How close is your death?

New algorithm can tell patients how long they have to live

By Elizabeth Payne

Ottawa researchers are taking a page from Netflix and Google to help patients, their families and their doctors have informed conversations about death.

Researchers at Ottawa’s newly minted National Centre for Individualized Health have developed an algorithm that predicts how many months, or years, patients near the ends of their lives have to live.

It is information some people might not be comfortable with, acknowledged Dr. Peter Tanuseputro, an investigator at the Bruyère Research Institute and family doctor who offers house calls to his palliative patients. But he believes many elderly patients will want to know exactly how long they have to live, information not currently available for most. He also said everyone deserves access to the information, based on an individual’s health information and data collected across Ontario.

Among other things the end-of-life calculator can lead to is more appropriate care and more people benefitting from palliative care. Only 15 per cent of Canadians receive palliative care, according to recent data released from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Even those who do often get it too late, said Tanuseputro.

“In Canada, we don’t like to talk about death and dying,” he said. “We think patients have the right to their own information to tell them about what is going to happen to them. We still live in a paternalistic society where we don’t think the patient can handle that information or don’t think they should have this information.”

The predictive algorithm, which goes by the acronym RESPECT (for Risk Evaluation for Support: Predictions for Elder-life in the Community Tool for the End of Life), calculates how long a person has to live based on 25 questions about what diseases they have and how difficult it is to care for themselves. The algorithm was developed using data collected through the province’s health system.

It is one of the digital health projects being developed by Bruyère aimed at addressing the health needs of people as they age (more info at bruyeredigitalhealth.ca/en/projects).

It is currently being pilot-tested in Windsor-Essex to help people who are frail understand whether they would benefit from palliative care. It is one of a series of algorithms using big data that is aimed at helping older people better understand their health risk factors in an effort to help them get better treatment.

When they are complete, the tools will be available to individuals and family members on the projectbiglife.ca website. In addition to calculating how close a person is to death, researchers are developing tools that will help calculate how long before an individual is likely to end up in a nursing home, and their risk of hospitalization.

Those tools can lead to preventative measures to help people stay in their homes longer, in some cases, or to get more appropriate care. Their development is part of the National Centre for Individualized Health, affiliated with Bruyère Research Institute, which was created with the help of donations totalling $1.25 million.

Tanuseputro said the use of big data to create predictive tools has the potential to change individual treatment and health care more generally. The health system is just catching up to what has been done elsewhere.

“If you watch Netflix, it will tell you what Netflix thinks you like based on your previous choices. In health care, we are just figuring this out,” he said.

“These tools are to help patients make informed decisions. Too often, you visit your doctor and your doctor has only limited amount of time and limited information.” While they might have a patient’s electronic medical data, that would not include what happened, for example, if the patient was in a hospital 100 kilometres away.

Among information patients are asked for in the 25 questions that feed into the predictive algorithm, are questions about activities of daily living, such as eating, bathing, personal hygiene and toiletting. Those, he said, are often a better indication that a patient does not have long to live, than a diagnosis of chronic illness.

He said physicians are sometimes hesitant to tell patients they are close to death — in part, because it is difficult to be accurate. This tool should change that, he said.

“We think patients have the right to know and seek out care that is appropriate to their needs. If a patient knows that they have a year to live, they should be receiving palliative care, supportive care, in order to stay at home. Clinicians don’t do it enough, partly because we live in a death-denying society and partly because it is hard, especially if you don’t have a terminal cancer diagnosis.”

Complete Article HERE!

More to dying than meets the eye

Those who work with dying people are familiar with patients seeing long deceased loved ones, angelic beings, even hearing music and comforting voices as the patient nears death. Deathbed phenomena have been documented in the days, weeks, and months before death since the 1500s. Often confused with hallucinations, deathbed phenomena can bring comfort to patients and caregivers if those involved know what they are experiencing. This talk will explain deathbed phenomena and present on-going research about the topic. Accounts from the dying and bedside witnesses will be shared.

The Four Words Nobody Likes to Hear

You’re Going to Die

You’re Going To Die is part open mic, part storytelling, centered around a more positive embrace of death.

By Emma Silvers

About two months ago, seated on a small airplane that was descending through a lightning storm on its way to land in Florence, Italy, I was 90 percent certain I was going to die.

My terror only lasted about 10 minutes—from the moment I saw the first flash in the dark outside the tiny window, through a half-dozen weightless-feeling, heart-stopping lurches, until the wheels touched down on the runway.

Which is to say, it was nothing compared to what the residents of Hawaii felt earlier this year when one click of the wrong button at a local government office sent warning of an imminent ballistic missile in an all-caps text message to everyone within state limits.

The mistake went uncorrected for 38 minutes—minutes in which, as a close friend who happened to be there for a wedding later told me, people did what anyone would do: panic and try to take shelter, yes, but also attempt to make peace with the inconceivable notion that there, on a previously unremarkable Saturday in January, they were about to die. Unable to assess the legitimacy of the threat, my friend called her parents and told them she loved them, then she and a few other wedding attendees headed for the beach. At the very least, they decided, they would die somewhere beautiful.

I can’t be alone in hitting a wall of cognitive dissonance when I try to think about death: it’s universal, an equalizer, one of the few absolute inevitabilities about the experience of being human (along with taxes, har har). And yet it’s also so personal, and unknowable: especially for those of us who don’t practice a religion with a sure-footed concept of the afterlife, what actually happens when we leave this mortal coil is the ultimate in unavoidable question marks. All of which makes it fantastically appealing to try to avoid the topic entirely—particularly if you live somewhere, like, say, America, that worships youth and the young.

But if the uptick in death-themed workshops and events geared toward young people is any indication, avoiding the topic of death is no longer working for a vast number of people.

“It’s a really a whole movement we’re seeing, in which people are asking different questions, having new conversations, saying they’re not satisfied with how death has been treated in our culture—which is, of course, to push it aside until you can’t anymore,” says Chelsea Coleman, a singer-songwriter and co-host of You’re Going to Die, an ongoing performance series in which participants are invited to share stories and songs about grief and loss. Coleman hosts the series’ first Oakland event this Wednesday, Sept. 26, at the Starline Social Club.

Founded in San Francisco in March 2009 by the writer Ned Buskirk, “YG2D” began as a monthly community open mic at the intimate, now-defunct venue Viracocha; it didn’t take long for the event to start regularly selling out. Buskirk soon restructured the night to highlight featured musicians at each event, eventually asking Coleman to join him as co-host.

Ned Buskirk founded You’re Going To Die in 2009.

Coleman attended her first event in 2012, shortly after the death of her grandfather, with whom she was very close. “I was with him when he died, and I wrote songs about it, so I was looking for an outlet to perform some heavy stuff,” says Coleman. “Often when you play at a bar, it’s like—sure, you can play songs about heartbreak, but ‘Here’s a song about my grandpa dying’ is really not the vibe most places.”

She was hooked after one show. “It was such a powerful space,” says Coleman. “Hearing other people speak and perform is always moving, but I also felt like what I was offering had more power there. In the past I had sometimes felt like what I was doing was a burden.”

“But people show up [at YG2D] because they want to have an emotional experience,” she says. “That changes everything.”

A selection from the You’re Going To Die Instagram feed, which offers regular reminders of the inevitable.

You’re Going To Die became a registered nonprofit in 2017. The organization has expanded swiftly in the last two years, forging new partnerships with prisons—including workshops and shows at San Quentin—and with hospice programs, in which volunteers visit with people who are dying to hear stories, and to write or play music with them. The events are spreading geographically as well, with workshops or shows planned for San Diego, Ohio and New York in the coming months.

In doing so, the nonprofit joins organizations like The Dinner Party, a grief support network for 20- and 30-somethings that began as a series of informal potlucks in LA; the network now includes meetups in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C. and New York. Death Salon, meanwhile, hosts pop-up events of academic discussion and performance organized by a group of medical historians, artists and funeral industry professionals who’ve positioned themselves at the forefront of the Death Positive Movement.

It’s tough, as an American, not to wonder if there’s some correlation between the growing call for such conversations and the events of the past two years—when macabre jokes about our president’s access to nuclear buttons have become part of daily life: one part gallows humor, two parts very real fear.

But for a vast number of Americans, of course, the reality of death is perhaps no closer than it ever felt before: black men and women contend with the reality that they might be killed every time they step out the door, for actions as simple as walking, driving or taking BART.  When a former coworker of mine, an activist and health care worker who was also a trans woman, died earlier this year, I felt (along with sadness for her family and close friends) a small sting of resignation: the numbers don’t lie. 

Coleman has a sense, however, that those not previously accustomed to considering death may have been moved in that direction by the “heightened” state of U.S. politics since 2016.

“I think a lot of people who have had the privilege of being in denial for a long time are starting to ask questions,” she says, as I flash on my brief lightning storm-induced terror. “A lot of communities haven’t had that privilege.”

Regardless of the timing, “I think things feel heavy right now for pretty much everyone, and it’s very clear to me that people are hungry for these kinds of conversations,” says Coleman, recalling the first YG2D event she hosted solo, without Buskirk. “I was nervous people weren’t going to want to talk, but from the moment we started, everyone wanted to tell stories.”

Oh, and keep that in mind if you’re heading to your first YG2D, as well. Coleman says some of the most powerful performances come from people who weren’t planning on performing. While the event has morphed over the years, the open-mic portion still makes up its bones. Audience members who’ve never sung or told stories publicly before quite frequently take the stage.

In other words, there’s perhaps something universal happening there as well. What would I do if I had 38 minutes to live? For a topic so commonplace, so obvious and so inevitable, people surprise themselves all the damn time.

Complete Article HERE!

Death Is Not An Emergency: How Recompose Is Redesigning The End of Life

Katrina Spade envisions more options for the end of life that draw on nature as a model. Spade was named a 2018 Ashoka Fellow for her groundbreaking work.

Ashoka

Katrina Spade wants to transform the U.S. funeral industry, making way for many more options for those facing death and for their families. She founded Recompose in 2017 to champion a dramatically new approach that reconnects death to natural cycles of life and engages people through meaningful participation. Ashoka’s Michael Zakaras caught up with Spade to learn more.

Michael Zakaras: What inspired your interest in the rituals and practices around death?  

Katrina Spade: I had a moment around age 30 when I realized I was mortal, and I became curious about what would happen to my physical body when I died. Because my family is not religious and most of my friends aren’t either, I thought, what will they do? And I discovered that there are really just two options in the U.S.: cremation and conventional burial. Both practices poison the planet — this struck me as the wrong punctuation for lives lived in harmony with nature.

Zakaras: Why do we have just these two options?

Spade: Much of it is convention, it’s just the way things have been done. Take modern embalming. Many people think of it as a centuries-old tradition — but it became popular in the U.S. only during the Civil War. A couple of enterprising young people invented and marketed it to soldiers on the battlefield as a way to get their bodies home to their families — for advance payment. They used arsenic instead of formaldehyde back then. Today’s funeral practices, and many of our laws, are based on the dual practices of selling caskets and embalming bodies from 150 years ago.

Zakaras: How big is the funeral industry today?

Spade: About $20 billion dollars, and it’s an interesting industry, with many funeral homes passed down generation to generation and a few large corporations that own a lot of funeral homes. One of the things that’s so interesting is the idea that every person can “own” a piece of land for eternity, in the form of a cemetery plot. This is not a sustainable model, especially for cities with space constraints.

Zakaras: That’s a good point. How much land would you need to bury everyone in, say, New York City?

Spade: We’d need over 200 million square feet of land, or 7.5 square miles! And besides the land use, cemeteries are filled with metal, wood, concrete, and embalming fluid, a known carcinogen.

Many people consider cremation to be a more sustainable choice, and its popularity is rising: by 2035 an estimated 80% of Americans will be cremated. But actually, cremation is an energy-intensive process that releases greenhouse gases and particulates, emitting more than 600 million lbs of CO2 annually.

Zakaras: So what’s the alternative?

Spade: With Recompose, we asked ourselves how we could use nature — which has totally perfected the life/death cycle — as a model for human death care. We developed a way to transform bodies into soil, so that with our last gesture we can give back to the earth and reconnect with the natural cycles. We’re also aiming to provide ritual, to help people have a more direct and conscious experience around this really important event. As hard as it can be, the end of one’s life is a profound moment — for ourselves and for the friends and families we leave behind.

Zakaras: If you are successful, what will look different in 10 years?

Spade: I’m hopeful that we will have many options for the end of life — from hospice care all the way through disposition. It won’t be the odd family who says, “Maybe we should have a home funeral” — it’ll be every family that says, “Okay, how are we approaching this? What feels right to us?” And it will be normal to ask: “What do I want my end of life to look like? What will happen to my body? Where do I want to be when I die?” These are things that should be up to us, but we’ve never really felt that we had the agency or the cultural support to decide them.

The funeral industry would like us to think that it’s difficult or impossible for us to care for our own after a death, but humans have been doing that for millennia. There are a lot of reasons to take back some of that work, the work of caring for the dead, because there’s so much beauty inherent in it and it’s such a personal thing.

Zakaras: Why is this a particularly important moment for this work?

Spade: There’s a growing realization of climate change, coupled with this incredible cohort of baby boomers — 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day — who are approaching the end of their life or seeing someone go through death and thinking, “Is this really the best we can do?” This is a generation that’s really good at saying “Wait a minute, we can do better than this.”

Zakaras: Do you ever get tired of talking about death?

Spade: I never do! We have such a long way to go, but a new relationship with death is totally possible. One of my favorite sayings is “Death is not an emergency.” This is a wonderful reminder that the very first thing we should do when someone dies is pause and take a deep breath and just be in the moment.

‘Vampire’ discovered buried in Cemetery of Children in Italy

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s extremely eerie and weird,’ says archaeologist

The 10-year-old’s skeleton is the oldest body to have been uncovered at the fifth-century Italian cemetery

By Josh Gabbatiss

A “vampire burial” unearthed at a Roman site in Italy is evidence of ancient funeral practices to stop corpses rising from the dead, according to archaeologists.

The body of a 10-year-old child was buried ritualistically with a stone in its mouth, possibly out of fear it would return to spread disease to its community.

Known locally as the “Vampire of Lugnano”, evidence collected from the bones suggest the child was infected with malaria at the time it died.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s extremely eerie and weird,” said Professor David Soren, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who has run excavations in the region for over three decades.

The remains are the latest unusual discovery to emerge from the Cemetery of Children, a site containing dozens of children’s bodies and evidence of witchcraft including toad bones, raven talons and bronze cauldrons. 

Dated to a time in the fifth century when a deadly malaria outbreak swept across central Italy, archaeologists thought the cemetery had been set aside specifically for the babies and young children who would have been most vulnerable to the disease.

The “vampire” skeleton, which is of unknown sex, is the oldest child to be identified so far at the site.

It was one of five new burials discovered there over the summer, and was found placed underneath a makeshift tomb constructed from roof tiles.

“Knowing that two large roof tiles were used for this burial, I was expecting something unique to be found inside, perhaps a ‘double-inhumation’ – not uncommon for this cemetery – where a single burial contains two individuals,” said David Pickel, a PhD student a Stanford who directed the excavation.

“After removing the roof tiles, however, it became immediately clear to us that we were dealing with an older individual.”

The child’s open jaws and tooth marks on the surface of the stone were evidence that it had been placed in the mouth intentionally.

Similar burials have been documented from Venice to Northamptonshire, and along with dismembering bodies and forcing stakes through the heart are thought to be methods of preventing these “vampires” from returning to haunt the living.

“This is a very unusual mortuary treatment that you see in various forms in different cultures, especially in the Roman world, that could indicate there was a fear that this person might come back from the dead and try to spread disease to the living,” explained bioarchaeologist Jordan Wilson, another PhD student who examined the body.

Professoer Soren added: “We know that the Romans were very much concerned with this and would even go to the extent of employing witchcraft to keep the evil – whatever is contaminating the body – from coming out.”

An abscessed tooth, which can be a side effect of malaria, provided evidence that the child had been killed in the epidemic that struck so many of the cemetery’s inhabitants.

Elsewhere at the site, a three-year-old girl had been buried with stones weighing down her arms and feet – a practice also thought to prevent corpses from returning to life.

The researchers said these practices provide a fascinating insight into the thought processes of ancient Romans and their fears about life after death.

“It’s a very human thing to have complicated feelings about the dead and wonder if that’s really the end,” said Ms Wilson.

“Anytime you can look at burials, they’re significant because they provide a window into ancient minds.”

With much of the cemetery still unexplored, the archaeologists intend to return to the site next summer to complete their excavations.

Complete Article HERE!

Help for Pets of Dying Owners Brings Peace of Mind

For many ailing people, their pet is their life, experts say

By Kim Painter

Roland Carter, 78, of Stafford, Va., has advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, suffers from dementia and spends most of his time in bed. Missy, one of his four dogs, usually is there with him.

“Missy stays on his bed all the time — she protects him,” says Carter’s wife, Barbara, 72. So when she recently told Roland that she was not sure she could keep caring for the dogs, along with him, he was distraught.

“He said, ‘Please don’t get rid of my dogs,’“ Barbara Carter recalls.

Thanks to a program called Pet Peace of Mind, the Carters still have their dogs. The growing program, now offered through 120 hospice and palliative care organizations in 40 states, helps about 3,000 sick pet owners and their animals each year, says founder and president Dianne McGill. Other groups offer similar services, though they may be more limited.

Helping Care for Pets Who Are Family Members

In some cases, volunteers feed and walk the pets or take them to veterinarian and grooming visits. Sometimes the program pays for pet food and other essentials for dogs, cats, horses and even snakes. Many participating organizations will, when needed, place pets with new families, often after owners die.

A serious illness can make pet care difficult. Owners may no longer be able to walk dogs or clean litter boxes.

McGill, of Salem, Ore., says she realized the need for such services nearly a decade ago. She was working for another animal welfare group and heard from a woman who wanted to help a dying friend. The friend was desperate to keep her beloved cats and ensure their care after her death.

“Her son was going to put the cats down because he didn’t want to take care of them,” McGill recalls. “The woman I spoke with couldn’t take them because she had terrible allergies.”

McGill started calling hospices and learned that they often saw similar situations and typically had no way to help.

Pet Peace of Mind started soon afterwards, as a pilot program in Oklahoma. In 2015, McGill launched it as a freestanding charity, offering assistance to palliative care and hospice organizations nationwide.

Promoting ‘The Human/Animal Bond’

“There’s a lot of research out there about the value of the human/animal bond,” McGill says. For example, studies show pet owners tend to have lower blood pressure, higher levels of physical activity and lower levels of depression and loneliness, according to the nonprofit Human Animal Bond Research Institute.

Hospice and palliative care workers see the power of pets all the time.

“We have patients where all they have is their dog or their cat,” says Terri Roberts, director of volunteer services at Columbus Hospice of Georgia & Alabama, based in Columbus, Ga. “That’s their family. That’s the reason they get up every morning.”

But a serious illness can make pet care difficult. Owners may no longer be able to walk dogs or clean litter boxes; exhausted caregivers may not have the energy for such tasks. Money can be a problem, too. Some people are so determined to take good care of their pets that they may skimp on their own needs, Roberts says.

“We have patients getting Meals on Wheels who are giving most of their food to their animals,” she says.

Variety of Services

Roberts’ organization offers Pet Peace of Mind services to clients cared for in their homes and in a 25-bed in-patient facility. Solutions vary, person to person and pet to pet, she says. In one recent case, a woman had to go to a nursing home that would not allow pets. A volunteer adopted her dog and took her to see the woman every week until she passed away.

For the Carters, the most urgent need was veterinary care for their three boxers, Missy, Max and Buck, and their Pomeranian, Molly. Because Roland needs almost constant care, Barbara had been unable to get out of the house long enough to take the dogs for rabies shots and other care.

Capital Caring, a hospice participating in Pet Peace of Mind, sent veterinarian Stacy Horner-Dunn to the Carter home to get the job done. Horner-Dunn also took Molly to her office for a much-needed nail-trimming. In addition, the program has provided dog food.

“It really has given me peace of mind,” Barbara Carter says. “I know they are well-fed, they’ve had their shots and they are healthy.”

And they are still there for Roland, she says: “Sometimes when he gets confused about where he is and he sees the dogs coming to him, he’ll say, ‘We’re home,’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, we’re home.’‘’

Keeping Animals Healthy

It is fitting that pet care has become part of the mission of so many hospice and palliative care organizations, Horner-Dunn says.

But animals need to be kept healthy for their owners’ sake. “When pets are sick, it’s not a good idea to have them around people who are sick, too,” she says. Pets who are up to date on their vaccines and dental care and free of parasites as well as other ills are safer, happier companions, she says.

Pet Peace of Mind lists all participating care organizations on its website. It also provides a state-by-state list of animal rescue groups, veterinary colleges and other organizations that might be able to help people who do not have access to the program.

Complete Article HERE!

‘Time to grieve.’

Victorian-era funeral rites carry lessons for today, St. Louis group says

Pallbearers carry one of two caskets to the grave site from the chapel during the Victorian-era funeral reenactment by the Mourning Society

By Nassim Benchaabane

Flowers weren’t just for decoration at Victorian-era wakes.

“They were having people over to view the body so they had to try to keep the odors to a minimum,” said Edna Dieterle, with the historical re-enactment group, the Mourning Society of St. Louis.

Dieterle, 61, spent Saturday at historic Bellefontaine Cemetery in black dress and veil, as one of several people re-enacting a vigil at the gravesite of the Lindells, a family of five wiped out in a single week by a cholera epidemic that struck the city nearly exactly 152 years ago.

Although other historical enthusiasts hold cemetery tours or storytelling events, the Mourning Society has spent the last five years teaching people about Victorian funeral customs by bringing those customs back to life.

Re-creating mid-19th-century funerals is a hobby for Dieterle and her fellow mourners, but it’s also a way to connect people with the past through a shared experience, death, which was a pervasive part of daily life back then due, in part, to epidemics and unsanitary living conditions.

“People think Victorians were so focused on death, but they had so much of it to deal with,” said Dieterle, a nurse whose interest in historical medicine led her to learn more about diseases, death and funeral etiquette. “It was such a common visitor to homes in the 1860s. They weren’t morbid people, it was just reality.”

The Mourning Society also re-creates Victorian-style wakes at 19th-century homes, showcasing Dieterle’s creepy collection of mementos: jewelry made with the hair or teeth of a lost loved one, photos of dead children dressed in their Sunday best, black-and-white china painted with graveyard scenes that say “The Orphans” or “Mother’s Grave.”

Some of that collection — including instruments once used to “bleed” sick patients and recipes for funeral biscuits — will be on display at the Mourning Society’s event Oct. 26 at the Campbell House Museum in downtown St. Louis. Visitors will take part in a re-creation of the wake for Robert Campbell, a prominent businessman who died Oct. 16, 1879, in the family home. The house, which has its original furnishings, will be dimly lit by candlelight to set the mood as attendees learn about another killer that haunted the Victorians: diphtheria.

The widow, played by Edna Dieterle, poses for a photo in the cemetery during the Victorian-era funeral reenactment by the Mourning Society

While October is prime time for the Mourning Society events, thanks to Halloween, members say their goal isn’t to spook spectators but to teach them.

“It has a somber atmosphere, but no one is jumping out of the coffin with a chainsaw,” said Katherine Kozemczak, another organizer with the Mourning Society.
“But if you think about it, dying of cholera is a pretty scary thing.”

Time to grieve

As opposed to current day, Victorian customs encouraged people to mourn their loved ones openly, intensely, and for elderly widows, permanently, Dieterle said.

They mimicked the United Kingdom’s Queen Victoria — the namesake of the era — who upon the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861 from suspected typhoid fever, plunged into deep mourning and wore black the remaining four decades of her life. The long-lived monarch ruled from 1837-1901.

“They focused on the grief, whereas nowadays we sometimes give advice to just move on,” Dieterle said. “The Victorians gave them time to mourn, time to grieve and time to heal.”

Women in mourning would wear special clothing — black dresses, veils, gloves and shawls, in addition to carrying parasols to block out the sun — for several months, if not a year or more. Women who couldn’t afford to buy funeral wear would dye an old dress with tea to stain it brown or gray. Men would wear armbands or brooches they could affix to regular clothing.

The homes of those in mourning would have their doors covered with black fabric, which, like the clothing, signaled to passers-by not to disturb them and muffled the sharpness of a knock on the door if they did.

Pallbearers carry one of two caskets to the grave site from the chapel during the Victorian-era funeral reenactment by the Mourning Society

“Whereas now, if you lose a loved one, people don’t know,” Dieterle said. “We’ve all had it happen where someone you haven’t seen in a while comes up and asks you how you’ve been, and you don’t want to talk about it. They could avoid those awkward situations.”

They may give people goosebumps these days, but Dieterle says there is logic behind every Victorian funeral custom.

“To us, now, they’re very sad, but for them it helped them focus on their grief, and they felt it was an appropriate thing to do,” Dieterle said.

For example, photo shoots of dead loved ones?

“They might have been waiting for a special occasion to spend the money, and that might have been the special occasion, unfortunately,” she said.

Jewelry with something from a dead relative?

“I say all you moms in the group probably have a snippet of your baby’s first hair cut taped in a baby book,” Dieterle said. “They just took it one step further.”

Just as they are now, mourning customs were a stable hand guiding people through difficult times, especially during the cholera outbreaks, Dieterle said.

“There were so many people dying during this and people didn’t know what to do, but they had to get through it somehow,” she said.

The wake

For the first 24 hours after an apparent death in the Victorian Age, relatives would sit with the body day and night just to make sure the person was actually dead. Cholera, for example, would often make people so dehydrated that they wouldn’t have enough fluid in their veins to detect a pulse.

“The term ‘wake’ came from the experience of watching the body to make sure they didn’t wake up,” said John Avery, a retired funeral director who plays undertaker for the group. “Before there was embalming — which began during the Civil War — on occasion, someone would fall asleep and be thought to have died when in fact they may have gone into a coma.

“And people were very afraid of being buried alive, so they would have someone sit and watch.”

If the dead person didn’t come back to life, the family would then wash the body, using a special solution of vinegar and alum to keep the person’s skin taut and prevent it from discoloring. The hands-on involvement was part of the family’s grieving process, Avery said.

During the wake, the dead person was the life of the party. The body would be laid out on ice and adorned with flowers as the centerpiece of a candlelit room in which family and friends would gather.

A second funeral

At the Lindells’ second funeral, mourners and people interested in learning about the rituals gathered at Hotchkiss Chapel at the cemetery. Bob Ruby played hymns on the organ — “Abide with Me” for the procession, “Jesus Loves Me” during the service and “Nearer My God to Thee” for the recessional — while Tom Allen played the part of a minister.

The funeral re-creation began with the 23rd Psalm and included comforting words about everlasting life at a time of widespread sorrow. The sermon was written by Avery, a retired diaconal minister in the United Methodist Church, who led a procession to the family plot.

Pallbearers carried two antique coffins to the burial site. A white child’s coffin represented the one that held Peter Lindell, who died in infancy; a larger coffin was for his mother, Nancy. The service ended with more words of faith and comfort.

Funeral attendees and viewers arrive at the gravesite during the Victorian-era funeral reenactment by the Mourning Society

All five of the Lindells died of cholera within a week of each other and were buried Aug. 30, 1866, at Bellefontaine Cemetery. They were part of the family that owned property along the boulevard that now bears their name.

The cemetery was established after a severe cholera outbreak in 1849. During the 1866 epidemic, which killed more than 3,200 people, the cemetery buried 200 victims in August alone, said Daniel Fuller, cemetery event and volunteer coordinator.

Nearly half of the 87,000 people buried at Bellefontaine were interred from the Victorian Era to just before World War I, and much of the cemetery, dotted by towering, centuries-old trees, has remained virtually unchanged, Fuller said.

“That’s what makes the setting out here so good for this,” he said.

The Lindell family plot looks virtually the same as it did in 1866, though cemetery caretakers added plants on nearby graves to reflect Victorian tradition. Family plots back then would be outlined with plantings done by relatives, often ivy, which symbolized permanence; fragrant herbs such as sage and rosemary that invoked particular memories; and flowers, white for children’s graves to represent innocence, and red roses for love.

For people who missed the Mourning Society’s funeral re-creation Saturday, fear not. It will return the first Saturday of October next year, with a different theme.

While Mourning Society events may not be for everyone, there are those who return every year, Dieterle said.

“When you put it to life, you see schoolkids’ eyes light up, and they start asking all these questions about what they’re seeing in front of them,” she said. “They’re not going to get that out of a book.”

Complete Article HERE!