Not all end-of-life decisions are covered in a will.

Here’s what else you need

By Sarah O’Brien

With the number of deaths from the coronavirus continuing to mount, your own mortality may be more on your mind than usual.

In fact, The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a rise in estate planning, according to certified financial planner Stacy Francis, president and CEO of Francis Financial.

Pandemic or not, though, part of that contemplation should include making a plan for when you die, experts say. That is, you should give thought to what would happen to your home, your bank accounts and belongings, as well as, perhaps, your dependents.

That planning should start with a will. If you pass away without one — called dying intestate — a state court generally decides who gets your assets and, if you have children, who will care for them.

“In every jurisdiction, if there isn’t a valid will, assets will pass on to your heirs by law, who may or may not be who you would have provided for in a will,” said Samantha Weyrauch Davis, an estate planning attorney and director with the law firm Hall Estill in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It also lets you name a guardian for children.”

However, a will is just one piece of an “estate plan.” An estate just refers to what you own — your financial accounts, possessions and any real estate. Putting a plan in place for those assets helps ensure that upon your death, your wishes are carried out and that family squabbles don’t evolve into destroyed relationships.

In other words, it’s partly about making things easier for your loved ones during an already difficult time.

Here’s what else you should consider if you want to prepare.

Limitations of a will

A will is a document that lets you relay who gets what when you pass away. You can get as specific as you want (you leave a certain family heirloom to a particular person) or keep it more general (you want your surviving spouse to get everything).

However, there are some assets that pass outside of the will, including retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts, as well as life insurance policies.

This means the person named as a beneficiary on those accounts will generally receive the money no matter what your will says. Be aware that 401(k) plans require your current spouse to be the beneficiary unless they legally agree otherwise.

Regular bank accounts, too, can have beneficiaries listed on a payable-on-death form, which your bank can supply.

If no beneficiary is listed on those non-will items or that person has already passed away (and there is no contingent beneficiary listed), the assets automatically go into probate. That’s the process by which all of your debt is paid off and the remaining assets are distributed to heirs. This can last several months to a year or more, depending on state laws and the complexity of your estate.

If you own a home, be sure to find out how it should be titled to ensure it ends up with the person (or people) you intend, because applicable laws can vary from state to state. Moreover, there can be other considerations when it comes to how a house is titled, including protection from potential creditors or for tax reasons when the home is sold.

A big decision

As part of the will-making process, you’ll need to pick an executor of your will (sometimes called a personal representative).

This can be a big job, experts say. Things such as liquidating accounts, ensuring your assets go to the proper beneficiaries, paying any debts not discharged (i.e., taxes owed to the IRS), and even selling your home could be among the duties undertaken by the executor.

In other words, just because you’ve known your best friend since elementary school doesn’t mean handling the challenge of being an executor is up their alley.

Where to get a will

To prepare a will, you can turn to an estate planning attorney in your local area — to ensure familiarity with state laws — or use an online option. However, be aware that not all web-based alternatives will necessarily reflect the specifics of your state’s law.

“There’s risk in doing it that way,” Davis said. “Those forms or software may not be compliant with your local law, so look at the fine print.”

If an online option ends up being appropriate for your situation, you may be able to find a form to download for free. Software will-making options can run about $60 or more, depending on what else is included. Setting up an estate plan with an attorney could run several hundred dollars to more than $1,000, depending on the complexity of your situation.

Also, you’ll need to have a witness and/or notary sign it and make the document official, depending on the state where you live. The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel’s website offers a guide to laws and accommodations in every state if in-person meetings are not permitted due to the pandemic.

Other key documents

Typically, estate planning also includes preparing a few other legal documents. This includes an advance health-care directive, also known as a living will.

This document outlines your wishes if you become incapacitated due to illness or injury.

Say you are on life support. Instead of a loved one making the agonizing decision whether to end all life-saving measures, your wishes would be specified in a legal record.

I tell my clients it’s really important to carefully consider the individuals you name.
Samantha Weyrauch Davis
Estate planning attorney and director with Hall Estill

It’s also worth assigning powers of attorney. If you become incapacitated, the people to whom you grant powers of attorney will handle your medical and financial affairs if you cannot.

Often, the person who is given this responsibility when it comes to your health care is different from whom you would name to handle your financial affairs.

As with choosing an executor, make sure whoever you hand the financial reins to is trustworthy and smart.

“I tell my clients it’s really important to carefully consider the individuals you name,” Davis said. “You want to make sure they have the ability, skill set, time and desire to make such decisions and do these sorts of things.”

Make a master list

While it can be hard to imagine your own death, picture your family having to search through drawers for your original will, documents regarding your bank accounts and other assets, and maybe even your Social Security number.

The best way to avoid forcing them to deal with that task on top of mourning is to leave an organized list of information that the will’s executor will need to settle your estate, experts say. Be sure this includes passwords so your online accounts can be accessed.

Consider a trust

If you want your kids to receive money but don’t want to give a young adult — or one prone to poor money management — unfettered access to a sudden windfall, you can consider creating a trust to be the beneficiary of a particular asset.

A trust holds assets on behalf of your beneficiary or beneficiaries, and is a legal entity dictated by the documents creating it. If you go that route, the assets go into the trust instead of directly to your heirs. They can only receive money according to how (or when) you’ve stipulated in the trust documents.

The average cost to set up a trust using an attorney ranges from $1,000 to $1,500 for an individual and $1,200 to $1,500 for a couple, according to LegalZoom.com. Doing it yourself with online software could run at least several hundreds of dollars.

Complete Article HERE!

Rethinking Black Friday to include end-of-life conversations

By L.S. Dugdale

With more than 250,000 Americans killed by Covid-19, it’s time to think about reimagining Black Friday.

Police officers in Philadelphia gave the Friday after Thanksgiving its dark name in 1966 as zealous shoppers mobbed streets and sidewalks. But it quickly came to mean a day when business owners could expect their accounts to be in the black, as opposed to in the red.

If Black Friday celebrates American consumers spending in order to live well, we could also adopt it as a day to consider what it means to die well. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus ostensibly put it, “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.”

As a physician, I’ve met countless patients who were ill-prepared for death. The “trajectories of decline” described by geriatrician Joann Lynn make it easy not to prepare. Some people live for years with chronic illnesses but feel no need to ponder their mortality. Hospital tune-ups enable them to live seemingly forever. Others enjoy relative health until being caught off guard by a deadly illness. Still others live good long lives only to succumb to dementia, which robs them of their ability to plan.

We are habituated to living with hope for intervention or cure. To accept the impossibility of treatment is to admit defeat, which most people are loathe to do.

How and where we die underscores how unprepared we are. Most Americans have never had end-of-life conversations or formalized their wishes for medical treatments at the end of life. Despite existing in some form since the 1970s, only 37% of Americans report having formalized their wishes through an advance directive. What’s more, most Americans say they want to die at home, yet roughly 60 percent die in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. There’s no question that institutional care can be a lifesaver for families not equipped to care for their loved ones at home.

If we are to realize the ideal of death at home surrounded by family, we’ve got work to do. Making a home death possible requires difficult decisions — in end-of-life conversations with family members and health care professionals — about which treatments and hospitalizations to forgo, whether homes can accommodate hospital beds, and who will do the hard work of caring for the dying.

That’s where taking a new approach to Black Friday comes in. On that day, families could pivot from giving thanks to giving thought to ending well. A simple prompt for starting end-of-life conversations might be, “Mom, Dad, if you become so sick that you can’t speak for yourself, who would you want to make medical decisions on your behalf?” And the natural follow-up would be, “Help me know how to advocate for you. Let’s talk about the benefits and burdens of particular medical interventions.” Conversation can then move to broader community-based issues such as funeral, burial, and religious or existential concerns.

It’s not the easiest conversation to have, but the payoff can be worth the effort. And since Black Friday comes every year, it’s a discussion that can build on itself over time.

A reimagined Black Friday could help Americans formalize their wishes for care at the end of life. Advance care planning documents allow people to identify health care proxies to make medical decisions if they lose decision-making capacity. Living wills specify an individual’s choice to have — or not have — cardiac resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, and other invasive procedures.

To be fair, there are good reasons why some people don’t want to prepare for death. Many of my patients fear that talk of death might “jinx” them. Some are reluctant to put their wishes in writing because they worry that doctors will give up on them. Others are concerned they’ll change their minds down the road but be too sick to say so. These concerns are real, but the potential exists for much greater harm by ignoring finitude entirely.

Reflecting on death has the potential to bring into relief that which matters most, and it can empower us to change how we live for the better. Ask anyone who is fully engaged in the process of dying. When our days are numbered, we value our relationships differently. We spend our time and money differently. We ponder life’s mysteries.

In ordinary times, we fool ourselves into thinking that the preparation for death can wait. But these are not ordinary times. When I was caring for hospitalized Covid patients this past Spring in New York City, they were frequently astonished that they had become so sick. They had not understood, as did Epicurus, that the art of dying is wrapped up in the art of living. But the pandemic has taught us that sickness and death do not happen only to other people. All of us must live with a view to our finitude.

This Black Friday, after the feasting has subsided and before the shopping begins, take a few minutes to talk with those you love about how to die well. Be frank about end-of-life wishes. Complete and sign documents.

At the same time, it also makes sense to talk about living. If Epicurus is right, to die well one must live well. And attending to what it means to live well — in light of the precarity of life — can make all the difference.

Complete Article HERE!

Women handling the dead

— More female morticians in South Korea as taboo fades

By ,

A growing number of South Korean women are training to be morticians, a field from which they had long been excluded, amid changing views on gender roles and a rising preference for women’s bodies to be handled by women.

With recent deaths of female celebrities and prominent figures, as well as growing scrutiny of sex crimes against women, gender sensitivity is changing the way families of the deceased bid farewell to their grandmothers, mothers and daughters.

“I felt uncomfortable when my classmates of a different sex touched my body, even when I was fully dressed,” said Park Se-jung, 19, who is in her second year of funeral directing studies. “I sure wouldn’t want them to touch, wash and dress my naked body even if I were dead. I am determined I should be the one bidding those women a proper farewell.”

The trend comes amid growing calls for crackdowns of sexual violence against women, including a rash of hidden-camera crimes, “revenge porn”, and online networks that blackmailed women and girls into sharing sexual and sometimes violent images of themselves.

In the early 2000s, about a third of mortician students in the country were women, but today they make up around 60% of the class, said Lee Jong-woo, a professor of embalming at Eulji University in Seongnam near Seoul.

“With Confucian ideology, death was considered a taboo in South Korea in the past, and had negative perceptions of whether women could handle such work, but the perception has been changing,” Lee said.

YOUNG DEATHS

Funeral companies say they have been receiving more requests for female morticians.

“Most of the deaths of young people are suicides, and the families of the bereaved, especially if it was suicide and a woman, feel more comfortable if we handle the body,” said Park Bo-ram, a funeral director of seven years.

“I recall a teenaged student, an only child … had committed suicide,” Park said. “Washing and dressing the body, I saw many signs of self-injury on her thigh, but none of her family knew.”

Park recalls that the girl’s parents were immensely grateful, even in the midst of sadness, that a female mortician handled their daughter’s body.

South Korea’s suicide rate is the highest in the developed world: 24.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019, compared with an OECD average of 11.3. That year, it was the No. 1 cause of death among teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s.

More than 4,000 women committed suicide in 2019, including young female K-pop artists Koo Hara and Sulli.

In 2016, a quarter of the country’s 6,200 funeral directors were women, and with more than 130,000 girls and women dying each year, requests for female funeral directors are expected to rise further, Korea Employment Information Service said.

Yet some resistance to women in the mortuary business remains.

Shin Hwa-jin, 21, who plans to work at a funeral home after graduation, said she was shocked to hear a female mortician relate a conversation with her mother-in-law.

“Her mother-in-law asked her: ‘How dare you think of cooking my meals with the hands that touched a dead body?’” she said.

Complete Article HERE!

Living With Ghosts

By Mary O’Connor

“What’s your name?”
“Mary.”
“Mary what?
“O’Connor.”
“From where?”
“From here.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m your daughter.”
“No, you’re not. What’s your name? . . .”
“We should get him a tape recorder.”
“He’s human. He needs a human voice.”
“But his is almost gone.”
“That doesn’t matter.”

Staring into the face of an undead ghost in a green tweed jacket and flat-cap over toast and cornflakes is unnerving at the best of times; and traumatic at the worst. Especially when that ghost is your father. And the cornflakes have gone soggy.

But unlike gothic novels or films where ghosts happily offer themselves up as symbols of repressed memories, traces of crimes against innocents, and (usually) murderous pasts, this ghost has never crossed over into the realm of the metaphorical. Inconveniently, it decides to remain very, very human. Actually, that depends on your definition of human.

Even more inconvenient is the fact that this ghost refuses to follow the script and disintegrate with the morning light. Instead, it prefers to haunt the modern comforts of an electric armchair; swapping dreary castles for daytime television and crumbling dungeons for motorised beds.

And that’s just the start of my day living with a living ghost. Or Alzheimer’s as it’s otherwise known. Or, more correctly, my father’s Alzheimer’s.

Living with Alzheimer’s, both as a carer and sufferer, is a growing phenomenon in the UK. Often confused with dementia, Alzheimer’s refers to a physical disease which affects the brain while dementia is simply a term for a number of symptoms associated with the progressive decline of brain function. These symptoms can include memory loss, difficulty with thinking and problem solving, and challenges with language and perception. There are over 400 types of dementia—with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia as the most common forms. According to the Alzheimer’s Society of the UK, dementia is now the leading cause of death in the UK with someone developing it every three minutes. Alzheimer’s is classified as a “life-limiting” illness according to the NHS, but sufferers can live for many years after the initial diagnosis, depending on the progression of the disease. Divided into three stages, early, middle, and late, the symptoms of Alzheimer’s gradually become more severe as the disease progresses and more parts of the brain are affected.

In the early stages, having Alzheimer’s as a companion wasn’t too unpleasant; the emptiness hadn’t fully taken over and I had more human than spectre to talk to. I could still pretend to have a normal(ish) life with only the minor inconvenience of a (mostly) present parent, despite the occasional wandering through doors unexpectedly and lunatic outbursts. The human part kept his smiling eyes, watching the world orbit around the sweat-stained tea-pot and apple tart. But the Alzheimer’s relentless erasure of my father left a morbid spectre sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.

In the middle stages, my father’s personality and identity dropped away like discarded clothes. His manner of speech was the first to surrender to the disease. Forgetting words rapidly metamorphosised into hours of repetitive questioning, as if seeking to ground himself in concrete knowledge of the now while his fingers grabbed vainly at a slipping sense of reality. The final stages of the disease witnessed his childish cries for help without knowing what or who he wanted.

“Gone childish” is an archaic term that was once used to describe dementia and Alzheimer’s sufferers before these diseases were better understood. Capturing the vulnerability these diseases inflict on their sufferers, the phrase sums up the centrality of memory to the human experience. If our identities are formed by our experiences, and these experiences are stored in our memories, shaping who we are and how we make decisions, what can we do when we have no memory? Without a roadmap of precedence, how can you plan for the future or know yourself without knowing how you got to where you are now? Like children, Alzheimer’s sufferers lose a sense of the past and futurity. They become transfixed in the present like ghosts trapped in limbo.

The last stages of my father’s disease cemented his role in the family home as the new phantasm. Like a well-behaved, conventional ghost he punctuated our nights with night-walking, ghoulish shrieks, hallucinations, and knocking on doors at all hours while the day-time witnessed empty eyes peering out from behind the safety of a purple blanket. Innocent of blame, our ghost blocked our escape from the house. For fear of hurting himself, we couldn’t leave him alone but grew resentful for being held hostage by a madman with no memory or awareness of his own actions.

After being stripped of memory and identity, my father’s Alzheimer’s left a shell of body; a ghastly reminder of the person that had once inhabited it. Bereft of the markers of humanity, this animated mannequin asked, “What makes up a human? Is it the mind? Or the body? And what happens when you take one from the other?”

Researchers have identified the cause of Alzheimer’s as the build-up of abnormal structures in the brain called ‘plaques’ or ‘tangles’. These structures cause damage to brain cells and can block neuro-transmitters, preventing cells from communicating with each other. Over time, parts of the brain begin to shrink with the memory areas most commonly affected first. Why these build-ups occur or what triggers them is not yet understood, but researchers now know that it begins many years before symptoms appear.

Ancient Roman and Greek philosophers associated the symptoms dementia with the ageing process. However, it was not until 1901 when the German psychiatrist, Alois Alzheimer, identified the first case of the disease. Medical researchers during the twentieth century began to realise that the symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer’s were not a normal part of ageing and quickly adopted the name of Alzheimer’s disease to describe the pattern of symptoms relating to this type of neurological degeneration.

No physical markers like the puckered lines of surgery scars or the uneven hobble of a game leg signposted my father’s declining health. But the slow creep of this living death brought on grief long before his body was expected to fail. Without the essence of the person, all of their quirks and curiosities, which once animated a familiar body, how do you grieve for someone’s loss before they have died? And how do you cope with the guilt?

This type of grief is usually referred to as anticipatory grief. It is a type of grief that is experienced prior to death or a significant loss. Typically, it occurs when a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal or life-threatening illness, but it can also happen in the face of a personal diagnosis. However, it can often trigger feelings of guilt because people feel ashamed for grieving their loved one’s death before they are dead.

With my father’s memory gone, my connection with him was broken. During the later stages of the disease he forgot my name and my existence. Fading from my life, his body remained as a perverse mockery of the person that had once inhabited it. Now all that haunts me are the memories of peering over barley stalks before the autumn harvests at a grizzled old farmer in a flat cap and tweed jacket, a hand reaching out to help guide the walk home.

Complete Article HERE!

‘I don’t want to compete with this disease’

— What physician-assisted death is like for a family

Margaret Handley wrote the essay so her children understood their grandmother’s experience and to help others learn about physician-assisted dying.

By Meghan Holohan

It started with weakness and pain when walking. Then Jacqueline Shapiro had a deep lesion on her leg before she broke it, oddly, and doctors struggled to set it. The pain medications caused her to have bad reactions and her energy waned. Eventually doctors learned that the 85-year-old had lymphoma. She underwent three grueling months of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but it only left her exhausted and feeling worse.

“It can cause delusions and a sort of psychosis. And it just was horrible, just horrible. And it was really hard for her to get her pain stabilized,” Margaret Handley, her daughter who is an epidemiologist living in the San Fransisco Bay area, told TODAY. “If you looked at those episodes medically, they were going well, but it was just part of an escalating discomfort for her. She increasingly felt like ‘I don’t think this is a good place for me to be.’”

Shapiro worried about spending the rest of her life undergoing painful treatments that might not even cure her cancer.

“She didn’t want to be lying there dwindling while people take care of her,” Handley said.

When a palliative care doctor visited Shapiro to discuss her pain, they started talking about California’s End of Life Act. People with terminal illnesses, who meet a certain criteria, can request drugs to aid dying, according to the California Department of Public Health. Similar legislation exists in eight other states. Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit working to improve patient rights and individual choice at the end of life, recently reported that Brittany Maynard’s advocacy of “death with dignity” inspired the passage of medical aid dying laws in Washington, D.C, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey and Maine.

Shapiro met those requirements. Hearing about the option of medically assisted death seemed to lessen her burden.

Handley shared more about her mother’s death in an article in the Annals of Family Medicine.

“She told me right away after the doctor left, ‘That’s what I’m going to do — physician-assisted dying. I don’t want to compete with this disease — that’s not what I want to do with the rest of my life,’” she wrote. “I sat with her and my sadness and then, over the next few days, we set upon the logistics to put her right-to-choose into motion.”

While her oncologist thought there was a possibility that the cancer could go into remission, Shapiro wasn’t sure if she could endure more treatment. Then she spoke with a doctor from the physician-assisted dying group, who described how the process works. He noted that many people request the drugs but don’t ultimately go through with it. Handley felt impressed by how all three doctors acted when advising her mother.

“I don’t think that (the doctors’ input) affected her decision,” Handley said. “But it was also much better that she heard them and witnessed them doing their work and felt like she was part of the narrative, not outside of it.”

Shapiro loved nature and the forest. As a young woman, she spent her summers at Yosemite and lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains until age made a remote living situation a little tougher. She had a garden with plants from the forest and an ornery cat name, Darcy, named after Mr. Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice.” While she was sick, she worried about his well-being. Making the decision for physician-assisted death put her mind at ease about what would happen to her pet, her plants and her life. This allowed Shapiro to say goodbye to her family the way she wanted, watching nature shows and cat videos, enjoying one another’s company.

“We were lucky to know it was coming and to be able to say let’s have these moments together,” Handley said.

Handley and her brother sat with their mother, with Darcy on her lap. As Handley read the poem, “Evening” by Rainer Maria Rilke, her mom passed away.

“It was a really powerful experience to be able to sit with someone who is making this choice,” Handley said. “That was a good experience for us to share.”

Handley said she wrote the essay because she felt there were so few personal stories about what physician-assisted death is really like. She also hoped that by sharing the experience her three children would also better understand her mom’s choice and experience.

“I wanted to write down what happened with my mom’s decision-making so that they would understand,” she said. “I thought this was just adding a little more real personal experience of what (physician-assisted death) looks like in one given situation.”

Complete Article HERE!

Sacred Songs for the Dead

Women had few powers in Ancient Greece – except in death.

The picture of mourning: the Lamentation of Achilles. Vase painting, Greece, c.575/550 BC.

By Patricia Lundy

Demonstrating grief through wailing and song has long been a historic, sacred part of honouring and remembering the dead. From the Chinese to the Assyrians, Irish and Ancient Greeks, oral rituals of outward mourning were a responsibility that fell (and continue to fall) to women.

In Ancient Greece, while women may have lacked political and social freedom, the realm of mourning belonged to them. Their role in remembering the dead granted them their only position of power in a society where they possessed no autonomy. Yet this power was also believed to supersede mortal constraints, giving women the ability to do something that men could not.

The Greek funeral was composed of three parts: the prothesis, or preparation and laying out of the body; the ekphora, or transportation to the place of burial; and the burial of the body or the entombment of cremated remains. It was during the prothesis that the women began their ritual of lament. First, they cleansed the corpse, anointed it and decorated it with aromatic garlands as it lay atop its kline (bier). Once the body was prepared, scores of female relatives gathered around it to beat their breasts and tear the hair from their scalps as they sang funeral songs. They wished to communicate the awful weight of their grief in order to satisfy the dead, whom they believed could hear and judge their cries. In contrast, the men kept their distance to salute the dead, physically signifying their separation from the realm that belonged to women. Some art from the Geometric period suggests they may have joined the female mourners in writhing to the lament, though they were spared from the excruciating gesture of ripping out their hair.

The funeral song served as an extension of the physical pain women inflicted upon themselves during the prothesis. Its purpose was to communicate a cry of uncontrollable pain, a hysteric melody that was believed to be rooted in feminine emotions; thus, only women could be the vessels for this pain. In the depths of their sorrow and self-torture, female mourners in the Geometric period would have sung a melody from one of the four major funeral song categories: threnos, epikedeion, ialemos or goos. These songs were personal and meaningful to the bereaved. In her book Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (1979), which, through the art they have left behind, analyses how the Ancient Greeks viewed death, Emily Vermeule writes that goos was the most intense kind of funeral song. It might have been reserved for lovers or close family members, as its theme was centred on the relationship between two lives shared, the one now lost.

Leading the funeral lament was the song leader, also called the eksarkhos gooio, or the chief mourner. In early times, she was a professional mourner, but could also be the mother or close female relative of the dead. The song leader served as the liaison between those who mourned and those who had passed, guiding the bereaved through the proper course of remembrance in order to mollify the dead. As she led the female mourners in lament, she was careful to cradle the head of the corpse. Touch was necessary in order to open the ears of the dead. But once the ears were opened, the living women had to tread carefully. Not only could the dead hear funeral laments sung for them during the prothesis, they could also determine whether the presence of the living was good or malevolent. This is the reason, writes Robert Garland in The Greek Way of Death (1985), that Odysseus is advised against participating in Ajax’s funeral. Mourners entrusted their song leader with the responsibility of appeasing the dead to ensure their smooth transition into the spirit world.

As time went on, the role of female song leader would serve as the predecessor to an occult offshoot, the goes, who used song as a vehicle to transcend mortal constraints. Under the goes, funeral songs were no longer songs: they were spells, used to lure the dead back to earth. The goes was akin to a witch, due to her supernatural powers; she had even mastered the art of necromancy and could temporarily bring corpses back to life. Yet, even before the goes and the eksarkhos gooio, women in Ancient Greece had ties to the occult side of death. If the eksarkhos gooio was the mother of this occult tradition and the goes the maiden, the egkhystristriai was the crone. Before the classical period, the egkhystristriai was believed to have officiated at the burial of the body. Like an occult high priestess, her powers stemmed from the ritual of making blood sacrifices to the dead. Later, these sacrifices turned into the more modest ritual of offering libations, exemplified as Antigone pours offerings over her brother Polyneikes after she performs rites over his body.

By the fifth century BC mourning rituals had become less elaborate and deliberately reduced the importance of the female role. The number of female lamenters who surrounded the dead dwindled from scores of close relatives to only a few. Laments became more antiphonal and grew to involve men. Gestures such as tearing the hair were replaced by the symbolic gesture of cutting the hair short. These later changes suggest that the Greeks believed their dead were in less need of appeasement, eradicating the need for a song leader with supernatural inclinations. But they attempted to diminish the role that women had in the death process, thus dismantling a space in which women held dominance. In the classical period, women were relegated to the background of the funerary ritual, writes Maria Serena Mirto in Death in the Greek World (2012), because men feared it would threaten social cohesion and their desire for death to be pro patria, for one’s country. This is evident from Greek state funeral records, such as that in Kerameikos, the Athens cemetery, in which female lamenters are only briefly mentioned, suddenly peripheral to the ritual they had previously orchestrated.

The trend of removing women from the centre of death is not exclusive to Ancient Greece. While some cultures, such as the Assyrians, fought to preserve the role of female lamenters, others have been unable to do so.As Richard Fitzpatrick reported in the Irish Examiner in 2016, in Ireland, the tradition of female keeners, who wail in grief, began to die out in the mid-20th century. In the United States, male funeral directors replaced the long-standing tradition of female layers-out. Women were left behind, as the funeral directors attempted and succeeded at monetising the death industry, a legacy that continues to haunt the recently bereaved, who must deal with costly funeral arrangements.

Today, however, we find ourselves in the midst of a death renaissance, spearheaded by morticians, activists and artisans alike – a majority of whom are women. Ancient mourning rituals and traditions are resurging. Perhaps the role of the female song leader as a spiritual caster of spells will find its way back, too.

Complete Article HERE!

Why Arun Shourie concludes that the ultimate preparation for death is simply love

The former Union minister and veteran journalist’s latest book, ‘Preparing for Death’, is both a contemplation of and an anthology on death

by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Arun Shourie is an unflinching seeker. He has an exemplary ability to face the toughest questions. After a bracing meditation on the problem of suffering in Does He Know a Mother’s Heart (2011), Shourie now turns to Preparing for Death. There used to be a joke that the purpose of literature is to prepare you for the good life, while the purpose of philosophy is to prepare you for the good death. But it is hard to understand our own extinction. Broadly speaking, two diametrically opposite views are invoked to reconcile us to death. One is that we don’t really die; in some form, through an incorporeal soul or something, we continue to exist. The other unflinchingly accepts that we just are evanescent matter and nothing else. Both approaches address the question of dying by simply saying “there is nothing to it.” There is something to this strategy, but it cannot make sense of the significance of life. It seems we can either make sense of life or of death, but not of both.

Shourie’s book takes a brilliantly different pathway. The book has three distinct themes. The first, the most powerful and meditative section of the book is not so much about death as the process of dying. He documents with detail, “great souls” experiencing the often painful dissolution of their own body — the Buddha, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vinoba Bhave, and, as a cameo, Kasturba. All of them give lie to Sigmund Freud’s dictum that no one can contemplate their own death. But what emerges from these accounts is not so much the conclusion that they all faced death unflinchingly; most of them have a premonition. It is also not about capturing the moment where the good death is leaving the world calmly. It is rather what the suffering body does to consciousness, all the memories and hard decisions it forces on us.

But the relationship between the body and consciousness goes in two different directions at once. On the one hand this suffering is productive: consciousness works through this pain. On the other hand, even the most exalted soul does not escape the utter abjection of the body. The most poignant moment in this section is not the calm and plenitude with which these exalted souls face death; it is the moments where even the most powerful souls are reduced to abjection by the constraints of the body. The only one rare occasion where Ramana Maharshi ever loses his cool is in his now utter dependence on others for most basic bodily functions. The problem of dying is not that you cannot ignore the body; it is that the body does not ignore you.

The second theme of the book is to take a sharp scalpel to false comforters of all religions and philosophies that promise the everlasting soul, or the preservation of bodies only to subject them to torment in hell. This metaphysical baggage makes dealing with death harder and is a total distraction. This section is less generous in its interpretive sympathies. The third theme of the book, interspersed in various parts, is about the discipline of dealing with your own body as it is in the process of dying. The book impressively marshals a variety of sources, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its incredible imaginative exercises that make you take in the whole of existence, to Jain sources of Sallekhana, and various meditative techniques to inculcate a certain kind of mindfulness. But mostly one gets the sense that the ultimate preparation for death is simply love, something that can endow the evanescent moment with significance.

But this is a seeker’s book. It is in parts profound probing, honest but not dogmatic. Its immense value comes from the fact that the book is both a book and an anthology on death, with extracts from not just the words of those experiencing the process of dying, but an astonishing range of sources: from Fernando Pessoa to Michel de Montaigne, from yoga to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. For the politically inclined, there is an ambivalently revealing account of the Prime Minister’s visit to Shourie while he was in the ICU. All throughout, the book is laced with judiciously selected poetry: the startling moment where Gandhi recites the Urdu couplet to Manu: Hai baha- e-bagh-e duniya chand roz/ Dekh lo iska tamasha chand roz, a register you might associate more with Guru Dutt than Gandhi. There is a lot of Kabir, of Basho poetry and haikus. One stunning one: Circling higher and higher/At last the hawk pulls its shadow/From the world.

This haiku caught my attention because I happened to be reading a stunning essay by Arindam Chakrabarti at the same time, “Dream, Death and Death Within A Dream”, in Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe (2018), a volume edited by Sudhir Kakar and Gunter Blamberger, that reads as a great philosophical complement to this one. That volume has a powerful piece by another brilliant philosopher, Jonardan Ganeri, on illusions of immortality that deals with a source Shourie cites at length: Pessoa. Chakrabarti’s essay ends with the insight of Yoga Vashishtha: To be born is to have been dead once and to be due to die again. Shourie is perhaps right: Can we really unravel what it means for the hawk to pull its shadow from the world? Does the shadow reappear if it flies lower?

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