experiment to bear much meaning.

And the industry continues to adapt and innovate. An Italian company used to market the Capsula Mundi, a starch-based, acorn-like pod that calls for no headstone as it, with the body, dissolves in time as compost and produces a tree. Demand, it turns out, was slim. Now the company offers an egg-like urn for cremated remains that does the same job for US$457 – tree not included. (But again, there’s the carbon footprint of the cremation itself.)

Straight-up green burial – in a shroud, with no embalming, in a legally designated forest (the law frowns on “freelance” burial) – is sparsely available. The industry has never embraced it.

Maybe it expects greater things from alkaline hydrolysis. After all, if meaning is and always will be knit deeply into our death rituals, it ticks the right boxes: In life, we rejected plastic straws and used twirly light bulbs. In death, we were thus safely melted. Carve it into your tombstone.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Netherlands nuns convert former battlefield to “natural burial” cemetery

Natural burials are a return to the old-world way, which avoids chemicals and resource waste.

By J-P Mauro

In a gorgeous plot of land that was once the site of the Battle of Arnhem in World War II, the Trappistine Sisters of the Abbey of Koningsoord in the Netherlands have opened a new cemetery where they will be providing natural burials.

“Natural burial” is a term that describes the burial practices of humankind for the majority of history. The process avoids embalming chemicals, as well as steel or cement vaults that are placed underground to protect the coffin from the natural course of decomposition.

These natural burials are becoming more popular today, as they are substantially more eco-friendly than the modern burial. According to Order of the Good Death, a website that supports the return to natural burial, modern burial practices can take a hefty toll on the environment, and squander valuable non-renewable and non-biodegradable resources. They write:

“American funerals are responsible each year for the felling of 30 million board feet of casket wood … 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete for burial vaults, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. Even cremation is an environmental horror story, with the incineration process emitting many a noxious substance, including dioxin, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and climate-changing carbon dioxide.”

At the Trappistines’ new cemetery, known as Koningsakker — King’s Field — the nuns are trying to remedy these ecosystem compromising factors by returning to the old methods of burial. Hettie van der Ven of Crux news reports that bodies there are not encased within a casket, but rather wrapped in a burial shroud made from linen, jute, hemp and wool that will biodegrade much faster. This avoids wasting natural resources and burying forever materials that would have impeded the decomposition process.

The sisters told Katholiek Nieuwsblad Foundation, a Dutch Catholic news organization, that they were inspired to open the cemetery by their American sister-house, The Trappistine Sisters of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Cross, in Virginia, who opened their own natural burial cemetery several years ago. The cemetery will provide the sisters with funds to sustain them, along with a book bindery and a restoration workshop.

While originally intended to serve as a Catholic cemetery, Koningsakker is now a public cemetery and the nuns welcome people of all faiths and walks of life, even those who come from foreign lands. The nuns feel that this was the right way to go, as it gives their graveyard an opportunity to impact a much wider range of the community. Riny Bergervoet, the cemetery’s location manager, said:

“Natural burials are a perfect fit for this day and age. At the end of their lives, people are looking for connection with the ground they came from and on which they are living … Choosing this as a resting place is a testimony to one’s identity. People know that we are praying for them on a daily basis, which they find very uplifting.”

CruxNews reports that Koningsakker currently only has four people buried on their property, but dozens have already reserved a plot. It’s only a matter of time before this “natural cemetery” will be full of people visiting their beloved lost.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Documentary of Funeral Care for Abandoned AIDS Patients

With restrained camera work, “Departing Gesture” shows the process of a solitary funeral and burial, tended to by funeral-home staff.

By Sarah Larson

Jonathan Napolitano and Brian Bolster’s eleven-minute documentary “Departing Gesture” opens inside a suburban-style funeral home, with a long shot of a visitation room, where a white-haired man in a red necktie appears to be setting up for a wake. The casket is open, the flower arrangements generous and autumnal. The only people we see are the man in the coffin and the man taking care of him. “It happens more than you think,” a man’s says, in a voice-over. “Maybe ten or twelve deaths a year, I think, where their family would abandon them and never come back.” The film gives us a minute to contemplate this—the screen goes dark and shows a title card, and then the camera lingers on an exterior shot of the tidy funeral home. Who would abandon their late relatives, and why?

“Departing Gesture,” the first film in The New Yorker’s new series highlighting short documentaries, sheds light on this story patiently and with care. It focusses on the Sebrell Funeral Home, in Ridgeland, Mississippi, whose director, Trey Sebrell, is the person we have just heard speaking. Bolster’s camera observes the funeral home, both its public-facing rooms and its behind-the-scenes areas—offices, an embalming room—as we listen to Sebrell talk. “It’s one of those professions that, once you’re involved, you feel like you’re serving,” he says. “Even if I did not love working for myself, I still would be a funeral director and an embalmer at another funeral home in Mississippi.” As Sebrell goes about his work, in a suit and cufflinks, his movements have a calm certitude.

Sebrell Funeral Home has a partnership with a local charity, Grace House, which provides care and housing for people with H.I.V./AIDS; Sebrell cares for its dead, some of whom are ultimately abandoned by the family members who survive them. These families don’t hold a service and don’t want their relative’s remains. In the film, we watch the process of a solitary funeral, of sorts, and a burial, tended to by funeral-home staff.

Many of us have been in funeral homes like Sebrell’s and have attended memorials of various sizes—the wakes that teem with mourners, the calling hours that feel underpopulated. Either circumstance can enhance the sad surreality of death; in this case, the sadness is heightened further still. Bolster’s camera remains static, at a respectful distance, as it watches people at work: a man with flowers, a woman tending to the deceased’s makeup, pallbearers bringing the casket to the hearse. Other shots show us caskets, a lectern, the embalming room and its tools, embroidered seat covers that say “pallbearers.” The restrained camerawork subtly heightens the contrast between life and death, movement and stillness.

Bolster and Napolitano met on the film-festival circuit and have worked together on several projects; for “Departing Gesture,” Bolster shot and Napolitano edited. They met Sebrell in the course of working on a feature, still in development, about H.I.V./AIDS in the American South. The South has become the epicenter of the crisis in the United States, owing to factors including poverty, cuts to health-care funding, and social stigma. And H.I.V. infection in rural areas and smaller cities is on the rise. “I’m very interested in issues of regret,” Bolster told me. As a boy growing up in Massachusetts in the eighties, knowing that he was gay, Bolster watched reports of the unfolding AIDS crisis and the ignorance and fear that surrounded it. “Families abandoned their kids in hospitals,” he said. “I thought, This is what’s going to happen to me.” In 2019, an era of PrEP, undetectable H.I.V. viral loads in well-cared-for patients, and nationwide marriage equality, it can be stunning to see and hear about present-day ignorance that reminds us of decades past—for example, when Sebrell mentions a local funeral home that refused to collect a man’s body after learning that he was gay. “Departing Gesture” gives us a window into such stories with compassion, through Sebrell’s empathy and its own.

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