Tag: Final Farewell

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Meet Patricia, Aunt Esther’s Amazon Alter Ego

It was only after her death that I really got to know her — through hundreds of online product reviews.

By

esther-ill2

When my Aunt Esther died in the summer of 2011, we knew we’d have to deal with her apartment—specifically, the floor-to-ceiling Amazon.com boxes that filled every room.

The job of cleaning fell to my brother, who was living nearby at the time. He spent months repackaging unused items, all the while reporting back on the tragedy of all this stuff. Why did she need hundreds of pocket calculators? Or dozens of books on beating the odds at the casino?

Why, indeed?

The first Amazon review I encountered by Patricia “A Reader” was in 2007. It was an earnest, paragraphs-long piece about an old picture book. I was reading the review because that very book had just been gifted to my daughters by Aunt Esther. It took a few reads before I realized that Patricia and Aunt Esther were one and the same, but I kept my discovery to myself, filing it away as just one more strange fact about her.

It was only after her death that it became clear my quirky, shut-in aunt had been writing long-form Amazon reviews of everything from books, to pocket calculators, to ice cube trays, to boxes of sugar. And I became her most dedicated reader.

Here is the opening to a 2007 review by Patricia for a one-handed can opener—an item that has sadly long since been off the market:

I presently live in a “no-pets” building – which has its advantages and disadvantages. The “One Touch Can Opener” –- though obviously an inanimate object – can easily be a “pet-substitute”, as well as an excellent can opener! For, as it zips around your can, opening it, it makes a nice little “wiggle motion”….almost like a fish in the water!

The title of this review is:

“A N D…..I T….O P E N S…..C A N S,…..T O O !,”

Certain obsessions become clear when scanning through the more than 700 reviews posted by Patricia between 2004 and 2011. Among them: Alien Nation (the TV show, “NOT the film”); coasters and mugs featuring the British royal family; books on beating roulette in the casinos by use of pocket calculators; pocket calculators; canned fish; and candy bars. It also seems Patricia was either unable or unwilling to purchase many of the items she was reviewing, as evidenced by this late-career review of the film “Lesbian Vampires”:

This movie is full of blood, gore, and lust. (Not that I have seen it…I’ve read other people’s reviews). It has only one redeeming value, in that, (by and large), it must usually keep its viewers inside either their homes or their friends homes….and OFF THE STREETS! …I have a very strong suspicion that it insults both REAL lesbians, and, (IF they exist), real vampires as well.

But Patricia’s crowning moment as a reviewer was when she stumbled across a novelty item in the form of a can of Unicorn Meat. I can only imagine she came to the item while searching Amazon for other actual canned meats. Patricia is both outraged and disgusted by this product, and does not hold back, giving it two stars out of five:

Now, I am definitely NOT a vegetarian. Yes, I am a proud and happy omnivore, (eating non-meat products as well as meat), and even eat……VEAL!

However, I draw the line at Unicorn meat! These rare and beautiful creatures, if they indeed do exist, should NOT be killed and /or eaten! At least, not till we have a good, authenticated herd of 1,000 or so unicorns around! And if this is only a toy, it is still teaching children, (and adults), a very bad lesson.

There is considerable debate in the three pages of comments on this particular review as to whether Patricia is writing a “spoof” review. Patricia baffles her detractors, and in the end she pulls rank on them all.

“you can’t write over 600 reviews for Amazon, and over three thousand musical pieces — all, alas, presently unpublished — without being sensitive”

The tone of Patricia’s reviews is always hopeful, and thoughtful. For me, this is a window into Aunt Esther’s world, one that I was rarely privy to in our brief personal interactions. In her first review, Patricia discusses her sometimes fraught relationship with her more worldly sister, my mother, by celebrating their shared love for a book on class and status. Elsewhere, she discusses her childhood, her loneliness, and her desire to be useful, to be needed.

Yes, she was searching the endless options available on Amazon.com for the perfect pocket calculator. But I think she was searching also for the sake of sharing her discoveries with her adoring readers, even if that group was only just me.

In the months after she died, I read and reread each of Patricia’s reviews. Only then was I able to do the thing I wished I had known to do when she was alive. “Was this review helpful to you?” Amazon asked me at the end. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Complete Article HERE!

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Who chooses not to have a funeral?

By Justin Parkinson

Who chooses not to have a funeral

The writer Anita Brookner, who has died at the age of 87, requested that no funeral be held after her death. How common is this and what does it mean for friends and family?

When someone dies, the UK government’s advice is given in three simple steps. First, get a death certificate from a GP or hospital doctor. Second, register the death. Third, arrange the funeral.

But the writer Anita Brookner, best known for her 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac, requested that step three didn’t happen in her case, her death notice in the Times saying: “At Anita’s request there will be no funeral.”

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In January, the musician David Bowie didn’t have a funeral either – his body was cremated in New York without any of his friends or family present.

This type of ending, where a coffin goes straight from the place of death to the cremator, where it is burned, is known as a “direct cremation”.

Catherine Powell, customer experience director at Pure Cremation, which offers services for England and Wales, estimates that 2,000 people a year are now making this choice.

The most common reason, she adds, is to enable a more “celebratory” event, such as a summer beach party or function at a golf club, to take place weeks or months later. However, some choose it for financial reasons – a direct cremation, including transport and coffin, costs just over £1,000, whereas an average funeral costs £3,600, according to research by Bath University’s Institute for Policy Research.

A direct cremation involves a company moving the body from a hospital, hospice or home to the crematorium. As with a conventional funeral, the coffin travels along the aisle of the chapel to the cremator, but no ceremony takes place.

davidbowie

However, families and friends can come to watch the coffin’s procession. They can touch it and request music to be played. One woman who attended alone “sang her heart out”, says Powell, while the procession of one man’s body was accompanied by his two daughters performing “air guitar”. But there is no eulogy or other ceremonial aspect.

Some Christians have used the direct cremation service, in one case with friends of the deceased reciting scripture as the coffin passed through the crematorium. A religious memorial service took place months later.

UK funerals, in which mourners traditionally have worn black, have become less conventional. In some cases there is now a party theme, with attendees dressing up as, among other things, clowns, Vikings and Dr Who characters. Some might regard this as flippant behaviour, but supporters say they involve thoughtful, personalised ceremony – a tribute and a send-off.

The US-based website What’s Your Grief offers “guilt-free alternatives” to funerals. These include erecting a “shrine” – a collection of photographs and mementos – in the home, holding birthday or anniversary memorials, planting a tree and setting up a memorial book. Of course, all of these can, and often do, happen if the deceased has a funeral too.

“What we offer isn’t a cheap funeral – it’s a simple cremation,” says Powell. “That’s not right for everybody, but it allows the later remembrance to be more personalised and planned. Often there’s no time for some relatives and friends to get to funerals, so it gives them a chance to attend a memorial when one takes place at a better time. It offers more flexibility.

“The body is the part of the funeral process that people find most difficult to deal with. This takes away that worry for people.”

A central question is whether seeing the body (in an open casket) or at least having it in the same room as the mourners is important. In recent years it’s become more common to refer to a corpse as “just a shell”, wrote William Hoy, clinical professor of medical humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but he questioned how widely this is actually believed.

He cited the concept of “liminality”, described by the early-20th Century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep – that the immediate period following physical death is a “threshold” in which people aren’t sure whether to describe them as dead or alive.

“The bereaved need support in two months, to be sure,” Hoy wrote, “but they most certainly need the support of personally meaningful ceremonies in the early days after death.”

Who chooses not to have a funeral2

There are no centrally held figures on funeral – or non-funeral – types in the UK, but the National Association of Funeral Directors estimates that direct cremations and the rarer burials without ceremonies follow less than 3% of the 480,000 or so annual deaths.

“This is largely because, despite high-profile examples such Anita Brookner and David Bowie, as a society we generally view the act of a committing a body to the ground or to the flames as a central part of the funeral service,” a spokeswoman says.

She acknowledges that those who opt out of funerals usually do so for personal rather than financial reasons. “While a funeral can be extremely distressing,” she says, “it can also be an important part of the grieving process for those left behind and so providing an option to allow people to come together in another way might be an important consideration in the planning process. ”

Brookner, who nursed her own mother until her death in 1969, said she had read the Bible as a child but had decided there would be “a lot of questions and no answers”. She described herself as a “pagan” and supported the use of euthanasia.

The author, who taught at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and was the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University before becoming an author, never married or had children.

It’s not been revealed whether she planned for her friends and family, and many thousands of fans, to hold a celebration of her life at a later date.

Complete Article HERE!

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A Physical Place to Mourn a Virtual Friendship

Our memories took place over social media and business travel. So it was complicated when he died, but my daily routine didn’t change.

By

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The thought struck me as I hopped in a cab to LaGuardia: I have a long layover at ORD; I should call Adam and meet up for coffee.

This was a common thought in our friendship, which began on Twitter and was sustained by emails, meandering phone calls, and spontaneous IRL meet ups whenever one of us found ourselves in the other’s city. But this time was different: Adam died two weeks ago. The realization smacked me harder than the February wind, and I found myself struggling to breathe in the back of the taxi.

It is always crushing to lose a friend. Even more so when it is sudden and completely unexpected. How does a completely healthy man in his 20s just not wake up one morning?

But what do you do when the familiar haunts of your friendship are not shared neighborhoods or favorite coffee shops, but social media platforms and overlapping business travel? When time with Adam is short hand for Medium posts and ORD.

Adam first found me on Twitter four years ago. He was a consultant at BCG and I had recently left the company to found my own tech startup. He followed me, tweeted hi, and then wrote a blog post with a huge shout out for my startup. So when he came to New York City later that month and asked to grab coffee, of course I said yes. We talked for more than two hours. The next day I got a package from Amazon for giving him my time, Adam sent me a copy of, a book considered by many founders to be the startup bible. I called him immediately and told him it was the first time in the dozens of the coffee chats I had done that I got more out of the conversation than I gave. (I neglected to tell him I already had two copies of the book.)

Adam gave to everyone in his life. So it was always a pleasure when I could give in return. Whether offering career advice on leaving BCG to move into venture capital, providing feedback on an early draft of a blog post, or making introductions to people I thought he’d love, it always felt like a gift rather than a favor.

We had a few mutual friends, but mostly our relationship was online. So when Adam died suddenly and I couldn’t make it to Chicago for the funeral I found myself at a loss for how to mourn. Technically nothing had changed in my day-to-day life.

On Twitter, I fell down the Internet rabbit hole of seeing of Adam. I liked, retweeted and engaged with complete strangers who were part of his life. It was like attending a 21 century Twitter shiva with casserole in hand, listening as strangers shared stories from college or summer camp.

I realized that in four years of friendship we never took a picture together. I yearned to see his face. His Facebook photo albums did not disappoint, though I noted with some sadness that he had been in NYC just three weeks prior for a wedding, while I’d been at a conference in Charleston. I recalled promises we’d made to meet up next time.

So on this Chicago layover I decided we should have our usual coffee chat, updated to our new circumstances: I’d swing by his grave with some coffee (for me) and flowers (for him).<

I was surprised to find the cemetery was close to O’Hare both because it was incredibly convenient for me but also because I suspect his permanent location near a major airport hub would have delighted him. Upon landing I bought roses from the kiosk at baggage claim and a latte from the airport Starbucks. My driver was annoyed the destination was so close, but I promised him return fare and a generous tip.

When I arrived, it was 4:32 and the cemetery’s gates had been locked at 4:30. Undeterred, I convinced the cabbie to drive around the perimeter until we found an opening in the fence that I could hop over with flowers, coffee, and a cast on one arm. I had to sweet talk a guard who flagged me down. He gave me ten minutes before I had to scram.

By the time I located Adam’s freshly dug grave I was flat out laughing. I’d spilled coffee all over myself and the shenanigans required in order to see him seemed perfectly apropos. The sun was setting quickly.

I told him how I ended up with a cast on one arm and that I was bummed he couldn’t be on my new podcast. I told him about my mission to get computer science into middle school science classrooms and how I was elated to make Gold status on United, which would keep me flying through Chicago for another year.

And then our time was up.

I left him the flowers and promised a longer coffee chat next time I flew through ORD. Heading back to O’Hare I realized my sixth favorite airport for layovers had become a place I looked forward to visiting providing a physical space to honor my online friendship.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Long Walk Away From My Son’s Grave

BY

The Long Walk Away

The hardest steps I ever took happened 17 years ago, on a hot Thursday afternoon in early September, as I walked away from my son’s grave for the first time. The cemetery smelled of juniper and baked dirt, and as my husband Jason and I stood arm-in-arm, readying ourselves to go, I felt the heat rise up from our ankles. I remember how my body slowly lurched forward as we steered each other toward the car while the hot sun filled the high desert cemetery with light. The wind, an almost constant presence out there, was still as I made my way along, feet dodging big clumps of cheatgrass along the way.

Just two days earlier, we’d sat huddled together at the mortuary, “making arrangements” as they called it, which really meant having to tell someone else about how our lives seemingly and without warning came to a halt as Dylan’s heart stopped beating in utero, a week past his due date. He was stillborn. We’d walked out of the hospital carrying a small purple memory box rather than our 10-pound son.

The day we buried Dylan, there were reminders all around me of how the forces of nature could alter everything. Close to the cemetery, outside our then-home of Bend, Oregon, the elevated peaks of Three Sisters weren’t the gentle fairy tale their name suggested, but the result of plates that had shifted deep in the earth, during a process called subduction. Layers of crust had crashed into each other in a fiery show, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, creating the widest and longest fault lines in the earth.

Subduction zones are places where great trauma lies. And here I was, all these years after the mountains formed, standing in their shadows in the middle of my own destruction. Enveloped in grief. Loss all around me.

***

Dylan’s in every step I take as I walk away from his grave. He’s all I can think about as I recall the sound that came out of me when I held him for the first time, “Oh!” His still warm body is wrapped in a white cotton blanket and he is wearing a little white onesie with colorful baby-sized hand prints across it. At first glance, his face looks reddish, and I can see that it’s turning blue, but I am not seeing what he is right now. My eyes are soaking up what he should have been. I can see the slight curve of his nose and the shock of dark hair on his head. His eyes are closed, but I know the sky-blue they would otherwise be. He feels light in my arms as I hold him close against my own skin, and as I study him, I am quiet for a while. He’s brand new and so familiar at the same time.

Perhaps there are still other people in the room, or maybe not. Everything and everyone else recedes and all I see is the top of his head and all I hear are words that come pouring out of some deep recess: “I love you so very much. All the way to the moon and back and around the world three hundred and sixty seven times.”

“He’s brand new and so familiar at the same time.”

Some words I say out loud, and some words I don’t need to give voice to. I know that he hears them. It is an ancient wisdom. I tell him about his family and about his sister. I tell him about his room and our cats. I tell him that we all love him. All this time, I am holding my son for the only time we will be together on this big blue planet. I know that this is something I will never get back. I know I have to remember this fiercely. It will all be over far too soon.

Later, when I can reflect on the funeral, I remember our family and friends dropping what they’re doing to stand with us. I remember our daughter sitting on the ground with friends, and their three little heads bowed together while playing with dolls. I remember visually gathering some of their innocence, and it feeling like something close to hope.

As we drive along the dirt road that leads out of the cemetery, I slump down in the seat. By the time we reach the fence, as it will happen every single time, perhaps for the rest of my life, my tears water the desert air. Even as the miles pass and we make our way back to Bend, toward our families and the small gathering at his grandparents’ house, inside my head, I stay in the cemetary where my son is buried, my heart turned inside out.

***

After Dylan’s funeral, we walked back to our apartment and into a life that the three of us no longer fit into. For more than a year, we did our best to go through the motions—we worked, we took short family vacations to the coast and southern Oregon, and we tried to dodge the grief that followed us. Then one day, our 4-year-old daughter asked, “Mom, we used to be so happy, huh?” I nodded. “And then Dylan died and now we’re all so sad.” Six words leapt at me. “When will we be happy again?”

Up until her brother’s death, our lives had been full of quiet walks down a gravel-filled road on the outskirts of Sunriver, where we scouted ospreys, baby hawks, and porcupines. “Look,” I’d say while pointing out some amazing new discovery as we wandered the edge of the Deschutes River. We lived in a sweet log cabin that Jason’s Aunt Jennifer built with her own hands. At night there was a gathering of stars above us as the clearest moon lit up the sky. It was by all accounts an idyllic life and for her, it was a gentle childhood surrounded by a forest of towering but friendly ponderosas and jack pines.

Now I felt like we’d all been catapulted headfirst into the kind of neighborhood you didn’t want to be in after dark. We’d never been here before, didn’t know where we were going, and from what I could see, there weren’t any road maps. Clearly we’d lost our bearings. How could we go from such a well-crafted “before” to such an unimaginable “after”?

“How could we go from such a well-crafted ‘before’ to such an unimaginable ‘after’?”

That fall, my daughter could have entered pre-school, but the thought of sending her away, even just for a few hours, was inconceivable to me. She was my reason for getting up and facing each day. When I wanted to hole up and stay home, she would cajole me to take her to the park so she could swing higher and higher. She pointed to birds and flowers around our neighborhood and made me see beauty again. “Look at that!” she would say. And on the days when I could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning, she would be there. “I love you,” she would remind me. All those lessons I had poured into her, came right back to me when I needed them most.

And all the time, those six words pulled me along, inspiring me to keep trying to find something that resembled happiness in this new form. We moved back to southern Oregon and eventually made our way back to Ashland, where bright red flags lined Main Street and the lush foothills around us offered a sense of peace. I didn’t know it back then, but we were charting our own map, however imperfect. We threw ourselves into volunteer work, discovering in the process that fighting for the rights of low-income people—for better access to health care, economic justice, and independent media that tells the stories behind the issues—felt especially fortifying.  We rooted ourselves in southern Oregon until it felt like home. Healing crept up on us, not all at once, but in tiny flashes of kindness. Two more daughters were born and grew.

Above us, the moon kept rising and lighting up the darkness. Seventeen years passed.

***

Here’s the thing that nobody else will tell you about grief. Sometimes, however uncomfortable it is, you just have to sit with sadness for awhile. Sorrow waxes and wanes. You can ground yourself in simple things while time drags along; I recommend the taste of a fresh, ripe peach, listening to the sounds that a hummingbird’s wings make when they visit the feeders, and love notes penned to a small daughter, perhaps added into a brown paper lunch bag with a funny little drawing on one side.

“Sometimes, however uncomfortable it is, you just have to sit with sadness for awhile.”

The sorrow that most of us want to flee helps spit-shine the lens, until we see things more clearly, feel things more deeply. And perhaps, in its wake, grief may even beget a baffling richness.

Complete Article HERE!

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For loved ones, scattering of ashes becomes a healing journey

By BOB TEDESCHI

Scatter_ashes

On a January afternoon in 2013 when an oncologist first raised the possibility of Evan Scofield’s death, his mother Susan Scofield half-jokingly asked what she should do with his body. He was 25 at the time.

“Not my body, my ashes,” he told her. “Scatter me.”

He died six months later at age 26, and over the past three years his mother has honored that wish, enlisting a group of his closest survivors to scatter his ashes, if not to the four corners of the earth, something close to it.

They were also asked to write about the experience, and their tributes are collected on a website, ScatterEvan.com. It’s a testament to his life, of course, but it testifies, in particular, to a remarkable posthumous gift he arranged for his loved ones.

“I told him what I thought I’d do with all of his ashes and he said ‘No, not that,’” Scofield recalled during a recent phone call. “He said ‘You go to Scotland,’ because we’d talked a lot about hitting the Scotch distilleries together. With everybody else, his attitude was that they would know where to go.”

They did.

Evan’s ashes have found their way to the Ganga River, a rain-soaked garden in Kyoto, the Gulf of Alaska, a fjord in Iceland, and a lake on New Zealand’s south island.

Less exotic spots have also been quietly consecrated: a burger joint in LA, a Weezer cruise, the American Museum of Natural History.

“He was a very unusual person,” as his mom put it.

“He kept saying every year from age 7 on that we should go to Thermopylae for vacation. We said stop it; we’re not going to Thermopylae,” she said. “He loved anything to do with the ocean, and Vikings, and ancient history. Epic literature was his thing.”

He also had a thing for narwhals, so his friend Marc Seedorf saw to it that some of him ended up in Iceland in November 2014. Seedorf was joined by Evan’s close friend Alexander Maxwell and Evan’s partner of seven years, Ursula Strauss, who was a unifying force in the project.

Seedorf’s description of the experience ended with this passage:

“It was the most beautiful landscape I had ever witnessed. A house sat on the hillside with no view of another building in sight. We spent all day hiking the surrounding hills, learning, drinking fresh glacial water. After leaving one of Evan’s Buddhas on a window sill in the house, we found a spot on the shore for the scatter. I poured the ashes of my best friend in my hand and let him go into the water. All that I wanted when we were exploring Iceland was for Evan to be there to tell us about the Vikings that had once traveled those seas. To watch him climb some rocks he probably shouldn’t be climbing and somehow manage to come away unharmed. To sing us songs and translate the story of the northern lights at night. I feel very overwhelmed as I write this. With sadness and nostalgia. With anger. But I will be forever grateful that even after he was gone, Evan still made sure I was part of his adventure.”

There is danger, of course, in making too much of one community’s approach to memorializing a loved one. And Scofield does not for a moment suggest that this group’s decision is somehow prescriptive for others. Few would have the means to raise $45,000 in donations for the project, as they did, for instance.

And yet.

n ways, the “Scatter Evan” project embodies a sentiment that appears to be gathering momentum in the broader popular culture, outside the context of death. For the past decade or so, psychologists and philosophers have promoted the wisdom of buying experiences, not things, given the often deeper and longer-lasting emotional impact that experiences can offer.

Rather than leaving behind a monument or objects that might offer solace to survivors, ashes have become a conduit for a more experience-based connection to those who have died.

None of these things necessarily change the trajectory of a survivor’s mourning, said Holly G. Prigerson, who teaches and researches grief and end-of-life care, among other things, at the Weill Cornell Medical College.

“People always ask about burial rituals and whether they’re therapeutic and promote bereavement adjustment or not,” she said. “Sometimes, as may be the case here, how surviving loved ones memorialize the deceased is more an indicator of their adjustment than a promoter of it.”

Scofield said the project “gave us another focus and another form of communion with a group of people. Even for those who just donated money, it gave them an opportunity to feel like they did something, so they felt like they weren’t just completely powerless.”

The official final scatter will happen this summer, at the family’s summer gathering spot in Cape Hatteras. They will build a pitfire on the beach and throw in the rest of his ashes, his urn, and a Buddha statue Evan had been carving. He asked her to burn it, just as he asked her to let go of any personal belongings that might become a shrine, as he put it.

An unofficial last scatter will follow at a later date. “We’re holding a little bit left,” Scofield said. “We’re going to Thermopylae.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Save Money…By Donating Your Body to Medical Science

by Davis Grey

morgue cadaver

Okay, we know. It’s not the standard thing you think about with end of life planning. But hear us out. The average cost of a funeral these days is coming in at $10,000. Sure, you can whittle that cost down. Or you can go with a cremationfor around $2,000-$3,000. But it’s still is a lot of money to gather up. This is where donating your body to medical science comes in.

If you really want to go the frugal funeral route, start considering donation. It may sound unorthodox but it’s a vital step in medical education and save your family a lot of money.  Here are some general Q&A’s that come along with body donation.

What will your body be used for?

Budding doctors and dentists have to learn anatomy and physiology. Cadavers are a critical part of their education, allowing them to understand things like organ systems and musculoskeletal relationships. If it weren’t for body donation, the first bodies these students could work on would be live patients, which is a little scary.

Researchers also need human tissue to further medical science and develop new procedures or medications to treat debilitating illnesses.

What costs are covered or not covered when donating your body to medical science?

As you can imagine, the body will have to go to the research organization. Normally families have to pay for transportation to funeral homes or to cemeteries. In the case of body donation the medical institution will cover body transportation fees.

If you want to have a memorial service for friends or family, or a burial service of the cremains, you will have to pay for that. Other than that, there are no fees that you’ll have to deal with.

Are any bodies not accepted for donation?

Body donation is usually “whole body” donation, which means the research facility needs the body intact. Bodies that have been autopsied, dissected, embalmed or in an advanced stages of decomposition will not be accepted. You can also expect that if the individual died from a contagious disease like tuberculosis or hepatitis the body would be rejected.

Some institutions will accept standalone eye donations so check with your local institution if that’s something that would be of interest.

What happens to the body after the research is done?

After 1-2 years remains are cremated. The cremated remains (e.g. cremains) will either be buried at the organization’s expense or returned to the family. It’s common for medical students to hold a memorial ceremony for the cadavers before they are cremated.

How do I talk to someone about body donation?

If you want to make arrangements for donating your body to medical science, or talk to someone about the process, contact the closest university-affiliated medical school in your area. If you’re not sure which that is, check out this list from the University of Florida.

There are also private organizations that accept whole body organizations, which include Science Care andMedCure.

Complete Article HERE!

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Funeral Flower Terminology

File under:  Funeral Fun Facts

Funeral Flower Terminology

Sending sympathy flowers to a family in mourning is a great way to show your support and contribute to the funeral arrangements. However, it can be difficult to know what kind of funeral flowers to send or what each type of bouquet entails.

This quick guide to funeral flower terms and options should help give you a clearer understanding of what kind of choices are out there—and what funeral flower etiquette dictates you should do.

  • Arrangement: The arrangement is what shape and style the funeral flowers will be delivered in. Some of the options include basket arrangements, vase arrangements, wreath arrangements, cross arrangements, and pedestal arrangements, just to name a few.
  • Blooming Plant: If you want to send something that will last longer than cut flowers, a blooming plant is a good choice. These potted plants come with a bright floral bloom.
  • Casket Blanket: This “blanket” of flowers is draped over the casket to provide a visually stunning effect.
  • Casket Scarf: Instead of an entire blanket, some families choose to decorate a casket with a smaller scarf of flowers that can be artfully arranged.
  • Easel: If a wreath or cross arrangement of funeral flowers will be on display, you may need a frame to hold it up and provide a visual centerpiece. These can be rented or provided by most funeral homes.
  • Filler: Most flower arrangements are made up of several large and beautiful flowers, surrounded by what is known as “filler.” Ferns, fronds, baby’s breath, and other less expensive items help to make the arrangement look nice and full without making it too costly.
  • Flower Bearer: As the name suggests, this individual is similar to ring bearer/flower girl in a wedding, and walks before or after the casket carrying flower tributes.
  • Flower Car: A special vehicle may be needed to transport the flowers to the cemetery or funeral home for a secondary service.
  • Grave Blanket: This display can be made of flowers, ribbons, greens, and other floral fillers to cover a newly laid grave. It is meant to be temporary.
  • In Lieu of Donation: Some families would prefer not to receive funeral flowers, and ask instead that you make a donation to a charity or other organization instead.
  • Potted Plant: Not all funeral flowers have to be floral in design. Many families prefer the lush greenery of potted plants, which can be blooming or made up of ferns and other non-floral designs.
  • Spray: The most common type of funeral flower, a casket spray is an arrangement of florals and leafy greens that is designed to be displayed on the top of a closed casket.

For a more detailed list of what types of funeral flowers are available and what is appropriate to send to the family, you may want to contact a florist directly. Most of them have considerable experience working with funeral displays and will be able to direct you toward the best options for your relationship to the family and your budget.

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