Category: Cultural Expressions

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‘I Run a Death Cafe’

By Megan Mooney

I’ve been interested in death my entire life. I was going to be a mortician, and then I took a grief and loss class in college and switched degrees. I’m now a social worker. But I had always wanted to do something on a macro level to help my community around issues of death and dying.

In 2012, I was completing my social work practicum at a hospice and the team leader there wanted me to do some community involvement work. She told me she’d read an article about a “death cookie” group. I talked to my boss and she explained the correct name for the organization was Death Cafe and told me to get in touch with Lizzy Miles, who had started the cafes in the U.S. that year, after reading about them in the U.K.

It happened to be around the same time my uncle had died of cancer; he’d had a horrible death. So I really wanted to create a group where people could come and talk about death and educate each other. After I emailed Lizzy, she called me and we talked for hours.

She helped me get my first death cafe started in February 2013 at a coffee shop in town. The cafes were starting in LA, Atlanta and New York, but I’m in a small town called St. Joseph in Midwest Missouri, so there were none around my area at the time. At my first death cafe and for the five after, I had two women who would drive 7 hours each way to attend. That showed me how much people needed this safe place to talk about death and dying.

We have coffee and cake at each session and my first cake said “Missouri’s First Death Cafe” on it. I laugh about it now because I got so much cr*p for that cake. I went to a big grocery store and told the lady there that I wanted little headstones on the cake. She got mad and told me it was a family business. I had to explain to her what I actually needed the cake for.

But people still thought we were going there to “drink the Kool-Aid” and die. Before my first death cafe a local hairdresser said that an older woman had read a news article about it and was talking about how it was a morbid group getting together to do God knows what. A lot of people still think it’s a morbid group.

Every death cafe is different in terms of who attends and what the attendees talk about, but we all follow the same rules: It’s not a grief or counselling service, we are non-profit, the cafes are held in an accessible, respectful and confidential space and they have no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action. We also always offer drinks and nourishing cakes! Having food is very important. It is life sustaining and we believe it helps people to feel more open to talking about death.

There were about 20 people at my first death cafe and their ages ranged from 25 to 70. It’s for adults, so 18 and older but I’ll have people of all ages; the oldest attendee I’ve had was 85. But I’ve only ever had one person come who was terminally ill.

When I host, I have four or five people at each table and at the beginning I ask everyone to start with what brought them here to talk about death and dying. That seems to be the only thing I need to ask.

My dad and aunt came to my first death cafe. My father never talked about death and my aunt hadn’t been able to talk about my uncle’s recent death without crying, so I didn’t know how it would be. But as I was looking around, my dad was laughing with his group and my aunt was laughing with hers. I sat down and heard my aunt talking about my uncle’s death without crying for the first time.

The following week my dad called me and was talking about how you’re not supposed to make any big decisions within the first year of a loss. He then told me he’d learned that from the ladies at his table at the death cafe.

My dad came to every single death cafe I held after that, except one, and he planned his funeral and all his funeral songs. He died three years ago, but his death was easier for me because we’d had all these conversations about it. He talked all the time about how much the death cafe helped him face his own death.

Death cafes run all over the world
Megan Mooney has been running death cafes in St. Joseph, Missouri since 2013.

A theme that often comes up is relationships and death. People will talk about losses they have had and how it impacted them. Everybody has experienced a death in their life and most of them have never really talked about it. I had a lady who came in, she was probably in her late 50s and she was really shaky at the beginning. At the end she came and thanked me and said that she had never been able to talk about death with anybody before because in her family it was a “taboo”.

People also talk about what they want at the end of their life. There can be a superstition that talking about death brings it closer, so people avoid talking about it at all costs. But when you don’t plan for the end of your life it can be harmful to your loved ones, or add to their grief. My dad making plans helped me tremendously and it was cathartic for him too.

While there are sometimes tears, most death cafes are full of people laughing and having a good time. I believe that thinking and talking about death helps us to be our authentic selves. It helps us to take our mask off and not take things for granted. We’re often in such denial about death that we hurry through life and don’t appreciate the people in it. At these cafes, you get together with strangers and you’re talking about an intimate topic that most people can’t even talk about with their family. It brings you closer and helps improve your relationships with people.

At the end of each death cafe I ask attendees what their “Aha!” moment has been and I hand out surveys. One of the questions is: “Did your views on death change as a result of the death cafe?” It’s crazy because almost every time people answer something like: “My views on death didn’t change but my views on life have changed.”

When COVID first hit we decided the death cafes had to be online. But it ended up being a blessing in some ways because it meant we could meet with people in different countries all over the world at the same time. Now we’re back meeting in person, but we do have cafes online too.

Death cafes began in the U.K.
Megan Mooney first started running death cafes in 2013. She has now run 45 death cafes with hundreds of attendees.

I’ve run about 45 death cafes since 2013 and the smallest group I’ve ever had was still 10 people. I’ve also had companies ask me to host death cafes for their staff. I had one life insurance company with 1,500 staff and there was a woman there whose son had died by suicide. When I asked if anyone had any “aha!” moments, she stood up and shared how she felt about her colleagues’ reaction to her since she had returned to work.

Being involved with Death Café has taught me to love with my whole heart and that nothing in life is permanent. I’ve learned how to accept change, which can be hard. And, I’ve realized that relationships matter the most in life: my relationship with my daughter and spending time with her. That used to include my dad too, he was my best friend.

As a leader for Death Café, I have learned tremendous lessons from attendees and our followers on social media. I’ve learned that so many things in life are trivial. I don’t really get upset any more. Our views on death usually inform the way we live. When you start to come to terms with your own mortality, it can push you to really live your life and to be the best version of yourself. If you look at life from the vantage point of death you can see how beautiful it is.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Seattle startup Lalo is latest ‘death tech’ innovator, with an app to share and collect stories and more

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Juan Medina first considered the idea for his new startup back in 2003, after the death of his father, when his wife asked him to tell a story about his dad and Medina realized he hadn’t known him all that well. Stories, jokes, recipes and more were either lost or scattered across various friends and family, Medina said.

The idea resurfaced in the last couple years as Medina’s own daughter, now 9, said she never really met her grandparents. Medina decided to launch his startup Lalo — also his dad’s nickname — with the mission of giving people a private, digital space to connect, share stories and hold on to precious memories.

Currently operating as a small, private beta, Lalo is an app that facilitates the collection of digital content such as images, video, voice, text and more. Away from the noise and common pitfalls of traditional social media platforms, groups are intentionally kept small to foster increased trust and privacy. Imagine family members gathering to collect the best recipes in one space or share images that might have been lost to an unseen photo album.

“It’s a space to capture those more important family memories, the Sunday phone call from the grandkids to the grandparents where they can say, ‘Grandpa, tell me about a time … ,’  Medina said.

Lalo plans to make money by charging $25 a year for a subscription to the ad-free app, with multiple people being able to have access to a space for that price. Medina said the idea is optimized for smaller groups of 10 to 15 people and over-biased on privacy.

“You’re not going to get pinged by your middle-school friend, like, ‘Hey, join my account,’” he said.

Medina is also working on securing the permanence of the data, potentially with a blockchain solution or other ways to archive the material for the long, digital haul. He views his competitors as traditional social media such as Facebook where people are trading images and stories today, or more story-focused offerings such StoryCorps on NPR, or StoryWorth.

The idea brushes up against the wave of innovation falling into the “death tech” category, where startups are reimagining everything around traditional end-of-life and funeral industry practices with ideas involving body composting, cremation services and casket purchases.

Lalo users don’t have to focus on a recent or impending loss of a loved one, but Medina does believe the app can be a helpful tool in the grieving process.

Before trying his hand at his own startup, Medina spent a little over eight years at Amazon working on assorted tech, building things from scratch and understanding how to build things quickly. The decision to leave and start Lalo came with some apprehension.

“I’m married, I have a daughter, we have a mortgage. Walking away from that steady income that I’ve had my whole life was scary,” Medina said. “But it’s been amazing. I’ve loved it. It’s been great doing what I love, something I’m passionate about.”

And interest from different angel investors as well as funding from Lalo’s first institutional investor has eased some concerns about the long-term viability of the idea. Columbus, Ohio-based VC firm Overlooked Ventures announced earlier this month that Lalo was its first investment, and founding partner Janine Sickmeyer wrote of the startup, “No amount of technology can ease the pain of losing someone you love, but having better ways to grieve can help people cope and stay connected to mourn the loss together.”

Medina didn’t share how much money Lalo raised in pre-seed funding. The company incorporated at the end of 2020 and got moving in March after Medina left Amazon.

Lalo currently employs eight people and was among 30 startups selected for Washington Technology Industry Association’s sixth Founder Cohort Program, announced in August. The plan is to come out of beta in early 2022.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What is a death doula?

How trained companions help people face their last days

Death doulas can arrange pre-funeral ceremonies with their clients, in a bid to relive happy memories and get some closure.

From organising living funerals to offering grief support, these specialists aim to create a ‘death-positive landscape’

By Lavina Dsouza

Arlena Marie from Arizona, Texas, decided to take a leap and ask in Side Hustle Nation, a Facebook group, how to become a “death doula” and market herself as one.

While some were aghast at hearing such a profession exists, others had their interest piqued because, morbid as it sounds, every person on the planet is a potential customer.

The word doula originates from the ancient Greek term doule and translates as a person who serves. Birth doulas are now common and, like midwives, provide services during the birthing journey. A death doula, on the other hand, offers emotional support to people who believe they’re nearing the end of their life and would like to make the days count.

Death is the single certainty in life, yet people continue to fear it instead of preparing for it. I wanted to create a death-positive landscape.
Avril Carr, death doula from Al Ain

While professional moirologists (also known as “crying ladies” in some cultures) have been around for centuries and are hired to wail at funerals, the pandemic has brought death doulas to the fore, as an alternative form of mourner.

Avril Carr is a death doula from Al Ain. She trained as a hypnobirthing teacher, breastfeeding supporter and paediatric sleep consultant, and realised that while a wealth of knowledge is available for the birthing process, the reality of death remains largely ignored.

“We’re suspicious of death, which is interesting because not everyone will give birth, and yet there are countless ways in which mothers and fathers are encouraged to prepare for birth. Death is the single certainty in life, yet people continue to fear it instead of preparing for it. I wanted to create a death-positive landscape,” Carr tells The National.

Having a calm presence to see people through difficult moments and celebrate any glimpses of beauty together is a much-needed trait for death doulas. Carr says the feeling of fulfilment when helping someone with death anxiety is an extremely rewarding experience.

“We care for clients in ways that are personally meaningful and affirming to them. Our focus is assisting people with planning, preparing and processing,” says Francesca Arnoldy, a death doula from Burlington in the US, who also developed the end-of-life doula training programme for The Robert Larner, MD College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.

The most heartbreaking thing is to hear someone say: ‘I wish I had known about you sooner’
Lala Langtry-White, doula

Unlike hospice nurses and other end-of-life support providers, death doulas are emotional companions first and foremost, and must be able to customise their services based on what a person is looking to do to help ease the process.

Planning could involve creating schedules to meet others, having conversations that help with the transition, organising a pre-funeral while the person is still alive and sorting through belongings. Some may even want to make a scrapbook or involve family members to help them through the grief.

The amount of grief and uncertainty the pandemic brought has made many – both the ill and the relatively healthy – want to discuss death and have all their affairs in order, be they practical or emotional.

While stay-at-home measures were enforced in many places across the world, death doulas, like most others, turned to technology and came up with creative ways to virtually bring families together during tough times, making people realise they needed tools and information to bolster their sense of readiness.

Jessica Mendivil, a death doula from California, developed free community calls and training for families to help them cope with the loss of loved ones and general lack of preparedness.

Carr realised that while she missed being physically present, she could still impart training virtually on setting the death space, which included different ways to record one’s legacy and sit vigil when death was near.

Small and Mighty Babies, run by Lala Langtry-White and Joanne Hanson-Halliwell in the UAE, set up and continues to offer an online Love Through Loss community, plus monthly support evenings and access to voluntary bereavement doula support and counselling with The LightHouse Arabia.

It’s a lucrative job, but professionals know it can be a vulnerable and intense journey. Death is still not an easy subject for most people and perhaps never will be, but Langtry-White says the most heartbreaking thing is to hear someone say: “I wish I had known about you sooner.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Four things you might not know about your digital afterlife

What happens to your data after you die?

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1 Your digital footprint will one day become your digital remains

If a complete stranger were granted access to every scrap of recorded information about you that exists in the world, would they be able to stand up at your funeral and deliver a personal, moving eulogy that captured the essence of you? Thanks to the modern digital world, the likely answer is yes.

If you’re not active on social media, you might think that you’d be leaving behind very little in the way of a meaningful or personally telling digital legacy. Social media, however, are merely the tip of the little toe when it comes to our digital footprints. Anyone who has access to your devices and accounts after you die – including all the material you never intended to share – could tell quite a lot about you.

Formerly ephemeral communications are now comprehensively stored in searchable, time- and date-stamped emails and message threads. Once untrackable movements are logged by our smartphones, smartwatches, and facial recognition technologies in public spaces. Internet of Things (IoT) devices like video doorbells and virtual assistants are filling our homes.

And our internal desires, thoughts, and feelings can be discerned by innumerable others through our search histories, websites we’ve visited, and the documents and photos we store in cloud accounts and our data-storage devices.

Little wonder that the algorithms seem to know us better than we know ourselves – in this hyperconnected and electronically surveilled world, we are constantly feeding them our data.

A 2019 survey found that 1 in 4 people in the UK want all of these data to be removed from the internet when they die, but no legal or practical mechanisms exist for this to occur. There is no magical switch that is thrown, no virtual worms that traverse the internet nibbling away all traces of us when we die.

Physical death does not equal digital death. Our personal data is simply too voluminous, spread too far and wide throughout the digital world, and too under the control of innumerable third parties to simply call it back home to ‘bury’ it.

2 Social media are becoming digital cemeteries

Dedicated digital cemeteries do exist, the oldest being The World Wide Cemetery, founded in 1995, where people can still visit online graves and leave virtual flowers and tributes. Memorial gardens are dotted around the virtual world Second Life.

Many funeral homes now offer online condolence books, and some physical cemeteries even feature graves with digital components such as video screens or QR codes affixed to traditional headstones. Scores of digital legacy companies appear regularly, often going out of business shortly thereafter.

None of these digital cemeteries can hold a memorial candle, though, to the platforms that never intended to become online places of rest in the first place: sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Facebook has been memorialising profiles in one form or another since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, after which users pleaded with the site not to delete profiles that had become memorials for the lost.

Scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute have estimated that the number of deceased users on Facebook could be as high as 4.9 billion by 2100. The dead are also mounting up on Instagram, which also memorialises profiles, and Twitter may follow suit. In November 2019, Twitter cancelled an imminent inactive-account cull in response to an outcry from bereaved people who feared the loss of their deceased loved ones’ Twitter feeds.

Social media companies may be actively trying to work out what to do about the data of the deceased on their servers, but dead people’s information is all over the internet, across all sorts of websites and apps. Many – perhaps even most – of the entities that manage our data are not planning well for the end from the beginning, so information can stick around online for an indeterminate period of time.

We should never assume, however, that online is forever. Disappearance of online data is inevitable through deliberate culls, accidental data loss, and companies going bust.

3 People are struggling to make plans for their digital legacies

It’s not only organisations that are flummoxed by what to do about digital legacies. It’s us, the people who are accumulating them. Less than half of adults in the UK have made a traditional will, and far fewer have considered what will happen to their digital one.

In the Digital Legacy Association’s 2017 Digital Death Survey, 83 per cent of respondents had made no plans at all for their digital legacies. A handful of people – 15.2 per cent – had made their wishes known for their Facebook accounts using the Legacy Contact feature. Legacy Contact allows you to appoint a trusted person to manage your memorialised account after you die, and you can also stipulate if you want the account deleted.

Whether instructions left on Legacy Contact or any other online platform would hold up in UK courts, however, is another matter. As in many realms of modern life, this is an area where laws and regulations are not keeping pace with technology. GDPR and the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 don’t comment on what should happen to the digitally stored information of the dead, who are no longer entitled to data protection.

Service providers are understandably reluctant to hand over account contents or access to next of kin, especially when that’s likely to compromise other (living) people’s privacy.

Laws governing wills and probate don’t help much either when it comes to digital material. To bequeath something to someone in the UK it has to be tangible or valuable, and your social media profiles might not be judged to be either. In addition, you can’t pass on what you don’t actually own in the first place.

You do not own your social media profiles. Even if you’d like to, you cannot pass on an iTunes or Kindle library, since you have only purchased a license to watch, listen or read while you’re alive. The vast majority of your online accounts and their contents are non-transferable: one account, one user.

It may be a while before coherent, enforceable systems are instituted to govern what should happen to the data of the deceased. Until then, the companies to whom we entrust our data when we’re alive largely decide what happens to it upon death and who can access it.

In this legal and regulatory void, we can only make arrangements as best we can. For sentimental and practical material that might be valuable to our loved ones, we need to leave behind instructions for how to access it or – even better – back it up in secure but accessible formats that are not under the control of online service providers. In the not-too-distant future, digital estate planning may be a career all its own, or at least a necessary component of an existing profession.

4 It is impossible to predict how digital legacies will be meaningful to the bereaved

Our expectations that ‘normal’ grief will follow predictable, orderly stages is encouraged by our algorithmic environment. If you type ‘stages of…’ into a search engine, that engine will likely suggestion completion with ‘grief’. If you type ‘grief’, the engine will likely suggest ‘stages of’.

Despite what you and the algorithms might think, however, bereavement is actually incredibly, spectacularly idiosyncratic. Just as every relationship we have in life is unique, each bereavement is particular too. Despite dominating the popular discourse for the latter half of the 20th Century, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous grief stages – which were actually based upon qualitative research done with dying people, not bereaved people – boast little empirical support.

Across cultures and millennia, people have continued bonds with their dead in various ways, and we cannot predict what digital artifacts will be important in helping a bereaved person feel a thread of connection to those gone before.

For every person that relies upon a memorialised Facebook profile in their grief, there will be another that wishes it would just disappear. A preserved Twitter profile might be an absolute lifeline to friends, but the family might want it removed, perhaps imagining it’s not important to anyone. There is no rule book for what should and should not be important to someone in grief.

An astonishing and unpredictable variety of digital artifacts have been reported to me as being sentimentally significant to bereaved people. The digital recording of her husband’s heartbeat, stored in iTunes on a widow’s phone. The way that a woman’s brother organised and named his files on his laptop, giving her a window into how he thought and reasoned. A spam email from a woman’s deceased friend whose account was hacked – even though she knew it came from a hacker, she didn’t want to erase it, because it was his name in her inbox. A mother’s search history on her laptop, revealing to her daughter what she was thinking about in the last days of her life.

And finally, Google Street View, haunted by those who are no longer at that address. There is dad, watering the front lawn. There is a fondly remembered pet, peeking out the window of the house. There is grandma, sitting on the porch where she always did, waiting for the school bus to bring her grandchildren home. Even Google Earth is full of ghosts.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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30 Astonishing Facts About Death

By Bess Lovejoy

Death is the start of a great adventure—never mind that you might not be around for it.

  1. You can be declared dead in some states but considered alive in others. That’s because New York and New Jersey allow families to reject the concept of brain death if it goes against their religious beliefs.
  1. One of the first visible signs of death is when the eyes cloud over, as fluid and oxygen stop flowing to the corneas. That can happen within 10 minutes after death if the eyes were open (and 24 hours if the eyes were closed).
  1. Today, there are about 300 bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen in America in the hope that science will one day be able to bring them back to life. (Contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney is not one of them.)
  1. It’s a myth that hair and nails grow after death. What really happens is that the body dries out, so the nail beds and skin on the head retract, making nails, stubble, and hair appear longer.
  1. Rigor mortis is only temporary. It’s a result of certain fibers in the muscle cells becoming linked by chemical bonds, but usually goes away in a day or two as those bonds break down. How long it lasts depends on the temperature in the environment, among other factors.
A corpse flower, or titan arum, known for smelling a lot like death.
  1. Two of the gases responsible for the distinctive smell of death are called putrescine and cadaverine. They’re produced when bacteria break down the amino acids ornithine and lysine, respectively.
  1. Bodies can become covered in what looks like soap after death. Technically known as adipocere (and sometimes also called grave wax), it’s a byproduct of decomposition that happens as the fat in a body decays under wet, anaerobic (lacking in oxygen) conditions. Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum and Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian each have an adipocere-covered corpse on display.
  1. There are more than 200 corpses of failed climbers frozen on Mount Everest.
  1. The low-temperature, low-oxygen, highly acidic environmental conditions of European peat bogs can preserve bodies with remarkable detail for centuries, and even millennia. One of the most famous examples of these “bog bodies” is the Iron Age Tollund Man in Denmark. When his body was discovered in 1950, it looked so fresh his discoverers thought they’d found a recent murder victim.

  1. Scientists are currently studying the “necrobiome”—all the bacteria and fungi in a corpse—to figure out whether changes in the microbes alone can provide clues to the time of death. The concept is known as the “microbial clock.”
  1. People used to believe that the blood of the freshly executed was a health tonic, and would pay executioners a few coins to drink it warm from the gallows.
  1. “Hop the twig,” “yield the crow a pudding,” “snuff one’s glim,” and “climb the six-foot ladder,” were all once slang terms for death.
  1. Dead bodies generally aren’t dangerous just because they’re dead. But in the 19th century, there was widespread belief in “miasmatic theory,” which said that air coming from rotting corpses and other sources of decay lead to the spread of disease. This belief was more or less replaced by germ theory.

  1. Embalming is rarely required by law, except in certain situation where bodies leave state borders.
  1. The average human body produces between 3 and 9 pounds of cremated remains after being burned. The cremation chamber, known as a retort, can get as hot as 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
  1. The Victorians often took photos of dead loved ones as part of their grieving process. These postmortem photographs became keepsakes that were displayed in homes, sent to friends and relatives, and worn inside lockets.
  1. In at least one version of telegraph code, LOL meant “loss of life.”
  1. In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of a previous pope, Formosus, exhumed, perched on a throne, and questioned about his “crimes” (which were mostly about being on the wrong side of a political struggle.) The event is known as the Cadaver Synod.
  1. The term mortician was invented as part of a PR campaign by the funeral industry, which felt it was more customer-friendly than undertaker. The term was chosen after a call for ideas in Embalmer’s Monthly.
A statue of Abraham Lincoln, whose embalming widely popularized the practice
  1. The embalming of Abraham Lincoln for the journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, is widely credited with encouraging everyday acceptance of the practice.
  1. You’re more likely to be killed at a dance party than while skydiving.
  1. Between the 16th and the early 20th centuries, artists used ground-up mummies as paint pigment. (It was also thought to be a potent medicine.)
  1. The idea that graves need to be 6 feet deep comes from a 1665 plague outbreak in England, when the mayor of London decreed the burial depth to limit the spread of disease.
  1. No Mormon mourning is complete without Mormon funeral potatoes, a cheesy casserole that usually involves cornflakes. Other foods associated with death include pan de muerto (“bread of the dead”), traditionally eaten on Dia De Los Muertos in Mexico; ossa dei morti (“bones of the dead”) cookies in Italy, meant to represent the bones of dead saints; and Victorian funeral biscuits.
Mormon funeral potatoes
  1. Contrary to popular reports, it’s not illegal to die in Longyearbyen, Norway. But since the town has no nursing homes and only a small hospital, residents are required to move to the mainland once they become elderly. It is true that it’s so cold there bodies barely decompose.
  1. “Human composting,” in which bodies decompose into dirt in reusable “recomposition vessels,” is legal in Washington state. The results don’t smell, and are suitable for use in the garden.
  1. The Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Nederland, Colorado, is held each year in honor of a 110-year-old corpse located in a local Tuff Shed and surrounded by dry ice (it’s a DIY cryonics set-up). The festival features coffin racing, frozen salmon tossing, costumed polar plunging, and frozen t-shirt contests.
Coffin racing at the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Nederland, Colorado in 2019
  1. In the 19th century, several inventors came up with “safety coffins” equipped with bells, flags, and air tubes and designed to help people avoid being buried alive.
  1. Although the etiquette guides for Victorian mourning varied widely, widows mourned for a total of two-and-a-half years, while widowers mourned for three months.
  1. In the 17th century and beyond, human skulls were soaked in alcohol to create a tincture called “the King’s drops” that was said to be good for gout, dropsy (edema), and “all fevers putrid or pestilential,” among other ailments. King Charles II of England allegedly paid £6000 for a personal recipe.

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The Best Books to Help You Cope With Death and Dying

How the wisdom of Joan Didion, death doulas, and Big Bird have prepped me to dance into the void (and plan my estate).

by Mary Frances Knapp

The chillest people I know are the ones surrounded by death. I’ve spoken with a lot of them over the years: end-of-life doulas, hospice workers, embalmers; eco-coffin designers, grief counselors, and country homesteaders; all of whom look their inevitable demise square in the face. They’ve all taught me something different about death and dying, but they’ve also driven home a similar point: Death doesn’t have to be this freaky egg that gets cracked on your head out of the blue. Death—rather, dying—is a process, and that process is what you make of it.

One of my first writing gigs in college was all about death (which is why I’m on this coffin-shaped soap box in the first place). I freelanced for an end-of-life planning business in San Francisco, which was part practical, local resource for what to do after a loved one dies, and part death blog (that was my jam). We were always careful not to stew in topics related to death and dying in a macabre way—the landing page was baby blue, and blogging topics ranged from DIY crafts for memorializing loved ones to learning more about biodegradable urns. Why on Earth they let a 19-year-old with no knowledge of funeral homes write for them is beyond me, but I’m so glad they did. I learned that when you’re constantly surrounded by death, it doesn’t feel as foreign and unnavigable. Of course, those in the death and dying industry don’t become magically exempt from the emotional demands of death, and having the time and resources to live and die well is a privilege. But in the years I spent learning about estate planning, or talking to home health aides about what you can do literally moments after a loved one has died to find some peace, I learned that dying well is just like living well: You reap what you sow.

So where do you start? Books. Read what other people have been through in hospitals, at home, or with their own existential crises. While the titles below are hardly a definitive guide to death and end-of-life planning, they’re the ones that have helped me feel better prepared to dance into the void.

No one does death like le French

Simone de Beauvoir is a *chef’s kiss* great Frenchy to hold your hand through the topic of death. This is one of the author’s most beloved books from the 1960s, and it takes you through the experience of her mother’s death with an acute sensitivity to detail; it’s Beauvoir’s talent for focusing on the more “banal” moments of terminal illnesses and dying with philosophical panache that makes it so good.

A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

Learn how physicians feel about patient care

This one reads like a diary, if diaries were super exacting tell-alls by medical professionals. Author and doctor Ira Byock is a palliative care physician, and getting insights into the strides and pitfalls of his end-of-life care experiences teaches you a lot about the kinds of questions you’ll want to ask when/if you ever end up navigating similar situations and medical institutions. It’s the kind of book that just makes you feel like you have someone on your side, even in the face of daunting health scares.

The Best Care Possible by Ira Byock

Yes, there are end of life doulas

We usually think of doulas as kindly granola folk who help bring wee babes into this world, but there are also doulas and death midwives who are trained to accompany those who are dying and usher them into whatever comes next. I’ve spoken with a lot of them over the years, but this book rec actually comes from a friend who just started pursuing a career in end-of-life care. “I picked up this book to learn more about reclaiming deathcare as a sacred, holistic, and intimate practice,” she told me, saying she’d absolutely suggest this book for those who could see themselves in a similar profession, or who just want to learn more about the above.


Anne-Marie Keppel

Death Nesting by Anne-Marie Keppel

There’s room for creativity

Overall, I think the United States has this knee-jerk reaction to sterilize the processes of death and dying. We exact our funerary ceremonies with a kind of uniformity and somberness—which is fair. Death is hard, and everyone grieves differently. But, dude. Have you ever seen the coffins in Ghana? They’re beautiful, and personal. A really celebratory labor of love.

The Buried Treasures Of The Ga: Coffin Art In Ghana by Regula Tschumi

Raise your hand if you’ve got daddy issues

A hard read, but a super cathartic memoir by Jesmyn Ward for anyone who has lost a loved one at a young age, or who tightrope-walks their relationship with their parents. The book follows the author’s relationships with five different people in that sense, and it’s also a powerful portrait of what it means to live and mourn as a Black person in the American South.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

That’s one way to cope

We’ve all had it happen, or seen it happen to someone else: Rather than confront our grief, we pour ourselves into a new hobby or time-suck pursuit (cc: all those quarantine sourdough loaves). And that’s OK. There’s no etched-in-stone timeline for grief, and this memoir by Long Litt Woon, written about her late husband, is a great reminder of that; it’s about all the curious, dark, and beautiful places our grief can take us, such as mushroom hunting. “Long tells the story of finding hope after despair lightly and artfully,” writes the New York Times in a review that I think really hits the nail on the head. “[She writes with] self-effacement and so much gentle good nature that we forgot how sad she (and we) are.” Then, like the narrator, we remember. But guess what? We’re still in one piece. 

The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon

If you’re not spiritual…

… Then read every essay and book by Joan Didion, honestly. Her writing will spoon feed you a tough yet deeply observant love, and feels like getting a sit-down chat from your most level-headed relative about hippies, the Pioneer West, and, in this case, the death of her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. So many books on death and dying are deeply spiritual or religious, but for those of us who have only ever had faith in logic and, IDK, Pokémon, Didion is your gal. No one else writes quite like her about the surreal logic of grief-brain with as much honesty and accuracy. 

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

One for the kids

Do you have Muppet Feels? (Of course you do.) You might remember the legendary Sesame Street episode where Big Bird deals with Mr. Hooper’s passing. Heavy shit, man. The children’s book adaptation of that episode brings the same nuanced tenderness of the show, and literally everything in life is better when Big Bird is by your side. Give this to a kid, or anyone going through it.

I’ll Miss You, Mr. Hooper by Sesame Street

See you in the next life.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Hamlet: a play that speaks to pandemics past and present

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I went to the theatre for the first time in 15 months to see the Theatre Royal Windsor’s new production of Hamlet. Starring Ian McKellen and directed by Sean Mathias, it really resonates in a time of ongoing pandemic. Mckellen’s very contemporary, teenage Hamlet slouches around in a hoodie and trackie bottoms, grieving, isolated and angry.

The setting, like the original, is the city of Elsinore, Denmark. In this version, COVID funerals are disrupted and truncated. Hamlet, a latterday prince, is a bisexual university student stuck at home with mum and step-dad when he wants to be back at uni in Wittenberg, hanging out with his friends and lovers.

Mental health issues afflict those in mourning, especially royalty. Hamlet muses “to be or not to be” as his lover, Horatio, gives the prince that most precious of things in lockdown, a haircut. Characters are overwhelmed by feelings of loss. Suicidal thoughts lurk. Denmark feels, and looks, like a prison. The government is morally corrupt.

Much of the play, this modern interpretation and Shakespeare’s original, speak to the circumstances and current climate in which we live. There is much in it to relate to and also learn from as our world widens and we learn to “live with the virus”.

Pandemics past

The spectre of plague and pandemic hung over much of Shakespeare’s life. He was born in April 1564, a few months before an outbreak of bubonic plague killed a quarter of the people in his hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon. Such pandemics would recur during his time in London in 1592, 1603, 1606 and then 1609.

When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, usually dated around 1599-1601, feelings of grief, mourning and bereavement were probably at the forefront of his mind. His parents were very elderly by contemporary standards. Shakespeare’s father, John, died in September 1601 around 70 years of age. Five years earlier, in August 1596, Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, had died aged 11, possibly of plague.

It is an uncanny coincidence that the name Hamlet is so close in sound to the name of Shakespeare’s son. The play is obsessed with fathers and sons, and how to navigate mourning a father’s death. It is full of speeches about grief and attempts to move on after bereavement. Hamlet is not alone in this as Ophelia and Laertes also suffer from unresolved grief in the play.

 

What galvanises Hamlet out of his emotional lockdown is theatre. When he hears travelling players are in town he leaps into action. Like so many in the audience he has really missed the theatre.

Despite the modern dress, Sean Mathias’ production eclectically evokes the theatre practices of the troupe in Hamlet. Most obviously, casting ignores age, ethnicity and gender, something which evokes the fact that Shakespeare’s stage had young men playing women. So while Jonathan Hyde is realistically cast as a plausible, efficient Claudius, the teenage Hamlet is played by an 82-year-old, while Francesca Annis who plays his elderly ghost.

Pandemic theatre

Lee Newby’s set design also encourages audiences to think of early modern playing conditions, transforming the Theatre Royal stage into a black metal, faux Globe theatre with two banks of seats on either side of the stage and a gallery at the back.

As a result, the onstage audience are clearly on display, sharing light with the performers. The mandatory face masks offer a constant reminder of COVID, while blanking out the audience’s reactions, but they also offer a reminder that Shakespeare’s playhouse had to navigate its own pandemic and often had to negotiate sudden lockdowns.

When the weekly plague death count reached 30 in Shakespeare’s time, the playhouses closed. Plague transmission was not properly understood, but it was clear that people congregating created a super-spreader event of sorts.

Shakespeare, a player, playwright and, most importantly of all, a shareholder in the Globe, seems to have seized the moment and written prolifically during plague lockdowns. In 1592 he was writing narrative poetry – Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece – as plague raged.

The years 1603 to 1604, 1606, and 1608 to 1609 were also bad for plague, and seem to have given Shakespeare space to write. For example King Lear was performed at Whitehall Palace on Boxing Day 1606 at the end of a year of plague. From 1597 on, Shakespeare could also escape to his sprawling Warwickshire country mansion, New Place, one of the largest houses for miles, with at least 20 rooms.

Illustration of the original Globe Theatre.
Globe Theatre, detail from Hollar’s View of London, 1647.

By contrast, many players were desperate for any income and facing destitution. So, sometimes playhouses would reopen before the mortality rate fell to the level considered “safe”. The thought of what a “freedom day” was like in the early modern playhouse, with those standing (known as groundlings) pressed closely together in the yard, is perhaps even more daunting than watching people flood back now restrictions are lifted.

Now that so many restrictions have been lifted now in the UK since July 19, I am feeling very ambivalent about the shared experience of live theatre. The Theatre Royal created what feels like a very safe space and, personally, I could get used to having such a generous amount of leg room in front of me. In a COVID-secure theatre, there’s no need to get intimate with complete strangers while trying to squeeze through to your seat.

But after “Freedom Day”, the theatre is only insisting that masks remain mandatory for the audience onstage who are in such close proximity to the actors. The theatre will only “strongly encourage” the rest of the audience to mask up.

During the first decade of the 1600s, pandemic ravaged the country’s population and theatres were closed as often as they were open. This might be the case now too. Already productions have had to close to isolate, including London’s Shakespeare’s Globe, after positive cases among cast and crew. Maybe restrictions indoors could stave off more productions having to close. It took 30 deaths to close the playhouses in the 1600s, but now all it takes to close a theatre is one case of COVID.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!