“I’m not afraid of dying…

But I’m not ready to give in yet”

Lisa Brassington spoke with us in October as she was receiving support from Marie Curie Hospice, Bradford. Here she talks about how the kindness of Marie Curie staff made all the difference to her wellbeing.

By Lisa Brassington

I was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2011. I’ve had years of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but I’m on the very last chemo now. After that, there are no more treatment options. The tumour has started to spread to my temporal lobe, so it’s affecting different areas of my body and I’m paralysed down one side. I now need a lot of support.

I used to go to the gym three times a week and I loved food and cooking. I love reading and history. I fostered and rescued Bassett hounds. I had a Bassett hound called Ralph who I walked daily, but I had to give him up. A fantastic rescue charity found him a beautiful home and they keep me updated on his progress. I’ll never be able to have another dog. That breaks my heart.

Before coming to Marie Curie Hospice, Bradford, I’d been stuck in my bedroom at home for over eight months. My husband and I had been looking for care that whole time and couldn’t find anywhere that could support my needs. I felt so unsafe and frightened. Eventually, we found the hospice, and now I feel so safe, cared for, and even loved.

Nothing better than a hug

The Marie Curie Hospice in Bradford is fantastic and it had such an impact on my outlook. It’s not just the unbelievable care they give, it’s their kindness as well. I’ve never experienced kindness like it here, and I’ll never forget that. The staff are always smiling, and I get hugs and lots of care and attention. There’s nothing more important to me than a hug.

Before I arrived, I hadn’t eaten for a long time, so I had no energy, but the food here is delicious and the nurses encourage me to eat. Now everybody is saying I’ve got colour in my cheeks – it’s amazing.

The nurses offered to take my bed outside

There’s a lovely bath here that I can use, and I have a beautiful view of the garden outside of my room, I can watch the squirrels and birds feeding on the bird table. The nurses even offered to take my hospice bed outside if I wanted them to. Because of my condition, I wake up and I don’t know what day it is. I’ve been FaceTiming friends and family thinking it was the evening, but it’s actually been the morning. The nurses write down on a board what day it is and who is supporting me, which is so simple but so helpful for me.

When I first arrived, I told the staff that I love dark, West Indian rum. They told me I can have some here, and so I have my little rum nightcap, which is lovely. Nothing is off limits.
— Lisa

The healthcare assistants and nurses always find time to come and charge my electrical devices, which keep me in touch with family and friends. They’re constantly busy helping people, I can hear their buzzers going off all the time calling them into different rooms, but they still find time to come and charge my things for me and spend some time with me.

A sense of achievement

The hospice has got a fantastic physiotherapist team who have helped me to use the gym. I’ve even taken four steps, which is amazing. It’s not just the sense of achievement for me, it’s the feedback the team gives. I constantly get praised and encouraged. I never realised how important encouragement was until I came here. They have given me some exercises, and I do what I can to try to get my body working.

We’re all dying… I’m one of them

I’ve had a fantastic life, I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do, I’ve been everywhere I wanted to go. I’m now doing my bucket list. I’ve jumped out of aeroplanes, I’ve gone down to the Spinnaker Tower, I just love doing something different. I’d love to go on a zip-wire, in fact I had a joke with the team here about the hoist in my room!

It was frightening when I first heard the word “hospice” because I just thought of dying people. There’s nothing wrong with dying people, we’re all dying, but it scared me to realise that I’m actually one of them. Now, I’m not afraid of dying. In fact, sometimes, I think it’s going to be a release. But, I’ve always been a fighter and I’m not ready to give in yet.

Complete Article HERE!

Why I imagined my husband’s death

— What if fiction can alter the real world?

By

In my new novel, A Book of Days, a husband is dying slowly. While I was writing it, my own husband died suddenly, with no warning. He died in his sleep, I was told. His children and I hope that is true. He was 400 miles away, and on his own when it happened. The thought of his loneliness, if he was conscious and aware of what was coming, is unbearable, so we do not think of it. Or we try not to. We do know that he was in bed and his window was wide open; before he could hear nothing more, he would have heard the sea breaking on the rocky shore just below the cottage.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the lived experience of death. I don’t mean the first-hand testimonies of people who have actually died. If Lazarus told his sisters what it was like to be dead, they did not record it. If Jesus ever described the loneliness of the tomb, his words have been forgotten. No, I mean death as experienced by the living, the survivors.

The experience of death was once far more widely shared. Two hundred years ago, around 15% of babies in Britain died before their first birthdays. “Death borders upon our birth and our cradle stands in the grave”, said a 17th-century bishop of Exeter. Childbirth was dangerous for mothers too. And back then, most people in this country died in their own beds at home, with their families watching. If they did not, if they died on Flanders Fields for instance, their deaths were still not private in the main. But now many people reach adulthood without ever seeing a corpse.

I have seen several corpses, but I did not see the dead body of my husband. For complicated reasons to do with autopsies, transport and distance, neither I nor our children saw him until he was in a sealed coffin in the back of a hearse. I put my hand on his coffin as we filed past it on our way out of the crematorium, but I wish now that I had asked for it to be unsealed. Or that we had gone to the mortuary where he was. If you don’t see that the one you loved is really dead, how can you believe it?

My main feelings when he died were disbelief and a stony sort of shock that left me dry-eyed and clear-headed. And then there were weeks and weeks of paperwork and practicalities that left no space at all to think about my unfinished novel. There was only the haunting fear that by writing a death I had brought a real one into existence. My rational self knew that was not true. Fictions are not premonitions, any more than dreams are. But still.

“There was only the haunting fear that by writing a death I had brought a real one into existence.”

Even when life returned to something close to normal, I could not write the novel. For a while, I thought about writing a memoir instead, a painfully truthful one, about my husband, my grief and anger, and how complicated mourning is. Truth seemed somehow more relevant than fiction; I kept remembering something novelist Rachel Cusk said in an interview: “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.” I made a start on the unvarnished work I had in mind and then abandoned it almost at once. I knew then that I had had more than enough of me.

If I had written and published that memoir, I would have been asking you, the reader, to sympathise with me. Even, perhaps, to identify with my lived experience of grief. Why should you want to do that? My experience is particular but not in any way unique. If, on the other hand, I could write imaginatively enough to transcend the limits of that experience, to widen it, to bring to it the resonances of other lives, other ways of seeing — well, that I felt would be worth doing. I, as the author, would be opening windows for the reader, not beckoning them to follow me into a shuttered room.

Autofiction — fictionalised autobiography that dispenses with the traditional elements of the novel such as character and plot — is arguably the prevailing literary mode of our time. It suits the general demand for self-revelation in life as well as art: in print, on screens, in public, people share the most intimate of details and bare their souls — or seem to. For years, aspiring writers of fiction have been told to “write what you know”, to stick to their own experience and their own boundaries, and by writing their own lives in thin disguise they are demonstrating their obedience to the rule. This is in many ways a good thing. Care must be taken not to trespass clumsily on territories of gender, racial identity, or sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between unacceptable cultural appropriation and creative imagination. That difference can be described as empathy.

However carefully curated, whatever balance it strikes between “truth” and “story”, auto-fiction requires ego. It says: look at me, even though what you see may actually be a mask. And it implicitly assumes a degree of mutual recognition between writer and reader. It’s a mirror, not a clear window. This can often be immensely valuable. But how, then, can a reader step outside their own personal experience, to feel as Keats felt when he first read Homer: “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”, breathless with anticipation like Cortez’s men, “silent, upon a peak in Darien”? How, indeed, unless writers can still write of lives beyond their own known and confined realities?

Great writers don’t need lived experience to convey emotion. The psychologist Steven Pinker described an experiment in which people listened to an interview with a heroin addict, who was either a real person or an actor. When the listeners were asked to take the addict’s point of view, they became more sympathetic to addicts in general, even when they knew the interviewee was acting. In other words, they did not need to believe the “addict” was sharing a lived experience in order to empathise. We can see this in William Golding’s astonishing novel, The Inheritors, which takes us into the world of the last Neanderthals and shows us how it feels to be on the wrong side of the cusp of change: disempowered, under threat and fearful. He achieved this masterpiece through an empathetic leap across millennia that owes everything to his brilliance as a writer and his understanding of unchanging human nature, but little to his own experience of life in 20th-century England.

As T.S. Eliot said: “What every poet starts from is his own emotions [but then transmutes] his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” To me, that’s a counsel of perfection, the highest of aspirations. My husband’s death caused me great grief, but when eventually I could write that grief upon the page, through voices that were those of imagined people who lived centuries ago, I hope I turned it into something shared, something that could strike chords in hearts other than my own.

Complete Article HERE!

I’d only met my neighbor a few times. When she died I took in her dog.

— As we walk the halls of the children’s hospital, I hope my neighbor is smiling, knowing how much joy her dog brings to everyone she meets

Lisa Kanarek with her dog Gaia, who she adopted after Gaia’s former owner died. Gaia is now a pet therapy dog, and the two regularly visit a children’s hospital. Gaia’s birthday is Valentine’s Day.

by Lisa Kanarek

In the early morning after Thanksgiving, I awoke to red lights blinking through the blinds. I slipped a long, puffy coat over my pajamas and rushed outside.

An ambulance idled in my 80-year-old neighbor Sandra’s driveway as paramedics rolled a gurney into her home. Although I hardly knew her, my neighbor’s last trip to the hospital would set off a ripple effect that would change my life and affect others she’d never met.

I remembered Sandra had a large dog, so I texted her friend, Gilda. She took care of the pup any time my neighbor was away, and Gilda and I had exchanged numbers once. Gilda was out of town and told me where to find the spare key to Sandra’s house.

During the three years my husband and I lived next door, I had only been inside Sandra’s home twice. The first was a few weeks after we moved in. I rang the doorbell, and Sandra, dressed in a colorful skirt and blouse, invited me in. I guessed she was in her late 70s.

After introducing myself, her dog walked up to me, sniffed my shoes, then lay on her side.

“I’m Sandra, and this is Gaia,” she said. “She loves having her stomach rubbed.”

I liked my neighbor immediately. She was direct and matter-of-fact with her conversation.

“Trash pickup is on Mondays, and introduce yourself to the security patrol so they’ll know who you are if you need them,” she said as she wrote down her phone number and the security number. She told me about neighborhood parties. “I don’t have time for those,” she said. “I have other things I’d rather do.”

The second time I saw her was a month later when I brought her a plant. She had thanked me for the gift but hadn’t invited me in.

I thought of Sandra and our last conversation as I turned the key and stepped inside her home. The caramel and white husky strolled toward me, her head down and her eyes locked on mine.

Unable to remember the dog’s name, I looked down at the silver tag on her collar. “Hi, Gaia,” I said. She dropped to the ground and rolled on her back so I could rub her white belly.

I texted Gilda to ask if the pup could stay with us until she came back to town. “Sure. Thank you!” she wrote back. During the next few days, Gilda called to tell me she was trying to find someone to watch the dog while Sandra was in the hospital. I told her not to worry; my husband and I would take care of Gaia. I walked her twice daily.

A week later, when Sandra returned home, Gilda temporarily moved into the second bedroom and became her full-time caregiver. As my neighbor’s health deteriorated, Gilda and I became friends. I asked her if I could continue my walks with the dog.

Each time I picked up Gaia, Gilda and I chatted for at least 10 minutes. During one of these conversations, she asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.

“Do you want to keep Gaia when Sandra is gone?”

“She’s not going to live with you?” I asked.

“I wish she could, but we might be moving, and the new yard is too small for her,” she said.

“We’re happy to adopt her,” I answered. “We love Gaia already.”

>Less than two weeks later, Gilda texted me: “The hospice nurse is on her way. I think it’s time.” Within an hour after I arrived at her home, my frail neighbor took her last breath. I waited in the kitchen as Gilda and her husband said their tearful goodbyes.

The hospice nurse called the funeral home, and Gilda’s husband stepped into the kitchen. He patted Gaia on the head and scratched her back. “It’s time to take her to your house,” he said.

I attached her faded orange leash to her matching collar. By the time we crossed Sandra’s driveway and stepped onto my lawn, tears dripped onto my coat. I was mourning a woman I’d only talked with twice, but I felt connected to her through her animal companion, now mine. For weeks, I watched Gaia closely, knowing she would be sad, confused and possibly disoriented moving to a new home.

A month after Sandra died, I completed training as an end-of-life doula. Gaia was calm on our daily walks, even around the small children who stopped to pet her, so she seemed to be a good match as a therapy dog.

I finished the online training with Pet Partners, passed the in-person test and then applied to volunteer at a local children’s hospital.

On our first day at the hospital, I hid my shock at seeing a young girl with a shaved head and tubes attached to her arm, a patch on her hand to hold the IV needle in place. I knew the hospital specialized in treating complex cases, but I hadn’t mentally prepared for what I would find behind each door. Gaia had a different reaction, not hesitating to pad up to the bed and let the girl scratch her behind her ears.

Now, every other week, I slip Gaia’s purple therapy dog vest over her neck, and we head across town to see patients and their families. Before leaving the hospital room, I hand the child a trading card with Gaia’s picture on the front and facts about her on the back: favorite food, activities she likes and her birthday. When I could not confirm her date of birth, I listed my neighbor’s birthday, Feb. 14.

More than eight months later, I’m no longer surprised by the young patients we see. I follow Gaia’s lead and focus on making the children smile. They rub her back and tell me about their pets. Recently, one little boy asked for her phone number, while another told his mom, “Look at her badge, Mom. She’s a doctor!”

Gaia’s life changed when she became part of our family. She interacts with the kids down the street (her fan club) during our walks, and she provides laughter and levity to sick children, all with her tail wagging. She goes with us on road trips and to outdoor festivals where she knows that people will stop to run their hands down her fluffy back or ask her for a high-five.

My life is different too. Meeting dozens of people during our visits has brought out the extrovert tendencies I lost during the pandemic. Before I knock on each patient’s door, I breathe in, then greet families with confidence, knowing the reaction my sidekick will receive. The same skills I’ve learned through being with Gaia, I use as an end-of-life doula. One of the first ways I bond with a patient or a family member is through a conversation about our dogs.

Adopting my neighbor’s dog has allowed me the opportunity to pay it forward in ways I’ve never experienced before. As we pass through the halls of the children’s hospital, I think of Sandra and hope she’s smiling, knowing how much joy Gaia brings to everyone she meets.

Complete Article HERE!

Being There for a Loved One’s Final Breaths

— Can our presence at the last breaths of a loved one help us heal?

By Elaine Soloway

My mother’s last words to us were, “Drive carefully.” She had been admitted to a Chicago hospital a few days earlier after signs of a heart attack. It was Dec. 19, 1981, just shy of her 69th birthday on January 30.

As directed by Mom, with my spouse at the wheel, we drove silently home, grateful she was in the good hands of her internist and in one of Chicago’s most prestigious medical centers. But in the middle of that same night, we were awakened by a phone call. I lay silent as my spouse picked up the receiver. I listened, then watched as he pulled a tissue out of the nearby box and handed it to me. “Your Mom died,” he said.

I had no idea her condition was that grave. I pummeled my pillow, soon damp with my tears, shattered I had not been there for her final breaths.

They are likely thinking of my eventual last breaths and are hoping to avoid the trauma and frantic flights that would get them to me in time.

That long ago scenario has resurfaced because my adult children, who live on the East Coast, are asking me to move from Chicago to Boston where I’d be closer to them and my grandchildren. I am 85 and gratefully in good health. But they are likely thinking of my eventual last breaths and are hoping to avoid the trauma and frantic flights that would get them to me in time.

I understand my children’s worries. When my mom died, I dreaded my call to my brother, who lived in Kansas City, Missouri. “Why didn’t you let me know it was so serious?” he charged. “I could’ve flown there and seen her before she died.”

My apologies tumbled with my tears. “I didn’t know it was so serious,” I said. His grief, and my guilt, affected our close relationship. It was as if I had deliberately kept silent because he was her favorite.

Gratefully, we moved on to have a loving relationship. Frequent phone calls and occasional visits to each other’s town were salve. When he became seriously ill at 83, I traveled to see him. But when he died a few days later, I was not there for his final breaths.

‘Please Don’t Let Daddy Die’

Long before my mother’s death, I missed the last breaths of my father. He was 47, a heart attack fueled by diabetes, smoking three packs of Camels a day, and obesity. It was 1958 and I was a 20-year-old student at Roosevelt University when I was called to the school’s office to take a phone call from my uncle. “Get to the hospital right away,” he said.

Hospice workers report that some people who are dying wait to be alone for their final breaths.

I remember racing down several flights of marble stairs. “Please don’t let Daddy die,” I repeated as I sought a cab. But Dad was already gone when my uncle had called. My uncle met me outside of Dad’s room. And with his arm around my shaking body, said, “I’m so sorry; he’s gone.” I missed his final breaths, but I’m certain his labored words would have included, “I love you, Princess.”

My second husband, Tommy, was in hospice at our home after suffering several years of frontal temporal degeneration (FTD) and lung cancer. Neighbors helped me move our queen-sized bed to a different corner of our bedroom and assemble a hospital bed with guardrails. Although some had urged me to move Tommy from the hospital directly to a hospice center, I refused. I wanted him to know I was with him ’round the clock, not miles away where he might feel abandoned, and I bereft.

“I’ll be downstairs,” I told him one night. “And I’ll be up to kiss you goodnight before I go to sleep.” He smiled and squeezed my hand. I had barely settled on the couch when the hospice worker appeared at the top of the stairs. “He’s gone,” she said.

I learned this pause is not unusual. Hospice workers report that some people who are dying wait to be alone for their final breaths.

Now I have far outlived both parents and a husband. I doubt that fact has mollified my children’s concern about the 984 miles that stretch long and unknown between us. I am grateful for our strong relationship. I understand that their careers and own family obligations have skimmed our in-person meetings in Chicago to just a few times a year.

Looking for Peace

But what if I did heed their request and slice those miles to a more manageable five-minute car ride away? Then, if my fatal day arrived in their own backyard, they might be able to be part of a Jewish ritual that could bring all of us peace.

“So often, the experience of a loved one dying gets crowded out by the emotional needs and agendas of family members.”

In my search for end-of-life healing, I found “The Last Breath — Enriching End of-Life Moments” published in the medical journal JAMA by Dr. Martin F. Shapiro, who is a member of the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

He writes, “In Jewish tradition, the soul leaves the body with the dying breath, and it aids the soul on its journey if those present say a prayer, ‘The Shema” (“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”) as the individual breathes their last breath.”

In his remembrance of his own mother’s death, Shapiro explains, “I certainly did not believe that our words had provided Mom with a ticket to heaven … what we did discuss, and all agreed on that it was a wonderful experience … So often, the experience of a loved one dying gets crowded out by the emotional needs and agendas of family members. Saying this prayer structured our experience in a positive way.”

I realize that even if I did move to Boston, we could emulate the scene in Chicago when despite living in the same city as my parents, or just downstairs from my husband, I missed their last breaths. But at least they would not have to endure an airplane ride with their hearts mimicking a flight’s turbulence.

Should last breaths be enough of a reason for me to move 984 miles away from my current home?

I’ll leave that to my children.

Complete Article HERE!

We are all going to die

— During my first several hours administering ashes as a hospital chaplain, I kept cringing.

Chaplain Angela Song, right, places ashes on the forehead of surgeon Michele Carpenter at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, in February 2023.

By Rachel Rim

Inside the vast, dimly lit chapel, I stand beside a stool that holds Q-tips, a number ticker, and a small jar of ash. The chapel is musty and dark, its stained-glass windows allowing little light to permeate the pews. It lacks a cross, bimah, or any other particular faith marker. This chapel is not a gathering place for a specific community but a refuge for the thousands of patients, family members, and staff who enter the Columbia University Irving Medical Center each day.

Nurses in navy scrubs begin to queue outside the entrance, and I ready a Q-tip in one hand and the jar of ash in the other. Then, as each person squats before my five-foot frame, I check their badge, make a black cross on their forehead, address them by name, and say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Most of them murmur a thank-you and leave; a few walk past me to sit silently in the pews. One or two enthusiastically tell me how glad they are that the hospital offers ashes on Ash Wednesday. The mood, however, is mainly somber, and I wonder as I administer the ashes what these colleagues of mine—nurses and doctors and social workers—are thinking as they receive a sign of death on their bodies before making their way to the dying bodies they are caring for.

Ash Wednesday is the busiest day of the year for our spiritual care department. It’s a whole-team affair: the Catholic priest attends to specific sacramental needs, the chaplains who are comfortable with the imposition of ashes each cover an assigned part of the hospital, and those who are not handle the litany of calls and referrals that make up a day at the hospital. Like a symphony, it takes everyone doing their part to play the piece.

Last year, the day after Ash Wednesday I was sitting with my chaplain cohort when I saw a New York Times article about a man who was being investigated for hate crimes after multiple incidents in which he punched Asian Americans on the subway. I found myself suddenly in tears, unable to breathe—an intensely physiological response that was unusual for me. When my supervisor, a rabbi, realized what state I was in, she promptly invited me to accompany her and another chaplain friend to visit a colleague who’d gone into labor the day before. We made our way over to the maternity ward and held the beautiful baby. At the new mother’s request, we each spoke a blessing over the infant—one Jewish blessing, one Christian blessing, and one Indigenous blessing, representing each of our traditions. As we stood in the quiet, clean room blessing this new life that had entered the world on Ash Wednesday, my body calmed and I relaxed into the safety of my friends.

The mother, also a rabbi, now says that Ash Wednesday is her favorite non-Jewish holiday. She loves the personal resonance she feels with it as her daughter’s birthday, as well as the memory of the sacred moment of mutual blessing and respect that we shared the following day.

I, too, have come to love Ash Wednesday differently after two years of working in the hospital on this day. For me, the memory of being invited to provide a blessing in my own tradition to this daughter of a rabbi feels like the embodiment of interfaith chaplaincy. It baptizes this day with a kind of hospitality, marking it not merely as a day of somber repentance and meditation on mortality but also one of generosity and grace, a day that all can participate in regardless of their faith tradition.

The first time I administered ashes at the hospital, I was shocked both by how many people—patients, staff, visitors—wanted ashes and by the genuine gratitude and peace they seemed to feel upon receiving them. It felt incongruent to me, to feel peace at a symbol of one’s mortality: Why were they so grateful to have a stranger remind them that they will one day die? I felt as though I were saying, “Hello, good doctor—receive this sign that one day you will die just as inevitably as all your patients will.” I cringed for the first several hours that I administered ashes.

Then something shifted. I went to the pediatric ward and administered ashes to my patients, the children of parents desperate for hope and healing. I saw how this ritual gave them that hope and healing, the way their eyes closed, their heads bowed in gratitude, and their shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. I remember going into the room of a patient I’d been following for months, a five-year-old girl with leukemia, and feeling both a kind of dread and a strange, unexplainable grace as I marked her and her parents’ foreheads. It meant something—it meant everything, perhaps—that I, too, wore a cross of ash on my forehead as I marked theirs. I was not pronouncing their deaths like some kind of prophet or angel of death; I was joining them, and inviting them to join me, in the knowledge of our universal mortality. In a sense, I was saying, “We are all patients here. We are all going to die. We are all called to join Christ in his death and his resurrection.” Perhaps providing ashes on this holiday was the deepest embodiment of solidarity with sick and dying people that I possessed.

After that experience, I came to see administering ashes to staff differently as well. Rather than feeling like I was dooming the work of the doctors and nurses who came to me with their heads bowed—essentially telling them that no matter how hard they tried or how advanced medical science became, they would ultimately fail—I was relieving them of a burden too great to carry, one that medical providers are too often asked to hold. They are not, in fact, in the business of saving lives—not in the sense of endlessly deferring death, curing people of the disease of mortality.

Human beings cannot be cured of our mortal diagnosis; death will come for each of us at one time or another, no matter how healthy our lifestyles and how frequent our scans and checkups. Perhaps by administering ashes to these doctors and nurses, I was helping remind them of that truth, freeing them even a little from the enormous pressure that they carry. Their jobs are not to cure but to care, not to fix but to heal, until the inevitable and universal healing of our bodies comes in the form of the death we will all one day face.

According to the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, physician and clinical services expenditures in 2021 totaled $864.6 billion. An estimated $4.3 trillion was spent on health care that year in the US, $1.3 trillion of it on hospital care. In 2017, a team of Australian health-care researchers reported that so-called futility disputes in that country—wherein patients with an extremely low or zero chance of recovery, such as those who are legally brain-dead, are kept on life-sustaining interventions in the hospital—cost $153.1 million per year.

The story behind these numbers is a complex one, and no single narrative can be extrapolated from it. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Western culture is too often a death-denying culture, one where the inevitable fact of our mortality stands in stark contrast to the billions of dollars spent each year not only on medically futile treatment but also on the many products aimed at denying death, halting the aging process, and alleviating the sting of acknowledging that we are mortal creatures. We know that we will die, but like children who cover their ears to ignore their parents’ commands, we block out the noise of our impending death with any device or entertainment we can find.

Distracting ourselves from death is not necessarily a bad thing. Human beings weren’t designed to dwell endlessly on our mortality, to read constant stories of violence and death on the news and ruminate over the inevitability that our loved ones will one day leave us. Jesus himself, even as he set his face toward Jerusalem and the violent death he knew would come, broke bread with his disciples, debated with his neighbors, and spent hours reclining after supper with friends and strangers.

Nevertheless, there is a difference between appropriate distraction and endless denial, and research has shown that such denial has enormous costs, from medical expenditures to the quality and length of one’s life (Atul Gawande makes this argument powerfully in Being Mortal). For my part, I have come to see Ash Wednesday, with its blunt liturgy and embodied rituals, as a profound antithesis, perhaps even a kind of antidote, to the particularly American denial of death. I now see the hospital setting as a uniquely appropriate stage for the drama of ashes, and its actors—the patients, families, and staff—as the people who have the most to teach us about how to live well as mortal beings, which is above all a question of how to die well.

The dramatization of death in the hospital that happens every year at the start of Lent leaves no room for escape, whether one wears a cross of ashes or shares a room with one who does, whether one is receiving a diagnosis or delivering one. We all bear witness with our bodies to the truth of our finitude, and for one day every year, perhaps we can help heal one another of our tendency to forget. There can be a grace to remembrance, after all. We remember that we are dust and that we will return to dust, and by remembering, we invite ourselves and one another to learn how to live in this fatal time between.

Complete Article HERE!

I Love the Beautiful Chaos of a Jewish Funeral

— There is something quite moving about all this grief amongst all this routine.

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It was only relatively recently that I learned that holding funerals within 24 hours was a Jewish custom, and not the general norm. I’ve been extremely lucky in having gone to quite few funerals, and almost all of these have been those of Jewish family members, so it simply didn’t occur to me that we might be doing anything unusual in having them so quickly. Without the understanding that this wasn’t standard practice, I didn’t consider it exceptional — but the impact it has on the process of mourning can be, in my opinion, a significant and unifying one.

In the Torah, we are told that “You shall bury him the same day. His body should not remain all night.” And traditionally, the urgency of the funeral is linked to the importance of returning the body to the earth and allowing the soul to return to God. As a culturally-not-religiously Jewish person, I was unaware of both the scriptural and spiritual reasoning until very recently. I would have placed the emphasis on the emotional reasoning, which argues that the immediate experience of loss, mourning and proximity to death is a deep pain to feel, and one which should not be undergone any longer than absolutely necessary. Now it seems clear to me that it’s more about custom than anything else. Either way, I have come to hold it as an immensely important, beautiful aspect of the Jewish culture around death.

In December, my great-great auntie Marjorie became quite ill and we as a family braced ourselves for an upcoming funeral. She, along with much of my family, lived in Manchester, so in the lead-up to her passing, the London sect of us were on slight tenterhooks in anticipation of journeying up on little notice. In these moments, the banal and the profound are forced to find some kind of harmony. When contemplating loss is simply too vast, logistics take on a special importance.

In some ways, the knowledge that you’re just waiting for a death to occur so that the chain of events can start to unfold can be quite tiring. Maintaining a state of urgency over an extended period of time is logistically and emotionally tricky, and having to be pragmatic in the face of something so sad can feel like an unnecessary added encumbrance. But ultimately, there is no actively good time for a funeral. No one is looking at their diary and finding the perfect date to dedicate to doing something none of us want to do. In some ways, recognizing that the funeral will be hard no matter what, and then allowing it to take precedence over all other commitments, is the best way to allow a loss the appropriate space it deserves in our lives.

When the day arrived, a large portion of it for me was taken up by travel. We woke up to cancelled trains — standard — and then huddled alongside however many other disgruntled passengers at Euston. My mum’s cousin Caroline and I ran at absolute breakneck pace through crowds of people to get seats as soon as the platform was announced. On the drive from the station to the cemetery, we passed innumerable family monuments: the prison to which my uncle was told his parents had been sent in a prank by his cousin, the sandhills where Caroline reported “practically torturing” my mum when they were little, the shop to which it was a very grown up privilege to be allowed to walk to alone. Despite most of my visits to Manchester now being for funerals, the city will always feel full of life. Our memories and our history are part of the fabric of the place, and so many of those who we’ve lost are kept alive in the stories we can’t help but keep telling.

The funeral itself was brief and beautiful. My great-great aunt was a truly incredible person whose innate kindness and protectiveness distinguished her as remarkable to everyone around her. With it all having to come together so quickly, the words people choose take on a special significance: they are candid, and emotional, and cut straight to the core.

And yet, alongside mourning and meaning exists the mundane. People keep being people, and we continue to have to get ourselves from A to B. On the journey back to the station after the funeral, I sat squashed between my uncle and my grandfather in the backseat of my great uncle’s car, and we sat for a short eternity in a gridlock outside my grandma’s primary school, entertained by stories about that time of her life. When we finally got to the station, we caught a train by the skin of our teeth. By holding funerals so quickly, we force our lives to fit into the space around them, and require them to find a way to enmesh themselves into the day to day. There is something quite moving about all this grief amongst all this routine.

Sitting on trains gives you the wonderful gift of time to think. I reflected on my privileged position, experiencing the funeral of someone so beloved as a peripheral mourner, and how this offered another insight into the magic of having a funeral within 24 hours of a death. With this custom, in the direct aftermath of losing someone the people closest to the deceased are immediately wrapped in love. Their family and friends flock to them and make sure they aren’t alone with their grief. The initial experience of living without someone involves being in a room full of people who are there to remember and celebrate them. A funeral within 24 hours catches you just as you fall into the abyss.

And whilst there are undeniable impracticalities, the system manages to account for most. For those who are unable to make it, attending a shiva in the coming days offers them another chance to support and commemorate and mourn for themselves, as well as to contribute to the elongation of the period in which those closest to the deceased are surrounded by care. Whilst the funeral comes quickly, this does not mark the end of the grieving process — rather, it’s the beginning of the talking, processing and feeling. I am grateful that, thanks to Jewish custom, that beginning starts within 24 hours of a death. It’s exactly what we need.

Complete Article HERE!

I Was Looking The Other Way When Death Surprised Me

— I didn’t see him coming.

By Christine Schoenwald

I’d heard about Pattie before I’d ever met hershe was a psychic.

My friend Lissa had done a one-woman show and had talked about her psychic. Since Lissa was the owner of a theater, soon, everyone was going to see Pattie, who wasn’t only a psychic but an empath.

I had to check out Pattie’s skills for myself and made an appointment. Pattie lived in the same town as me but on a cul de sac further up in the hills. It was remote enough that deer came into her garden and ate her flowers, but not so far that she didn’t get trick-or-treaters.

Walking into Pattie’s house as she requested, I felt strange, and I always knocked and called out when I entered. She usually had four or five cats sleeping in boxes scattered throughout her living room.

Pattie was seated at a table in a little room with a cat in her lap and a tumbler full of iced tea at her side. She was a large woman with vivid blue eyes and a warm smile.

She enjoyed her work and loved people, and she didn’t fear the spirit world as she often communicated with them.

My mother has been dying for months; I have a cat with a brain tumor and another cat who is getting up there in years. When any of them die, it won’t be a surprise. I’ll be as ready as one can be.

What I wasn’t ready for was the death of someone outside of those three.

But Death is a trickster and hates to be predictable. He refuses to operate on anyone else’s timetable and does what he pleases.

I found out as I was waiting for my mother to die that Death came along and took my friend, Pattie, to the hereafter.

When I heard from a mutual friend that Pattie was in the hospital — it didn’t sound especially serious.

She was in her seventies, had Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and had some health issues this past year, but Pattie was also the most positive person I know, and she was resilient. She’d gone into the hospital on a Thursday, and I fully expected her to be out by Monday, laughing about the experience.

After my initial consultation, I saw Pattie regularly for a few years.

I’d crack the both of us up with my opening questions, “What do you hear?”

What were the spirits telling her that I needed to know?

Besides her psychic abilities, Pattie could read people, and much of the time, it felt like she was reading me more than she was getting info from the great beyond.

I also encouraged her to use the tarot cards with me as I felt the cards gave structure to our sessions and gave the proceedings a gravitas. The tarot cards made me feel she was being guided, not making things up on the spot.

Eventually, I couldn’t rationalize paying a bunch of money to an unlicensed therapist, but we stayed friends.

We went to a couple of dinner theater productions, and out to eat (which was challenging after she had weight-loss surgery,) talked on the phone, and sent texts and cards.

She was immensely proud and supportive of my writing, and I shared my favorite stories with her. She was one of my supplemental mothers who loved me unconditionally and always remembered my birthday.

I said before that she was an upbeat person — someone who made the best out of a tough situation.

One time, Pattie fell down the escalator at Target. Rather than being embarrassed, she befriended the paramedics, asking their names, finding out their stories, and making them laugh as they loaded her onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.

I thought this time in the hospital would be another event, but it turned into a funny anecdote about how Pattie had charmed even the snottiest surgeon or caused all the nurses to fall in love with her.

“I don’t know if this is the right thing to do or say,” my friend Poppy said, “but Pattie is dead. She died in her sleep.”

Yes, Pattie died how I wanted my mother to go — peacefully and in her sleep.

Death had gotten his wires crossed, or maybe it was deliberate on his part.

Why now?

Pattie loved Christmas and would often decorate her house to maximum Christmasness. I sent her a Christmas card last week and wished her a happy and healthy New Year.

I’m not ready to mourn her — my grief has already been parceled out. I’m at full capacity, and yet, I do grieve because not grieving is the same as not being grateful for knowing her and having someone as kind and good as she was in my life.

How often have Lissa, Poppy, and I discussed arranging a group lunch date with Pattie? We always put it off for when we weren’t so busy or for other silly reasons.

We thought there’d be plenty of time to get together — we didn’t know Death was lurking nearby.

Pattie may be gone, but I’m not ready to say goodbye.

Complete Article HERE!