“I’m letting her down by seeing her suffer:”

managing a cancer home death during the pandemic

What is it like to care for someone you love who is dying from advanced cancer at home during lockdown?  Kate Binnie discusses it can heighten isolation and moral distress for the family caregiver

One evening in early May during lockdown, Alan calls me almost raving with exhaustion. He’s caring for his mum, my friend Mary, who is in the final stages of stomach cancer and who has chosen to die at home. It seems to him that this last part—where she has stopped eating or drinking and is in bed hooked up to a syringe driver for pain relief and sedative medication—is going on forever. Tonight she seems irritated and upset although she is not coherent, and Alan cannot soothe her. There is a live-in carer who is helping with the heavy lifting, changing of sheets and so forth, but otherwise Alan is completely alone apart from short daily visits from the community nurses. We talk for a while and I suggest he a) tells the palliative care team what is going on and b) writes down how he feels. An hour or so later an email arrives:

In lockdown with having more than too much time on my hands, I question how in 2020 this cruelty is continuing without any other choice than to endure it or look away.

The nurses keep saying that the drugs are “keeping Mum comfortable” but I can’t see there is any way to describe what I witness to display any kind of comforta slow death is not comfortable for anyone no matter how you sugar-coat it.

Alan is right. There is no evidence to prove that sedation improves quality of life for the patient with terminal delirium/agitation and of course we have no first-hand accounts from dying patients to draw on. [1] What he describes is the shock and moral dilemma of a totally untrained and unprepared member of the public, caring for a loved one in the last phase of life and finding it hard to communicate effectively with the professionals charged with his mother’s care. All this is made worse due to physical isolation during the covid-19 pandemic.

I feel like I’m failing my Mum, but actually it’s the law that is failing us both. I have had to administer oral morphine as the carer is not allowed because it is a controlled substance. My mind has turned to helping her end it, but I know she would not want me to ruin my life by doing something that would put me in prison. The desperation to see my mum in peace is a hugely strong emotion.  It made me wonder how stressed I, or someone in a similar position, has to get before the wish to end the suffering becomes stronger than self- preservation.

I have also considered taking some of the anti-anxiety medication that has been provided for her just so I can sleep. If I found it all too much, I could drink the three bottles of morphine and I assume that would do the trick.  Being someone that has struggled with life in the past and has turned to drink and drugs as a coping mechanism I’m amazed that I am the person that has to administer and has access to all these drugs.

Alan’s complex feelings about being in charge of controlled medications do not appear to be singular.  A recent review of family caregiver experiences of managing medications for patients dying at home revealed a lack of training and support for family caregiver who worry about over or under-medicating their loved one. [2] Patient and family attitudes to anticipatory medications and issues around misuse in home deaths are under-explored in the literature. As Alan discovered—and the Wilson review corroborates—health professionals lack confidence in discussing the ethical implications of family care givers becoming medication gatekeepers at a time of extreme stress and anticipatory grief. [3] A stress that is magnified during lockdown where normal structures of support are unavailable leaving Alan feel traumatised, angry and abandoned.

How on earth is it kind to put a family pet out of its misery but somehow say it’s ok to drag dying out like this in a human? Do you ever stop being a child when it comes to watching your parent deteriorate and have no real belief that they are not suffering? Surely this is traumatic for anyone?

With the lockdown as it is, I cannot share this with people properly and have to make do with video and phone. I’m glad I’ve managed to hold on to rational thought and have not acted illegally due to immense pressure added to the temptation of having the means left right under my nose.

How many people will maintain that rationality in this lockdown, and whose fault would it be if they buckled under the strain? At the very least collective responsibility but most likely the individual would carry the blame, and all the people that can’t face up to the truth about this problem with the law will continue to live in the world they describe to themselves as ‘kind and comfortable’ without acknowledging that other people feel their loved ones are being effectively tortured and the onlookers traumatised. It would never have been mum’s choice to die this way.

In spite of current urgency in the media and within health and social care cultures during the pandemic to talk about death, dying and grief, there’s another level of this conversation about dying that we are still not having. Yes, advance directives are important so that treatment plans, place of care, and death can be discussed, and informed choices made in good time. But what about the end bit? Is the messy reality of and fallout from a home death really considered?

Specialist palliative care professionals are trained to meet the physical, emotional, and ethical needs of patients and families, but they are not resourced to be available for all home deaths, all of the time. Getting adequate home support (especially during lockdown when resources are directed elsewhere and infection risk reduces human contact) requires hugely responsive joined-up thinking, enough manpower and resources, competent relatives and excellent communication.  It only takes a few mis-timed, mis-judged, and overly stressed conversations for this fragile system to break down. And still—the body takes its sweet time. There is nothing more lonely than waiting for someone you love to die. Even experienced doctors in this position are pushed to re-appraise what amount of suffering is acceptable at the end of life. [4]

A survey from 2019 by Dignity in Dying revealed that 73% of people with a life-limiting illness with six months or less to live would choose to change the law so that they could choose an assisted death. And yet in practice conversations about this are often taboo. My mother—who died nine months ago at home from heart failure—kept asking about the possibility of assisted dying in spite of her strong spirituality and huge optimism. This was not depression or despair, but a fine mind and a loving heart wanting to maintain her dignity and protect her child (me) although I reassured her constantly that we would cope and that it would be OK. I was there when she asked the specialist about it and there was a sense of real discomfort in the room, as if she’d made a bad smell at a polite dinner party. It took the two of us, supported by a fantastic GP and heart failure nurse, working calmly and consistently with everyone involved with Mum’s care to have open conversations about dying, until we had clarity about no more hospital admissions, no more oral drugs, or other treatment.

I have over 10 years’ professional experience of being with dying so knew what to expect when Mum’s time came. For example, I understood that there was a complex and delicate relationship between the patient (Mum) the family care giver (me) and the healthcare professionals, and that the maintenance of this relational triangle was key. [5] In terms of actual dying, I recognised that the introduction of sedatives would reduce mum’s ability to communicate, and towards the end I knew what the frightening changes in Mum’s breathing meant and also that this might go on for some time until her last breath. But for most family members, watching someone die at home with all of the responsibility that this entails, is an un-familiar and un-held experience, broken only by the precious 30 minutes a day when the community nurse visits to introduce some calm, practical sense into what feels like a Kafka-esque alternate reality. [6] And remember, this was pre-lockdown. I was not alone and had my family and friends around to help me rationalise, to provide physical comfort and time to eat and sleep.

I suggest that alongside the current policy-level drive for supporting home death underpinned by evidence that this is what many people would choose, there needs to be a rapid re-appraisal of what this means for family members who are not trained or supported to do the job of extreme caring (which includes the administering of controlled drugs), and for which they are totally unprepared. [7] Funding and provision must be made within primary care, informed by the principles and practices of palliative care, to properly educate and support families through the dying process and into bereavement so that what Alan describes in the desperate last 12 hours of his mother’s life does not end in long-term mental health consequences or worse, a suicide or prison sentence. On a more subtle, emotional level we need to understand that calling NHS111 at 2am when your mother is terminally agitated is a cry for help from someone experiencing the searing pain of a breaking attachment.

The next morning, I check my phone. Mum died at 3.45am.

I call Alan who is relieved and exhausted He is facing the organisation of his mum’s cremation, the sorting out of her stuff and his life onwards in a seemingly endless lockdown. There isn’t going to be a funeral.  I suggest he try to get some sleep, talk to his GP, think about bereavement counselling, but he is in no mood for any sort of healing conversations with the professionals. I want people to know about this Kate he insists. I can’t be the only one this is happening to, can it? No, it can’t be. Around 450 people die every day in the UK from cancer, and about 25% of all deaths occur at home. What is it like for those families at the moment with huge pressure on services and hands-on community support from friends and relatives an infection risk and therefore forbidden?

The covid-19 pandemic has shone a fresh light on the importance of talking about dying, loss and grief in strange times where relationships are cruelly truncated by sudden hospitalisations, induced comas and separation from loved ones and community rites of passage. But deaths like Mary’s from cancer are happening every day, all the time.

Alan’s story shows us that what is a difficult and lonely experience at the best of times is made so much more traumatic during lockdown. Alan hopes that sharing his experience will lead to a greater awareness of just how traumatic it can be to facilitate a home death (which sounds cosy yet can be anything but). He wants to tell us about what he feels is a cruel lie that dying is kind and comfortable, and he challenges us to examine the dissonance between the reality of his lived experience and the beautiful idea of the “good death”.

Complete Article HERE!

When a Grandchild Asks, ‘Are You Going to Die?’

With the coronavirus largely affecting people who are grandparent-aged, it’s a good time to talk with children about death.

By

My granddaughter was a few months past 3 years old when she first asked the question, as we sat on the floor playing with blocks.

“Bubbe, are you going to die?”

Nobody is as blunt as a toddler. “Yes, I am going to die one day,” I said, trying to remain matter-of-fact. “But probably not for a very long time, years and years.”

A pardonable exaggeration. Bubbe (Yiddish for grandmother) was 70, but to a kid for whom 20 minutes seemed an eternity, I most likely did have a lengthy life expectancy.

My granddaughter, Bartola (a family nickname, a nod to the former Mets pitcher Bartolo Colon), was beginning to talk about the deceased ladybug she found at preschool. Make-believe games sometimes now featured a death, though a reversible one: If an imagined giant gobbled up a fleeing stuffed panda, he would just spit it out again.

So I wasn’t shocked by what a psychologist would call a developmentally appropriate question. I did mention our conversation to her parents, to be sure they agreed with the way I handled it.

Such questions resurfaced from time to time, even before something she knows as “the virus” closed her school and padlocked the local playground. Though her parents talk about hand-washing and masks in terms of keeping people safe, not preventing death, even preschoolers can pick up on the dread and disruption around them.

Long before the pandemic, it occurred to me that grandparents can play a role in shaping their beloveds’ understanding of death. The first death a child experiences may be a hamster’s, but the first human death is likely to be a grandparent’s.

With tens of thousands of young Americans now experiencing that loss — most coronavirus fatalities occur in people who are grandparent-aged — it makes sense to talk with them about a subject that’s both universal and, in our culture, largely avoided.

Parents will shoulder most of that responsibility, but “grandparents have lived a long time,” said Kia Ferrer, a certified grief counselor in Chicago and a doctoral fellow at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school in child development. “They’ve been through historical periods. They’ve lost friends.” We’re well positioned to join this conversation.

But that requires setting aside our own discomfort with the topic when talking to children. “It’s symptomatic of our society that we get nervous about what we tell them and how we’ll react,” said Susan Bluck, a developmental psychologist at the University of Florida who teaches courses on death and dying.

“But if they’re asking questions, they want to know,” she added. If we shy away, thinking a 4-year-old can’t handle the subject, “the child is learning that it’s a bad thing to ask about.”

We want kids to understand three somewhat abstract concepts, Dr. Bluck explained: that death is irreversible, that it renders living things nonfunctional, that it is universal.

We don’t need to prepare a lecture. “Only answer what they’re asking and then shut up,” advised Donna Schuurman, former executive director of The Dougy Center in Portland, Ore., which works with grieving children. “Listen for what they’re thinking. Let them digest it. The next response might be, ‘OK, let’s go play.’”

What and how much our beloveds understand depends on their ages and development, of course. Kids Bartola’s age will have trouble grasping ideas like finality.

They also tend to be awfully literal: My daughter, who knew better but spoke in the moment, once explained the Jewish custom of sitting shiva by saying that the family was going to keep their sad friend company because she had lost her father. “She lost him?” Bartola said wonderingly. “Did he blow away?” Oops, take two.

But 5- to 7-year-olds can think more abstractly. “That’s when they start understanding the cycle of life and the universality of death,” Ms. Ferrer said. And kids 8 to 12 “have an adultlike understanding,” she said, and may want to know about specifics like morgues and funeral rites.

What each age requires of us, experts say, is honesty. Euphemisms about grandpa taking a long trip, being asleep or going to a better place, create confusion. If someone died of illness, Ms. Schuurman advises naming it — “she got a sickness called kidney failure” — because kids get sick too, and we don’t want them thinking every ailment could be fatal.

Ms. Ferrer talks about a loved one’s body not working anymore, and medicine not being able to fix it. Even kindergartners know about toys that no longer work and can’t be repaired.

Nature can be helpful here. On walks, I’ve started pointing out to Bartola the flowers that bloom and then die, the leaves changing color and falling. A lifeless bird in the driveway presents an opportunity to talk about how it can’t sing or fly anymore.

Ms. Schuurman endorses small ceremonies for dead creatures. Wrap the bug or bird in a handkerchief or put it in a box; say a few words and bury it. “Let’s honor this little life,” she said. “It sets an example of reverence for life.”

Psychologists favor allowing children to attend the funerals of beloved humans, too, with proper preparation. In some families, religious beliefs will inform the way adults answer children’s questions.

The professionals I spoke with suggested some material to help grandparents with this delicate task. Ms. Ferrer is a fan of Mr. Rogers’s 1970 episode on the death of a goldfish and the 1983 “Sesame Street” episode in which Big Bird comes to understand that Mr. Hooper isn’t ever coming back.

Complete Article HERE!

The History of Mourning in Public

After a massive factory fire in 1911, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to stage a “symbolic funeral.”

Demonstration of protest and mourning for Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911

By: Livia Gershon

Days after U.S. deaths from COVID-19 surpassed 100,000, cities across the country erupted in protests against police brutality and racism, centered on the memory of George Floyd, killed by police officers in Minneapolis. Floyd was eulogized by the Reverend Al Sharpton in Minneapolis on June 4, as mourners listened in person and over livestream, and memorials to Floyd have sprung up in murals, protesters’ chants, and on social media.

In 2014, social theorist Stacy Otto looked at mourning in public and why modern taboos often encourage silence about death.

Otto begins with the horrifying fire at New York’s Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911. In 18 minutes, 146 people—mostly women and children who had been sewing garments in the factory—died. About half of them jumped to their deaths in attempting to escape the fire. Immediately, the public grasped the connection to the blossoming movement for workers’ rights. Just the previous year, the company’s seamstresses had struck for safer conditions.

By early April, seven corpses remained unclaimed, and labor activists sought to hold a public funeral. The city refused to allow it, fearing that the dead would become labor martyrs, so the unions held a symbolic funeral. On a cold, rainy day, 400,000 people gathered to march and mourn. As a show of respect, women’s garment workers in the funeral parade marched for hours without hats, umbrellas, or overshoes.

As they turned a corner and caught sight of the burned building, a contemporary source reported, the quiet of the march turned into “one long-drawn-out, heart-piercing cry, the mingling of thousands of voices, a sort of human thunder of the elemental storm.”

Otto writes that this highly emotional ritual of mourning reflected a Victorian culture. Through the nineteenth century, she writes, death was omnipresent and grieving was publicly visible. People wore jewelry made with the hair of their lost loved ones. Mourners wore visible signs for a prescribed period—a full two and a half years for a widow (though, notably, only three months for a widower).

But within a few years of the Triangle Fire, Sigmund Freud branded prolonged mourning as pathological melancholy. While Freud later changed his views, Otto writes, the idea that grief must be resolved definitively, quickly, and privately took hold in the twentieth-century United States. Increasingly, people died out of sight in a hospital. A near-miraculous decline in infant mortality made tragedy less salient as a widely shared experience.

And yet, ninety years after the Triangle fire, New York City experienced another moment of intense public grief following the attacks of September 11, 2001. People gathered spontaneously in vigils. Posters of the missing blanketed city walls, followed by memorial shrines built around the city so densely that, Otto writes, “the entire city effectively was transformed into the largest public shrine ever erected.”

Otto writes that the shared horror of 9/11 broke through modern taboos in an explosive expression of grief. Today, whether and how we publicly grieve our national tragedies reflects both how we view death and how we view our shared national life.

Complete Article HERE!

Different faiths, same pain: How to grieve a death in the coronavirus pandemic

A funeral director calls relatives of a COVID-19 victim for a virtual viewing before cremation on May 22, 2020 in New York City.

By , , and

Editor’s note: Every religion has its death rites, communal practices developed over millennia to honor the dead and console the living. Some of these rituals are unique to one faith, but more are shared – a reminder there’s a common path toward healing. Yet COVID-19 is forcing many people to grieve in isolation. We asked three faith leaders and religion scholars for their counsel on mourning during the pandemic.

Honoring the dead and comforting mourners

Rabbi David A. Schuck

Jewish mourning rituals follow the principles of “k’vod hamet,” honoring the deceased, and “nichum aveilim,” comforting mourners.

K’vod hamet includes sitting and praying with the body, ritual washing and burial within two days of death. At a Jewish funeral, family and friends take turns filling the grave with earth – a final act of love. Focus then turns to the family, who return to their home to observe shiva, seven days of intense mourning in which the community provides meals, prayer and comfort.

With these communal rituals inaccessible during the coronavirus pandemic, the trauma of losing loved ones is profound. For synagogues in the center of this pandemic, there’s collective trauma, too. I live in New York, and each week my congregants receive several death notices of longtime friends, but have no avenue to grieve together.

I’m broadcasting funerals online and coordinating shiva visits through Zoom, but technology will never approximate the comfort of a home full of people. During shiva, our community holds us in our grief until we discover ways to move forward alone again.

A family sits for a remote Zoom shiva, the traditional Jewish time of mourning, New Canaan, Connecticut, April 11, 2020.

The first funeral I officiated during the coronavirus pandemic was for a woman who would have wanted blaring trumpets to announce her death and throngs of admirers to come pay tribute. Instead, four people bid her farewell. As I grabbed earth with my fingers and dropped it onto her casket, I whispered an apology for how the world stole the dignity of her final moments.

Finding solace in the psalms of lament

Prof. Gina Hens-Piazza

In normal circumstances, the death of a loved one taxes the heart and mind with a paralyzing numbness. And, in normal circumstances, the traditional rituals of the Catholic faith – the vigil, funeral mass and graveside committal service – give mourners an occasion to honor the memory of the deceased and provide comfort.

A pandemic is not normal circumstances. The absence of these traditional practices compounds the rawness of grief.

In a recent interview with the American Catholic magazine Commonweal, Pope Francis suggested that this is a time “for inventing, for creativity” within the Church, urging Christians to find new ways to express their faith during lockdown.

A necessarily small funeral at a church outside Toulouse, France, during the coronavirus lockdown, April 2020.

I find examples of this creativity in how U.S. Catholic communities are using technology to accommodate gatherings of friends and family for consoling prayer, recitation of the rosary, online memorials and notes of remembrance. Some Catholic parishes have developed ministries of listening and consolation, with volunteers calling the bereaved or visiting online to offer support.

People are also commemorating their dead loved ones at home, lighting candles in their memory or playing their favorite hymns.

And while memorial liturgies have been postponed, families may find some comforting expressions of loss more immediately in biblical texts. The “psalms of lament” – especially Psalms 91, 121 and 130 – are prayers for help in surviving times of great pain. Such recitations provide words to narrate a pain and suffering so devastating it seems to eclipse words.

Healing begins after the homegoing

The Rev. Dr. Rodney Sadler Jr.

For African Americans of the Baptist faith, death is a communal experience. It is in this coming together of family and friends and associates and neighbors that the healing begins.

As the Rev. Dr. Peter Wherry writes in his book “Preaching Funerals,” black Baptists often call funerals “homegoing services,” denoting the fact that the believer once transitioning is in a better state than when here…they have “gone home to live with [the] Lord.”

When someone transitions, despite the clear suffering attendant to a loss, we celebrate their life. This occasions sayings like “trouble don’t last always,” or “we will see X again.”

Though well worn, these cliches seek to comfort the mourning that their loved one is not really dead, but lives on with God.

Since homegoing services can bring together family from across the world, they usually take place a week or more after death to ensure everyone may participate. There is typically a viewing for people to pay their last respects before the service, and afterwards there is usually a parade to the cemetery. Burial comes with its own mini-service.

Mourners after the funeral of the Baptist pastor James Flowers, a victim of COVID-19, at a cemetery in Landover, Maryland, April 13, 2020.

Following that is the repast – a meal expected to feed the guests and to allow for fellowship, storytelling, reuniting with distant loved ones and meeting those known only by name. This, though quite reverent, is also festive. It facilitates the resolution needed to progress after a loss.

I have presided at many such services, though not during the coronavirus pandemic. One piece of advice I would offer to those who mourn now is this: In the coming months, stay in close contact with those who also mourn. Call someone whenever you feel longing for the departed – share a sorrow, a song, a funny anecdote or a recollection of their quirks.

Share your grief. When you feel the urge to cry, let it out. Emotions are best handled not with reason, but by allowing yourself the freedom to feel them fully. And remember, the nadir of your grief is not a curse – it is an indication of how deeply you loved.

Complete Article HERE!

Mexican families struggle to send virus victims back home

By CLAUDIA TORRENS, GISELA SALOMON, and PETER PRENGAMAN

When Crescencio Flores died of coronavirus in New York, his parents back in Mexico asked for one thing: that their son be sent home for burial.

The 56-year-old construction worker had been in the United States for 20 years, regularly sending money to his parents but never going home. Since he died in April, Flores’ brother has been working with American and Mexican authorities to have the body transported to the town of Huehuepiaxtla in the state of Puebla.

So far, his efforts have been in vain. His brother’s embalmed remains are still in a U.S. funeral home.

“I am trying to do this because my parents, 85 and 87 years old, live there,” Francisco Flores said. “They are rooted in their customs. They want a Christian burial for the remains of their son.”

The family’s situation is common. More than a thousand Mexican immigrants have died of the virus in the U.S., according to the Mexican government, and many of their families are struggling to bring dead loved ones home.

Returning a body to another country is never easy, but the coronavirus has added extra bureaucracy and costs, all at a time when many Mexicans have lost jobs in construction, retail and restaurants.

For grieving loved ones on both sides of the border, the challenges are many: overwhelmed funeral homes, delays in paperwork because government offices are not working at full capacity and limited flights.

The process has become so difficult that the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles is encouraging cremation instead of repatriation and burial, said Felipe Carrera, a consular official.

“In a situation like this, we are encouraging our community to have an open mind,” Carrera said, explaining that cremation allows a loved one to return to Mexico in a week or 10 days. He declined to say how long it takes to return bodies. Family members who have opted for cremation say sending ashes home takes several weeks to months.

Cremation is a hard sell for many Mexicans, who are by far the largest immigrant group in America and deeply rooted in Catholicism. They are fiercely proud of their homeland despite problems that pushed them to emigrate, and they carry with them a constant hope to return one day, at the very least upon death.

And because many of them — particularly those who are in the U.S. illegally — have not been home in decades, returning in death is that much more important to their families.

For Mexican Catholics, having the body of a deceased relative is essential to giving them a “good death,” said Dr. Kristin Norget, an anthopology professor at McGill University in Montreal.

“Wakes are really important events in which the person is there, the casket is open, people go and bid that person farewell. They touch them. They kiss them,” Norget said. “It’s that tactile relationship with the body, representing the person.”

For over a month, the family of Javier Morales, 48, and brother Martin Morales, 39, who both died in New Jersey during the first week of April, tried to send the bodies to Santa Catarina Yosonotú, a village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The brothers had both left the village as teenagers, and family wanted to bury them there.

But after complying with U.S. and Mexican regulations, relatives said they hit roadblocks with health officials in Oaxaca. They eventually gave up and had the brothers created. Now they are working to have the ashes sent back, a process they estimate will take several weeks.

Between the lengthy stay in a funeral home and cremation, the family spent more than $12,000.

“It’s really sad,” said Rogelio Martin, a cousin who was close to the brothers. “We wanted to send them home, but it wasn’t possible.”

Felix Pinzón’s family went through a similar process. Pinzón wanted to send the body of his half-brother, 45-year-old Basilio Juarez, a construction worker, back to Cuautla, a city in the state of Morelos. The consulate warned him that the effort would be fraught, he said.

Juarez’s wife and two children back in Mexico “wanted to see the body,” Pinzón said. “They asked me to bring it back. At first, my niece did not understand that it was not possible. She did not want to accept it.”

Even though he chose cremation, Pinzón won’t be able to send the ashes back any time soon. The cremation cost $2,100, which he had to put on a credit card because as a construction worker he has been out of a job for more than two months.

When Marta Ramos, 63, died in New York, daughter Juanita Ramos, who lives in Bakersfield, California, hoped to fulfill her mom’s last wish, to be buried in Mexico. Since returning her mom’s body would be difficult, Ramos looked into cremation, figuring she could at least send the remains home quickly and have them buried there.

But the funeral home told her that a backlog of bodies meant that her mom would not be cremated for a month. Feeling that was too long to wait, and worried that her mom’s body could be lost, Ramos decided to have her mother buried at a cemetery in New York. Her aunt, Agustina Ramos, 55, died just ahead of her mother and had already been buried there.

For the Flores family, the long wait for Crescencio’s body has been painful, said Gerardo Flores, his oldest brother, who is in Mexico. But relatives feel strongly about bringing him home.

“We believe that in the moment my brother is buried, even as painful as it will be, in this sad moment, it will be the last chapter. We will turn the page. My parents will know where their son is,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!