Category: Cultural Expressions

Posted on

‘The Bitter Comes With The Sweet’

— Without Death, There Is No Life

By Mara Buchbinder

In the early days of the pandemic, my days were bookended by stories of death. I woke up each day hours before dawn to work on my book manuscript, happy to have a passion project to soothe my anxious energy. My book chronicles how Vermont patients, caregivers and health care providers navigated medical aid-in-dying, in the aftermath of legalization. In the morning, I combed through my notes, writing feverishly about dying, and in the evening, I absorbed the news of bodies accumulating around the world more quickly than they could be buried.

I have never been more acutely aware of my own mortality. I offered my husband detailed instructions about how to tend to my unfinished manuscript, should the need arise. We joked, with gallows humor, about how my death would make an ironic capstone to the book; he, of course, agreed to pen the afterword for the posthumous publication.

Studying medical aid-in-dying, and now living through the greatest pandemic in 100 years, has forced me to reckon with mortality. Over the five years that I’ve collected stories about death and dying, people have often questioned how I could study such a morbid topic. Isn’t it depressing? The answer is, anything but. Humbling and grounding, yes, and at times terribly sad, but never depressing.

An avid reader since childhood, I have always taken great comfort in stories. When the pandemic began, I realized that immersing myself in stories about death had actually helped me. Thinking about my own inevitable death is sad, but it doesn’t terrify me anymore. At 40, I hope I have a great many years left, but I’m also more or less at peace with my finitude.

Yet last spring, when I picked up Natalie Babbitt’s novel “Tuck Everlasting” to read to my 7-year-old son, I realized it was this book that first made me address my mortality, some 30 years ago.

If the concept of mortality was terrifying to me, the idea of immortality was even more so.

Published in 1975, “Tuck Everlasting” takes place in the 19th century, 87 years after the Tuck family unwittingly drinks from a magical spring that renders them immortal. The story is set in motion when a 10-year-old girl, Winnie Foster, accidentally discovers their secret. They bring her to their woodland cottage to persuade her to keep quiet, warning her of the catastrophe that would ensue if news of the spring were to become public.

The novel quickly charmed educators and parents, winning numerous literary awards. While it captivates young readers with its lyrical prose, its matter-of-fact philosophizing on life and death set it apart. In a key scene, Angus, the patriarch of the Tuck family, explains to Winnie that dying is an unavoidable part of the “wheel of life.” The bitter comes with the sweet. It is the difference between having a life and merely being alive. You can’t have living without dying.

The Tucks haunted my childhood. To my 10-year-old self, it seemed clear that the only thing scarier than dying was not dying. How awful it would be to outlive nearly everyone that you love! How bleak it would feel to be resigned to a life of complete social isolation. If the concept of mortality was terrifying to me, the idea of immortality was even more so.

This is precisely what the author had in mind. Babbitt wrote the book to tame the worries of her daughter Lucy, who was then 4-years-old. Babbitt wanted to help Lucy understand that dying was a natural part of the wheel of life, that not dying is much less desirable than it may seem.

Flipping cultural scripts on fears about death: this is the power of stories.

As a non-fiction author, I write for reasons not so different from Babbitt’s. I use real people’s stories to examine cultural fears about death — in my case, about lack of control over dying. Medical aid-in-dying offers what is, for many, a seductive vision of personal control over dying, and the promise of a peaceful, sanitized death. Yet such control often proves illusory, both because access to assisted death is much more complicated than it may seem, and because death, itself, is wily.

People have often questioned how I could study such a morbid topic. Isn’t it depressing? The answer is, anything but.

I think about a woman in her mid-60s I’ll call Candace, who developed metastatic cancer. Once it was clear that she was not going to get better, Candace decided to die on her own terms, with medical assistance. She procured the lethal prescription, which was no easy feat, because many physicians are reluctant to participate in the process. By the time she was ready to die, however, she was no longer able to ingest the medication.

The pandemic has made me even more sure that, like Candace, we are not in control of our destinies. But the Tucks weren’t in control, either. They waited passively, resigned to let the oppressive unfurling of time wash over them. In this sense, immortality’s promise of control over death is also illusory. It is poignant that the Tucks look forward to the day, every 10 years, when their sons return to the family cottage. During the pandemic’s eternal spring, when days bled into weeks and then months, I identified with this feeling, marking my days with UPS deliveries, as time moved ever so slowly.

During the pandemic, I have been in the fortunate position of being able to forestall illness and death with the appropriate precautions, such as staying at home. These measures should permit me to avoid the wrong sort of death. (There is universal agreement at this point that dying from COVID-19 is the wrong sort of death.) But I cannot avoid death altogether, nor (I think) would I want to

Now, 10 months into this crisis, my book is complete. The wheel spins on. The end of the pandemic no longer feels as far off and impossible as it did last spring. And still, I wonder what kind of story I am in. I marvel at that wonder.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

‘Where is our humanity?’

— A Minnesota man is on a mission to keep Native burial customs alive during the pandemic

Tribes beset by loss have few morticians in tune with traditions 

By

Braving bitter cold and gusting winds, nearly a dozen people said prayers in their native Dakota language as they watched a bonfire blaze through a deceased man’s clothing, sending a thin trail of smoke drifting over the snow-covered hills on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

The traditional burning of garments represented a final rite of passage for the spirit of Francis Jay Country Jr., a 66-year-old tribal elder and musician whose life was cut short this month by the coronavirus. The bonfire also culminated two days of elaborate ceremonies in which a tribal chief, dressed in an eagle feather headdress, led family members in songs, drumming and prayers facing the four directions.

For Mary White-Country, now a widow, the rituals brought much-needed comfort that her husband’s spirit was no longer suffering and had begun its journey. “Today, I have cried all my tears,” she said after the ceremony. “There is closure because my husband was sent off in a respectful manner, in a way that honored his traditions.”

But the burial customs and ceremonies that many Indigenous communities have cherished for generations are under pressure from an unforeseen enemy — COVID-19.

The coronavirus is killing American Indians at staggeringly high rates, inflicting incalculable trauma and exposing historic gaps in the predominantly white-owned funeral services industry. Only a handful of morticians in the region have specialized training in the diverse Indigenous customs that follow a tribal member’s death and know how to navigate the complex process for arranging burials on reservations. Overwhelmed by an upsurge of bodies, these funeral directors are being forced to turn away many Native families, depriving them of a traditional ceremony and emotional closure.

Nationwide, American Indians are perishing from COVID-19 at nearly twice the rate of white people, but the disparities are even greater across the Upper Midwest. Over 10 months of the pandemic, Native Americans in Minnesota have died at four times the rate of white Minnesotans, and they are being hospitalized at nearly 3.5 times the rate of whites after adjusting for age, according to state Department of Health data.

Few have borne closer witness to this deadly toll in Indian Country than Robert Gill of Buffalo, Minn., a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and among the only Native American morticians in the country.

A gentle hero to many tribal members, Gill has made it his life’s mission to restore Native burial customs and to “decolonize,” as he calls it, the process of honoring and burying those who die on Indian reservations. Since the arrival of the coronavirus, death has become an all-encompassing specter of Gill’s daily life, consuming his days and even his nights. He travels hundreds of miles each week to remote tribal communities as far west as the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana and as far north as the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation near the Canadian border.

Before the pandemic, Gill was being asked to arrange three to four burial ceremonies a month for Native families. Now the 50-year-old mortician is receiving that many funeral requests every week.

Even with a punishing work schedule, he sometimes struggles with guilt over his inability to meet the surging demand for traditional burial services. He knows that many tribal families are being left with no choice but to turn to white-owned funeral homes with morticians who do not understand their language and customs. Without ceremonies rooted in their culture, Gill argues, tribal members are disconnected from their history and unable to mourn properly.

“Where is our humanity?” Gill asked, as he prepared to load a casket into his waiting hearse. “An expression of a life that was lived brings closure for a family. And if they can’t have that, then it’s not dignified.”

“Where is our humanity?” Before the pandemic, Gill arranged three to four burials a month for Native families. Now he is receiving that many funeral requests every week.

A dark legacy

The dearth of funeral options, some tribal leaders argue, is a legacy of America’s dark history of racial subjugation of American Indians and their religious practices. Until 1978, when Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, spiritual ceremonies like the sweat lodge and drum dances were still technically illegal. The prohibitions enabled Christian churches to establish deep footholds on reservations and further restrict Indigenous customs — including their ceremonies for honoring the deceased.

“As a kid, they called us ‘devil worshipers,’ and we were taught to be ashamed of our own culture and traditions,” said Chief Arvol Looking Horse, a keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and elder of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. “Even our funeral ceremonies were outlawed.”

For Gill, the doors to becoming a professional seemed all but sealed as a child growing up along the wooded shores of Buffalo Lake on the Lake Traverse reservation. Gill suspects that, were it not for his unrelenting mother, he never would have graduated from the reservation’s public high school in Sisseton, S.D., which still calls its sports teams “the Redmen.”

When he was in second grade, Gill’s mother became alarmed when her son kept coming home from school with headaches. Gill, then just 9, told her that white teachers were beating him with rulers and regularly pulling on his ears and hair. His mother, Patricia Gill-Eagle, then learned of another boy who was beaten so badly with a broomstick that welts formed on his back. Fed up, Gill’s mother and 10 other parents removed their children from the local elementary school in Sisseton and opened their own tribal school.

“The public school made my son feel little, like he couldn’t make it in the world,” said Gill-Eagle, a retired nurse who is still active in the tribal school system. “He didn’t learn to be a proud Native until we pulled him out

After attending a nursing program, Gill spent nine years working as an ambulance driver and emergency medical technician (EMT) on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations in the Dakotas, where he says the poor treatment of deceased Natives became impossible to ignore. It sometimes took hours for a mortician to arrive and remove a body after someone died; and the bodies could be decomposed beyond recognition, he said. The non-Native morticians who arrived at the death scenes would sometimes talk or joke about a recently deceased person as if grieving relatives were “invisible or not in the room,” Gill recalled.

“I witnessed a deep lack of respect,” Gill said. “It opened my eyes and made me realize that we have customs and traditions that allow us to care for the deceased, but we weren’t being allowed to practice them.”

Determined to bring more dignity to the burial process, he enrolled in the Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Chicago, where he graduated in 2012. He is believed to be the only licensed mortician of Dakota heritage in the country.

Long-distance house calls

Today Gill is virtually alone in the funeral business for his willingness to make long-distance house visits — sometimes driving entire days, through sleet and snow, to meet with tribal families in their homes. Each visit carries the risk that he will contract the virus still raging through Indian Country. Gill is the only one of five morticians who work at Chilson Funeral Chapel in central Minnesota who has not been sickened by COVID-19.

“You’ve got to have nerves of steel to do this work in a pandemic,” Gill said.

Beyond the ceremonies, he spends long hours in the embalming room preparing bodies for public viewing. Too often, Gill said, he heard tribal members complain of how their loved ones “looked like clowns” after non-Native morticians failed to recognize their darker skin hues and used bright-colored makeup (purples and reds) meant for white skin, he said. Gill carries a cosmetics kit on the road and often touches up a body before a ceremony.

“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why do my people not have their own funeral homes?” he said. “We buried our own for hundreds of years.”

On a frigid day in mid-January, Gill traveled 200 miles through an unforgiving blizzard to a hamlet on the far reaches of the Lake Traverse Reservation to meet with relatives of Ronald Allen Goodsell, a 69-year-old former construction worker who died just days earlier from COVID-19. The evening light was still pouring through the windows of the family’s kitchen when Gill and his broad, 6-foot-3-inch frame appeared in the doorway with a suitcase full of documents.

He was greeted by three generations of Goodsell family members — including siblings, cousins and grandchildren — who came and went through the crowded kitchen as Gill talked them through the traditional burial process. The family had decided to give Goodsell an Indian name, “Tatanka Ob Mani” (Walks with Buffalo), which involved a separate naming ceremony. Then came a long discussion over the limited choice of caskets. Goodsell’s widow wanted a coffin decorated in the Native colors of the four directions (black, red, yellow and white). But such a casket, the family learned, simply did not exist.

The family would have to settle on a generic brown coffin that lacked any exterior symbols of the deceased’s Dakota heritage.

“It’s unfortunate, but there are no Native funeral casket-making companies anywhere in this country,” Gill calmly explained to the Goodsells.

“We’re always having to deal with these ‘wasichu’ (whites) for everything and they just don’t understand us,” responded Nola Ragan, the widow’s sister.

Before departing, the family handed Gill a small collection of Goodsell’s clothes — including a traditional, white-ribbon shirt made by the deceased’s grandson — to dress his body when he returned to Minnesota.

Gill politely thanked the family and stepped out into the clear, star-filled night on the reservation.

On the long return trip to Minnesota, he could smell the faint scent of the man’s clothes next to him on the passenger seat, and he rehearsed what he would say at his ceremony.

Finally arriving home past 10 p.m., Gill had a late supper with his wife, Bonita, and then laid out a suit for the next day’s journey back to the reservation.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Grave matter

— Germans seek new ways to talk about dying

Mourning speaker Louise Brown in Hamburg.

Lockdown and a hit Netflix series are inspiring alternative grieving rites, from chocolate and painted stones to memorial workshops

By

On a plane tree-lined shopping street in Berlin’s fashionable Gräfekiez neighbourhood, two children are glued to the front of a brightly lit ground-floor office space, decorated with the understated minimalism of a design agency.

The object of their curiosity is a Lego window display, showing a miniature cemetery and a coffin carried by four tiny pallbearers, complete with black top hats.

“I love this”, says their mother as Birgit Scheffler, the co-owner of funeral home Das Fährhaus (The Ferry House), steps out of building’s front door. “It would be nice if death becomes less of a taboo for my kids’ generation than it was for my own.”

Das Fährhaus’ inviting exterior is a deliberate contrast to traditional funeral parlours, who usually have “blacked out windows or drawn blinds, and maybe a dead fly lying on the window sill”, as Scheffler put it.

Specialising in alternative or bespoke funerals, her undertaker’s business is one of several ventures that are currently brightening up a German way of death that used to be considered one of the gloomiest, most ritualised and rigidly regulated in Europe.

“In postwar Germany, our grief culture was shaped by the legacy of the two wars”, said Scheffler, 43, who used to work in marketing and distribution for a media company before retraining in 2017. “In a culture that was focused on building something new from the ruins, death was pushed aside.”

The psychoanalyst couple Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich famously diagnosed Germany with an “inability to mourn”, a phrase that was amplified by the 1968 student movement and has since echoed through the country’s postwar history.

Coronavirus, however, is proving a catalyst for a new way of talking about mortality. “Death is suddenly at the centre of our lives”, Scheffler said. “The first thing many of us do when we wake up is look at the number of people who have died in the last 24 hours.”

A national conversation about dying has captured the radio waves and television screens. In My Perfect Funeral, a critically acclaimed new series for radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, interviewees describe how they want to be put six feet under.

Netflix’s recent The Last Word, meanwhile, stars German comedy star Anke Engelke as a widow who reinvents herself as a eulogy speaker. “There is no wrong way to mourn”, says Engelke’s voiceover in the concluding episode. “Death is only terrible if you take it seriously.”

Scheffler and her co-owner Sahra Ratgeber opened Das Fährhaus in August, at a time when neighbouring shops were struggling with social distancing requirements and losses incurred during the spring lockdown.

New hygiene rules have also proved a burden for undertakers, limiting the number of people allowed to attend funerals and requiring embalmers to wear additional PPE. Open-casket funerals have been banned; the bodies of those who have died of or with Covid-19 are buried in body bags.

Yet among bereaved families the lockdown has inspired creative new ways to send off the departed. This year, Das Fährhaus has organised a funeral in which mourners were allocated time slots to adorn the grave with painted stones rather than the conventional flowers. At another, family and friends dropped chocolate bars rather than sand onto the coffin of a deceased chocaholic.

Her business offers mourners the opportunity to build their own coffin or work with a ceramicist to make a bespoke urn. “The more elements of the funeral relatives or friends can create themselves, the better.”

Increasingly, she said, people were getting in touch to put down specific instructions for their own funeral in writing: one woman dreamt of being buried in her wedding dress, a composer wanted to make sure some of her works were burned alongside her.

A heightened sense of one’s own perceived uniqueness may be associated with the much-derided “snowflake generation” of the 2010s, but Scheffler said she has noticed a change across all ages. “Even people in their 70s and 80s are becoming more creative.”

Outside the German capital, with its high tolerance threshold for alternative lifestyles, more traditional last rites still prevail, said Louise Brown, who presents the My Perfect Funeral podcast. A Hamburg-based journalist for print and radio, Brown has since 2015 also worked as a Trauerrednerin, a freelance “mourning speaker” for those who don’t want a eulogy to be spoken by the clergy.

While the tradition of such “free speakers” goes back to the free religious movement of the 19th century, other aspects of the typical German funeral remain unusually heavily steeped in tradition. The country is one of the few in the world where coffins or urns must be buried in a cemetery, the so-called Friedhofszwang, and where scattering the ashes of the cremated or dividing them between family members is banned.

“Most Germans still have a small-c conservative attitude to death”, said Brown, 45, a dual British-German citizen. “The organ music at the start of the funeral, the church bells on the walk to the grave: to many people these rituals still matter”.

What was changing, she said, was the bandwidth of what could be said in a eulogy: “People want more personalised speeches, and they no longer want me to skirt around the conflicts and the difficult phases in a person’s life.”

Interviewing family and friends in preparation for her speeches, said Brown, was like leafing through a photo album: “Often the funniest, most honest and authentic pictures are filed loosely near the back pages. The pictures that were taken on the fringes of the official photo session on a holiday, after an award ceremony or a 50th birthday. The pictures no one tried to pose for, the ones we thought were too blurry or out of focus. In a funeral speech, these are often the images that the bereaved most identify with.”

The pandemic has also constrained the jobs of mourning speakers, forbidding not only communal singing but also the customary post-funeral meet-up over coffee, which Brown says can be more important than the funeral itself.

“After the body has been laid to rest, there is usually a moment where the bereaved are both still very vulnerable and very open with each other. The intimacy of these gatherings isn’t something that you can recreate in a Zoom call.”

In times of Covid-19 families are increasingly opting for cremations, in the hope they can postpone the communal get-together until after the pandemic is over (urns, unlike coffins, can be put into storage for up to six weeks): according to Germany’s national association of undertaker’s, cremations now make up 70% of all funerals.

But even before Germany’s severe second wave and the ensuing Christmas lockdown squashed hopes of get-togethers in the near future, many had started looking for alternative new rituals. Graphic artist Anemone Zeim started her “remembrance workshop” Vergiss Mein Nie (Forget Me Never) seven years ago, helping bereaved people to come up with creative projects that conserve memories of their lost ones: films cut together from old Super 8 footage, scarves recycled from a late grandmother’s favourite jumper, or lampshades patterned with a deceased friend’s handwriting.

“You can’t solve your grief with a checklist”, said Zeim. “You need to get creative to find individual solutions. You need to use your hands to stop you getting trapped in your brain. That’s what we help with.”

In recent months, requests for her agency’s services have doubled, with emails flooding in not just from the Hamburg area where her business is based, but from across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

So-called “grieving tools” sold via Forget Me Never’s website, such as funeral cards, an “anger capsule” for writing down unresolved feelings towards the deceased, or “flower tears” containing bulbs and a clump of soil, have been in high demand.

“We’ve been working flat out”, said Zeim, “not necessarily because more people have died because of coronavirus but because people who have suffered a loss have been shacked up in their own four walls. There are advantages to that too: you don’t have to deal with the social stigma of grieving in public. But the danger is that you can become wrapped up in your sorrow.”

Zeim said she expected demand to keep on rising in the new year. “The process of mourning can take months or years, and not just individuals can mourn, but societies too. We as a society are already grieving for the toll that this pandemic has taken of us. We just haven’t realised yet.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Microsoft patent shows plans to revive dead loved ones as chatbots

The patent also mentions using 2D or 3D models of specific people

By Adam Smith

Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.  

The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.

“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

Microsoft has even included the notion of 2D or 3D models of specific people being generated via images and depth information, or video data.

The idea that you would be able, in the future, to speak to a simulation of someone who has passed on is not new. It is famously the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, where a young woman uses a service to scrape data from her deceased partner to create a chatbot – and eventually a robot.

In October 2020, Kanye West bought Kim Kardashian West a hologram of her late father, Robert Kardashian, to celebrate her 40th birthday, further cementing the idea of digital representations of the dead that can more authentically communicate with the living.

The hologram spoke for around three minutes, directly addressing Kardashian and her decision to become a lawyer “and carry on my legacy”.

Apart from Microsoft, other tech companies have tried to use digital data to recreate loved ones who have passed on.

“Yes, it has all of Roman’s phrases, correspondences. But for now, it’s hard — how to say it — it’s hard to read a response from a program. Sometimes it answers incorrectly”, Mazurenko’s father said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Race, Socioeconomics Are Largest Barriers to Hospice and Palliative Care

By Holly Vossel

Race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are the leading differentiating factors fueling disparities in hospice utilization. Recent research reflects mounting concerns about inequitable access to hospice and palliative care across the United States.

Researchers from the John Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore examined March 2020 data from three national health care databases that outlined disparities in hospice and palliative care. Of the studies the researchers assessed across the PubMed, Embase and CINAHL EBSCO databases, 70% described differences in access outcomes to hospice and palliative care by ethnicity, race or socioeconomic status.

According to authors of a 2021 American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine research article, “there is growing evidence of disparities in access to hospice and palliative care services to varying degrees by sociodemographic groups.”

Studies have shown that demographic disparities can limit the scale of hospice. Roughly 82% of Medicare decedents in 2018 were Caucasian, according to the National Hospice & Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). Comparatively, slightly more than 8% were African-American; 6.7% were Hispanic, and 1.8% were Asian. That year, only 0.4% of Medicare decedents were Native American.

Hospice providers have increasingly strategized to improve access to end-of-life care among these historically underserved populations, seeking to bridge racial divides to hospice and palliative care. Addressing demographic disparities in hospice utilization can ensure more patients receive quality care at the end-of-life, as well as open untapped markets to hospice providers.

According to the study authors, a main objective was to highlight the range of sociodemographic groups affected by inequitable hospice and palliative care access. The research examined disparities across five domains of access, with 60% of studies emphasizing acceptability, affordability and appropriateness as primary barrier points. Other domains included approachability and availability of these services.

Other data included in the body of research found disparate access based on variables such as age, gender and geographic location, such as remote rural areas.

An objective of the study was to outline implications for future research, policy and clinical practices that would improve access for underserved communities.

Underlying factors contributing to disparity issues have received little systematic attention, according to the authors, who indicated that public policy initiatives will be needed to bridge these divides..

“This integrative review highlights the need to consider various stakeholder perspectives and attitudes at the individual, provider, and system levels going forward,” said the study’s authors. “[And] to target and address access issues spanning all domains.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

French archaeologists find ancient grave of child, pet dog

French archeologists dig at an ancient child burial site recent at the Clermont-Ferrand Airport. France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research said Thursday the site dates back 2,000 years.

French archaeologists said Thursday they discovered the grave of a small child with what appears to be a pet dog dating to the Roman rule of the region about 2,000 years ago.

The researchers said they found the burial site during a dig at the Clermont-Ferrand Airport in central France. They believe the child was about a year old and buried with animal offerings along with the remains of the pet dog inside a coffin.

The coffin was found in a 6-by-3-foot grave. It was surrounded by 20 objects, including terra cotta vases, glass pots, half a pig, three hams and other pork cuts along with two headless chickens.

“The graves of young Gallo-Roman children are often located outside the community funeral home and sometimes even buried near the family home,” a statement from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research said. “These toddlers rarely benefit from the same funeral practices as their elders, who at that time were generally cremated.

“The furniture that accompanies the deceased of Aulnat is quite exceptional, both in terms of its quantity and quality. Such a profusion of dishes and butchery items, as well as the personal belongings that followed the child to his grave, underline the privileged rank to which his family belonged,” the institute said.

The discovery is part of a dig that covers 7.4 acres where numerous objects from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages have been found. Researchers are conducting tests of glassware and containers to learn what they might have held.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Death doulas help the dying meet their end with affirmation

Death doula Anna Adams sits in an office at Holistic Hospice in San Antonio on Oct. 28, 2020. Just as birth doulas help expectant parents bring new life into the world, end-of-life doulas help the dying cope with their next journey. They help the dying and their survivors face death with empowerment and affirmation instead of fear and anxiety.

By RENÉ A. GUZMAN

Andrea Aycock can only sometimes look at the photos of her hands clasped with her mother’s just before she died in May. But she’ll always cherish the helping hand she got from Anna Adams, an end-of-life doula in San Antonio who preserved that personal moment and so many more for Aycock in her mother’s dying days.

“Anna came and took care of her,” said Aycock, a call center operator in San Antonio. “(She) just mainly comforted me.”

Just as birth doulas help expectant parents bring new life into the world, end-of-life doulas help the dying cope with their next journey. They help the dying and their survivors face death with empowerment and affirmation instead of fear and anxiety.

Also known as death doulas, these trained professionals provide the terminally ill and their families physical and emotional support before, during and after death, the San Antonio Express-News reported. These are nonmedical services that often include relaxation exercises, funeral planning, educating the family on their loved one’s condition and just simple companionship.

Adams sees death awareness becoming more commonplace in the United States in the way that Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations have grown more mainstream and that there are more calls for services of end-of-life doulas.

“Cultures like the Mexican culture that have these beautiful traditions of staying in connection with that (dying) process are so admirable and so beautiful. Doulas want to make sure that is available to all people,” said Shelby Kirillin, an end-of-life doula in Richmond, Va., and program development manager for the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA) in Jersey City, N.J.

Kirillin sees the rising awareness of death doulas as part of what she calls a “death positive movement,” where more people are getting back to supporting their dying loved ones at home and engaging with their death more up close and personal, much as their ancestors did.

“In the last 100-plus years in our Western culture, that has been taken away from us,” Kirillin said. “How to be with someone who was dying, how to touch them. That was something that we knew how to do.”

INELDA is one of just a handful of death doula organizations in the nation and was launched just five years ago. Co-founder Henry Fersko-Weiss created the first end-of-life doula program in the United States at a New York City hospice in 2003.

Kirillin estimates INELDA has around 40 certified death doulas across the country, yet has trained around 3,000 individuals in death doula care. Many just sign up to learn more about facing death and don’t pursue death doula work, she said, while others branch off to do their own training.

Most death doula services come in three phases.

The first is planning and preparation, which involves getting a terminal patient’s affairs in order and asking some tough questions that call for honest answers. Where does that person want to die? Who do they want present for those final moments? What so they absolutely need to say or do before they’re gone?

Kirillin said that first phase often addresses the dying individual’s regrets and unfinished business, as well as any advance directives, wills, etc. Often referred to as “legacy work,” such planning makes it easier for family to understand and respect the dying person’s wishes.

Fran Morgan is in that early stage with her dying mother Rosalee, who receives hospice care at the private residence of a family friend.

“With Anna in the picture, she will be advocating for all of the things that need to happen,” said Morgan, a retired telecommunications company manager in San Antonio. “It will release me from those responsibilities, and I can just be with my mom and cherish those final moments.”

That second phase is called the vigil, usually the last four or five days of the dying person’s life where end-of-life doulas and family members spend more time at their bedside.

“I call them my angel vigils,” Adams said.

During her doula vigils, Adams, 38, often creates a soothing space for the dying with soft music and dim lighting. Sometimes she’ll add a favorite scent with aromatherapy. Most times, she just gently massages her client’s arms and holds their hands.

And in those final moments as they take their last breaths, Adams comforts them with what they most want to hear, be it Bible verses, soothing music or just someone to say it’s going to be OK.

The final phase of a death doula’s work addresses survivors’ grief. Kirillin said that involves circling back with the family a few weeks after their loved one’s death to check on their emotional well-being.

Kirillin stressed that end-of-life doulas do console families, but are not licensed grief counselors and will refer families to such resources if necessary.

When it came to caring for Aycock’s mother, Adams mostly helped with her bedside care and keeping her visiting nurses on task. Adams also explained to Aycock any of her mother’s diagnoses she didn’t understand.

Then there was that time Adams took those hand photos of Aycock and her mother. Difficult as it is for Aycock to look at those photos, much less share them, she still holds them close.

She holds Adams’s work even closer.

“It is the best help that you can get,” Aycock said. “They provide comfort not only for your loved one that is going through the transition, but for you.”

Morgan expects to experience more of that care from Adams. “I’m looking forward to the relationship that we’re going to have,” said Morgan, who started working with Adams around three weeks ago. “For now my initial experience (and) impression is she certainly has the heart for what she’s doing.”

Adams’s first experience comforting the dying came when she was 16. Fresh from certification as a nursing aid, Adams tended to a best friend’s cousin for several months at her home with bathing and conversation. That care continued when that cousin transferred to hospice care and well up to her death.

“So we just had a bonding moment. I gave her that sacred zone,” Adams said. “That kind of piqued my interest.”

Adams went on to pursue a career in hospice, then for the last four years worked as an EMS manager and dispatcher for a private company. But something pushed her back into working with the dying.

“I told my family, ‘God wants me to do this. God is keeping me in line with this,’ ” Adams said.

At the start of this year, Adams got her end-of-life doula certification. Then over the summer, she partnered with fellow certified doula Sonja Koenig to launch TX Doula Movement, an online training and certification course for death doulas, senior care doulas and doula consultants.

Adams knows of just a handful of death doulas in San Antonio right now, but she expects that number to double later this year when around five of her TX Doula Movement students complete their certification. Adams plans to launch her own doula training service next year.

Adams said the coronavirus has not deterred her from her work, save for having to incorporate more video consultations with families and masks and frequent hand-washings during visits. She has yet to provide end-of-life doula services to someone with COVID-19, but one of the hospice companies she works with takes in COVID-19 patients.

“I don’t have a problem working with COVID patients,” Adams said.

Adams said most hospitals still don’t work with death doulas, but hospice services are slowly warming up to them as adjuncts to their own care.

“It is relatively new, but we’re seeing it more,” said Rachel Hammon, executive director of the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice in Austin.

Holistic Hospice Care is one of two hospice centers in San Antonio that works with Adams. Administrator Erica Sandoval said Adams has been a welcome bridge between families and clinical teams.

“She can get on (everyone’s) level,” Sandoval said. “And she’s very calm and very patient. And she just wins their trust and they feel very comfortable with her.”

Like Adams, Sandoval, too, sees parallels between death doulas and Día de los Muertos, such as the memory books the doulas make for their clients and the Day of the Dead tribute altars families make for their lost loved ones.

“I definitely think that there’s a good association to that because they are (both about) wanting you to cherish their memories and enjoy the last moments and everything that you can remember of the individual,” Sandoval said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!