‘Spiritfarer,’ a game about the afterlife, seeks to ease the terror of death

“Spiritfarer”

By Elise Favis

“Goodbye, my friend,” said a deer named Gwen, holding me close in a final embrace as we sailed into the blood red waters of the River Styx. Despite the intense color of the sea, and the intensity of the moment, I felt calm. Flower petals drifted on the surface of the water, and white, lush trees swayed in a tranquil way. Gwen disappeared into thin air.

“Spiritfarer,” a game releasing later this year (on several platforms including Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Stadia), is about guiding spirits to the afterlife. It hopes to make the subject of death comfortable, even cozy, by focusing on relationships and care in people’s last moments while guiding them to the other side. After playing for an hour, I came away feeling hopeful and uplifted, even after experiencing its somber themes.

You play as Stella (or Daffodil, her accompanying cat, if you’re player-two via local or online co-op), a young girl who becomes a new spirit guide to the dead after Charon, inspired by the ferryman of Hades in Greek mythology, retires from that same position. You sail a fantastical world, gathering spirits and convincing them to board your ship. You help them through their problems and encourage them to accept their fates. For creative director Nicolas Guérin, building a death-positive game was cathartic; a way to cope with his own mortality as well as the passing of loved ones.

“I’m terrified of dying,” Guérin told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “I’m terrified of leaving my daughter behind me. I’m terrified of losing my friends and my family.”

His whole team drew inspiration from their experiences with losing someone. The characters in the game are each inspired by grandparents, uncles and friends who died. They’re not “carbon copies,” Guérin said, but composite characters; a mix of traits, personalities, feelings and anecdotes derived from connections they’ve had with deceased loved ones.

Guérin and his colleagues at indie studio Thunder Lotus Games had “no idea at first” if they could pull off themes of death positivity in a management sim, saying he “lucked out” with how it all came together. He said it was important to combine normal, mundane tasks with the “extraordinarily, terribly gruesome moment we face when we know we’re going to die.”

In “Spiritfarer,” your ship evolves over time as you build different structures on top of one another like eclectic towers. Some of these are temporary homes for the spirits you gather, and others are stations for cooking, harvesting, gardening and more. Each character wrestles with something. A lion couple, for example, struggles to find happiness together when one of them is unfaithful. Others, like Stanley, a talking and walking mushroom with childlike traits, just wants to be cared for, so I made him his favorite meal: french fries. Some just want to be hugged. You spend time on and off the ship, completing quests for these spirits and finding out more about Stella along the way, too.

It isn’t just through mechanics that “Spiritfarer” achieves a sense of serenity. The game has a calming atmosphere, with a striking art style inspired by Japanese painter Hiroshi Yoshida and from whimsical Hayao Miyazaki films like “My Neighbor Totoro.” This world about death is bright and colorful, rather than dark and morbid.

Having spent 15 years in the games industry, much of that time at Ubisoft working on franchises like “Assassin’s Creed,” Guérin wanted to explore death in a way that forces the player to think about it outside the bounds of a game. Instead of a fail state mechanic, death in “Spiritfarer” is the key to progress. Every time a character dies, they leave behind a room filled with beautiful, overgrown flowers. It’s a symbol of heritage, Guérin explained.

“You need to actually gather some of these flowers that are used as a token to pay a shark, to build upgrades on the ship,” Guérin said. “And those upgrades will allow you to go across specific barriers like ice or rocks.”

Guérin’s brother is the chief of staff for a geriatric ward in southern France. During early development for the game, Guérin spent a significant amount of time “documenting and understanding” what people think and feel during their final moments by meeting patients in hospice and end-of-life care facilities. As he visited the terminally ill, he noticed their drive to experience human connection or enjoy a peaceful moment. He wanted to convey this in “Spiritfarer,” rather than have characters give grand speeches or make sweeping life changes as they faced death.

“They just want to still wake up in the morning, brew themselves some coffee and spend time with their family, relatives and friends. And that’s it,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

Sacred Crossings

– Reclaiming the Lost Art of Death Midwifery and Healing Ritual of the Home Funeral

Death Midwifery returns death to its sacred place in the beauty, mystery and celebration of life. A Sacred Crossings Death Midwife shepherds individuals toward a conscious dying experience; guides loved ones in after-death care of the body; and empowers families to reclaim the healing ritual of a vigil and funeral at home. They offer compassionate support to individuals and their families from terminal diagnosis to final disposition.

“As a culture, we deny the natural process of aging and death,” remarked Olivia Bareham, founder of Sacred Crossings. “Learning how to die consciously with grace and acceptance is the greatest gift we can give ourselves and those we love.”

Many people are unaware that they have the legal right to care for their dead at home before burial or cremation. Sacred Crossings offers education and guidance to families who wish to create meaningful funerals at home. We teach them the ancient ritual of bathing, anointing and dressing the body, laying the body in honor for a 3-day vigil and decorating the cremation casket. Inter-faith ministerial services include near-death prayer/meditation vigils, grief support and funeral celebrant services.

Sacred Crossings founder Olivia Bareham is a death midwife, home funeral guide, ordained inter-faith minister and funeral celebrant. She is a member of the National Home Funeral Alliance http://www.homefuneralalliance.org and serves on the board of the Center for Conscious Creativity. Sacred Crossings is owned and operated by certified death midwives.

About Sacred Crossings:
Sacred Crossings is changing the culture of death and dying – through death education and an alternative funeral home. We offer an environmentally friendly option to traditional funeral industry practices and the opportunity for families to have a vigil and funeral at home. The Sacred Crossings Institute offers workshops and classes in conscious dying, home funerals, end-of-life planning, and a certificate program in The Art of Death Midwifery. The Sacred Crossings Funeral Home, owned and operated by certified death midwives, offers a full range of services including home funerals, cremation, conventional burial, green burial and full-body deep sea burial. For more information, contact Annemarie Osborne, publicist at 949.237.2906 or by email annemarieosborne7@gmail.com or Olivia Bareham at 310.968.2763 or olivia@sacredcrossings.com or visit http://www.sacredcrossings.com.

The virus is robbing many people of a ‘good’ death.

How do we change that?

COVID-19 has taken away our ability as a society to avoid the topic of death. But we’ve needed to improve our ‘death literacy’ since well before the pandemic hit.

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For years, we kept death at arms length. We awkwardly avoided it, looked the other way, and hid it behind layers of euphemism.

But since January, death has been inching closer, a drum beat in the back of our minds getting louder as COVID-19 spread around the world. Body counts became the focus of every news update. Field hospitals in Central Park. Mass graves in Italy. A gnawing sense that within weeks, this could happen here.

In the United States, deaths started losing their meaning. The numbers quickly dwarfed 9/11, then Vietnam, then every war combined since Korea. While 189 Australians have died, and the numbers keep rising through Melbourne’s awful outbreak, there’s still a sense of distance. People die from COVID-19 in hospitals, and nursing homes, far away places we can easily ignore.

But with COVID-19, the issue isn’t who dies, or where they die, it’s often how they die. And that is something we, as a death-averse culture, might not be ready for.

A death with dignity

For a culture where talk of dying is so taboo, so many of us want the same thing — a death with dignity.

A good death, says University of Wollongong Associate Professor of General Practice Joel Rhee, can be hard to achieve. But what is key is having a sense of control.

“It’s a death where you’re in an environment where you’re surrounded by people you love. You’ve got some dignity about how you’re going through the last few months,” says Rhee.

“It’s when your concerns, fears, psychological and spiritual needs are taken care of.”

COVID-19 takes away all that. The virus robs people, no matter their age, of any sense of control over their final days.

People die slowly and painfully, choking to death in near silence. They die alone, isolated from friends and loved ones, with exhausted health workers draped in PPE. And when they go, the atomising force of the virus disrupts the post-death rituals that give loved ones the closure they need.

Funerals are restricted to just a handful of people. The whole process of collective bereavement, gathering under one roof to hug and cry, is suddenly too risky. When residents died at St Basil’s in Melbourne, their families couldn’t even enter the facility to collect their belongings.

It’s that loss of dignity and control, that isolation from loved ones, that make the cynical calls to let the virus rip seem all the more callous. Deaths from COVID-19 aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re real people, with families who are robbed of the chance to do right by them.

Jennifer Philip, chair of palliative medicine at the University of Melbourne, says the pandemic has made the job of supporting people in their final days so much more challenging.

“A big part of what we do in palliative care is communication and supporting families. But that’s all done remotely, behind layers of PPE,” Philip says.

“When you’re doing telehealth, many of the usual gestures we use are not visible. And there’s a lot of work with connectivity — using iPads and technology that older people may not be comfortable with.”

We need to talk about dying

But even before the pandemic hit, what stops people getting a good death, according to Philip, is our inability to talk about it, often till it’s too late.

“We don’t talk about it in a meaningful way, or grown up way. Certainly not in a nuanced way,” she says.

That’s something Jessie Williams wants to change. She’s CEO of the Groundswell Project, a not-for-profit that is trying to change the way Australians talk about death.

Once upon a time, Williams says, death was sudden and it was everywhere. But as we got wealthier, as medical science advanced, we were better able to draw out our final years, and push it away.

“We don’t see death, we don’t touch it and we don’t smell it,” Williams says.

Williams, who works with businesses, and runs public campaigns, to promote what she terms “death literacy”, says she’s felt a bit of a change during the pandemic.

“We’ve been overwhelmed — we’ve seen more engagement from new people coming on board.

“We’ve had more people coming forward for end of life planning workshops, more people are reaching out to access materials.”

In his work as a general practitioner, Rhee says he’s had more patients wanting to talk about death. They’ve seen the numbers, and the pictures. They don’t want to go like that.

“They see people passing away, and they think about it a bit more,” he says.

The pandemic has upended our lives so much in under a year that it’s hard to tell what will stay entrenched. Even habits like social distancing and hand hygiene, so much a part of our conversations in March, seem to have fallen by the wayside a little.

But perhaps this period, where death is everywhere, could start to subtly rewire how we view the end.

When we understand pain

Sometime around the 4th or 5th Century BCE, in what is now Nepal, there lived a prince. Raised amid total luxury, the prince’s parents did everything to shield him from nasty, brutish and short life outside the palace grounds.

If you can believe it, the prince didn’t leave the palace till he turned 29. The first thing he saw when he’d snuck out was a man whose body was crippled by ageing. He’d never seen old age. Next was a sick man. He’d never seen disease. The prince then came across a funeral procession. He’d never seen death either. The last thing the prince saw was an ascetic — a man who’d given up life. The prince returned troubled by what he saw. The next day, the man who would become the Buddha gave up everything. Jarred by suffering and death, he chose to live the life of an ascetic.

One moral of the Buddha’s story is that the experience of death, of realising the depths of human suffering and the limits of our own mortality, can change us. Like the Buddha, many in the affluent West grow up insulated from death. And while grappling with our own mortality doesn’t necessarily produce such a radical transformation, it at the very least produces conversations and feelings we might not otherwise have.

Philip says when people start talking about death, it can be a moving, humbling and relieving experience. Often, the conversations they have aren’t laced with morbidity. Instead, they’re often far more mundane. People talk about what they value, and, at a time when they’re at their most mature, decide what matters to them.

Perhaps this is the way into talking about death. Because so much of our discomfort around dying is part of a larger, more innate human difficulty with talking about things that are inconvenient. We like to sweep uncomfortable conversations under the rug and forget about them.

The sooner those conversations about who or what matters to us happen, the better. As Philip says:

“You have to tell people you love them, or you forgive them, or you thank them. If those things are unsaid that’s a great tragedy for those left behind.”

Complete Article HERE!

How Taiwanese death rituals have adapted for families living in the US

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Taiwanese people living in the United States face a dilemma when loved ones die. Many families worry that they might not be able to carry out proper rituals in their new homeland.

As a biracial Taiwanese-American archaeologist living in Idaho and studying in Taiwan, I am discovering the many faces of Taiwan’s blended cultural heritage drawn from the mix of peoples that have inhabited the island over millennia.

Indigenous tribes have lived on the island for 6,000 years, practicing their diverse ancient traditions into the modern day. Chinese sailor-farmers arrived during the Ming Dynasty 350 years ago. The Japanese won a naval battle with China and governed Taiwan as a colony from 1895 to 1945. Today, Taiwan is a vibrant democracy, albeit with contested sovereign status. Peoples from every corner of the planet visit, work and live in Taiwan.

Language, religion and food from all these traditions can be encountered in the cities and villages of Taiwan today. Multiple beliefs and customs also contribute to the rituals Taiwanese people conduct to send family members into the afterlife.

Death rituals

Taiwan’s death rituals offer a bridge with the afterlife that stems from multiple spiritual sources. Buddhists, who make up 35% of Taiwan’s population, believe in multiple lives. Through faith and devotion to Buddha and the accumulation of good deeds a person can be freed from the cycle of reincarnation to achieve nirvana or a state of perfect enlightenment.

This belief is fused with elements of the island’s other belief systems including Taoism, Indigenous spirituality and Christianity. Together, they form death customs that showcase Taiwan’s multiculturalism.

In the streets of Taiwan’s metropolises and villages alike, temples, churches and wooden ancestor carvings invite one to contemplate eternity while the odors of nearby food vendors – such as stinky tofu, a local delicacy – tempt people to pause and enjoy earthly delights afterward.

The rituals associated with passing from this life include cemetery burial or traditional cremation practices. The dead are cremated and placed in special urns in Buddhist temples.

Another rite involves burning of what are known as “hell bank notes.” These are specially printed non-legal tender bills that may range from US$10,000 to several billions.

On one side of these notes is an image of the Jade Emperor, the presiding monarch of heaven in Taoism. These bills can be obtained in any temple or even 7-Eleven in Taiwan. The belief is that the spirits of ancestor might return to complain if not given sufficient spending money for the afterlife.

Adapting in America

My Indigenous great-great-grandmother married a Chinese man and her great-grandson – my father – grew up speaking a typical blend of languages for the 1950s: the local dialect, Hokkien, as well as Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin. Arriving in the U.S. at the age of 23 to study electrical engineering, my father mastered English quickly, married my Euro-American mother, and raised a family in the American West.

Taiwanese people living in America often cannot participate in the rites of mourning and passage conducted back home because they do not have time or money, or recently, pandemic related travel restrictions. So Taiwanese Americans adapt to – and sometimes, accept the loss of – these traditions.

When my Taiwanese grandmother, whom we affectionately called Amah, passed away in 1987, my father was unable to return home for the Buddhist ritual organized by his family. Instead, he adapted the “Tou Qi,” pronounced “tow chee” – usually conducted on the seventh day after death.

In this ritual, it is believed that the spirit of the recently deceased revisits the family for one final farewell.

My father adapted the ritual to a modern U.S. suburban home: He filled our dining room with fruits and cakes, as my Amah was a strict Buddhist vegetarian and enjoyed eating cakes. He put pots of golden chrysanthemums on the table and incense whose smoke is believed to carry one’s thoughts and feelings to the gods.

He then opened every door, window and drawer in our house, as well as car doors, and the tool shed to ensure that our grandmother’s spirit could visit and enjoy the food with us for the last time. He then settled in for an all-night vigil.

After helping Dad with preparations, I returned to my small apartment across town, placed flowers and fruit and a candle on the kitchen table, opened the windows and doors and sat through long dark hours of my own small vigil.

I reflected upon the memory of my grandmother: a petite woman who raised six children during World War II by hiding in the mountains and teaching them to forage for snails, rats and wild yams. Her children survived, got educated, and traveled the world. Her American grandchildren learned how to stir fry in her battle-scarred wok, lugged all the way to the U.S. in a suitcase, and peeked curiously as she performed Buddhist prayers each morning in front of the smiling deity.

My vigil ended with the rising of the sun: the candle burnt out, the flowers drooped, and the fragrance of the incense faded. My grandmother, whose name in translation is “Fairy Spirit,” had eaten her fill, and said her goodbyes.

Complete Article HERE!

Boom Time for Death Planning

The coronavirus pandemic has drawn new business to start-ups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to a final tweet.

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One day in April, as the coronavirus ravaged New York City, 24-year-old Isabelle Rodriguez composed a tweet she would send from the grave.

She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t even sick. In fact, her risk of contracting Covid-19 had been reduced after she was furloughed from her job at a Manhattan bookseller and retreated to her rural hometown, Callahan, Fla. But when she came across the poem “Lady Lazarus,” by Sylvia Plath, Ms. Rodriguez knew she had found the perfect words to mark her digital legacy:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Ms. Rodriguez logged on to Cake, a free service that catalogs users’ end-of-life wishes, instructions and documents, and specified that she wanted the verse sent from her Twitter account after her death. “Any of my friends know I’m obsessed with Sylvia Plath,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “That was the best way to put my personality out there one last time.”

Through Cake, Ms. Rodriguez also filled out a “trusted decision maker” form, appointing her younger sister to call the shots should she end up incapacitated. She was still debating other important details: Did she want to be buried or cremated? If the latter, would her ashes be scattered, pressurized into a diamond, composted into tree food? Also, how much would it annoy the guests at her funeral if she requested that her favorite album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” be played on loop?

Ms. Rodriguez conceded that it might seem a little weird to be considering all of this in her mid-20s. On the other hand, young people around the world were getting incredibly sick, incredibly fast.

End-of-life decisions can be overwhelming, but making those choices when she was healthy gave her more control. Knowing that she’d ease the burden on her family if the worst happened also gave her peace of mind. “It would be easier for people around me to know what I want,” she said.

Before the pandemic, end-of-life start-ups — companies that help clients plan funerals, dispose of remains and process grief — had experienced steady to moderate growth. Their founders were mostly women who hoped a mix of technology, customization and fresh thinking could take on the fusty and predominantly male funeral and estate-planning industries.

Still, selling death to people in their 20s and 30s wasn’t easy. Cake’s team sometimes received emails from young adults, wondering if the site wasn’t a tad morbid. Since Covid-19, this has changed. Millennials are newly anxious about their mortality, increasingly comfortable talking about it and more likely to be grieving or know someone who is.

“The stigma and taboos around talking about death have been way reduced,” Cake’s co-founder Suelin Chen, 38, said. This has driven conversation across social media, spurred interest in deathfluencers (they will discuss how funeral homes are responding to the coronavirus but also whether your pet will eat your eyeballs) and increased traffic to end-of-life platforms. From February to June, people signed up with Cake at five times the normal rate.

Another new company, Lantern, which calls itself “the single source of guidance for navigating life before and after a death,” saw a 123 percent increase in users, most of them under 45.

Lantern’s tone is soothing and earnest, but not everyone takes that tack. Cake skews playful. It features a tombstone generator and suggestions like “Viking funeral” and “shoot my ashes into outer space.” New Narrative, an event-planning company for funerals and memorials, introduces itself with a wink: “We’re not your grandma’s funeral (… unless it’s your grandma’s funeral).”

It’s a tricky opportunity for these start-ups to navigate. “When you have a brand that’s directly interfacing with people in the throes of loss and grief, you have to walk a fine line,” said Liz Eddy, 30, Lantern’s co-founder and chief executive.

All these founders stress they’re not trying to capitalize on the coronavirus. But this hasn’t stopped anyone from pivoting hard toward Covid-19. The companies have created new forums and content on how to plan for death, honor the newly dead and grieve virtually. They have initiatives with major health care providers to disseminate their products more widely and formed new partnerships with influencers. The start-ups have even begun to coordinate with one another, sharing tips in a cross-company Slack channel called “Death & Co.”

They are all hoping the pandemic will be the event that turns end-of-life planning — from designing a funeral to writing a will and final tweet — into a common part of adulthood.

In 2012, a friend invited Ms. Chen and her fiancé to dinner and suggested they play an unusual party game: Write and share their own obituaries. “It’ll be fun!” the friend said. “They do it at Stanford Business School.”

At first, Ms. Chen was delighted by the exercise: Both she and her fiancé wrote, in the imagined past tense, about a music album they hoped to one day record. But when Ms. Chen started reading what she had written about her career, she was seized with panic and started bawling at the table.

“I just lost it,” she recalled. “It was confusing to me, because I loved my job. I was happy in the most obvious ways, but there was part of me …” She wasn’t sure how to describe the upswell of emotion.

Around this time, Ms. Chen was advising health care companies in commercial strategy. While interviewing last-line cancer physicians, she would constantly run a calculation in the back of her head: “If this treatment extends life by three months, how much money is it worth?” And yet she’d wonder: But at what quality of life? The system of prolonging life at all costs seemed out of whack.

Ms. Chen had also recently lost her grandfather, who died at 95 after a long period of suffering. He lived in Taiwan, where death in very old age is treated as a celebration, Ms. Chen said. And yet there had been a lot of family conflict around the experience.

Amid the pain and relief of her grandfather’s being at rest and the joyful commemoration of his life, Ms. Chen understood that she needed a new path. She didn’t yet know what it would be, but a few years later she met Mark Zhang, a palliative care physician and technologist, at an M.I.T. health care “hackathon.” The pair won first place at the event and went on to found Cake. The platform now includes resources and templates to help users write their obituaries along with guidance for how to get them published.

The venture-backed company makes money through partnerships and will eventually add fee-based services. The pandemic has been especially busy. Cake’s services, for example, soon will be integrated into the website of the British bank RBS/NatWest.

In April, Ms. Chen learned that Partners HealthCare, a large health care system in Massachusetts, was recommending Cake to all its members. Ariadne Labs, run out of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also came calling. They wanted help distributing their end-of-life conversation guide beyond a relatively small audience of doctors and patients. They also wanted real-time feedback from a young and healthy audience like Cake’s.

Cake also teamed up with Providence Health System, a network of 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics in seven states, to share Cake’s “trusted decision maker” form, the document specifying an individual’s medical preferences if the person becomes incapacitated. Through Cake, individuals could submit the form to their doctor without needing a notary and two nonfamily witnesses, which are often required but difficult to get under quarantine.

The next step is offering premium services, tailored to different types of users. “Are you here because you just lost someone, or because you just had a kid, or have an aging parent, or because a celebrity just died and you had an existential crisis?” Ms. Chen said. “We’re trying to automate based on what we know about the person.”

In April, Ms. Chen learned that her head of product’s grandfather had died from Covid-19. She had heard of people texting and messaging their condolences, but even email seemed inappropriate, overly impersonal. Unsure of what to do, she turned to Cake. Following an article from the site, Ms. Chen shipped her colleague soup, rolls and cookies with a note: If and when you’re ready, I’d love to hear more about your grandfather.

“In the modern age, the norms around supporting people who are grieving are not super clear,” Ms. Chen said. “It used to be that you belonged to a religious community or lived in a small town, but now we’re far away from where we grew up. We’re more secular.”

During the pandemic, condolence-related traffic on Cake doubled. To address the need, the company started a forum where users can crowdsource their questions and concerns.

Lantern provides its own grief and condolence content, including a “pandemic-proof” guide to “inclusively addressing grief at work.” In recent months, more people are grieving on the job, where the emotional distress for people of color over high Black and Latino rates of coronavirus infection is compounded by anguish over police brutality.

“Especially during Covid, it’s how can you incorporate the grieving process into 9-to-5 and day-to-day work?” said Alica Forneret, 31, who runs grief workshops and just started a namesake consulting agency to help companies address this question. “Employers, managers and H.R. need to understand there’s an extra burden on people of color and especially Black people when they sit down at their computer in the morning and are expected to engage and perform.”

For Ms. Forneret and other millennial founders, preparing for death and navigating grief during the pandemic has become a form of self-care. That has created new opportunities and partnerships. When Ms. Eddy pitched funders, she situated Lantern’s end-of-life services as an untapped market in the $4.5 trillion global wellness industry.

“We’ve been called a niche market,” she said. “But death and dying is possibly the least niche market out there.”

Corporations are rethinking the wellness programs they’re offering employees, Ms. Eddy said. They’re no longer just gym memberships and kombucha on tap. Studies have found that being able to talk about your mortality makes you a happier person and improves your relationships. The thinking, for employers perhaps, is that access to end-of-life services can make people happier (and more productive) at work.

This market potential is also why Near, a start-up that connects users with grief and end-of-life support services, like death doulas and art, sound, music and massage therapists, recently decided to seek investment. The company also moved its debut from September to June and is expanding its offerings to even more unconventional end-care providers like end-of-life photographers.

“Before Covid, we were looking at being a smaller platform. We’d be able to keep up with need through bootstrapping,” a Near co-founder, Christy Knutson, 36, said. “But the demand is far greater.”

This spring, a beauty writer and skin-care company chief executive, Charlotte Palermino, approached Lantern about co-hosting an Instagram Live. She had been watching her friends “panic post” death rates and was feeling increasingly anxious.

“I know people who got really sick, were suddenly on ventilators in their 30s,” Ms. Palermino, 33, said. She received such an overwhelming response from her followers that in June, she filmed a similar video for her Generation Z audience on TikTok.

In May, a large senior care company asked Ms. Eddy about a partnership. Ms. Eddy, who declined to identify the company, was intrigued but skeptical. In search of guidance, she did something that would normally be unexpected. She reached out to Ms. Chen at Cake, Lantern’s closest competitor.

Ms. Chen wasn’t surprised to hear from Ms. Eddy. In fact, she said, this kind of collaboration is frequent among end-of-life chief executives. “There’s a lot of texting and calling all the time: who are the good investors, the partners, give me the lowdown on these people,” she said.

The most common means of communication among end-of-life founders — and where Ms. Eddy went to reach Ms. Chen — is the cheekily titled Death & Co. channel on Slack. It was born in December during End Well, a conference about improving the culture, products and policy around end of life.

After one of the sessions, a handful of female founders gathered for an impromptu happy hour. They bonded over the rarity of having so many women running companies in the same industry, all them, in one way or another, trying to challenge the corporate, predominantly male funeral industry.

They discussed the difficulties of securing funding as womenand the challenges of trying to make a distinctly unsexy product accessible and affordable. Ms. Chen said a male founder had told her: “No one thinks about death. I don’t. I’m immortal.” Ms. Eddy said another had told her that he thought she’d be more successful if she created the “Tesla” of end-of-life services.

The women decided to start a WhatsApp group, which one of them named “Death Chicks.” A couple of months later, with more people wanting to join, including a handful of men, Ms. Eddy moved everything to Slack and renamed it Death & Co. For some months, the group was largely dormant. That changed in March.

“At the beginning of coronavirus, we came together and said this can all be reimagined with alternative, more modern solutions,” said Christina Andreola, 31, the founder of New Narrative, who joined the Slack channel in March. “My colleagues were asking: How can we team up to be competitive?”

The channel has around 70 members. They have worked together on a white paper about the funeral industry and Covid-19, raised funds for personal protective equipment for funeral directors and created short video guides for health care workers to talk about end-of-life options with their patients. Eterneva, a company that turns ashes into diamond jewelry, used the group to start a series of Instagram Lives about collective grief. LifeWeb360, which creates multimedia memorial scrapbooks, teamed up with New Narrative to create resource guides for planning virtual memorials.

The women have also freely shared connections and leads. Ms. Knutson of Near joined Death & Co. in March. She used the group to meet end-of-life photographers, a small and elusive set, and expand her provider list of death doulas, caregivers who help dying individuals navigate the end-of-life process.

“Overnight I walked into a virtual room with loads of smart, driven leaders who are building things that it would have taken me months if not years to hear about otherwise,” she said.

Not everyone is finding what he or she needs at Death & Co. Ms. Forneret, one of the few Black members, left after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. She said that the channel had done a lot of good for the industry and that she worked closely with Ms. Eddy and other members. But at this moment, she wants to align herself with other founders of color, she said.

In mid-June, Ms. Forneret participated in a Zoom panel featuring five Black entrepreneurs. The topic: how to have a “good death” in a racist society. The event was organized by Alua Arthur, 42, who runs a death doula training company, Going With Grace.

Ms. Arthur serves as an adviser to Cake and Near and has become a de facto spokeswoman for Black-owned death care businesses, especially in the last couple of months. She has become exhausted in this role and said end-of-life start-ups should be working harder to reach communities of color, which are largely underserved in the industry.

Even so, all of these founders share a mission: to democratize end-of-life planning and care. Ms. Arthur said the searchable database and broad collection of providers on Near were a step in the right direction.

Trust and Will, a company that bills itself as Turbo Tax for estate planning, charges a small fraction of what most lawyers do. Eterneva, the company that turns your loved one’s body into bling, just rolled out financing. Cake’s and Lantern’s basic preplanning services are free. Given that the average cost of a funeral in 2019 was $7,640, this kind of foresight could reduce the cost of dying. Because maybe you don’t want to languish on a ventilator or need a fancy coffin.

At the very least, when we can personalize our deaths the way we do our weddings and our wardrobes, we can feel a little more control over life’s greatest uncertainty. It’s something of a silver lining to this very scary moment.

“We’re never going back to the way it was,” Ms. Chen said. “That’s a positive thing — to accept the reality that we’re not immortal.”

Jennifer Miller is the author most recently of the novel “Mr. Nice Guy.” Her next book follows a year in the lives of first-generation college students.

Complete Article HERE!

Celebrating a life well-lived — one year later

“The goal is not a good death. The goal is a good life — all the way to the very end.”

— Atul Gawande, M.D., surgeon, writer and public health leader

By rclark

One year ago on this date, July 11, 2019, my wife, Norma, was freed from the prison of Alzheimer’s disease. So exactly one year later it is appropriate to celebrate Norma Houghton’s life and share with my readers personal reflections on my recovery.

You who have been with me all the way from diagnosis in 2010 to last summers’ final breath know the documented story of a lady who gave an extraordinary gift to sacrifice her privacy to help others. The sadness in over 10 years of seeing her drift away was softened by the concern of many readers, as well as numerous caregivers.

My restoration and renewal following our 57 years of marriage has been facilitated in part by periodic messages this past year from her hospice caregivers from Compassus. A healing journey of recurring memories was predicted by their periodic communication.

Norma’s good works have been recognized with the Norma A. Houghton Staff Award in the Birthing Center of Monadnock Community Hospital and an annual scholarship for a graduating student from one of our three local high schools choosing higher education in nursing.

As past co-chair of the Western New Hampshire Walk to End Alzheimer’s, I have been given the satisfying task of using my wife’s story as a monthly “mission moment” to cheer on the current walk committee through the challenges of planning a major event during the pandemic.

So her legacy lives on and, though grief has come to my life, spiritual growth and a new life have also emerged as predicted and aided by Compassus. I can now see that hospice is not about dying but helping caregivers and patients live life to the fullest.

When our time on Earth comes near a close, the choice of hospice provides a better quality of life than if aggressive end-of-life medical care were applied. Dr. Gawande’s classic treatise, “Being Mortal,” about “medicine and what matters in the end,” is on point.

You may remember an early column about full body donation for medical education. I expect next week to travel to Boston University Medical School to bring Norma’s ashes back to Jaffrey. Plans are being laid at the United Church to develop a memorial garden as a final resting place for beloved members of the church.

If you want to find out more about hospice services, visit the hospice and palliative care organization (www.nhpco.org). It is not true that hospice is only for the final days or hours of life. Hospice is about helping patients and their families have the best possible quality of life as they can when life expectancy is limited.

Usually a patient’s doctor and the hospice medical director work together to offer experience with hospice criteria, guidelines and clinical judgements. Hospice Medicare coverage includes nurses, other caregivers, medicines, supplies and equipment, with little or no cost to patients, families or caregivers.

Clearly for me hospice care provided even more than medical, emotional, social and spiritual support. I find myself surrounded with family and friends who share my loving memories of Norma and continue to offer peace and support as I come to this special date.

Compassus gave me positive relief and strength during a time of extended grief, allowing me to create appropriate remembrances and lasting reminders of a life well lived. Since they suggested a celebration on the anniversary of my loved one’s death, isn’t it a joy that my July column is published as a tribute on this very date!

“Enjoy life. Have fun. Be kind. Have worth. Have friends. Be honest.

“Laugh. Die with dignity. Make the most of it. It’s all we’ve got!”

— Ricky Gervais

Complete Article HERE!

BIPOC in Death Care

The voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) need to be amplified so we are going to use our newsletter and social media platforms to aid in their sharing. Here are a few resources for us to explore racism, privilege, and bias in death care:

Sayin It Louder: A Conversation About “A Good Death” in a Racist Society.

A conversation among death care professionals Alua Arthur of Going with Grace, Lashanna Williams of A Sacred Passing, Joél Simone Anthony of The Grave Woman, Alicia Forneret, Oceana Sawyer, and Naomi Edmondson.

 

Watch the recording of their discussion by clicking here.