After Death Care – Page 48 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

December 28, 2017December 28, 2017

The final act of love: reclaiming the rites of modern death

As people search for ways to reclaim death from the funeral industry, a home vigil can help with the grieving process

‘‘Death loses its power over us when faced matter of factly.”

[P]ete Thorpe was a wiry, strong and vital man. He loved his children, his wife, Fiona Edmeades, and the home they shared in Bondi. At 69, he was a well-known local character who was regarded with great warmth by all who knew him.

In early October he was laid up with stomach flu. It struck and didn’t budge for two days. Everyone expected that he would be back on his feet by the weekend. But on the evening of the third day – a Tuesday – Thorpe died suddenly of a heart attack.

“It was the last thing on earth … ” Edmeades explains, looking out of the window of their flat into the treetops, searching for the language to convey the shock of how her life had ruptured. “He just died.”

In the chaos of the hours that followed that moment, she knew one thing – Thorpe was not going anywhere.

“I knew I wanted to keep him with me,” she says. “Pete was Māori so that is the tradition in his culture – I had attended a couple of tangis so I knew it was possible.”

The tangi is a Māori death rite that involves close and extended family remaining with the dead for three days to mourn and honour them. “I just felt there was no way they could take him away,” she says.

Edmeades’s GP wrote a death certificate for Thorpe that night, which meant his body didn’t have to be taken away to the coroner’s. He could stay in the flat with his family, under New South Wales regulations, for five days.

He remained there until Friday afternoon. He was mourned at home and his funeral, organised by local funeral directors, was held there. Friends visited the flat and cried for him and told him jokes and sang songs and slipped small gifts into his hands. Extended family decorated his coffin in the back garden. Edmeades and their children placed him into it and sealed the lid themselves. They drove him to the crematorium and accompanied his coffin to the furnace door.

Edmeades says having him at home with her, their children and friends, helped her to process his death. It helped her face up to the fact that he was gone, especially because his death had been such a shock.

“As hard as it was to look at Pete and see it wasn’t Pete any more, it is just his body, it was so much less hard than having him disappear – poof,” she says.

“To be able to understand it in your body on a physical level means you can free yourself from the denial. Seeing that lifeless body is how you come to terms with the death and if you can’t come to terms with the death, how can you grieve? It would have been so traumatic if he just disappeared.”

Instead of Thorpe’s body being taken away that night to lie alone in a morgue or funeral home, Edmeades made a bed for him in the sunroom adjacent to their bedroom. It was his favourite room in the house and, with him there, she and her daughter could lie on their bed on that first night and see him.

‘I just felt there was no way they could take him away,’ says Fiona Edmeades of her husband, Pete Thorpe (pictured), who died suddenly.

“I was able to look at him all night and slowly understand the changes and that things had changed. He was still there and I could see him but the change was real, in such an unreal time.

“I would doze and then wake up and there was this wave of feeling utterly lost, but then there was Pete, anchoring me back in the world.”

The family’s story is becoming more common, as people decide to take death, dying and the days after death away from the medical and funeral industries and back into their own hands and homes.

Victoria Spence, an independent funeral celebrant and death doula, has noticed a groundswell of people in Australia over the past decade wanting to reclaim death for the family and the community.

Spence has worked with the dying, their bodies and the people they leave behind since the 90s when her father’s terrible funeral – the celebrant repeatedly got his name wrong – inspired her to train as a counsellor and civil celebrant specialising in end-of-life and after-death care.

She has seen communities transition from the need to whisk the dead away, hide them in a box inside a funeral home and then bury them in the ground like a secret. Instead she empowers the bereaved to bring their dead home from the hospital, wash them, dress them, hold their hands, talk to them, play music, build their coffins and hold their funerals in the community centre, school or living room. Taking death back in this way can set the groundwork for healthy grieving, she says.

“People feel alienated by the medicalisation, professionalisation and corporatisation of dying that has taken place,” she says. “Death has become a cultural blindspot for us and people want that to change.”

It is a sentiment echoed by Prof Ken Hillman, author of A Good Life to the End, who argues that death has become the new taboo – like sex was in the 1970s.

Pete Thorpe’s extended family decorated his coffin in his Bondi back garden.

“We only talk about [death and dying] in hushed tones,” he writes. “The subject of death and dying need to be brought into the open. There will be so many benefits for us as a society and individuals. Death loses its power over us when faced matter of factly.”

But dealing with death matter of factly is not always straightforward.

Often the thing stopping the bereaved from keeping their loved one at home is the lack of preparation and knowledge about what comes next, Spence says. Fear of the changes that take place in a dead body is also a potent deterrent.

“There is an increasing desire but not the knowledge to help people get ready and get the equipment,” she says.

The most important part of equipment for someone wanting to keep a vigil at home is the cool bed, a stainless steel plate that goes underneath the dead body and is usually set at 1C to 5C, keeping the corpse stable by slowing decomposition.

“Our dead change,” Spence says. “The body stiffens, the skin changes, there can be swelling and leakage. The cool beds slow down all of these processes, you get into a state of stasis.”

Once the bed is installed, Spence says, “It is very comforting to hang out with the body for a couple of days. Nothing untoward or scary happens.”

People holding vigils are often surprised at how peaceful and beautiful the dead are, she says.

Fiona Edmeades worried about all of this when Pete Thorpe died. But a close friend knew about the cool beds and the funeral home organised one.

“The cool bed changed everything because it reduced the aspect of the unknown and the fear that comes with it,” she says. ”Here is this amazing device that enables you to do what you want to do. It just feels so natural.”

Over the three days after Thorpe’s death, their home filled with friends and family. At first, some were hesitant to see him but their reticence always gave way.

“Lots of people who hadn’t seen a dead body before came. One child came and asked, ‘Can I touch him?’ and we talked all about it. When you are in it, it is so natural and gentle and beautiful – it is a beautiful way of saying goodbye.”

For her, having Thorpe at home, and a river of people wanting to come and show how much they loved him, made her own grieving easier.

“It helped us to deal with it together as a whole. In those first few days the weight of the grief is so overwhelming. Sharing Pete’s death with the community in this way helped spread the load. It felt like everyone was carrying a bit, as we slowly came to terms with what had happened.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 12, 2017December 12, 2017

The Difficult Business of Dying

The U.S. funeral industry is the most expensive and corporate in the world. Can Americans find a better way to grieve?

By Jess Bergman

[I]n the six years since my father died, I’ve visited the cemetery where his ashes are interred exactly twice—the second time only because of the Jewish tradition of unveiling, where the initial graveside funeral service is followed within a year by a ceremony to uncover and dedicate the headstone. It’s not that returning would be too difficult. It’s more like the reverse: I fear an inability to perform the sadness and solemnity the pilgrimage seems to require. I miss my dad, but the cemetery, nestled alongside the highways and strip malls of suburban South Jersey, fails to evoke him in any meaningful way. It’s a site associated with him only retroactively, for the worst of all possible reasons. Where I’m supposed to feel his presence, there’s only a void.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: TRAVELING THE WORLD TO FIND THE GOOD DEATH by Caitlin Doughty

Los Angeles-based mortician and writer Caitlin Doughty argues that such feelings result from the failures of America’s death industry, which has become “more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other on Earth.” According to the National Funeral Directors’ association, the median cost of traditional funeral with a viewing and burial was $7,181 in 2014; Doughty cites the current average at $8,000 to $10,000. 14 percent of US funeral homes are run by publicly traded firms. Service Corporation International, the largest funeral services provider in the US, operates over 2,000 funeral homes employing more than 24,000 people. The $20-billion industry often pushes grief to the margins by pressuring families to make a series of high-stakes decisions on a very short timeline—most funeral homes come to pick up a body within an hour of being contacted.

In some cases, funeral homes deliberately exploit families for financial gain at a time of profound vulnerability. A 2013 undercover investigation conducted by the Federal Trade Commission revealed that up to one in five American funeral homes engage in “deceptive and manipulative practices.” The offenders violated the 1984 Funeral Rule, which stipulates that funeral homes must provide itemized price lists. The compulsory bundling of products and services is prohibited: They can’t require that you buy a traditional varnished casket when all you want is a cremation; an inexpensive, unfinished wooden box must be made available. And the law bans the aggressive sale of products that are not required by law, like the use of a hearse to transport remains to a cemetery. Though most funeral homes keep dedicated websites, few display their prices online, which makes it challenging to compare costs.

With its focus on profits, the industry has also changed the way we treat dead bodies. As recently as a hundred years ago, “no one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband,” Doughty writes, “or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin.” The Civil War is often identified as the point at which practices began to shift. Embalming became more common as soldiers’ bodies were transported from the South to the North. It gained even more popularity after Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train tour, which took his embalmed corpse to 180 cities between Washington D.C. and Springfield, Illinois. Now, the United States is the only country in the world in which chemical conservation of the dead is common practice—a process that can cost anything from $495 to over $1,000. What was once a practical solution with a historically specific context has become a profitable norm, despite, according to the CDC, providing no public health benefit.

In her book From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Doughty tries to find a better way to die and to grieve, seeking out death rituals from the Western United States to Japan, Spain, Indonesia, and beyond. It sounds a bit like Eat, Pray, Die, but her project is much larger than its premise first implies. She is searching not for personal spiritual enlightenment or the morbid titillation of thana-tourism, but for practical, radical alternatives to our corporatized death industry. Her travels illuminate a host of compelling possibilities for better funerals and a less fraught relationship with our dead. But the book also reveals a larger failure of our culture to allow for mourning and grieving after the last goodbye. If it is hard to navigate the death care industry, it is harder still to work out how to live with grief.

On her travels, Doughty finds many rituals that involve prolonged contact with corpses—prolonged, at least, by American standards. All around the world, she meets people less troubled by the physical reality of dead bodies, whether those bodies are burned to ash, mummified, “decomposting,” or lying under glass in their natural, un-embalmed state. In Japan she visits a corpse hotel where families may rent a suite that looks like an ordinary condo and “just be with the body, free from the performance required at a formal viewing.” And at the Rinkai crematory, Doughty learns about the practice of kotsuage. According to this custom, families are escorted into a room called a shūkotsu-shitsu after a cremation, where they pick up their loved one’s remaining bone fragments and place them gently into an urn.

In North Carolina, Doughty spends time at Western Carolina University’s Forensic Osteology Research Station (FOREST), where corpses donated to science are turned into compost. The bodies are laid to rest in a wooded research facility, blanketed with alfalfa and woodchips, covered in a silver shroud, and in the hot sun to turn into dark, nutrient-rich soil after a period of weeks. The project is still in its experimental phase, but the FOREST researchers hope it will become a green solution with a therapeutic arc. Families will ultimately be invited to collect the soil made from the body of their loved one and with it, cultivate new life.

Doughty finds her most extreme example of dead body positivity in Tana Toraja in Indonesia. For Torajans, the border between the living and the dead is porous. Corpses frequently remain in the home for a period of weeks, months, or even years, and are cared for like any other member of the family—bathed, fed, dressed, and spoken to. After they are finally buried, following elaborate community funerals, bodies are periodically exhumed during what is called the ma’nene’. Families have the opportunity to reunite, and even picnic, with their dead; they can make animal sacrifices they may not have been able to afford at the time of the original burial. What sounds grisly to some is, to the Torajans, both tender and sacred: “Hauling someone out of their grave years after their death is not only respectful,” Doughty writes, “but it provides a meaningful way to stay connected to their dead.”

Doughty’s chatty calm in the presence of dead bodies and her arguments against American squeamishness are admirable. But it feels, at times, like From Here to Eternity’s focus on death comes at the expense of grief. This is not a failure of the project so much as its shape; the nature of Doughty’s inquiry makes grief a secondary concern. It does appear sporadically: In the chapter on the Day of the Dead, she travels to Mexico with her friend Sarah to visit a mummy museum, as well as the altars families erect to honor the people they’ve lost that year. Sarah is still reeling from the decision to obtain a late-term abortion when her fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 13, and Doughty writes about the isolation of Sarah’s grief, her feeling that the inability to move on from the loss had made her “radioactive” to her friends and coworkers. Her loss, and the future she had imagined, is devastatingly rendered. There is a digression, too, on the Western funeral industry’s fixation on “dignity,” by which they really mean silence, composure, and repression—this, too, is a moment of genuine feeling, and Doughty shows that though her tone is often light, she has the capacity to move and enrage.

But just as often, Doughty fails to engage with the realities of mourning. At an open-air cremation she attends in Crestone, Colorado, she professes to witness the “pall of grief [lifting] from the circle.” I don’t doubt the power of this ceremony. But the implication that it was able to dispel sadness—that such a thing is possible, or even desirable, at a funeral—gives me pause. Worse, in the book’s epilogue, she writes, “A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.” This is a neat, linear progression; in other words, it’s exactly what the experience of grief is not.

There is more to death and dying than funerals. From Here to Eternity is in some ways a missed opportunity to explore how the profit motive has distorted our experience of death—not just burial, but all the feeling that comes after a body is buried. In The Last Word, Julia Cooper writes of the difficulty of grieving under late capitalism. The amorphous, endless, and unpredictable nature of grief puts it fundamentally at odds with pressures “to be efficient, to progress, to—most of all—get back to work.” But, she writes, “mourning doesn’t work that way. There is no timeline because the work of grieving is never done. There is nothing efficient or productive about loss, but there it is all the same.” Grieving is the enemy of work, and we’re expected to suppress the former in the interest of the latter.

Minimizing the pain of personal loss, Cooper argues, is in service of “maintaining productivity for the benefit of a capitalist system.” Public displays of grief are shunned in part because they undermine the relentless positivity our economic system feeds on. The isolation of those who are unable to successfully curb their mourning is “a socially enforced strategy of our neoliberal era.” The repression of grief is also materially enforced: The standard paid bereavement leave, where it does exist, is three days. At Facebook, COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg changed the company’s bereavement policy following the sudden death of her husband in 2015; the company now offers employees a comparatively generous 20 days paid leave following the loss of an immediate family member.

In the op-ed Sandberg wrote for The New York Times about her children’s experience of bereavement, she talks about grief in the language of business. The death of a parent is “adversity”; the word “resilience” is used six times, while “grieving” makes one appearance. Sandberg writes of her son and daughter’s loss (and her own) alongside the story of a friend’s child who was bullied at summer camp, with the implication that both experiences can be “overcome” with the same set of therapeutic tools. Sandberg’s approach isn’t insincere; original or not, the idea that “there is no wrong way to grieve” is an important one. But for those who don’t find this way of thinking helpful, our culture offers few other ways to address grief and work.

Caitlin Doughty’s mission to reimagine the death industry—to cast out our shame and fear of the dead—is an important one, for which she makes the case well and with good humor. More humane and meaningful rituals around death would doubtless ease the transition into the new reality that awaits the living after a traumatic loss. For my part, I look forward to one day spreading what I’ve kept of my father’s ashes, at a site less dour than a New Jersey tomb. But reforming our funeral industrial complex is only the beginning of the work ahead of us.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 9, 2017December 9, 2017

Four Tasks Between Death and Burial

After death, there are four main tasks that need to happen before the burial. These can be achieved with the help of a funeral home or with the help of loved ones facilitating a home funeral. Learn what needs to take place between death and burial and the role of a funeral home versus a home funeral during the process.

When preparing for death, many people know that there are options for how a person is treated as they are dying. Documents may be completed, hopefully well in advance of the dying process, to express those personal wishes. Documents may include a Living Will, Health Care Power of Attorney, or 5-Wishes. Few know that there are options for after-death care. There are 3 options for the disposition of the body between death and interment or cremation:

Option 1: Hire a funeral home to carry out all aspects of after-death care, including transportation, refrigeration, initiation of death certificate, obituary, cremation and/or transportation to place of burial, and coordination of set up at cemetery for the graveside service.

Option 2: Hire a funeral home to carry out some of the above mentioned aspects of after-death care and take care of other details utilizing family and friends.

Option 3: Have family and friends direct the details of after-death care. This process is call a Home Funeral.

Four Main Tasks

Regardless of which option you choose for after-death care, four main tasks will need to take place between death and burial:

Transportation From Place of Death: The body may need to be moved from the place of death (such as a hospital/nursing facility or home) to the place of after death care (either a home or a funeral home).
Care of the Body: The body will need to be cared for until the time of burial. This care may include bathing, dressing, refrigeration or dry ice application, and perhaps wrapping in a shroud before cremation or burial.
File Death Certificate: A death certificate will need to be filed. This includes gathering the information to complete the certificate, signature from attending physician, and filing with the county registrar.
Transportation To Burial Site: The body will need to be transported from the place of care to Carolina Memorial Sanctuary when it’s time for the burial.

Between Death & Burial: Four Tasks

Before we go over the four steps that take place between death and burial, it’s important to understand the difference between a funeral home and a home funeral. If you’re not clear on the differences, read this page first.

The four tasks between death and burial are pretty detailed, so we’ve created the following graphic to help show your options. Scroll down to see a written explanation of the four main tasks.

Let’s say you’re mortal. Now let’s say you’re a book lover. Where’s the intersection between these two things? You guessed it — bookcase coffins. Which (with apologies to you squeamish types) is the theme of today’s post.

In my travels around the web searching for apartment storage solutions, I stumbled upon (and — really — it felt like I’d actually stumbled when I came across these) two different bookcases that double as coffins. This way you can hide your coffin in plain sight if you want to own and take possession of a coffin before you die, which apparently an increasing number of people are choosing to do.

Let me pause for a brief confession here: when I first found these bookcase coffin images, I thought this was going to be a funny post — a “what an odd and offbeat idea, let’s all laugh about it” post. BUT then I read the content of the webpages on which these coffins appeared, and the topic suddenly became both a lot less humorous AND a lot more interesting.

The first two bookcase coffins below come from the website of a Maine group called Last Things: Alternatives at the End of Life. The group and website were created by Klara Tammany, whose moving essay about her own mother’s burial illustrates the reasons her family and others are choosing to have green burials and rejecting what she sees as impersonal and ecologically damaging funeral and burial practices. Last Things offers support and resources for those looking for more information about alternative burial options. The coffins displayed on their site (including this one) are all handmade by group member/woodworker Chuck Lakin. The first one here is the Bookcase Coffin model.

This second model is what Chuck calls a Multipurpose Coffin. It can be used either as a bookcase OR as an entertainment center, and I personally think it’s 100% convincing as either of those things. (I mean, really — who would know?)

Like Chuck Lakin, New Zealand company Final Furniture Limited is creating coffins mindful of eco-conscious clients. Their nextgen bookshelf/wine rack allows you to raise a glass to your past while, well, facing your future. The photo on the beach at the top of this post shows how the bookcase/winerack looks in its… alternate form. (I feel like I’m writing about a Transformer here.)

While the Last Things and Final Furniture bookcase coffins are probably intended more for people nearing the end of their lives, this next one (via Inhabit), which designer William Warren calls Shelves for Life, is not. As Warren explains, “Shelves For Life is a self-initiated project to further explore ideas of built-in sentimentality within our possessions. The aim is to make stronger emotional relationships with our belongings and encourage lifelong use… They are intended to be used throughout life as storage for personal belongings. On death, the shelves are dismantled and rebuilt as a coffin.”

Maybe I’m being swayed by the fact that we’re about to spend some money on a “real” sofa which feels like an almost-lifelong commitment, but I like the rather anti-IKEA aim of Warren’s experiment with this. (Note, though, that someone has apparently come up with plans to make an IKEA bookcase coffin too.) Disposable is bad. You can store things in it now AND be buried in it later is, um… Good. Mostly. Especially when the design is as elegant as this.

That having been said (and this is the problem), I’m not sure how it would feel to be shelving books in and dusting knick-knacks on my future coffin. Suddenly that bookcase would feel a bit TOO important to me, I think. (God forbid the movers drop THAT one!) And I’m not sure I’d want such a large, visual reminder of my own mortality in my living room. Unless its presence would encourage me to procrastinate less and work more… Hmmm.

In looking around for more info on this topic I came across a thoughtful post on a blog called Pink Slip by one Maureen Rogers, that concludes thusly: “I have just gauged that our old Workbench bookcases are neither deep enough nor sturdy enough to act as coffins. If, when the time comes when Jim and I experience the miracle of death, we’re planning on anything other than cremation and scatter, I would consider one of [Chuck Lakin’s] creations. I’d probably go for the coffee table version. We can always use more storage.”

And, Maureen, you’d always have it too.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 26, 2017November 26, 2017

Families turn to death midwives for help with final passage

Anna Benton, of Milwaukee, left, Georgette Paxton, of Madison, center, and Jennifer Snow, of Waunakee, look over Heather Ockler, of Monona, who is playing the role of a dying person wrapped in a shroud during a home funeral demonstration. It was part of a death midwife class taught last month by Sharon Stewart, who helped aspiring death midwives practice skills such as washing and shrouding a body. Death midwives, sometimes called death doulas, are increasingly helping families prepare for and navigate the death of loved ones, in addition to or instead of hospice care and funeral homes.

By DAVID WAHLBERG

[B]efore Valli Warren’s husband died last year after a long illness, the Stoughton couple knew they wanted a home funeral and green burial.

But they weren’t sure how to make those things happen. They turned to Sharon Stewart, who delivered ice packs to preserve the body, shared videos about how to wrap it in a shroud and taught pallbearers how to carry it out of the house on a board.

Stewart also helped Warren file paperwork, including a permit letting her transport her husband to Circle Cemetery, near Barneveld, where he was laid to rest without being embalmed or using a casket or vault.

“She walked me through every phase,” Warren said.

Stewart is a death midwife, a new kind of occupation that provides emotional, spiritual and practical support to families before and after death — in addition to, or instead of, hospice care and funeral homes.

The service, which has emerged around the country over the past decade, is analogous to what birth midwives do compared to obstetricians. Some who offer the assistance call themselves death doulas or end-of-life midwives.

‘Back to their roots’

Whatever the title, the providers say they help people “take back” the death process from hospitals and funeral homes. Services include leading family discussions about death planning, sitting vigil with people as they die, helping family and friends wash the body afterward and aiding in tasks such as selecting memorial cards, sending obituaries to newspapers and closing social media accounts. It often involves home funerals or green burials.

“We’re taking families back to their roots, the tradition of when we were born and when we died in our own homes,” said Stewart, a former detective who lives near Brooklyn, south of Madison. “We laid in honor in our parlors, and the community came together to provide care for the family.”

Liz Humphries, a former birth midwife and hospice nurse who recently added an end-of-life doula service to Seasons of Life, her senior care company in Middleton, said, “It’s about reclaiming a really sacred and beautiful human experience.”

Mary Paulauskis, a former hospice nurse from Madison, has added what she calls end-of-life transitions counseling to her business, Mindful Awakenings, through which she teaches meditation.

Paulauskis focuses on helping people think about who and what they want around them as they die. She also coaches loved ones on what to say to a dying person and how to interact — letting them know it’s OK to lie next to the person if they want to, for example.

“It’s creating a space of whatever the patient said they want,” Paulauskis said.

Many people don’t realize that there are several ways to dispose of bodies without embalming, including new, greener types of cremation, said Angie Buchanan, a death midwife in Waukesha who trains death midwives around the country. She informs clients of the options and guides them through their choice.

“We’re the water that runs between the rocks of the medical profession and the funeral industry,” Buchanan said.

Dr. Toby Campbell, chief of UW Health’s palliative care program and a board member of Agrace Hospice and Palliative Care in Fitchburg, said he understands why death midwives are catching on. He said hospice care typically includes two or three visits a week from a nurse or social worker, and an occasional call from a doctor.

“That leaves about 99 percent of the time you and your family are on your own,” Campbell said. “That’s a big space. There are giant gaps between the health care system and death, even including hospice.”

Jim Olson, president-elect of the Wisconsin Funeral Directors Association, said caring for a body after death and managing a funeral are big jobs. Most people will continue to seek help from funeral directors, he said.

Death midwifery is “another alternative for families, which we think is great,” said Olson, who owns Olson Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Sheboygan. “Am I afraid it’s going to affect my business? No, absolutely not.”

There is no licensure or government certification for death midwives. Experienced practitioners, such as Stewart and Buchanan, offer training, as does the New Jersey-based International End of Life Doula Association, which held a session in Madison last year.

Many training programs offer their own certification. The burgeoning field is in a similar situation to massage therapy in the 1990s, before doctors pushed for its regulation, Buchanan said. In Wisconsin, certification for massage therapists started in 2003, with licensure beginning in 2010.

Fees for death midwives vary. Buchanan said she charges $100 for a consultation and up to $2,000 for services covering the whole death process. Stewart has accepted donations of $100 or $200 from some clients, but she doesn’t plan to establish rates until she retires from her day job, at the state public defender’s office, and devotes more time to death midwife duties.

Paulauskis said she plans to charge $25 to $50 for a counseling session and negotiate rates for other services but let people pay what they can. An academic adviser at the UW-Madison School of Social Work, she plans to continue making her living in other ways.

Humphries, who started her end-of-life doula service last month, said she might charge $40 to $100 an hour but offer a sliding-fee scale for people with low incomes.

Humphries is also an organizer of Walking Each Other Home Madison, a group that started in 2014 to help people carry out home funerals and green burials. People can rent the group’s home funeral kit, which includes a body board, ice packs, soap, lotion, diapers, latex gloves and small bags of rice to place over the dead person’s eyes to keep them closed.

‘The personal touch’

Stewart, who has long volunteered at Monroe Clinic’s hospice program, said she saw the need for a more personal death service after her brother died in a car crash at age 19. She was 21.

Police came to the house in the middle of the night, told her mother her son was dead and left. Stewart wanted to see her brother’s body before he was embalmed, but the funeral director wouldn’t let her, she said.

“There had to be a better way,” she said.

Later, as a detective for the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Department in Darlington, Stewart tried to deliver death notifications with more sensitivity. But she wasn’t able to do all she wanted to help grieving families. After a shoulder injury forced her to retire, she discovered death midwifery.

“I thought, ‘This is it. This is the personal touch. This is the attention that families need,’ ” she said.

At a death midwife class she taught last month, Stewart told students to help dying people reconcile with others if they ask, separate arguing family members at the bedside if necessary and encourage loved ones to say goodbye and leave the room if the dying person wants to die alone.

“Your job as a death midwife is to be an advocate for that dying person,” she said.

When Laurie Larson’s husband, Dennis Presser, died suddenly from a heart attack at age 54 four years ago, Stewart helped Larson and her two teenage children navigate the chaos.

Stewart joined Larson when she met with a funeral director to plan the funeral, which took place at the funeral home.

She organized an intimate gathering for family and close friends at the crematorium, with candles, incense and music. As Presser’s body lay inside an open cardboard cremation box, people read poems, told stories and colored the box. Then they placed him in the chamber, and Larson hit the ignition switch.

“I would never have had the energy to create that beautiful ritual,” said Larson, of Madison. “Sharon helped me in so many ways that I never would have thought I needed to be helped.”

Warren’s husband, Spencer, died at 64 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Stewart helped the couple carry out their wishes. His body remained at home for three days, instead of being whisked off to a funeral home. “I had time to be with him; it was very healing,” Warren said.

As family and friends came for the home funeral, volunteers changed ice packs beside his body as he lay on their bed for viewing. Warren drove him to Circle Cemetery, where gatherers sang and played guitar before shoveling dirt over his shrouded body.

“It was the most natural thing I’ve ever experienced,” Warren said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 24, 2017November 24, 2017

Death doulas: Bringing death, dying and grief out of the shadows and into the light

By Jennifer Ackerman, Regina Leader-Post

[E]lizabeth George was “tickled” to see what came after death.

She knew what she wanted her death to be like and she wasn’t afraid.

Diagnosed with colon cancer in 2010, Elizabeth told a friend she wanted three things to happen when she died: A singing circle, for a few select people to be present, and for her body not to be “whisked” off right away.

“Elizabeth really wanted to have a good death,” recalls one of her close friends, Ruth Blaser.

A childhood experience with death may have been what made Elizabeth so particular about her own passing. She lost her mother at age 11.

“She felt like the family response had been extremely unhealthy,” says Emily Wilson-George, one of Elizabeth’s two daughters. “They basically took everything that had belonged to her mother out of the house within the week and never spoke about it. She didn’t want that or anything remotely similar.”

Three days before she died, Elizabeth met with two death doulas. Together, along with friends and family, they ensured her death would go as planned.

A home vigil was organized. Elizabeth’s body was not whisked off to the morgue or a funeral home. Rather, she was moved to her dear friend Joyce Bethune’s house, gently placed on a massage table in a room full of tropical plants and a water fountain — a place where she found peace.

Joyce Bethune, left, and Ruth Blaser stand where they held a home vigil for their good friend Elizabeth George in Regina. George passed away last January from colon cancer.

Elizabeth’s fearless and accepting attitude toward her own mortality is often the exception.

“When you talk to people about how they feel about their own death, it’s a bit of a mood killer,” says Wilson-George. “It’s not really considered an acceptable topic of conversation.”

But an emerging cohort of death doulas in Regina is bringing death, dying and grief out of the shadows and into the light.

“There seems to be more healing when we can be sharing through grief, sharing through death,” says Denise Seguin Horth, one of the death doulas who met with Elizabeth. “So many other cultures embrace death more.”

Seguin Horth trained to become a death doula in 2016, through Beyond Yonder Virtual School for Community Deathcaring in Canada.

During a 14-week online course, participants learn advanced planning, home funerals, post-death body care, end of life financial considerations, grief, celebrant skills, death care rituals and more. A practicum is recommended, but not required.

“I feel that people have been so distanced from death that grief is heavier. It’s almost like a secret … It weighs on you and it just keeps you anchored down,” says Seguin Horth. “When we can talk more about death and talk more about grief openly without the taboo, … it seems to help that energy flow elsewhere so that we can move on.”

Sharon Pulvermacher — who also met with Elizabeth — did her training in 2014. She has been fascinated by death and the stages of grief since Grade 12 when she wrote a paper on death and dying.

Pulvermacher says being a death doula not only gives the dying person and their families a safe space to express themselves, but it’s also an opportunity to share with them their end-of-life options.

She says many people don’t even realize it’s within their rights to take the body of their loved one home for a vigil or home funeral, if that’s what they want to do.

“It’s … giving them a few more ideas, a few more tools, that they can imagine a little bit more largely than what they would do otherwise,” says Pulvermacher.

Defining death doulas

Definitions vary, but the core role of death doulas is to provide comfort and support to the dying and their families. Death doulas do one-on-one sessions, home vigils, simply sit with the dying person in the hospital holding their hand, and more.

“All death doulas have different niches. For me personally, I feel drawn more to accompanying those who are dealing with grief,” says Seguin Horth, who volunteers at Regina Wascana Grace Hospice.

She works with a variety of people — those who may have lost a limb or a pet, recently divorced or, like Elizabeth, someone who is in the last days of their life.

Besides the practical services death doulas offer, such as planning home funerals or helping with living wills, they also act as a sounding board for people to express their fears and musings about death, the afterlife and more.

A death doula brings no emotional or personal baggage that a friend or family member might and allows people the freedom to express themselves fully.

Sharon Pulvermacher is one of a few death doulas in Regina.

Where it began

Phyllis Farley, a key U.S. figure in the birthing centre movement, attended an end-of-life care conference in 1998. At the time, she was a chairwoman at the Maternity Center Association, an organization devoted to providing high-quality maternity care. She realized the same hands-on help and emotional support women receive when giving birth is just as important during death.

“We’re more than willing to, and very happy to in many cases, celebrate the birth of a child. While the potential of connections and the wonderful things they might do is always there, we don’t know that, but yet we celebrate it,” says Charisma Thomson, a professor at the University of Regina whose research centres on the anthropology of death.

But we deal with death differently.

“Here we have an individual at the end of their life, who we should be celebrating because we know what they’ve accomplished,” Thomson says. “Yet it’s that moment when … people just turn their back on them and really kind of silence their voice.”

At 80 years old, Farley founded an organization called Doulas to Accompany and Comfort the Dying. The program taught doulas how to listen and relate to the dying person, as well as do more practical things like helping with a living will.

The field grew and made its way to Regina, where there are about 10 death doulas. Some charge for their services, some don’t. Every death doula is different, and every person who seeks their services is looking for different things.

For Elizabeth’s daughter, the death doulas were invaluable.

“I think that having the death doulas not only provided the ritual that allowed us to process (her death) better, but it relieved a lot of the pressure,” she says. Not having to worry about the practical and procedural aspects of the vigil meant she could focus on being with her mom and getting closure.

But for many, the response to death may be much like when Elizabeth’s mother died — pushing death away.

Thomson traces society’s shift — from direct involvement in what happens to the body after death, to the current very institutionalized process — back to the Civil War in the United States, when embalming became common practice.

“You have Dr. Thomas Holmes during the Civil War starting to use embalming to send the soldiers back home … Once we start to add this clinical aspect to it, people I think believed it was beyond their abilities,” says Thomson.

As embalming became more popular, families sought professionals to do it — taking aftercare out of the hands of the family.

Around the same time, society decided priests were not qualified to declare time of death, and from then on only medical specialists could. Thomson says this shift also pushed death closer to the clinical realm rather than a personal one.

“We view death, or in North America anyway, … as though it is an illness or a disease or something that we can overcome with technology and science,” says Thomson.

And today, death happens in a hospital more often than not. When somebody dies, their body is typically moved to the morgue or the crematorium swiftly, giving family and friends little time with the body.

Bethune remembers a different time when home vigils were common.

“There was time for people to say their goodbyes and the whole process was a natural process,” she says. “I think we’ve just gotten so far away from that.”

She says having death doula services to help with things like home vigils or simply talking people through death is essential.

“It means that we don’t push our grief down into our subconscious, into our bodies. It means that we deal with it, that this is a natural part of life,” says Bethune.

Elizabeth wanted her family to have the time to say goodbye. So instead of denying the inevitable, she met it with playful curiosity.

“I know it sounds strange, but I’m a bit tickled at what’s coming next,’ Elizabeth told Seguin Horth, who describes that approach as beautiful. “She went past the fear.”

Denise Seguin Horth works as a death doula, and is shown standing at Riverside Memorial Park Cemetery. Death doulas support people in the process of dying.

During her meeting with the death doulas, Elizabeth was asked about her belief system and what she wanted her friends, family and the doulas to do when she died. According to Blaser, they also asked her what she imagined death to be like — a bold question friends and family might not feel comfortable asking.

“It was like mom didn’t have any doubts about what the death doulas were about,” says Wilson-George. “I was sitting there being like, who are these people? They’re sitting in on what’s a pretty personal time.” But in the end, she was grateful for their role in her mother’s end of life.

When the time came, Elizabeth’s vigil lasted a full 24 hours.

Someone from Alternatives Funeral & Cremation Services moved Elizabeth to Bethune’s home from the hospice, which she had entered just five days earlier. With no official certification or oversight board, death doulas are restricted from physically transporting a body.

“We sang her out of hospice with a favourite song of hers, and she had a quilt that had been made specially for her, draped over her,” recalls Pulvermacher.

Then they sang her into Bethune’s home where Seguin Horth and Pulvermacher positioned her body on a massage table and placed ice packs around her — looking after the practical and hygienic aspects of the vigil. They also made sure the family knew what to expect in terms of how the body would act in the hours after death.

A few close friends and family stayed the entire time. Others came and went to pay their respects. More songs were sung and memories of Elizabeth shared. Wilson-George remembers the feeling in the room as surprisingly intimate and radiantly positive.

For Blaser, the process with the death doulas helped her prepare.

“When Elizabeth died, I (felt) a sense of peace that we really accompanied her well and that it was her time to go,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t miss her. I do. But it’s not a wrenching kind of grief.”

For Emily Wilson-George it meant closure. After having seven years to imagine what her mother’s death would be like, Wilson-George went through so many different kinds of dread. The death doulas, along with friends and family helped minimize that fear.

“I think that they way that we managed to honour her death was something she would have approved of,” she says. “The feeling in the room that evening with the death doulas … it was so positive.

“I’m grateful to them for creating the space, for creating the opportunity.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 20, 2017November 20, 2017

Ashes to Ashes, Stardust to Stardust

Delivering cremated remains to the stratosphere joins a growing list of new ways to memorialize the dead.

By Marina Koren

[M]ark Harris says funeral directors talk about it all the time. More and more people are growing tired of traditional funeral services and opting for something a little more creative. “It’s getting more difficult to offer the cookie-cutter send-off,” explains Harris, the author of Grave Matters, which examines how people have started to think, er, outside the box about death.

And so, Harris wasn’t surprised to hear that a new British company is offering to send cremated remains to the stratosphere. High-altitude latex balloons will float to 100,000 feet above the surface of the Earth, where the curvature of the planet appears against the darkness of space, and then release the ashes into the cold, creating a glittering display. “Scatter your loved one’s ashes in space,” Ascension Flights says on its website. “We are all made of stardust.” The stratosphere is not technically space, but for their purposes, it’s close enough.

Ascension Flights, run by funeral directors and a near-space launch firm, will soon offer its high-altitude funerals, with the cheapest package starting at £795, or about $1,040. For more money, customers can choose the launch site and have the scattering photographed and filmed

The near-space funeral is, at first glance, a contrast to “green” burials, which return remains to the soil in biodegradable coffins or urns. In this way, the deceased can meet “the green reaper,” as a Guardian article in 2014 colorfully put it, and contribute to the physical processes of the Earth. Blasting ashes into the stratosphere sure sounds like the opposite of that, but Ascension Flights promises some kind of return to the planet. “As the particles eventually return to Earth, precipitation will form around them, creating raindrops and snowflakes,” its website explains. “Small amounts of nutritious chemicals will stimulate plant growth wherever it lands.”

Harris, who favors going the natural route, said this promise seems considerably less certain than that of green burials, where at least “I wouldn’t have to worry about having my loved one’s ashes raining down from space on some random location like a landfill or a Superfund site or a nuclear power plant,” he said.

Both kinds of memorials are part of the same growing trend in end-of-life affairs, Harris said. People are becoming increasingly interested in how their physical remains, and the remains of their loved ones, will be handled. They want something more personal and more personalized.

These days, people can forgo metal caskets and be buried in bamboo or recycled cardboard instead, or have their remains wrapped in banana leaf, cotton, or wool. A company called Eternal Reefs will fashion an environmentally friendly artificial reef out of cremains—cremated remains—and drop it into the ocean for nearby marine life to populate. Cremains can be pressed into diamonds, incorporated into paint, and ejected as fireworks. The variety of options for the dead reflects the consumer culture of the living, says Phil Olson, a Virginia Tech professor who studies funeral practices, like the home-burial movement. “There are at least seven kinds of Coke, 500 kinds of cigarettes—options, options, options,” Olson said. Consumers want just as many choices in death as in life.

The option to send a loved one’s ashes to actual space has existed for several years already, for a steeper price than Ascension Flights charges. Since 1997, the company Celestis has flown missions into space delivering the cremains of dozens of people, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The payload is launched inside a capsule to more than 300,000 feet, beyond the boundary of space, and eventually falls back to Earth.

While the concept of commemorating life’s final frontier in the final frontier may seem incredibly high-tech, the emotion behind it is no different than run-of-the-mill funerals on Earth. Funeral services can be, in the end, more for the benefit of those who are left behind than those who’ve passed away. They are about processing grief, and grief is personal. For some, the thought of sending their loved one’s ashes into the stratosphere is, simply, very fitting, and it’s difficult to pin down the exact reasons why.

Olson points to alkaline hydrolysis as an example of the funeral industry misunderstanding its customers. Providers of alkaline hydrolysis, which reduces bodies to skeletons in a liquid solution, believed the appeal of the process came from its eco-friendliness. They later found that the primary reason people gave for choosing hydrolysis was that they perceived it to be gentler than cremation. “For some reason, people see being dissolved in caustic alkaline as being gentler than being incinerated,” Olson said.

Perhaps having more options to memorialize the dead may ease the grieving process in some way, he said, even if it’s not clear exactly how.

“We can speculate all we want for people’s motivations for doing this, but we could be dead wrong,” Olson said of the high-altitude memorial and, when I laughed in response, quickly realized his choice of words. “Sorry, pardon the pun. I didn’t even notice that.”