March 2016 – Page 3 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

March 19, 2016March 19, 2016

‘I’m 16. Five months ago, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer’

Now I measure time in distinct chunks, focusing on events – a holiday or a party. Although it has been an intense few months, I’ve tried not to dwell on it

By Max Edwards

Five months ago, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer aged 16. It was rather as I’d pictured GCSE results day to be: a lot of stress waiting for potentially awful results, although, as it happened, GCSE results day was a pleasant surprise. But, like many whose grades came as a disappointment, I got over it soon enough. I think it’s surprisingly easy to adapt to this kind of news. After all, while I’m not going to deny its personal significance, it doesn’t really change anything important.

In the past, I have imagined terminal illness as the short and depressing period before a person’s premature death, but it somehow doesn’t feel nearly as dramatic or upsetting. I don’t feel as though normal life has ceased, or that my perception of it has changed drastically. In fact, if it weren’t for my loss of mobility following an operation, my life would have probably settled back to normal long before now. The assumed tide of unimaginable suffering that rests hand in hand with these kinds of situations is rather less dramatic in reality.

Being told you are going to die is a shock, but I was largely over it in a week, and as for breaking the news to friends and family around me, the guesswork on my part of trying to assess the other person’s emotional fragility, their guesswork at trying to assess mine, and the background danger – perhaps felt by both of us – that your partner in conversation is about to break down in tears, made the experience not so much sad as really quite awkward.

This isn’t to say that it hasn’t been an intense few months, but I can’t say that this experience has truly changed me as a person. People have told me how well I’m coping and how they couldn’t have done the same in this situation, as though I’ve faced an unimaginably horrendous set of circumstances and managed to do the impossible (remain positive), but I don’t see it that way.

While I understand why it may feel like that to those looking in from the outside, dying of cancer, in my experience, has been a succession of hospital visits, a lot of pills, and one or two pieces of bad news. But after that, there is an inevitable return to the way you were previously living. Pretty soon I came to realise that it doesn’t make any difference if you’ll be dead in 10 years or two months; you still get up, have a shower and make a cup of tea.

OK, so there are drawbacks – in my case, largely a lack of movement. After the operation on my spine, I was all but paralysed in my dominant hand, movement was compromised in the other and I could barely move my legs, all of which meant I could no longer write, walk, or play the guitar and clarinet. These limitations didn’t seem to matter when I was still in hospital, but as I left bed eight, ward 27 and returned home, I was confronted by all I could no longer do. At first, when the seriousness of my illness was still a new and shocking discovery, the issue of not being able to walk to the toilet seemed dwarfed by this drama, and it was only later that these kinds of problems started to irk me.

Nonetheless, I’ve found that these problems start to sort themselves after a while. For example, I was at first stretchered around the hospital. As my mobility improved, I spent more time in a wheelchair, which at least gave me the luxury of seeing where I was going. Currently, I walk with a stick, which of course resolves many difficulties, and I can now eat at a restaurant without having to sit half a mile from the table because the wheelchair won’t fit underneath.

Where there hasn’t been a significant improvement, such as in my right hand, I’ve tried to make up for the problem. Unable to play any instruments that require two hands, I’ve begun learning the blues harmonica (which only requires one – at least it does the way I play it) and, while practising writing left-handed, I now type on a touchscreen phone, this being how I continued to write my weekly blog and my recently published book. In addition to this, I’ve continued to write songs and music by composing on the computer. I suppose I can at least be glad to live in an era when technology makes this possible.

Religion has featured a lot in discussions since the diagnosis. I am told that many people are praying for me and I have prayed myself, though I never thought it would make a difference (I only did it on the off chance that something positive might happen – what’s to lose?). I don’t believe in God; I didn’t before my diagnosis and I don’t now. I can see how some in my position may want to turn to religion as a comfort, and I can also see how many may become disillusioned or even angry with the God they thought they believed in. But I have done neither. Most of my frustration has fallen on nurses and medical staff for the most trivial of reasons.

003 — Max Edwards with his sister Esme, 14, and brother Toby, seven, decorating the Christmas tree, 2015.

As for comfort, I don’t feel I need comforting. The initial shock wears off very quickly, and after that, life seems to become quite ordinary. The satisfaction of daily routines is enough in the way of comfort.

One thing I have started to do is measure time in distinct chunks. Ordinarily, I would allow days to blur into weeks, weeks into months and months into years. After my operation, however, I’ve found myself focusing on certain events. A holiday, for example, or a day trip, or a party. Perhaps my perception of time has changed, or maybe it comes from a lack of ways to fill the day, although that’s becoming less of a problem now that I’m more mobile and have been able to get more done, such as schoolwork (AS-level history), which I’ve just restarted.

In terms of where I want to be, my main hopes for the future are life-expectancy-related. This is one thing that still gets to me: I’ve more or less made peace with the idea of death, but it’s the question of when that is still a daunting thought. The (almost) inevitable growth of my cancer means it is likely to come some time soon, but I still don’t know when exactly, and I’m not sure I want to.

Regular MRI scans will probably give me an indication of how bad the situation is as and when that becomes the case, which means there is more bad news in store for me. I considered not having any further scans, but then I’m sure I’d panic with every slight pain or possible symptom of tumour growth, and given that I already interpret a headache as, “OH MY GOD, IT’S SPREAD TO THE BRAIN AND I’LL BE DEAD WITHIN A WEEK!”, I’d rather not venture any further down this route.

I am sure the expectation of death is worse than death itself. True, they say death is the worst single thing that can happen to you, and given that I can’t trick myself into believing there is an afterlife, I imagine it leads only to an empty void, but I’ve found ways to accept such an idea. First, I look on my life, which I believe has been a modest success, and remember that it could not have occurred in any other way. The only possible way I could have had my unique set of experiences is by living my life as it is, and that means dying when I die. Even if I’m wrong, and there has been more unhappiness than I care to remember (rendering my life “unsuccessful”), death – the absence of pain or pleasure – should then logically be seen as an improvement.

I also remind myself that the experience of dying is not unique to me. Whether it happens aged 16 or 95, experiencing the end of everything you know is the same process – it’s just that I and those around me are forced to come to terms with this fact prematurely.

Finally, I feel it has helped to process the whole issue selflessly. Some people might find it helpful to know that they are loved, that people care about them and that they won’t be forgotten when they die. I can understand this and I see how it’s comforting, but I also find it consoling to take the opposing view: stop dwelling on personal suffering and carry on as before.

This approach seems to help deflate the hype that terminal diagnoses carry. Pity, grief and sympathy are all natural emotions, and they certainly have their place, but I’ve found the message of “Stop whining and get on with it” far more effective. Stoicism, I feel, is more effective than grief: a simple reality-check helps to set my perspectives in place.

It helps to remind myself that even if I’m dying, it’s not all about me. At the end of the day I’m one in seven billion, a number that – like my cancer – will continue to grow and multiply over the coming months and years. While my life may be all I know, I’m nothing more than a dot on this planet. When you take into account the dozens of people I know, the billions I don’t, the thousands of miles that separate us, and the ever running river of time on which we all finitely float, you may come to the inevitable and strangely comforting realisation that we are all going to die: me, you and everyone else. Get over it.

Complete Article HERE!

March 18, 2016March 17, 2016

Who chooses not to have a funeral?

By Justin Parkinson

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.”

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.

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.”

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!

March 17, 2016March 17, 2016

A Doctor at His Daughter’s Hospital Bed

By BUD SHAW

I’VE been watching the monitor for hours. Natalie’s asleep now and I’m worried about her pulse. It’s edging above 140 beats per minute again and her blood oxygen saturation is becoming dangerously low. I’m convinced that she’s slipping into shock. She needs more fluids. I ring for the nurse.

I know about stuff like septic shock because for more than 20 years I was a transplant surgeon, and some of our patients got incredibly sick after surgery. So when I’m sitting in an I.C.U. in Omaha terrified that Natalie, my 17-year-old daughter, might die, I know what I’m talking about. I tell the nurse that Natalie needs to get another slug of intravenous fluids, and fast.

The nurse says she’ll call the doctor. Fifteen minutes later I find her in the lounge at a computer, and over her shoulder I see a screen full of makeup products. When I ask if we can get that fluid going, I startle her. She says she called the resident and told him the vital signs, but that he thought things were stable.

“He said to hold off for now,” she says.

“Get me two bags of saline. Now,” I tell her.

She says, “I’m calling my supervisor,” and she runs out of the lounge.

Natalie is awake and looking around when I return. Her face is that dark red that sends waves of panic through my gut.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

I’m a lousy actor.

I know I shouldn’t be my daughter’s doctor. They taught us the problems with that during my first week in medical school. It’s a really bad idea, especially in high-risk situations. There are a few exceptions; like, it’s probably O.K. to sew up your child’s cut on vacation or to hand out antibiotics for uncomplicated infections.

We doctors are also very superstitious that when dealing with family members of physicians, or of V.I.P.s, something is always going to go wrong. The more the Special Person hovers over the care of his or her loved one, the worse the complication will be. I’ve had conversations in which doctors feel they change their routine with V.I.P. patients, and it’s that disruption in routine that allows error to creep into their care.

But right now, I don’t care about any of that. I’m the one with experience taking care of really sick patients, and if I know she needs more fluids, she’s going to get them.

I break into the crash cart, a box on wheels full of stuff they use to resuscitate patients. I pull out two liters of saline solution and run both into Natalie’s IV in less than 20 minutes. Natalie’s pulse slows and her blood pressure rises. An hour later, after the nursing supervisor and on-call resident finally arrive, I’ve finished infusing a third liter. Natalie finally looks better.

This wasn’t the first time during Natalie’s illness eight years ago that I broke my promise to just be her dad. It started a week earlier when she came into the den and showed me the blood she’d coughed up. I suspect a father without my experience might have chalked it up to flu. Maybe because I was a transplant surgeon, and always considered the worst possible cause whenever a patient had a hiccup, I took her to the hospital. I was worried the blood meant she had a bacterial pneumonia, a bad one. And it did.

On the way to the hospital, Natalie took a deep breath and looked at me. “Am I going to die?” she asked. I’m convinced that she would have been dead before morning had I not been a doctor, and one who could recognize septic shock when it affected a normal teenager.

I am haunted by that moment, and others like it involving people I love. My younger son, Joe, almost died 15 years earlier from septic shock, the same kind that killed Jim Henson. He became ill while I was out of town. I flew home and by the time I arrived at the hospital, he looked deathly ill to me. I told the nurse I thought he should be transferred to the intensive care unit, but she said the doctors thought he was improving. Joe stopped breathing during the night and I have blamed myself ever since for not insisting they move him.

Over and over again during my dad’s last few years of life, I felt as if I should have just moved in with him so that I could prevent all the well-meaning doctors and nurses from killing him. Sometimes it was just because his doctors weren’t talking to one another and their conflicting prescriptions sent Dad to the hospital.

In the end, he died about 10 minutes after receiving an injection I didn’t want him to receive. From my home in Omaha, 800 miles away, I asked his caregivers not to give him a medication that I worried could be lethal but that they insisted was routine for old people like him. I thought we’d reached an agreement but while on the road to visit him the next day, I got word that his heart had stopped.

Last year my wife’s mother had colon surgery and when we went to visit her in a rehabilitation center two days after her release, I discovered that she had an abscess the size of a lemon in the wound. It was red and swollen and she said it hurt like the devil but the attendants had assured her it would get better because she was on antibiotics. We took her to the E.R. where the nice doctor used an ultrasound to look it over and told me he didn’t see any pus there. But I could see a large pocket of pus, so I asked him to call the surgeon. The surgeon probably told the E.R. doctor to humor me, but as he took a knife to the wound, no one in the room except the E.R. doctor was surprised when creamy yellow, foul-smelling pus shot out of the wound and soiled the young man’s spotless shoes.

I have more stories like this. What are the odds of that? I don’t think it’s me.

After three days in the hospital, Natalie got better. A new chest X-ray showed that there was much less fluid in her chest. Her fever resolved. They changed one of the antibiotics and the nausea she had had all but disappeared. They told her she could go home. They prescribed antibiotics for her to take at home, and removed her IV catheter.

Natalie went back to school, and the next day was interviewed by a TV reporter because she was one of the few who survived her kind of pneumonia in Nebraska. She talked about her disappointment over missing swim meets.

Natalie recovered from that illness eight years ago, but I didn’t. I stopped operating and taking care of really sick people two years later. I told myself I had become too distracted by my increasing administrative duties to be a safe doctor. I was glad to leave all that behind. Now I just want to sit on the sidelines and marvel as a new generation of doctors performs the miracles. I never again want to step in to rescue someone I love. But I will, if I have to.

Complete Article HERE!

March 16, 2016March 16, 2016

Alumna turns end-of-life conversations from dread to discovery

A hospice and palliative care physician hosts a radio show that aims to revolutionize how we discuss what to many is the last great taboo: death

BY Susan Bell

Dawn Gross interviews her first mentor, Jeffrey Mandel, a hospice and palliative medicine doctor, during the launch of her radio show Dying to Talk.

Dawn Gross ’89 knows how to talk about death.

“I’ve asked hundreds of terminally ill patients, ‘If I had a magic wand, what would you wish for?’ And not one of them has ever answered, ‘Cure me,’ which is staggering to me,” said Gross, a hospice and palliative care physician since 2007.

Instead, patients respond by asking for something that brings them closer to who they truly are, she said, whether it’s being with family or spending time in their gardens.

Gross, who earned her bachelor’s in psychology and neuroscience from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has years of experience supporting patients with life-threatening illnesses in their own homes. She is currently a member of a hospital-based palliative care team at the University of California, San Francisco.

Just listen

Her first job, she said, is to listen.

“People have a hard time articulating or even knowing what is most important to them when they’re struggling with uncontrolled symptoms,” she said, “whether it’s nausea, difficulty breathing or pain.”

Once those symptoms are brought under control, she helps patients plan their goals of care and helps them identify and realize what they really want to do with the time left to them.

Gross said she’s profoundly grateful for the opportunity to practice her chosen specialty.

“It’s not depressing,” she said. “It is sad, and I think to untangle the two is important for people to do. But what we do — being with people and supporting them in the things that matter most in their lives — is a gift. I fall in love with people immediately, so when they die, am I sad that they die? You’d better believe it. But what I’m left with is immense gratitude for having gotten to know them and be part of their lives, and hopefully for helping to make their lives the way they wanted.”

A new openness

In January, Gross began hosting Dying to Talk, a public radio show that aims to revolutionize the way people discuss death.

“People are averse to talking about death, but I’ve noticed that once you give them permission to do so, they really are dying to talk,” she said.

“It’s really exciting to have now been given a platform to try and make this conversation accessible to people in an unintimidating format that can also provide anonymity.”

Many forums now exist worldwide for conversations around death, including so-called “Death Cafes,” which bring total strangers together to sit down and discuss death. Gross noted that The New York Times recently ran a year-long series of op-ed pieces and stories about death titled “The End.”

“If you a look at any media outlet, there’s an article every week about death,” she said. “To me that suggests people are eager to talk about it and now we’re giving them permission to do so.”

A very personal inspiration

One of her greatest inspirations in pursuing a specialty in hospice and palliative care was her father, who had always been clear he wouldn’t seek aggressive, curative therapies to prolong his life. When he became terminally ill, he questioned traditional care options, asking, “Why is no one asking me what I want?”

Although her father was eventually able to die in his own home under hospice care, Gross said he taught her to want to ask those questions and to help the rest of the family try to listen to what he needed.

“Watching how my family learned to accompany him on his journey was eye-opening and made me more curious about how to support patients and families at such times.”

Alumna Dawn Gross’ love of end of life conversations shaped her decision to specialize in hospice and palliative care. (Photo/Gurusurya Photography).

While her father was sick, Gross’ mother was simultaneously confronted with a very serious illness.

“My mother has a very different approach to her life and therefore a very different outlook and approach to how she will die,” Gross said. “Seeing these two very different ways of navigating life has given me permission to discover new ways to raise this conversation.”

A fairy godmother

Born in Northern California, Gross spent her teenage years in Portland, Ore. After tagging along on a college tour of USC with her older brother, she decided she liked the university. At age 16, she joined her brother at USC as a resident honors scholar in her senior year of high school.

“I was intrigued by science but always hated the sight of blood,” she said. However, in her freshman year, she chose a biology option, “Introduction to Neuroscience: Man, Mind and Machine” taught by William McClure, now professor emeritus of biological sciences.

“I remember my first day in that class. Professor McClure began to map out on the board how the brain works. I was hooked immediately.”

Admitted into the psychology honors program, Gross focused on neuroscience research, helping map the circuitry of memory. She did a post-baccalaureate premed program at Mills College and an M.D., PhD at Tufts University in Boston.

“I wanted to be a scientist,” she said, “but medicine snuck up on me. It wasn’t until I was in fellowship at Stanford, training in hematology and bone marrow transplants that I realized I loved being a physician because I loved having end-of-life conversations. That was something completely unexpected, and it shaped my decision to go into hospice and palliative care.”

End-of-life conversations are something that many doctors — trained to heal, not to discuss death — find difficult. Why does Gross cherish the experience?

“In my USC admission essay, I talked about wanting to major in psychology and inspire people to reach their highest dreams and then reach higher still,” she remembered. “Now, that’s all I do everyday. I see myself as a fairy godmother. When you’re facing your own mortality, what becomes essential rises to the top and everything else melts away. All you’re dealing with then is what matters most. It’s an extraordinary conversation to get to be a part of.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 15, 2016March 13, 2016

The 8 best ways to die – green burial, biodegradable coffins, fertilizer funerals…

Your death. It’s bad for you, but could be worse for the planet. Fear not, though, doomed mortal – from green burial to self-composting, here are eight ways to straighten up and die right

By Alison Maney

You hear it all the time: “Your lifestyle affects the environment.” But do you ever consider how your death will impact the world after you’re gone?

Recently the idea of a green burial took a turn for the practical/macabre, depending on your point of view, with the excitement around the Capsula Mundi death pods – bulbous bodybags inside which your earthly remains can quietly decompose into earthy tree food:

Green burial inside Capsula Mundi burial pods: what sap!

Which is all part of a growing recognition that traditional burials aren’t very eco-friendly. Think about it: we fill a corpse with potentially toxic embalming liquid (formaldehyde, a chemical commonly used in embalming fluid, is sometimes classified as a carcinogen), put it in a mahogany box that’s been transported and harvested from the tropics, and allow nothing but grass to grow over the burial site for hundreds of years.

Or you opt for cremation, which is arguably worse – burning a body necessitates massive amounts of gas and electricity (about the same amount you would normally use in a month, according to some figures) and releases greenhouse gases and mercury (!) into the air.

“If you assumed your late Aunt Bertha could no longer expand her carbon footprint, you’re sadly mistaken”

Yes, if you assumed your late Aunt Bertha could no longer expand her carbon footprint, you’re sadly mistaken – the deceased continue to have an environmental impact beyond the grave.

But do not despair, environmentally conscious future-corpses. You’re not doomed to an afterlife of eco-unfriendliness. If you’re dead serious about turning your ultimate demise into your ultimate act of kindness, then read on, because we’ve put together a plethora of green burial options and eco-positive posthumous possibilities for you to peruse.

1. Freeze-dry your remains

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the saying goes. But what kind of dust? How about millimetre-sized freeze-dried particles? The process of promession, developed in 1997 by biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, does just that. The process is surprisingly gentle: your corpse is frozen at -18° C (0.4° F) and placed in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Slight vibrations break up the body and a vacuum chamber evaporates the liquid, transforming your earthly remains into a dry powder. A bit less traumatic than having your body incinerated, no?

Why is this so good for the environment? Unlike cremation, the process doesn’t release harmful gas into the air and helps break the body down more quickly once it’s buried (usually in a corn starch coffin, set in a shallow grave). After 6 to 12 months, the body and its coffin will have completely composted into the soil, creating fertile ground for new life. Aw!

2. From grief to reef – rebuild coral with your corpse

If you really want to be cremated, you can still do some good with your dust. Consider resting in a watery grave while helping the rebuilding of coral reefs and the creation of habitats for fast-dwindling marine life. Eternal Reefs will mix your ashes into environmentally safe concrete that will be used to create a Reef Ball, a porous, pod-like structure specifically designed to mimic a natural reef and provide a habitat for microorganisms, animals and plants.

An alternative to your more traditional urn, Reef Balls can be adorned with a small plaque and marked with handprints and messages from your loved ones, before being dropped into the sea. Family members and friends can boat out to your final resting place for a memorial ceremony. Gives the term ‘life after death’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

3. Literally become a tree

Another option if you feel you simply must be cremated? Become a tree. The Bios Urn is essentially a cone that contains soil, your ashes and a tree seed of your choosing. The urn itself is biodegradable, so you just plant the whole shebang in the ground and watch a sapling spring from what used to be your grandfather. It’s a touching way to keep the dearly departed in the family (unless there’s a termite infestation – sorry, grandpa) and helps combat the world’s abysmal deforestation statistics – up to 58 thousand square miles of forest per year.

So, what kind of tree do you want to be? The website offers maple, pine, ginkgo, beech and ash seeds, plus the option to contribute your own preferred seed if none of those tickle your branches.

4. Use a biodegradable coffin

When it comes to biodegradable coffins, the ultimate in green burial funeral accessories, you have plenty of choices. Fancy a colourful, personalised cardboard coffin that’s free of metal fixings and made from recycled materials? You got it. Prefer something earthy, pretty and endearingly similar to a picnic hamper, like a wicker coffin? No problem. How about a coffin made out of cotton and banana leaves? Done.

Unlike mahogany coffins, biodegradable coffins are usually built locally and aren’t treated or covered in lacquer. That cuts down on emissions used to transport the coffins and the time it takes for the coffin to disintegrate once in the ground.

Even better news? Biodegradable coffins tend to be cheaper than their more traditional tropical hardwood counterparts. With funerals typically costing around £3,700 (around $5,277) in the UK and over $7,000 (£4,909) in the US, your surviving family members will definitely thank you.

5. Get embalmed with essential oils

Sure, formaldehyde is great for preserving your flesh (or shark flesh if you’re Damian Hirst) so that you look your best at your funeral, but this popular embalming ingredient is also a toxic chemical and – surprisingly enough – is therefore rife with problems. It’s linked to cancer and has also recently been linked to ALS (a neurodegenerative disease), putting embalmers at risk. And although there haven’t been any conclusive studies measuring the environmental impact of embalming liquid (and, in all fairness, the compound typically breaks down quickly in the soil), some people have argued that the liquid could somehow make its way into our drinking water.

Instead of risking the life of your future funeral director, or the plant and animal life that will live in and around your grave, why not get yourself embalmed with non-toxic essential oils? Biodegradable embalming alternatives still disinfect, deodorize and preserve – though perhaps not for as long. Still, the sooner your body starts helping nourish new life in the soil the better, right?

6. Have a woodland burial

Woodland burials, also known as natural or green burials, have surged in popularity over the past few years. And why wouldn’t they? Traditional cemeteries are sad and macabre, not to mention covered in herbicides and manicured regularly with petrol lawnmowers. Instead, why not let local plant and animal life flourish around your former earthly vessel? Sounds like a much cheerier way to spend the afterlife.

A word to the wise: natural burial grounds can vary widely. Some are very strict about what you can put in the ground – no embalmed bodies, no stone memorials, no non-biodegradable coffins – while others are less stringent. Some plant a tree over the grave, while others place a wooden plaque (or both). Some are commercial enterprises, while others are non-profit charities.

Though they’re called ‘woodland burials,’ you can find natural burial sites in fields, meadows, woodlands and parks. Some are even adjacent to more traditional cemeteries. Whatever you like, really. But whatever you choose, you’re helping to preserve a green space by using it as your final resting place – after all, no-one wants to build condos over a burial ground.

These types of burials are also usually cheaper than buying a plot in a traditional graveyard. Again, your descendants will thank you.

7. Donate your body to science

Have you ever dreamed of helping to find a cure for cancer? Well, that dream doesn’t need to die just because you did. If you donate your body to medical science, you’ll help train future doctors or help scientists perform biomedical research. If you’re nervous about how young doctors will treat your former vessel, never fear – when it comes to human dissection, medicinal ethics generally dictate that medical students must treat your body with dignity. Well, as much dignity as you can grant a body while you’re slicing it open and peeking at its insides.

But be warned – if you’re an organ donor and one or more of your organs are removed post-mortem, most medical schools won’t take your cadaver (yep, that’s your corpse). This is an all-or-nothing sort of deal.

8. Compost yourself

This option isn’t available yet, but it might be by the time you meet your maker. Architect Katrina Spade’s Urban Death Project is essentially a dignified way to turn your remains into nutritive compost as quickly as possible.

Spade envisions a three-storey composting column, primed with high-carbon materials and microbes, surrounded by a wide winding ramp. Your family personally wraps your body in a shroud and walks it up to the top of the column, where they say goodbye. Then you’re gently placed in the composting facility, and before you know it, boom – you’re soil.

Of course, you can’t have your body embalmed – quick decomposition is kind of the point here – but the project will happily refrigerate your physical form until the ceremony takes place. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can even donate to the Urban Death Project.

Complete Article HERE!

March 14, 2016March 12, 2016

Brené Brown on Empathy

What is the best way to ease someone’s pain and suffering? In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities.

March 13, 2016March 12, 2016

A daring exhibit asks dying people: How do we make the most of living?

By Bob Tedeschi

Claudia Biçen, an artist based in San Francisco and London, spent the past two years interviewing and sketching hospice patients. She was convinced, she said, that dying people could help answer the question of how to live.

The result is a new multimedia exhibit, “Thoughts in Passing,” featuring nine sketched portraits and brief audio narratives in which the patients reflect not only on what it’s like to be dying, but on the lives they led.

The exhibit, completed in recent weeks and which will be shown in San Francisco, has already generated a passionate response. It is likely to be shown in other cities, and can also be seen online.

“Doing this felt like shining a light into this very dark, scary area for me and I’m sure for lots of people,” Biçen said in an interview. “It’s made me feel in my life more. I’m more in each moment.”

Born 30 years ago in London to a mother who brought home orphaned kittens and puppies for foster care, Biçen often held the animals as they died, and she grew accustomed to “the idea of death being close by.”

She earned degrees in psychology, philosophy, and anthropology before romance brought her to San Francisco, where she sketched portraits of family members. The work earned the attention of local galleries, but failed to deliver lasting satisfaction. Deeper wisdom, she thought, might be found in subjects facing death.

Biçen asked Bay Area hospices to find patients to sit for portraits and reflect on life and death, and in 2014 the first candidates emerged. She met several times with each, posing the question: What does it feel like to be dying? They had never been asked the question, they told her, and they had much to say.

She retreated to a studio, where she surrounded herself with photographs of her subjects and audio recordings from their meetings. Just 400 words would make the final audio cut. In the portraits, she would embed words taken from fragments of their conversations.

One subject, Jenny, is an artist herself. Written on her blouse are allusions to time spent locked in a mental institution with the criminally insane. In her audio recording, she tells of a childhood of being kept in an attic by foster parents, the terror of shock therapy, her later discovery of art, and the peace she found in it.

“I wonder about people who never ever know high peace,” Jenny says. “And I felt lucky that I knew. Little old nobody me could get high peace.”

Biçen’s pencil sketch of Jenny will hang in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery starting March 12 — a significant achievement for an artistic project, but one that doesn’t in itself speak to Biçen’s more spiritual achievements.

Experiencing her exhibit, even online, is like stumbling onto an exquisite, futuristic cemetery: portraits that capture the subjects’ essence; spoken words that distill their feelings on life and death; written words that hint at experiences that shaped them.

On screen, the portraits fade to black before their voices go silent, leaving viewers to confront their own reflection on the screen as patients offer their final thoughts.

The exhibit begs the question: How will you be when the time comes?

Complete Article HERE!