‘I help people die’

A nurse reveals how she became a ‘death doula’ and volunteers to help people ‘let go’ at the end of their life

 
Rebecca Green was devastated when she lost both of her parents before she turned 16, but she’s never been afraid of death

As told to

REBECCA Green, 46, is a nurse and lives in Edinburgh. She says:
As I sat on the sofa, tension filled the air.

Rebecca Green was a nurse for 20 years before becoming a death doula

‘What if the ambulance doesn’t get here in time?’ a man in his 70s asked me anxiously.

He was suffering from a chronic lung illness, which meant that if his condition took a turn for the worse, he’d need immediate resuscitation or he would die.

He had always been told by family and medics to keep fighting death, but I asked if he’d ever considered letting go instead.

Rebecca decided to train as a nurse when she was 20 years old and started working in intensive care

Instantly, all traces of his fear disappeared.

He admitted he didn’t want to die, but had never thought of simply giving in when the time came.

As an end of life doula – or death doula – my job is to support people in facing their fears and coming to terms with their own passing.

As odd as it sounds, people tend to want ‘permission’ to die without upsetting their family, and as I’m a stranger, they feel more able to tell me when they’re ready.

Often chatting to them over a cup of tea at home, I encourage my clients to express how they feel, share memories and see the beauty of their lives.

If they want to die at home, I help organise it with family support and act as a link between their loved ones and the NHS.

I’ve never been afraid of death, despite losing both parents as a child.

Despite losing both of her parents when she was young, Rebecca has never been afraid of death and enjoys helping others come to terms with letting go

Mum died of cancer when I was 11 and my dad died of a heart attack four years later. After that, I went to live with my aunt.

I remember being very angry – how could people carry on when my world had ended?

I wasn’t offered counselling, and while my school was sympathetic, no one wanted to talk about it.

At 20, I realised I loved being around people and didn’t want a typical nine-to-five job, so I trained as a nurse and started working in intensive care, A&E and later hospices, becoming familiar with the fragility of life.

But it wasn’t until 2010 that I became a death doula.

I mentioned to a friend that I’d love to take care of people through the dying process, and she told me she’d heard that people did that as a job.

While there are training courses, I decided to draw from 20 years’ nursing experience and my understanding of what to expect from patients living with a terminal illness.

Rebecca with her pet dog Baloo: She isn’t paid for supporting people through the dying process and still works full-time as a nurse

I first started doing it through word of mouth, helping a friend of a friend, but soon began working with a local charity Pilmeny Development Project, which put people in touch with me. I’ve even had people contact me on Twitter.

Although it can be a paid job, I do it voluntarily, and it ranges from once a week to once a month.

Mostly it involves simply talking to someone, but I might run the odd errand, such as popping out for a packet of biscuits.

I try not to get emotionally attached – if my feelings are involved, I’d be doing clients a disservice. But of course, I’ve been incredibly saddened by their stories.

One man in his 50s was devastated he wouldn’t live to see his sons grow up.

As he spoke, I burst into tears and we were both crying together.

Through her work, Rebecca has an appreciation for life and urges everyone not to waste it

I’ve helped 12 clients in total, but I’ve never been with one when they died – usually I don’t find out until the family informs me.

It can be hard to balance the job with a social life, as whenever a client needs me, I’m happy to help – unless I’m nursing, which I still do full-time – so I’ve cancelled many nights out.

Sometimes it’s hard to switch off, so I make sure I unwind by going to the gym, painting or walking my dog Baloo.

Some partners have found it scary, but most were supportive.

Being a death doula has made me realise we take the time that we have for granted.

It’s about making the most of the simple things and doing what we love.

Life is so precious – don’t waste it.

Complete Article HERE!

Boomers driving changes in end-of-life care

With ever more baby boomers entering their golden years, third party end-of-life planners may be in great demand over the next two decades, as people try to take more control over their care as they die.

By Candace Moody

The Baby Boomers have redefined every stage of life they passed through, changing the definition of what it meant to be young, middle aged and now, old. (Fifty is the new 30, and gray is the new black.) Finally, we’re working on the last frontier — death.

An enormous amount of health care spending is invested in the postponement of dying. Courtney Martin wrote in the New York Times last year: “According to the National Institute of Health, 5 percent of the most seriously ill Americans account for more than 50 percent of health care spending, with most costs incurred in the last year of life in hospital settings.”

The Baby Boom generation is becoming the largest group of elderly people the country has seen, and when we go, we want to go well.

End-of-life planning became a controversial part of the Affordable Care Act when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin labeled the idea “death panels” in 2009. In 2015, the ACA once again proposed reimbursing doctors for having the discussion with patients. Some futurists predict that third party end-of-life planners may be in great demand over the next 20 years as people try to take more control over their care as they die.

Studies have shown that two-thirds of us would prefer to die at home, but most of us generally die in Intensive Care Units at hospitals, receiving care and medication that extends the quantity of time we live, but greatly reduces the quality of it. End-of-life planners can help individuals and their families create a plan that accounts for how and where someone will face the last few months of life: at home, in a hospital or in hospice.

End-of-life counseling can be delivered by a variety of professionals, including clergy and chaplains, financial planners, medical staff or attorneys. Some colleges now offer certifications for professionals who want to specialize in end-of-life care. The certifications are often part of a gerontology program, preparing students to offer advice on social, psychological, medical, financial, legal and spiritual issues related to care.

Florida-based Mediation Training Group offers training on how to mediate between elders and their adult children about issues such as driving, remaining at home or medical care. The continuing education credit program is aimed at psychologists and social workers who deal with these issues in their family practice; similar training is offered for family law attorneys.

Doulas are women who have traditionally been trained to provide information and physical and emotional support to women before and during childbirth. The International End of Life Doula Association (www.inelda.org) offers the INELDA certification, which requires 22 hours of training. Doulas must meet certain requirements, including character references, and must complete several vigils that are evaluated by staff.

End-of-life doulas focus on planning, conducting vigil during death, and reprocessing a death with loved ones afterwards to provide insight and comfort. They may work in hospice or other institutional settings or work independently. Both the University of Central Florida and University of South Florida offer graduate certificates in end-of-life care.

End-of-life counseling is a relatively new profession, so data on salaries is not broken out from a professional’s primary practice. Attorneys and social workers will offer end-of-life services, so their earnings will supplement their fees. According to prodoula.com, certified doulas charge up to $1,500 for their services and earn an average of $45,000 per year. If compassion is your strength, you may be able to turn dying into a living.

Complete Article HERE!

6 Animals That Mourn Like People

By

[A]mong animal lovers, the urge to anthropomorphize our four-legged, furry, scaly, and/or winged friends is strong. We tell ourselves that dogs like hugs and that cats actually have a sense of loyalty, despite Science refuting both of these rose-tinted hopes. One area of animal behavior in which research gets even more complicated is grief.

Studies have long suggested that certain mammals may recognize and understand death on near-human levels. Elephants and primates, most notably, have been observed mourning and performing what scientists refer to as “death rituals.” That said, these same scientists are reluctant to refer to any non-human species’ response to death as “grieving” just yet. And despite the heartbreaking viral images of chimpanzee funerals, more research needs to be done on animals’ emotions before we draw any conclusions.

Of course, none of this lessens the emotional impact of what we’ve seen so far, whether it’s a mother giraffe licking her dead calf’s body or a baboon seeking comfort with the rest of her group after the death of her daughter. Because the thing is, even among humans, grief can feel like a mystery, so it’s a small comfort to see some of our own mourning processes reflected in other species.

Chimpanzees

Footage of chimpanzees mourning and even holding funerals for their deceased peers abounds. These viral moments are often used as the best proof we have that the apes grieve — but a 2010 study revealed just how profoundly death can affect a community of chimps.

The study focused on the death of an elderly female chimp known as Pansy. The researchers noticed that Pansy’s daughter and another female chimp stayed by her side and groomed her until she died. A male chimpanzee, Chippy, charged Pansy’s body multiple times before she was removed in what researchers viewed as a “final effort to elicit a sign of life,” perhaps out of “some kind of anger about the loss of an important member of the group.”

That night, Pansy’s daughter was observed shifting in her sleep a dozen times (far above the average). When the keepers took Pansy’s body away, the rest of the chimps appeared “profoundly subdued” and exhibited near-human signs of grief in the following weeks, namely having less of an appetite and avoiding the area where Pansy died.

Whales
Seven different species of whales have been seen staying with their dead and even taking their bodies with them. Researchers believe these may be specific cases of mothers grieving the loss of their young.

For example, a bottlenose dolphin was found pushing another dolphin’s body through the water as it swam. The deceased dolphin was visibly rotting, and yet, when scientists in a nearby boat started to pull the body on board, the dolphin swam after it, staying near the shore after the boat came aground.

Killer whales and pilot whales were also observed carrying dead calves to keep them above water and pushing them toward boats. Other than mourning, scientists haven’t been able to find an explanation for this behavior.

Baboons

Much like humans, baboons’ stress hormones increase production in response to grief. Research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that that isn’t where the resemblance ends. In order to reduce those feelings of stress, baboons will seek out friends for comfort.

After the death of her daughter, a notably high-status, queenlike baboon known as Sylvia went to great lengths for social bonding. She was observed spending time with a group of female baboons who were considered of lower status than her — something she’d never do otherwise, reflecting her immense need for support at that time.

The researchers clarified that Sylvia’s behavior isn’t proof that baboons grieve exactly like humans, but it shows that we aren’t the only species that look for friends when we need to cope with stress.

Elephants

Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve, has called elephants “the gold standard of animal-grief research,” citing two long-term projects studying their behavior.

While other species will mourn their own young, elephants come together as a larger community to share their grief. In an article for NPR, King described the emotional display from a group of elephants reacting to the death of one of their matriarchs, Eleanor.

As Eleanor lay dying, another elephant, Grace, came to her side and tried to nudge her to her feet. Grace became “visibly distressed” after Eleanor failed to stand on her own. After Eleanor died, other elephants approached her body. Some appeared merely curious, gazing and prodding at her, but others seemed profoundly upset, rocking over her and refusing to leave her. The elephants that visited Eleanor were from five different families.

Other elephant communities have been filmed seemingly paying their respects to their dead, even several weeks after their peer has died.

Biologist George Wittemyer told National Geographic that, as much as we’ve seen of their so-called death rituals, elephants’ responses to death remains mysterious: “Every time it happens, it’s not the same, but it is striking behavior — not based on survival or necessity, but based on some sort of emotion.”

Giraffes

Research on giraffes’ capacity for grief is nowhere near as extensive as that on elephants or primates, but one extreme demonstration of loss gave rise to the belief that this species should be considered along with other animals that appear to mourn.

In a scene published in the African Journal of Ecology, a mother giraffe was seen standing over her deceased newborn. She spent hours investigating and licking the body, hovering over it with her legs splayed out. According to BBC Nature, this behavior is anything but normal — giraffes will only splay their legs out wide if they’re eating or drinking, and they do not like being alone for extended periods of time.

At the moment, this mother’s display is one of only three documented cases of giraffes recognizing (and reacting to) death. They may not be the “gold standard” for research that elephants are, but it stands to reason that they may understand death more than we believe.

Ducks

This story also comes from Barbara J. King: Two ducks that were rescued from the same foie gras factory bonded rapidly when they were brought to a sanctuary. One of the ducks, Kohl, had been losing the ability to walk and sanctuary staff eventually decided it was best to euthanize him. The other duck, Harper, witnessed Kohl’s death, approached his body, prodded at it, and laid his head down on top of it. He stayed like that for hours.

After Kohl died, Harper was visibly more nervous around people and never seemed to bond with another duck. Two months later, he died.

This strikes us as eerily similar to the so-called “broken heart syndrome” sometimes seen in humans, but there aren’t enough Kohls and Harpers out there to know for sure if this is common among ducks.

 Complete Article HERE!

The Japanese Art of Grieving a Miscarriage

By

[W]hen we lived in Japan, my husband took me on a date to a cemetery. In his defense, it was a famous cemetery in an Ewok-worthy forest on Mount Koya known for gimmicky headstones in the shapes of rockets and coffee cups.

Yet they didn’t interest me as much as the hundreds of stone Jizo statues that lined the wooded paths. These small figurines dressed in red caps and bibs honor the souls of babies who are never born. Crowding their feet are toys and snacks left by parents to comfort their children in the afterlife. Sometimes a woman would turn away as we approached her on the path. Sometimes the flowers would still be fresh.

My husband, Brady, and I were young enough then to assume that tragedies happened to other people and not to us. This was a belief we carried for years until the day we held hands on an ultrasound table watching the technician turn off the monitor and tiptoe out of the room. A miscarriage at 10 weeks produces no body, so there would be no funeral. “What do we even do?” I asked the doctor.

She wrote me a prescription for Percocet: “Go home and sleep.”

We went home. I didn’t sleep. I spent a week throwing myself around the house I’d decorated to look like a dojo — that’s how many souvenirs I brought when we’d moved back to the States from Japan. I was itchy with sadness. I picked at my cuticles and tore out my hair. I had all this sorrow and no one to give it to, and Brady couldn’t take it off me because his hands were already full of his own mourning. We knew miscarriage was common. But why wasn’t there anything people did when it happened?

“If only there were some kind of tradition…” I said to Brady.

“Like a Jizo?” he replied, recalling that quiet day we’d spent walking hand-in-hand through a Japanese forest of other people’s grief.

It was as if someone had poured calamine lotion all over me. “Exactly like a Jizo.”

What can’t one buy on the internet? Our statue of Jizo arrived a few days later. He was the height of a paperback and made of cement. His eyes were squinted in a mellow smile, hands folded in prayer.

According to Buddhist belief, a baby who is never born can’t go to heaven, having never had the opportunity to accumulate good karma. But Jizo, a sort of patron saint of fetal demise, can smuggle these half-baked souls to paradise in his pockets. He also delivers the toys and snacks we saw being left at his feet on Mount Koya. Jizo is the U.P.S. guy of the afterlife.

Brady and I grieved the baby in ways that were different but equally sad. One thing we both understood perfectly, though, was Jizo — why we had to search for the right kind of red yarn, how I had to crochet the smallest hat and coat three times to get it right. It was nice for us to have something to do, a project to finish in lieu of the baby I failed to complete. When Jizo was dressed, Brady complimented my handiwork. “Where should we put him? In the yard?”

“Maybe in a few days,” I balked, stationing the statue on our dining room table where I could pat him on the head on my way to the kitchen. I talked to him. Sometimes I kissed him when no one was looking, or I took him with me to the living room to watch TV.

It was crazy to fuss over a statue like I did. But I felt crazy, which could have been from the pregnancy hormones still coursing rudely through my body. Or maybe it was the lack of traditions surrounding miscarriage in the States that gave me nothing to take the edge off my grief. Without a prescribed course for mourning, I didn’t know what else to do besides mother this lump of concrete as if he could actually transfer my love to the afterlife.

After a few days of keeping Jizo in the house, I got to the point where I could put him on the front porch without too much separation anxiety. A few weeks later, Brady planted a garden for him in the backyard, where Jizo now sits and reminds us of the baby we lost — not so often as to make us sad, but often enough so that we don’t forget him entirely.

I check on Jizo when I take out the trash, picking him up when he gets knocked over by squirrels or brushing snow off his hat. I catch Brady through the window plucking leaves from his little red coat. On the anniversary of the miscarriage, I replaced the statue’s sun-bleached clothes with fresh ones, gave him a bath, kissed him on the head and put him back outside.

I’m not sure if this is the correct way to weather a miscarriage, or even the right way to Jizo. I don’t know how long I’m supposed to crochet new outfits: maybe until I don’t feel the need to, or maybe forever.

I do know that like those parents haunting Mount Koya, Brady and I will always think of that baby who never was. We’ll leave pieces of our love for him wherever we go, hoping Jizo will deliver them to wherever he is.

Complete Article HERE!

San Francisco Is At The Forefront Of Another Frontier: Care For Dying People

Volunteers make seasonal mandalas, a ritualistic symbol in Buddhism, out of flowers in the garden of the SF Zen Hospice Project’s Guest House.

by Jay Barmann

In large part due to the enormity of suffering and loss of life during the height of the AIDS epidemic here, San Francisco has emerged two decades later with new models for providing palliative and humanistic care at the end of life, one of the best of which is represented by the tiny San Francisco Zen Hospice Project in Hayes Valley. The hospice facility, in a Victorian on Page Street, grew out of the 54-year-old San Francisco Zen Center just up the street, and began in 1987 as a way for Zen Center members to care for young AIDS sufferers and provide them with a peaceful and comfortable death. (A similar organization, Maitri, sprung up around the same time near the Castro, and continues to this day.) As a new piece in the New York Times Magazine puts it, the Zen Hospice Project “originated as a kind of compassionate improvisation,” and it has served as inspiration and proving ground for Dr. B.J. Miller, a 45-year-old clinician at UCSF who has emerged as a passionate and charismatic advocate for a new kind of end-of-life care. As he tells the Times Mag, his goal, and that of the Zen Hospice Project, is to “de-pathologize death.”

Miller is unique as a spokesperson for this new type of palliative care in that he had his own brush with death early in life, and wears the scars from it very prominently. At the age of 19, while a sophomore at Princeton, he and a couple of friends went climbing on a New Jersey Transit commuter train after a night of drinking. When he reached the top of the train, an electrical current arced out of a charged wire into Miller’s metal wristwatch, sending 11,000 volts through his body and severely burning his arm and two legs. He would soon become a triple amputee, but the experience of being in the burn unit for months and talking himself back from near death profoundly changed how he saw life, especially when he went to medical school. It’s something he describes in a TED Talk from 2015 that’s garnered nearly five million views. In it he says “we are all patients,” using the definition of the word as “one who suffers,” and says he hopes to bring a design sensibility, “that is intention, and creativity, to the experience of dying.”

A year after the Brittany Maynard case gained national attention, around the time that California’s death-with-dignity law was passing through the state legislature in mid-2015, the Times first discovered Miller and the Zen Hospice Project, describing it as “a fascinating, small-scale experiment” in an age when end-of-life care typically falls to hospitals. Hospitals, however, are not programmatically designed to comfort and care for the needs of dying people — they’re designed to make people well and send them home — and families often panic in the face of death causing disruptions in the final months of a person’s life. While, as of 2015, 44.6 percent of all deaths took place in hospice settings, 40 percent of those patients only spent a few days there following stays in intensive care — meaning, as the Times put it, there’s “not enough time to take full advantage of the technique’s soothing possibilities.” Add to that figure the fact a 2013 study that found that more people are choosing to die at home, however they still are transported back and forth to hospitals three or more times in the final 90 days of their lives — time that would be better spent quietly with loved ones, or doing something pleasurable. Also, a hospice experience should free friends and family from the burden (and occasional trauma) of being caregivers, so that they can simply be there with the person who is dying.

That is the focus of the SF Zen Hospice Project’s Guest House: sensory pleasure. Patients are allowed to smoke, outdoors, if they wish. The smell of freshly baked cookies wafting through the house is a frequent one. People play musical instruments. And in a case described in detail in the new Times Mag piece, a 27-year-old man dying of mesothelioma, that care involved welcoming in the man’s throngs of friends, their Bud Light and their video games, decorating his room like a “late-20’s-dude’s room,” letting him go on one last Sunday sailing trip with his friends despite being in significant pain, and helping him plan a wedding for his best friends to be performed in the small garden next door to the Guest House. This all happened in the course of nine days, after which he would be dead. And the wedding went on anyway, and what followed, in the hospice Guest House, was a combination wedding reception-funeral, a celebration that was “mixed up, upside-down and unexpectedly joyful.” “It makes you happy for a place like the Guest House where such things can happen,” Miller tells the Times Mag, via a meeting with colleagues, “a roof where these things can coexist.”

Shortly thereafter Miller stepped down as executive director of the Zen Hospice Project in order to pursue related goals. He’s raising seed money for what he’s calling the Center for Dying and Living, a kind of design lab focused on new models for palliative care, and he’s co-writing a field guide to end-of-life care.

These days the Zen Hospice Project’s Guest House is still only six beds, two of which are reserved for UCSF patients, and the others funded through donations and sliding-scale fees from patients. In contrast to hospitals, which may charge thousands of dollars per day to house and care for a dying patient for an indeterminate period, stays at the Guest House cost the organization about $750 a day, proving that their model is not just better from a human standpoint, but also an economic one, even if traditional insurance does not tend to cover the cost of residential hospice.

It’s something the rest of the country, and the insurance industry, needs to consider, and maybe Dr. Miller will be the one to build it on a larger scale here in the Bay Area, before long.

Complete Article HERE!

A life lesson in the death of a much-loved cat

By Tim Dick

[O]ur household had a late and unwelcome entry in the death toll of 2016. It came with Rocko, who scraped in with a departure on Friday. Granted, the death of a cat is of less moment to most than that of George Michael, and he was a celebrity only to those who knew him, but our wee furry guy managed to give us life lessons without the irritation of a life coach, and company without human complications.

His first life lesson to me was early rising. His day, and therefore mine, began with regularity at 5.30am with a gentle whisker brushed across my face, then the nudge of a cold nose if that didn’t work, then a bite to the nose if all else but mild violence failed to rouse the deliverer of his morning meal.

 


 

Once the irritation has passed that the cat alarm once again chose my side of the bed, and never the other, I was up, fed, and at work before most others, getting my stuff done, and setting up an early exit at the other end of the day. Rocko was a productivity booster devoid of mumbo-jumbo: get up early, do your work, go home.

His second lesson was to demonstrate the benefits of adequate insurance, by having no insurance. Pet insurance might sound faintly ridiculous, but having spent thousands on vet bills in the last two years, and unless you’re able to save for unknown future medical catastrophes, it’s a no-brainer. We’re now breaking even on the insured dog, but were too slow for the cat. It’s compulsory for any future pet.

Rocko the cat

His third lesson was the decision in which he took no part, but which was the right thing to do, and which is the law makes impossible for people: euthanasia.

Nearing Christmas, he became bloated, carrying lymphoma in his gut, heart disease, and a tumour on his liver. We decided to put him down, but delayed it a week or so. He didn’t make it that far, forcing the decision to euthanase after he’d collapsed at home.

I knew something bad was up when, for the first time, he didn’t shred my arms while being shoved in the cat carrier.

As he lay dying on the vet table, our sadness came tinged with relief that the law is gentle enough to allow vets to put down pets when their time has come. His suffering was exceptionally short, his end far more peaceful than we force some people to endure.

After the narrowest of defeats for a euthanasia bill in South Australia in November, the next test of whether politicians will allow people the same mercy as we afford our pets comes in Victoria later this year. The Andrews government said in December it would bring legislation to allow some dying adults to die sooner than they otherwise would.

The right will be restricted to those who have the capacity to make decisions, who are at the end of their lives because of a terminal illness. Two doctors will likely have to approve the prescription of a euthanasia drug, and patients unable to take the tablet themselves could be helped by a doctor.

It strikes the right balance between the right of the dying to avoid unnecessary pain, and protecting others from an unnecessarily hasty death. It merely adds another option for those at the end of their lives, rather than being pumped with morphine to dull the pain of a disease taking its course.

It would end that fake distinction between the legal form of hastening death known as passive euthanasia (like doctors turning off a life-support machine), and the form of hastening death known as active euthanasia (a doctor-provided pill or injection that causes death) which remains illegal across Australia even with the ardent wishes of the patient.

It’s now two days after we put Rocko down, and I am using the home computer without feline keyboard interference for the first time in years. On the screen, which I can see without having to peer around a cat head, is an e-book called Damage Done, a collection of personal essays compiled by Andrew Denton’s advocacy group, Go Gently Australia.

A short way in is an extraordinary death notice, published in The Age last year, which captures the need and urgency for voluntary euthanasia far better than I can. It speaks for itself: “Andrew Ross Carswell, a skilled musician, at times tedious intellectual, much loved friend of many, valued family member, and adored husband to Carolyne, died an unnecessarily protracted, distressing death on Sunday 13 March as a result of the continuing absence of legislation that could have otherwise allowed a man of his integrity experiencing the final stages of liver cancer peaceful, timely access to euthanasia. May he finally be able to enjoy the long sleep he had been anticipating and may the anti-euthanasia lobby collectively experience the tediously prolonged, objectionable demise they are so determined to impose on everyone else.”

Complete Article HERE!

5 places: Where you can’t die

By Himanshu Yadav

[A]s you know, death is inevitable. But there are places where humans have made the laws which prohibit a person from dying. Dying or giving birth was banned for religious reasons in 5th century BC, on the Greek Island of Delos. Here are some places where dying is not allowed.

1. Itsukushima, Japan

The island of Itsukushima is considered a sacred location in Shinto belief, and is the site of the Itsukushima Shrine, an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Purity is of utmost concern in Shinto worship, and because of this, the shrine’s priests have attempted to keep the island free of the pollution of death. Immediately after the Battle of Miyajima in 1555, the victorious commander had the bodies of the fallen troops removed to the mainland, and ordered that the entire battlefield be cleansed of the blood that was spilled, to the point that buildings were scrubbed and blood-soaked soil was removed from the island. No deaths or births have been permitted near the shrine.

2. Sellia, Italy

Five hundred and thirty-seven people live in Sellia, a medieval hillside town right on the ball of the foot of Italy. In the 1960s, it was three times that, and today most residents are over 65. As a result, Sellia’s laws are also developing a medieval flavour. Last month, in response to its demographic crisis, the mayor, Davide Zicchinella, signed Ordinanza 11 which makes it expressly “forbidden to get ill within the municipality” and insists that “dying is prohibited”. Those who selfishly refuse to take the necessary steps to comply with this law by attending health checks can expect to be fined 10 Euros a year.

3. Lanjaron, Spain

Death has been prohibited in the Andalucian town of Lanjarón. The village, with 4,000 inhabitants, is to remain under this law until the government buys land for a new cemetery. The mayor who issued the edict explains that the awkward new law is his response to politicians urging him to find a quick fix for a long-lasting problem. The edict has become wildly popular amongst residents, even amongst political opponents of the mayor who issued the law, and was received with a sense of humor from most.

4. Longyearbyen, Norway

The frozen town of Longyearbyen in the Svalbard Islands of Norway has a completely different reason to ban deaths in the area. The bodies there never decompose. Due to permafrost, dead bodies were completely well preserved and did not decay. In fact, live samples of the virus of the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1917 were taken from bodies buried there. People who are gravely ill or about to die are taken to different parts of Norway.

5. Sarpourenx, France

Three settlements in southern France have prohibited death. The mayor of Le Lavandou outlawed death in 2000, after planning permission for a new cemetery was turned down due to environmental concerns. He described the new bylaw as “an absurd law to counter an absurd situation”. In 2007, Cugnaux also prohibited death, for similar reasons, and was subsequently granted permission to enlarge the local cemetery inspired by the town’s success, Sarpourenx was next to follow suit, in 2008.

Complete Article HERE!