Tag: After Death

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Why I Decided To Have A Wake For My Dog

“I hated the idea of saying goodbye to our beloved shelter pup in a sterile exam room — she despised vet visits.”

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The end was near.

In her final weeks and months, our old dog, Daisy, had trouble with her legs, struggling painfully to stand up or lay down and occasionally getting her front feet tangled. The vet theorized that she had a tumor on her spinal column, but at her age (16 or so) surgery was too dangerous.

The focus turned to comfort care and the looming question of when.

Then Daisy — always a bit of a neat freak — started losing control of her bowels and bladder. Her hip and leg pain seemed to be worsening. Eyesight and hearing were going. It was clear that she was suffering.

I hated the idea of saying goodbye to our beloved shelter pup in a sterile exam room — she despised vet visits. I also didn’t want to leave her body with strangers, albeit kind ones. After seeing our family through 14 years of good and bad times, I felt a duty to honor Daisy by caring for her body myself.

We booked a home euthanasia appointment with a licensed vet. I started poking around the internet for information on postmortem care.

When the day came, the vet was wonderfully calm and kind. Daisy laid on a cherished blanket taken from my late father-in-law’s house. It was a beautiful day, the March sun melting a recent snowfall, birds chattering in the trees.

She passed so quietly. I’d given myself permission to let it all out, so once the vet confirmed she was gone, I held her and wailed.

Then the work began. It was hard. It was scary. It was terribly sad. But I also felt like I did right by our beautiful friend.

If you have an animal companion you’d like to honor with a wake of your own, here are a few tips I can pass along.

Learn About The Euthanasia Process

The basic order of events is basically the same, whether at home or at the vet clinic. The vet administers a sedative that puts the pet into a deep sleep. Once they’re out, another drug is injected that stops the animal’s heart. And that’s it.

It costs more to have the vet make a house call, but it was totally worth it for us. Daisy fell asleep with the taste of steak in her mouth and with my husband and me at her side. We petted her and whispered in her enormous ears the whole time. Her breathing quickened a bit after the fatal drug went in, then it slowed, then it stopped.

Talk It Over With The Family

We have two kids, ages 4 and 8, who’ve never experienced a loved one’s demise. They knew Daisy was old and would probably die soon, so we explained a couple of weeks prior that the visiting vet would speed her transition to prevent further suffering.

From there, I let them decide how — and if — they wanted to participate. My 8-year-old son preferred to stay out of it. My 4-year-old didn’t want to attend the procedure (a relief), but she helped decorate Daisy’s body with flowers afterward, and gently petted and kissed her as we sat with her that afternoon.

Not everybody wants to get this close-up to death, and that is absolutely understandable.

Get Childcare If You Can

I was fortunate my mom and sister were available to help out that day. We didn’t have to worry about what the kids were up to while we said goodbye, and I think having some extra family at home was a comfort for everyone.

If the kids will be around, consider scheduling the euthanasia appointment for later in the day — that way bedtime won’t be too far off and you can (hopefully) have some space to grieve.

It Won’t Be Gross

There’s a misconception that dead bodies are instantly grotesque, all leaking fluids and lolling tongues. Not true. The body still looks like your loved one. Fur is soft. Ears are floppy. The body stays warm for a while.

The only slightly yucky thing that happened: When my husband hoisted Daisy up to move her body, a little pee dribbled out. Nothing we hadn’t seen before.

You Have Time

After your pet passes, there’s no need to rush. Rigor mortis — the phase of death that causes tissues to stiffen —  takes two to three hours to set in. You have that time to hold your dearly departed, cry, snuggle, say a prayer, whatever you want.

Keep Ice On Hand

Ice keeps the body cool, staving off the beginnings of decomposition. We filled an old plastic baby pool with bags of ice, covered that with a tarp, then put a blanket on top for a cozier look. Daisy laid on the blanket, appearing to be in a deep slumber.

It helped that it was cold in the garage, too — warmer temps require replacing ice as it melts.

Plan For Your Needs

Once the novelty of having a dead dog in the garage wore off, our kids were back to their usual snacking requests.

I hadn’t thought much about the, uh, catering, so I was left trying to arrange meals for people between bouts of tears. Have frozen stuff ready to go, get something delivered, whatever works — just make the plan in advance so you’re not trying to create menus while in the throes of new grief.

Go Easy On Yourself

There’s no wrong way to do any of this. If the idea of an at-home dog wake is bizarre to you, that is totally fine. If some parts sound nice, but others don’t? Also fine. The key is to lock into what works for your family and go from there.

Daisy’s home wake felt like the grieving equivalent of ripping off a Band-Aid. I cried more, and harder, in those 24 hours than perhaps I ever had. But it also helped me, on some primitive level, truly accept her loss.

Taking care of her on her last journey took a little of the sting out of it all. She had a good life — and a good death.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Finding someone to handle your end-of-life, after-death affairs when you have no friends or relatives

Without friends or family, you’ll need to find support. And you may need two different kinds of help, because you could potentially have a situation where you need one type of assistance while you are alive and another after you have died.

By Ilyce Glink and Samuel J. Tamkin

Q: I was wondering if you can help me. I thought you may know of a business firm, not an attorney or health-care provider, that can act as my “end-of-life-agent.” I want to be prepared as I have no family to ask or friends young enough that I would trust. My attorney says that he can draw up trust documents, but he can’t be my “end-of-life” agent.

It seems that no attorney can (be my end-of-life agent) due to it being against their liability insurance. So, what I’m looking for is a business person who can read my end-of-life wishes and carry them out. I need someone who agrees by contract to carry out my specific written wishes. Of course, when that is needed, they will be compensated for this in my estate. Do you have any suggestions?

A: There are two parts to your question. First, you may face end-of-life decisions while you are alive, which may pertain to your health or financial matters. Second, you have decisions to make now as to what happens to your estate once you have passed on and who will carry out those wishes.

While you are alive, we can understand how your attorney would see a conflict in making health-care decisions for you or even deciding when to tell the doctors that they should no longer provide medical assistance. In this situation, your attorney would like to know that you have chosen a friend or relative to make those decisions.

We’ll start by saying that most estate attorneys would advise you to have a last will and testament, a power of attorney for health care, a power of attorney for financial matters, and a living will.

The last will and testament lets people know how you wish to distribute your money and personal property after your death. The power of attorney for health care lets a family member or friend make decisions about your health care, if you cannot, and work with your doctors to carry out your wishes regarding your health.

The power of attorney for financial matters allows someone other than you to attend to your finances, including paying bills, selling assets and taking care of your financial affairs when you are incapacitated. Finally, a living will is a document that lets the medical community know your wishes as to what medical treatments should be given to you to keep you alive and when to stop any treatment.

If you can’t find a friend or family member to help you with your health care and financial matters if you become incapacitated, your attorneys won’t want to draft those documents and also name themselves in those same documents. Family and friends are key parts of our lives, but some people either don’t have family or the kind of friends they wish to ask this of (it can be a significant ask, depending on what happens) and prefer to have a neutral party handle their affairs when they either become incapacitated or they are at the end of life but have not yet passed away.

These sorts of decisions about when to stop lifesaving medical treatment (even if you have a living will) are emotionally fraught. You want someone to be able to separate emotions from making a tough call, who will be willing and able to carry out your final wishes while you are alive: decisions about your health care, your living situation, and managing financial affairs.

Without friends or family, you’ll need to find support. And you may need two different kinds of help, because you could potentially have a situation where you need one type of assistance while you are alive and another after you have died.

While you are alive, you can still set up a living will. You can deliver a copy of that living will to your personal physician or primary care person. They, in turn, can deliver a copy of the document to a hospital if something happens and you wind up there. You don’t need to appoint anybody on a living will. You just have to make it readily available. Can your local hospitals keep it attached electronically to your file? Perhaps. What happens if you are traveling abroad and you need to go to that hospital? In that case, you might need to carry a copy in your wallet or with your passport.

If you become incapacitated for a longer period of time, you will need someone to step in and handle your financial affairs. While your attorneys can’t help you, they may be able to recommend a different attorney, accountant, financial planner or financial adviser who could assist you. Take care, because this individual (or firm) will control your money when you can’t, and you take a big risk if you don’t know who they are and haven’t thoroughly vetted them.

You should know, once you have passed away, there are companies that can help you with estate issues and assist your estate, such as estate settlement and wealth transfer advisers. For example, if you set up a trust, they can act as the successor trustee and proceed to follow your wishes relating to your estate plan after you die.

Trust companies are also set up to perform the services you’re asking for. These companies usually work with high or higher net worth people. If you fall into that category, you can call on them to help you out.

You won’t have to deal with a particular person, as the company will act as your trustee and whoever is assigned to your estate when you die would work to follow your estate plan. They can be expensive, but perhaps this sort of solution would work. We don’t make specific recommendations, but you can look for a bank or other financial institution in your area that has a trust and estate services department. You can talk to them and see if it’s right for you.

Having said that, if you don’t want to or can’t spend the kind of money that some of these companies charge, you may find an estate planning firm that can work with you in taking care of your estate and follow your wishes after you have passed.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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New ‘green’ burial option turns humans into fertiliser in just a month

Popular Youtube channel, Ask A Mortician, went behind the scenes to find out how one company is turning corpses into compost

By Emily Sleight

It’s a well-known fact that conventional burials and cremation can have high environmental costs.

‘Green burials’, which is where the body is put directly into the soil with just a shroud, could be seen as the ideal solution.

But with land at a premium in highly populated areas, green burial cemeteries aren’t always the first choice and that’s where ‘human composting’ comes in.

In her YouTube video, Caitlin Doughty (also known as Ask A Mortician) discusses the process, which is a practice many farmers have been doing with livestock for decades.

In 2015, the first donor bodies were composted in prototype studies at the department of forensic anthropology at Western Carolina University.

Now, the process is a lot more established. Caitlin’s friend, Kristina, is the founder of Recompose – a public-benefit corporation offering a natural alternative to burials. It is where Caitlin volunteers to explain what happens during composting.

In the video, Ask A Mortician places herself in a ‘vessel’ where she is covered with greenery with her favourite music playing in the background.

It is explained that families often bring clippings from their own garden, and are fascinated by the process itself, likening it to a ‘melding of science and spirituality’.

The composting ‘ritual’ involves laying wood chips and plants on top of the body with the belief that the body is ‘taking a new place in the carbon cycle.’

Next, the body is loaded into the vessels where microbes break it down in about a month.

When talking about the vessels themselves, Caitlin describes them as looking “kind of like a Japanese capsule hotel.”

She added: ”You’re actually probably pretty warm and cosy, comfortable, and with plenty of air.

“We have these microbes on us right now, but the only thing that makes them work on your body is if you’re dead.”

In a nutshell, the body is covered with wood chips and straw for 30 days to really get the microbes working, and eventually, you become soil.

Don’t worry though, if there are still a few bones after the 30 day period, they will be placed into a cremator.

The soil is then allowed to cure before it can be used in gardens, forests or conservation lands.

Of course, the soil is tested to ensure it meets the requirements, and families can take some of the soil home and donate the rest if they’d prefer.

And if you’re wondering how much an average person makes of soil, it’s around two wheelbarrows worth.

In the video, Caitlin even visits a compost heap of 28 people. The impressive mound was eventually donated to Bells Mountain conservation forest.

Washington has recently become the first US state to legalise human composting and UK funeral directors are also seeing a surge in requests for green burials and sustainable alternatives to burial and cremation.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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We Need to Talk about Mortuary Makeup

Societal beauty standards follow us to the grave.

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It’s impossible to aestheticize death, but we still try. Shortly before the pandemic reached lockdown level last year, my 101-year-old grandmother died. When my mom proposed that I help her dress the body for the viewing, I obliged despite the fact that I creep out with ease. My grandmother was such a central figure in my life and I wanted a more private opportunity to say goodbye.

The experience fulfilled that expectation, but it also taught me that the process of prepping a body for burial is a vivid reflection of our relationship with societal beauty standards—an interminable dance that continues even after we die.

When we arrived at the funeral home the day before the viewing, the staircase leading us to the room where her body was kept felt like it spanned miles. What if she suddenly reanimates? If I tugged on a limb too hard, would it detach from the rest of her body? Once we got started, my anxieties were assuaged but my curiosity piqued. I knew that mortuary makeup was a common practice, but I didn’t anticipate how thorough the grooming would be; her skin had to look supple, her cheekbones had to look lifted and her complexion had to appear even and, at minimum, rosy-adjacent, given the circumstances.

The most shocking sight, though, was seeing the funeral director stuff my grandmother’s bra. After eight children and 101 years, the jig on perky breasts had long been up. So, what was the reason?

“I don’t know how I feel about stuffing bras, but it’s definitely something that embalmers do,” says L.A.-based funeral director Amber Carvaly. “It’s very commonplace and the idea is that people will look different laying down. But they’ll obviously look different because they’re dead and they’re lying in a casket.”

In a 2018 episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Carvaly gave Kim Kardashian—who is, by many standards, an archetype of the eternal fascination with youth and beauty—a step-by-step on mortuary makeup. To elucidate the idea behind the practice to me, Carvaly compared it to the philosophy behind Kardashian’s controversial Balenciaga Met Gala look. Basically, we each have distinct signatures that we like to be known by while we’re alive and ideally, these become the attributes that we’re remembered by after we’re gone. Which means that it’s never ideal for a dead person to actually look dead.

“Kim’s image and who she is and what she looks like is so iconic that you don’t even have to see her face or an article of clothing. She can just be draped in black and you know exactly who she is. Like that’s her brand and her icon.”

In the funeral industry, this would be likened to a “memory picture”, a term Carvaly introduced me to during our chat. In essence, it refers to the lasting image of a decedent that’s ingrained in the minds of their loved ones. “It’s a memory of who they used to be,” she explains.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to liken our desire to make the dead look life-like to the ongoing obsession with looking younger, or to attribute the latter to a society-wide fear of dying. This is something that can’t be color-corrected, concealed, or glossed over.

“We are obsessed with image as society and as individuals,” Carvaly says. “But this idea is implanted while we’re alive. As women, we’re so obsessed with anti-aging and it sort of emerges from a fear of death.” Carvaly says that this even shows itself in how beauty trends evolve. “They change to keep us looking younger and if you wear a trend that’s from the past, it dates you,” she says.

We want the memory picture to capture our loved ones at their best, so the measures that we go to to bring corpses to a perceived standard are just symptoms of the widespread idea that younger is always better.

“We’re a death-denying society,” Carvaly adds. “We don’t like to talk about it, we don’t like to accept it, we don’t like to look at dead bodies because all of it just reminds us of our own mortality. We do so much of that while we’re alive, so of course it carries into death. We don’t even want to look at old ladies on screen—we only want to see people when they’re young and beautiful.”

But while this is a reflection of Western culture’s image-conscious underbelly, the process itself was therapeutic for me. My grandmother died overnight and I slept through my mom’s calls and texts to come to the hospital. Helping to dress her felt like an atonement for not being there, beckoning back to times when I would paint her nails, help to pick her church hats, or watch her apply baby powder with a glamorous, fluffy powder puff. It’s how I cared for her and how she cared for herself. “I think that from a standpoint of beauty as a ritual and beauty as a way to care for people, it’s something different. It’s grooming as a form of love instead of beautification to suit industry standards,” Carvaly tells me.

When Carvaly’s friend Maria passed away, applying makeup to her corpse was a way of honoring how she liked to be seen; while she was alive she was seldom seen without a red lip. “If someone had been like, ‘Don’t put lipstick on her!’ or, ‘She’s dead. Don’t glam her up,’ she would have haunted us,” Carvaly recalls.

Both my experience and the concept itself are multifaceted: I was comforted by the ritual, but alarmed at the extent to which it was practiced. We beautify the dead mostly with the living in mind: to filter the intensity of seeing a corpse, to create a comforting pre-funeral ritual, and to pacify the most pressing reminders of our own mortality. But our discomfort with aging and death is tampering with how we live, and that’s something that no amount of makeup can mask.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Planning your funeral doesn’t have to be scary, says the author of ‘It’s Your Funeral: Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime Before it’s Too Late’

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The pandemic has forced many to rethink and readjust their present with their future. Some have left jobs that provided steady paychecks and a predictable complacency for unknown, yet meaningful passion projects. Others are are taking more control of their destinies as they see fit. Unwilling to settle in life anymore. So why would you settle in death?

That’s the question Kathy Benjamin, author of “It’s Your Funeral! Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime — Before it’s Too Late,” asks. Amid the book’s 176 pages, Benjamin exposes readers to death in a light, humorous, and practical way, akin to a soothing bath, rather than a brisk cold shower.

The Austin-based writer’s niche is death (her last book centered on bizarre funeral traditions and practices). Having panic attacks as a teen, Benjamin said enduring them felt like she was dying. It was then that she started wrestling with the idea of death.

“I feel like I’m actually dying all the time, so maybe I should learn about the history of death and all that,” she said. “If I’m going to be so scared of it, I should learn about it because then I’d kind of have some control over it.”

It’s that control that Benjamin wants to give to readers of this book. She introduces readers to concepts and steps one should contemplate now, in order to make sure the last big gathering centered on you is as memorable as you and your loved ones wish. Poring over the book, one finds interesting final resting options such as body donation that goes beyond being a medical cadaver, “infinity burial suits” that lets one look like a ninja at burial, but also helps nourish plants as decomposition begins; and quirky clubs and businesses that allow one to make death unique (as in hiring mourners to fill out your grieving space and time, and designing your own coffin).

Kathy Benjamin knows death can be scary, but she's determined to show that planning your own funeral doesn't have to be.
Kathy Benjamin knows death can be scary, but she’s determined to show that planning your own funeral doesn’t have to be.

Now before you think this is all a bit macabre, Benjamin’s book also serves as a personal log so you can start planning your big event. Amid the pages, she offers prompts and pages where you can jot down thoughts and ideas on fashioning your own funeral. If you want to have a theme? Put it down in the book. You want to start working on your eulogy/obituary/epitaph, will, or your “final” playlist? Benjamin gives you space in her book to do so. It’s like a demise workbook where you can place your best photos to be used for the funeral and your passwords to your digital life, for your loved ones to have access to that space once you’re gone. If all the details are in the book, a loved one just has to pick it up and use it as a reference to make sure your day of mourning is one you envisioned.

As Benjamin writes: “Think about death in a manner that will motivate you to live the best, most fulfilling life possible. By preparing for death in a spiritual and physical way, you are ensuring that you will succeed right to the end.”

“Everyone’s going to die, if you’re willing to be OK with thinking about that, and in a fun way, then the book is for you,” she said.

We talked with Benjamin to learn more about the details of death and thinking “outside the coffin” for posterity’s sake. The following interview has been condensed and edited.

‘It’s Your Funeral! Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime — Before it’s Too Late’ is by Kathy Benjamin, Quirk Books, 176 pages, $14.40.
‘It’s Your Funeral! Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime — Before it’s Too Late’ is by Kathy Benjamin, Quirk Books, 176 pages, $14.40.

Q: How much time did it take you to find all this data about death? You share what was in the late Tony Curtis’ casket.

Kathy Benjamin: I have shelves of books that range from textbooks to pop culture books about death, and it’s something that a lot more people than you think are interested in so when you start doing online research you might just find a list of, here’s what people have in their coffin and then from there, you’re like: ‘OK, let’s check if this is true.’ Let’s go back and check newspaper articles and more legitimate websites and things and those details are out there. People want to know. I think of it as when you see someone post on Facebook — somebody in my family died. I know for me, and based on what people reply, the first thing is: What did they die of? We want these details around death. It’s just something people are really interested in. The information is out there and if you go looking for it, you can find it.

Q: Was the timing for the release of the book on point or a little off, given the pandemic?

KB: That was unbelievable timing, either good or bad, how you want to look at it. I ended up researching and writing during that whole early wave in the summer (2020) and into the second wave, and it was very weird. It was very weird to wake up, and the first thing I would do every morning for months was check how many people were dead and where the hot spots were, and then write … just a lot of compartmentalization. My idea was because people who were confronting death so much, maybe it would open up a lot of people’s minds who wouldn’t normally be open to reading this kind of book, they’d be like: ‘OK, I’ve faced my mortality in the past year. So actually, maybe, I should think about it.’

Q: Is there anything considered too “out there” or taboo for a funeral?

KB: I always think that funerals really are for the people who are still alive to deal with their grief, so I wouldn’t do anything that’s going to offend loved ones. I can’t think of what it might be, but if there’s a real disagreement on what is OK, then maybe take the people who are going to be crying and keep them in mind. But really, it’s your party. Plan what you want. There are so many options out there. Some people, they still think cremation isn’t acceptable. Because death is so personal, there’s always going to be people who think something is too far, even things that seem normal for your culture or for your generation.

Q: You mention some interesting mourning/funeral businesses, but many seem to be in other countries. Do we have anything cool in the U.S. as far as death goes that maybe other places don’t have?

KB: One thing we have more than anywhere in the world is body farms. We have a couple and just one or two in the entire rest of the world. The biggest in the world is at the University of Tennessee. For people who don’t know, body farms are where you can donate your body as if you would to science, but instead of doing organ transplants or whatever with it, they put you in the trunk of a car or they put you in a pond or they just lay you out and then they see what happens to you as you decompose. Law enforcement recruits come in and study you to learn how to solve crimes based on what happens to bodies that are left in different situations. I think they get about 100 bodies a year. I always tell people about body farms because if you’re into “true crime” and don’t care what happens to you and you’re not grossed out by it, then do it because it’s really cool and it’s helpful.

Q: You mention mummification and traditional Viking send offs, what about the burning of a shrouded body on a pyre? Have you heard about that? It was the way hunters were sent into the afterlife on the TV series “Supernatural.”

KB: I haven’t heard of anyone doing it in America but obviously that’s a big pop culture thing. For Hindus, that’s the way it happens in India … you go to the Ganges, and they have places specifically where you pay for the wood and they make a pyre and that’s how people go out. I doubt there’s a cemetery or a park that would allow you to do it in the U.S., but on private land, you’re pretty much allowed to do whatever. I would definitely check on regulations. You would have to get the pyre quite hot to burn the body to ash, like hotter than you think to make sure you don’t get a barbecued grandpa.

Q: In your research, have you come across anything that completely surprised you because it’s so unheard of?

KB: There’s been things like funerary cannibalism, which is where you eat loved ones after they’ve died. But once you’ve read the reasons why different tribes around the world have done it, you’re like ‘OK, I can see why that meant something, why it was meant to be emotional and beautiful.’ Things like sky burial in Tibet, they have a Buddhist monk chop up the body and lay it out for the vultures to come get. Part of it ties back to Buddhist tradition but also it’s Tibet, you can’t dig holes there in the mountains. So, there’s a logical reason for it. When you look at these things that originally seem gross or weird, once you learn the reasons behind them it all comes back in the end to trying to do something respectful for the dead, and trying to give the living that closure.

Q: What are your plans for your funeral?

KB: I definitely want to be cremated. I don’t know if I want people to necessarily come together for a funeral for me but like I have a playlist, and even before the book I had a whole document on the computer of what I wanted. I want all the people to know about the playlist and then they can kind of sit and think about how awesome I am while the sad songs play, and then there’s different places that I would want my ashes scattered.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why Some Scientists Think Consciousness Persists After Death

We should not assume that people who are near death do not know what we are saying

By News

A very significant change that happened in the last century or so has been the ability of science professionals to see what happens when people are thinking, especially under traumatic conditions.

It was not a good moment for materialist theories. Here is one finding (there are many others): Death is a process, usually, not simply an event.

Consciousness can persists after clinical death. A more accurate way of putting things might be that the brain is able to host consciousness for a short period after clinical death. Some notes on recent findings:

The short answer is, probably, yes:

Recent studies have shown that animals experience a surge in brain activity in the minutes after death. And people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness, [Sam] Parnia said. Substantial anecdotal evidence reveals that people whose hearts stopped and then restarted were able to describe accurate, verified accounts of what was going on around them, he added.

“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them,” he explained. According to Parnia, these recollections were then verified by medical and nursing staff who were present at the time and were stunned to hear that their patients, who were technically dead, could remember all those details.

Mindy Weisberger, “Are ‘Flatliners’ really conscious after death?” at LiveScience (October 4, 2017)

Death is probably, in most cases, a process rather than a single event:

Time of death is considered when a person has gone into cardiac arrest. This is the cessation of the electrical impulse that drive the heartbeat. As a result, the heart locks up. The moment the heart stops is considered time of death. But does death overtake our mind immediately afterward or does it slowly creep in?

Some scientists have studied near death experiences (NDEs) to try to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they’ve found is remarkable, a surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study out of the University of Michigan, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found they entered a hyper-alert state just before death.

Philip Perry, “After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists” at BigThink (October 24, 2017)

Despite claims, current science does not do a very good job of explaining human experience just before death:

Researchers have also explained near-death experiences via cerebral anoxia, a lack of oxygen to the brain. One researcher found air pilots who experienced unconsciousness during rapid acceleration described near-death experience-like features, such as tunnel vision. Lack of oxygen may also trigger temporal lobe seizures which causes hallucinations. These may be similar to a near-death experience.

But the most widespread explanation for near-death experiences is the dying brain hypothesis. This theory proposes that near-death experiences are hallucinations caused by activity in the brain as cells begin to die. As these occur during times of crisis, this would explain the stories survivors recount. The problem with this theory, though plausible, is that it fails to explain the full range of features that may occur during near-death experiences, such as why people have out-of-body experiences.

Neal Dagnall and Ken Drinkwater, “Are near-death experiences hallucinations? Experts explain the science behind this puzzling phenomenon” at The Conversation (December 4, 2018)

Such explanations are a classic case of adapting a materialist hypothesis to fit whatever has happened. They don’t explain, for example, terminal lucidity, where many people suddenly gain clarity about life.

Research medic Sam Parnia found, for example, that, of 2000 patients with cardiac arrest,

Some died during the process. But of those who survived, up to 40 percent had a perception of having some form of awareness during the time when they were in a state of cardiac arrest. Yet they weren’t able to specify more details.

Cathy Cassata, “We May Still Be Conscious After We Die” at Healthline (September 24, 2018) The paper requires a subscription.

So we should not assume that people who are on the way out cannot understand us. Maybe they can — and would like to hear that they are still loved and will be missed.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How ‘Big Funeral’ Made the Afterlife So Expensive

It’s time to reevaluate the cost of death care—and its environmental impact.

By Eleanor Cummins

“You can’t die these days because it’s too expensive,” Randy Hinojosa told Time last year. Hinojosa had just paid $15,000 for a funeral for his wife of 26 years, after she died of the coronavirus. Like thousands of families coping with unexpected pandemic funeral costs, he drained his savings and launched a crowdfunding campaign to recoup some of the losses. “I didn’t even want to ask anybody for money,” Hinojosa said, crying. “I had this pride that I could do this.”

The pandemic, which has killed 690,000 Americans and counting, has magnified the importance of swift, respectful disposition of the dead—and the untenable cost of doing business in the current system. In 2019, the average funeral cost $9,135, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. That included viewing and burial, but not dwindling cemetery space or big-ticket items like monuments and other grave markers. Even cremation, for decades promoted as a cheaper (and greener) alternative to burial, now averages $6,645.

These practices are not just financially devastating, they’re also environmentally calamitous. In addition to human remains, traditional burial puts an estimated 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete and 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde—a chemical used in embalming and a probable carcinogen—into the earth each year. Cremation, meanwhile, generates an estimated 534.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per person—more than the per capita emissions of Afghanistan.

These harsh end-of-life economics have contributed to a crisis of funeral poverty in the US, says Victoria J. Haneman, a professor at Creighton University School of Law in Nebraska. Funeral poverty existed long before the pandemic and, without significant reform to both the funeral industry and to national and local systems of funeral aid, many families will continue to struggle with growing credit card debt and new personal loans amidst their crushing grief.

In the worst-case scenario, people will be forced to leave their loved ones unclaimed in county custody, where sheriffs, medical examiners, social workers, chaplains, and others will cremate or bury the remains. In the US, as many as 3 percent of bodies are left unclaimed each year, a number that has reportedly risen due to economic inequality, the opioid epidemic, and the pandemic.

Though the US has the resources to guarantee everyone a proper burial, they’re not evenly distributed. “We should not be normalizing the $9,000 as the average cost of a funeral,” Haneman says. “Not only is that staggering, it’s wholly unnecessary.”

For most of American history, people died at home, where they were tended to by loved ones. Women in the community prepared the body, while men made the casket. That started to change with the Civil War, where death occurred on faraway battlefields. Enterprising morticians subsequently popularized embalming, a preservation technique that allowed families to ship bodies long distances so those who died could be buried where they had lived.

Today, death is a $20 billion industry. (That’s similar to the total revenue for the global music business in 2019, or the market for meat substitutes.) In its most corporate and cynical forms, it’s marked by largely unchecked pricing, including markups as high as 500 percent on caskets. It’s also defined by decades of resistance to innovation, even as public attitudes toward death are shifting. In 2015, for example, one funeral conglomerate estimated that for every 1 percent of its customers who chose cremation the company lost about $10 million—a “problem” some morticians attempt to solve by selling families often-unnecessary services and products, from pre-cremation embalming to pricy urns.

Where many communities were once served by small mom-and-pop funeral shops, the death-care landscape has been transformed by shareholder-driven companies. Service Corporation International is the largest funeral services provider in North America, with over 1,500 funeral homes and 500 cemeteries in its portfolio, accounting for roughly 16 percent of the overall market share. Instead of lowering prices as it has scaled, SCI prices average 47 to 72 percent higher than those of its competitors, according to a 2017 report coauthored by the Funeral Consumers Alliance. The only people who don’t seem to mind are investors, whose stock is up 151 percent over five years. Thanks to the efforts of Big Funeral, the industry holds a monopoly on the afterlife—and it’s pricing people out of dying.

But reining in these profit-driven companies has proven difficult, as their practices are often supported by local statutes. For example, two-thirds of states have onerous “ready to embalm” laws that require funeral directors to have access to an embalming room, even if they don’t want to offer the service or families don’t request it. These regulations persist despite the fact that embalming isn’t necessary in the case of cremation, which half of Americans now choose, and that green burial grounds—an increasingly popular choice among the eco-conscious—typically forbid the practice in order to prevent contamination of the soil. In New York State, the cost to maintain such facilities is passed on to consumers (in the form of higher funeral prices) to the tune of $25.8 million annually.

To date, the best efforts to curb these practices have come from the funeral consumers’ movement, spurred on by muckraker Jessica Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death, which found evidence of widespread predatory pricing and disinformation in the industry. In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commissions instituted its Funeral Rule, which requires that funeral service providers offer prospective customers accurate, itemized prices. Yet in 2020, the agency’s own undercover investigators found that roughly 19 percent of funeral homes they visited in five states failed to disclose adequate pricing information.

Part of the problem is that many people feel that the sticker price of a solid mahogany coffin or a ceramic urn reflects their love and respect for the dead. And even if they wanted to find a cheaper alternative, with so many Americans unable or unwilling to plan for their death, families are often left to organize and finance funerals under duress. It’s no wonder the majority of them will use the first funeral home they contact, without conducting a price comparison.

While business as usual remains clearly exploitative, it’s hard for many Americans to envision an alternative. But death care doesn’t have to be so commercialized, says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. “That is not a natural law.”

Today, the federal government, as well as many state and local agencies, provides some assistance to families who might otherwise struggle to bury their kin. But these funds are not always accessible, and reimbursement is typically meager. In 2020, for example, the Social Security Administration set the cap on funeral grants to $255 a person—and it issues aid only to select heirs.

That’s what made the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s decision to reimburse the families of people in the US killed by Covid-19 up to $9,000 for funeral costs so unprecedented. While FEMA has provided burial assistance in the wake of natural disasters before, the pandemic relief effort is of a different magnitude. As of September, FEMA has awarded over $1 billion to more than 165,000 people.

FEMA’s remarkable support should have been a model for federal funeral assistance, with or without disaster, for decades to come. But by doling out aid without any attempts at environmental, economic, or other reform of the funeral industry, the program effectively subsidized it. “We had this fantastic opportunity to use this moment to not only pay for death care but to also promote environmental initiatives and innovative death technology,” Haneman says. We failed.

Even so, the pandemic has encouraged many people to reconceive death care as the end point on the continuum of health care, says Philip Olson, a technology ethicist at Virginia Tech who studies death. Funeral directors are now seen as #LastResponders who pick up where doctors left off. In an ideal world, both kinds of care would be universally accessible and focused on quality, not profit.

In 2016, Olson ran for the board of directors of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. He made government-funded death care his platform, but the idea of a socialized system was one few in the organization were willing to broach. Some consumer advocates worry that universal death care will inevitably benefit the funeral industry, whose worst practices they aim to curb. (“Big warning flags go up in my head when I hear ‘subsidy,’” Slocum told me, adding, “is that charity for the family, or a subsidized profit to the funeral home?”) But Olson still believes that funeral costs could and should be covered, perhaps through a future expansion of Medicare, a federal health insurance program primarily for Americans 65 and older.

Medicare is funded by several sources, most notably the payroll taxes of those currently in the workforce. That money is used to cover hospital, skilled nursing, and hospital services for enrollees, as well as some outpatient services and prescription drugs. Olson says taxpayer dollars could be distributed to ensure minimum coverage for funeral expenses, too. If health is a human right, as the World Health Organization claims, the dignified treatment of human remains should be, too. In the end, Thanatos comes for us all.

There’s some international precedent for such a system: In Sweden, every resident is guaranteed a funeral service and burial or cremation. In 1990, the government instituted a burial tax calibrated to the area in which someone lives (and presumably dies and is buried), as well as their income level.

When a Swede dies, their family automatically receives space for storing and viewing the body, a ceremony hall free from religious symbols, a grave or equivalent in a public cemetery for 25 years, coverage for the cost of burial or cremation, and some limited transportation. Other items, such as a coffin or urn, tombstone, funeral officiant, decorations, and reception, are not included. Nonetheless, the average cost of a funeral in Sweden in 2014 was just $2,897.

Right now, the Biden administration is advancing a law that, if passed, would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. In the same way, universal death care coverage could negotiate the cost of coffin prices and other funeral services and supplies. While not everything could (or should) be covered, the essentials would be guaranteed to everyone. The government could also make it a point to incentivize green death care options, including natural burial, aquamation, human composting, and mushroom suits. In the process, Olson says it could lead to a sizable shift in power by challenging the primacy of what he calls “funeral industrialists” (funeral directors, cremationists, cemetery managers, and others) and biomedical experts, and raising up advocates of alternative approaches like home funerals, DIY caskets, and more.

“There are other ways of thinking about ourselves, not just as funeral consumers,” Olson says, “but as mourners, grievers, as members of a society in which the management of the dead is a social necessity.”

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