Category: Death Curiosities

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Death anxiety: The fear that drives us?

Death is often a taboo subject, so when death anxiety comes into play, it is hard to know how to face it.

By Maria Cohut

[D]eath is something that we all, sooner or later, have to face. But how do we respond to it? Why are some of us more afraid than others? And what is it, exactly, that scares us about death? We offer an overview of theories related to death anxiety, and what you can do to address it.

To a greater or lesser extent, it is likely that we are all scared of death – whether it be the thought of our own cessation or the fear that someone we love might pass away. The thought of death is not a pleasant one, and many of us avoid such morbid musings, naturally choosing to focus on what life has to offer, as well as on our own wishes and goals, instead.

Yet, as Benjamin Franklin once famously wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” so it is no surprise that death-related worries sometimes take us by storm.

Fear of death is sometimes referred to as “thanatophobia,” deriving from the Ancient Greek words “Thanatos,” the name of the god of death, and “phobos,” meaning “fear.”

Notably, thanatophobia – which is called “death anxiety” in a clinical context – is not listed as a disorder in its own right in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Still, this rarely spoken-about anxiety has the potential to seriously affect people’s lifestyles and emotional health.

Thanatophobia: Natural or trauma-driven?

Thanatophobia was first tackled by Sigmund Freud, who did not consider it to be fear of death, as such. Freud thought that we cannot truly believe in death as a real occurrence, so any death-related fears must stem from unaddressed childhood trauma.

But it was the theory put forth a little later by an anthropologist called Ernst Becker that ended up informing most current understandings of death anxiety and its causes. Becker believed that death anxiety comes naturally to all people who find the thought of death and dying unacceptable.

That is why, he argued, everything everyone does – the goals we set, our passions and hobbies, and the activities we engage in – is, in essence, a coping strategy, and that these are things we focus on so we that need not worry about our eventual death.

Becker’s work gave rise to “terror management theory” (TMT), which posits that humans must constantly deal with an internal conflict: the basic desire to live against the certainty of death. TMT emphasizes individuals’ self-consciousness and their drive to achieve personal goals, motivated by the awareness of mortality.

Also, according to TMT, self-esteem is key for the degree to which individuals experience death anxiety. People with high self-esteem are better at managing fear of death, while people with low self-esteem are more easily intimidated by death-related situations.

Some newer approaches suggest a “middle way” between TMT and another theory referred to as “separation theory,” which highlights the importance of early trauma, reinforced by an awareness of mortality later in life.

Another recent approach to understanding and explaining death anxiety is that of “post-traumatic growth theory” (PTG). According to PTG, going through a distressing event – such as the death of a loved one or receiving a worrying health diagnosis – can actually have a positive effect, causing individuals to appreciate the small things in life a lot more, or to become more goal-oriented.

Death anxiety as a disorder

Although it is likely that we will all be worried about death or a death-related situation at some time in our lives, death anxiety is only pathological when it reaches extreme levels, disrupting the normal lifestyle of an individual.

One account of death anxiety – as reported by a man’s worried wife – emphasizes how this kind of fear can become obsessive and get out of control.

“The fear is specifically of death (not pain or dying as such) and the emptiness of it (he’s not religious) and the fact that he will no longer be here. […] this is an irrational, emotional fear that he has trouble controlling. Recently it has got worse – he’s not sure why – but it has made him feel panicky and the thoughts have been straying into the daytime.”

Who is afraid of death?

Dr. Robert Kastenbaum has reviewed various psychology theories and studies related to the concept of death, outlining which populations are most likely to express a persistent fear of death. Drs. Patricia Furer and John Walker summarize the findings in an article published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Women are more likely than men to experience death anxiety, and this tends to peak twice: once in their 20s and again in their 50s.
  1. The majority of individuals are afraid of death. Most people tend to fear death, but they usually only exhibit low to moderate levels of anxiety.
  2. Women tend to be more afraid of death than men. Additionally, a newer study has found that while death anxiety seems to surface in both women and men during their 20s, women also experience a second surge of thanatophobia when they reach their 50s.
  3. Young people are just as likely to experience death anxiety as elderly people.
  4. There appears to be some correlation between a person’s educational and socioeconomic status and reduced death anxiety.
  5. No association has been found between religious engagement and reduced death anxiety.

Specialists argue that more often than not, death anxiety does not come on its own, and that it is instead accompanied by another type of mental health disorder (such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Other studies show that people exhibiting health anxiety, or hypochondriasis, are also affected by death anxiety, as it naturally correlates with an excessive worry about health.

Complete Article HERE!

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Meet the “Death Positive” Women Changing the Funeral Industry

Courtney Lane, who practices the art of Victorian hairwork, with some of her creations.

by

[S]ooner or later, the end is coming — for all of us. But women in particular have been at the forefront of the “death positive” movement, which aims to strip away the mystery and fear around the end of life and help us each find our own “good death.”

Amber Carvaly is a mortician and service director at Undertaking LA, the funeral home she coruns with Caitlin Doughty. A women’s studies major whose life’s passion has been to work harder, better, smarter, and kinder as a human being, she soon found herself in the nonprofit industry, preparing meals and holding birthday parties for LA’s homeless. When she lost her job after the economy crashed in the late aughts, she made friends with a funeral director. “It seemed like it had similar characteristics to what I was doing at the Downtown Women’s Center,” Carvaly remembers of their talks about funeral work. She wanted to continue helping people and decided to go back to school, this time to study mortuary science. “I had been emailing Caitlin throughout this,” Carvaly says, “although we had never met.” Eventually, Doughty asked if Carvaly was interested in helping her start Undertaking LA and the rest, as they say, is death-positive history.

Amber Carvaly of Undertaking LA.

“It is not death that is important, but how we live our lives as we near it,” Carvaly explains. “How we view and treat the dead is a reflection of society and our values. What I want is to change our hearts and souls and the way we literally see and process the world around us. I think our very existence and survival as a species depends on it.” Carvaly’s next big plan is to offer house death calls, where families are given a person to guide them through washing and dressing the body. “In my experience,” Carvaly says, “families have not needed anything spiritual or extravagant. They just want someone to stand with them and help give them the confidence to use the strength they already have within themselves to start.”

Melissa Unfred with her sidekick, Kermit.

The Summer before Melissa Unfred‘s senior year of high school, a local funeral home was featured on the news. They were a family-owned business looking for assistance and, as a joke, her mom turned to her and suggested she get a job. A budding rebel, Unfred did just that. “I was fascinated by the science and art involved in funeral service and embalming,” Unfred says. “And led by such a strong woman, no less! Billie White Everett [the home’s owner and one of the first female directors in Texas] made a huge impression on me.”

These days, Unfred educates people about home funerals and green burial, which focuses on returning the body to the earth in its natural state by foregoing embalming and using biodegradable materials like wooden caskets. She partners with an Austin crematory that shares her core values and is one half of Texas’s first certified therapy dog team working in funeral care, along with her furry sidekick, Kermit the dog. Originally adopted to be a pet and emotional support source for Unfred, Kermit’s knack for interacting with others, particularly the grieving, quickly became apparent. Now, the two are inseparable during transfers to funeral homes after someone has died, at graveside ceremonies, and everywhere in between. Together, they’re on a mission to clear out the smoke and mirrors of the funeral service, helping families understand their options so they can make an informed decision on what they want for themselves and their loved ones.

One of Lane’s hairwork pieces.

Courtney Lane of Never Forgotten braids hair for a living. She’s following a tradition called “hairwork,” which was part of the extensive Victorian mourning process. “What really makes hair art and jewelry special is that it can contain the hair of your loved ones,” Lane says. Her clients might provide her with their own hair to make into a romantic gift or a snippet from their child’s first haircut. Lane also works with cancer patients who lose their hair during treatment. “A cancer survivor once explained to me that this was an artistic statement that helped her feel like she wasn’t losing her hair, but transforming it into something new and beautiful,” Lane says. Very often, of course, the hair she’s working with is that of a deceased family member; because hair doesn’t decompose, Lane explains, it’s a perfect relic with which to remember our dead.

In addition to custom work for clients, Lane also makes art out of antique Victorian hair and travels to give lectures and workshops on the misunderstood history behind hairwork and its elaborate techniques. The first time she showed her art at a convention, a man walked up to her table and asked, in what she calls a Disney villain voice, if she could make him “something truly evil” if he brought her the hair of his enemies. Since then, she has gotten so many similar requests that she added a section to the FAQ on her website. The answer is no.

The theme of education runs throughout the work of Lane, Carvaly, and Unfred. For while death is ubiquitous, it is also misunderstood and maligned. “I do completely believe that humans should not be afraid of dead bodies,” Carvaly says. “By leading by example, I can show others that there is another way to approach our existence and demise. And that if I can do it, so can they.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Prehistoric Britons ate the dead & carved their bones – research

Prehistoric cannibals who once lived in a Somerset cave engraved human bones with zig-zag designs as part of a “complex” eating ritual, according to new research.

The bones, which had a number of deliberate cuts and human teeth marks, were discovered at Gough’s Cave in the Mendip Hills and are believed to be between 12,000 and 17,000 years old – when the cave was occupied by Ice Age Britons.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum in London and University College London (UCL) compared hundreds of cut-marks found on human and animal bones in the cave. They discovered one human body with the bones separated, filleted, chewed and then marked with a zig-zag design, before it was finally broken to extract the bone marrow.

Researchers ruled out an initial theory that the marks were made during the butchery process, because they were found on a part of the bone with no muscle attachments. There is no indication on the skeletons that the humans had suffered violence before they died.
They concluded that the “zig zagging incisions are undoubtedly engraving marks, produced with no utilitarian purpose but purely for artistic or symbolic representation.”

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, says the marks may have represented the “story” of the victim’s life or a memorial to how they died. Whatever the reason, researchers agree it must have been part of a ritual or ceremony to mark the person’s passing, like modern day funerary rites.

“The sequence of modifications performed on this bone suggests that the engraving was a purposeful component of the cannibalistic practice, rich in symbolic connotations,” says Dr Silvia Bello, lead author of the study.

“Archaeologists have linked the engraving of objects and tools to ways of remembering events, places or circumstances, a sort of ‘written memory’ and ‘symbolic glue’ that held together complex social groups.

“Perhaps the engraving of this bone may have told a sort of story, more related to the deceased than the surrounding landscape. It could be that they are indicative of the individual, events from their life, the way they died, or the cannibalistic ritual itself.”

Gough’s Cave was first discovered in the 1880s and frequent excavations at the site found evidence that humans lived there for thousands of years, including “Cheddar man,” Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, which dates from 7,150BC.

DNA taken from the skeleton was found to match that of Adrian Targett, a man living in the local area today.

The cave is 115 meters (377ft) deep and 3.405km (2.12 miles) long, and contains a variety of large chambers and rock formations.

Human bones have been found intermingled with butchered large mammal remains as well as flint, bone, antler and ivory artefacts, including a 13,000-year-old carving of a woolly mammoth.

The team has previously found skulls at the site which had been turned into bowls or cups, possibly to eat or drink from.

Complete Article HERE!

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Man dresses up as dead sister to help grieving elderly mother cope with loss

Man dresses up as dead sister to help grieving elderly mother cope with loss

[A] 50-year-old man has been dressing up as his dead sister for 20 years to ease his elderly mother’s heartbreak over losing her daughter.

A video, which has gone viral across Chinese social media, shows the unnamed man wearing a traditional cheongsam dress while tending to his elderly mother.

The man, from South China, told the BBC his mother was so grief-stricken by his sister’s death two decades ago, she began showing signs of mental illness.

A 50-year-old man has been dressing up as his dead sister for 20 years to ease his mother’s heartbreak.

So he began wearing his late sister’s clothing, which he said made his mother feel as though her daughter had come back to life.

“She was so happy, so I kept doing it. I’ve basically been living as a woman ever since.”

The devoted son, who admitted he no longer owns any men’s clothing, said didn’t care what anyone thought, as long as his mother was happy.

The video, which has gone viral across Chinese social media, shows the unnamed man wearing a traditional cheongsam dress while tending to his elderly mother.

In the short clip, which has been viewed more than 432 million times, the man with long black hair is wearing a blue and white traditional dress.

He can be seen feeding the frail-looking woman and helping her stretch her legs, as she lies on a makeshift bed on the back of a small van.

The selfless gesture has been called an act of “filial piety” – a kindness towards elders, considered a key value in Chinese culture.

The woman says in Chinese: “She is my daughter. When my other daughter died she became my daughter.”

The man has told reporters he doesn’t care what people say because he’s “doing it for his mother”.

“Why would I be afraid of people laughing at me?” he asked.

The selfless gesture has been called an act of “filial piety” – a show of respect towards parents, elders and ancestors, which is is considered a key value in Chinese society and culture.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Gentler Symptoms of Dying

By SARA MANNING PESKIN, M.D.

The patient’s hair was styled with curls so stiff, they held her head a few inches up from her hospital pillow. She had painted her lips a shade of bright pink that exuded the confidence of age.

Just after her colon burst, she was still awake. She looked around, at me, at the monitors. She asked for pain medication. “Am I dying?” she asked.

“We think so,” I said, touching her manicured fingernails. “I am here with you.”

Later, she kept her eyes closed but opened them when we talked. It was a state that the author and hospice nurse Barbara Karnes described as “one foot in each world.”

“Can I do anything?” I asked.

“No, honey. I’m just tired.” She closed her eyes again.

Still later, she lapsed into a stupor. It was as if I wasn’t in the room at all, as if she’d gotten so close to death that she could no longer see the living world. With each hour, her lipstick appeared brighter as if in defiance as her blood pressure dropped and her skin whitened. Midmorning, she died.

While some of the symptoms of dying, like the death rattle, air hunger and terminal agitation, can cause alarm in witnesses, other symptoms are more gentle.

The human body’s most compassionate gift is the interdependence of its parts. As organs in the torso fail, the brain likewise shuts down. With the exception of the minority of people who suffer sudden death, the vast majority of us experience a slumberous slippage from life. We may be able to sense people at the bedside on a spiritual level, but we are not fully awake in the moments, and often hours, before we die.

Every major organ in the body — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys — has the capacity to shut off the brain. It’s a biological veto system.

When the heart stops pumping, blood pressure drops throughout the body. Like electricity on a city block, service goes out everywhere, including the brain.

When the liver or kidneys fail, toxic electrolytes and metabolites build up in the body and cloud awareness.

Failing lungs decrease oxygen and increase carbon dioxide in the blood, both of which slow cognitive function.

The mysterious exception is “terminal lucidity,” a term coined by the biologist Michael Nahm in 2009 to describe the brief state of clarity and energy that sometimes precedes death. Alexander Batthyány, another contemporary expert on dying, calls it “the light before the end of the tunnel.”

A 5-year-old boy in a coma for three weeks suddenly regains consciousness. He thanks his family for letting him go and tells them he’ll be dying soon. The next day, he does.

A 26-year-old woman with severe mental disabilities hasn’t spoken a word for years. Suddenly, she sings, “Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace!” The year is 1922. She sings for half an hour and then she passes away. The episode is witnessed by two prominent physicians and later recounted by them separately, at least five times, with identical descriptions.

Early reports of terminal lucidity date back to Hippocrates, Plutarch and Galen. Dr. Nahm collected 83 accounts of terminal lucidity written over 250 years, most of which were witnessed by medical professionals. Nearly 90 percent of cases happened within a week of death and almost half occurred on the final day of life.

Terminal lucidity occurred irrespective of ailment, in patients with tumors, strokes, dementia and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Nahm suggested the mechanism of terminal lucidity may differ from one disease to another. For example, severe weight loss in patients with brain tumors could cause the brain to shrink, yielding fleeting relief of pressure on the brain that might allow for clearer thinking. Yet this theory doesn’t explain terminal lucidity in people dying from dementia, kidney failure or other diseases. Like death itself, terminal lucidity retains a screen of mystery.

My grandfather talked to us for 10 minutes the day before he died. He hadn’t spoken coherently in days. His hands had become baby-like, grasping our fingers or the bed railing reflexively. The weight of his eyelids had become too heavy to lift.

Suddenly, he was back. “What’s the good word?” he asked, as if that day was the same as all the days before. He marched down the line of grandchildren at his bedside, asking for the latest news in our lives. He asked if they ever finished building the Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem. He made a joke, one I can’t remember except for the way he smiled out of the right side of his mouth, tilted his head from side to side, and held up his hands in jest.

And then, again, he was gone.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Professionals Who Want to Help You Plan Your Death

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[W]hen events involve a lot of moving pieces, it’s common to bring in a specialist. We have planners for weddings, parties, corporate retreats, and more — people who help us nail down our goals, explain complicated rules and contracts, and take care of the logistics so we can focus on the parts that matter most. When it comes to the most difficult event of all, though, many of us are on our own. Enter end-of-life specialists, who make it their job to guide dying people and their families through all the details they never wanted to think about.

Michelle Acciavatti, a former neuroscientist and ethics consultant, is the woman behind Ending Well, a Vermont-based business that helps people plan, prepare for, and experience “their own good death.” After working in hospitals and in hospice care, Acciavatti says, she began to notice repeated problems with end-of-life care: patients and family members not feeling listened to, people feeling too afraid or uncomfortable to broach the subject of death, outright denial about what was coming. Through Ending Well, she now offers services to help her clients come to terms with mortality, whether that means caring for a dying loved one, mourning a miscarriage or stillbirth, or planning their own advance care

“My work is to help people face and embrace the fear that keeps them from living well,” she says. “I educate people about their options at the end of life, but, hopefully, I also help them learn about themselves.” To do that, Acciavatti helps people articulate their priorities around death — do they want a home funeral? have any last requests? what do they want their legacy to be? — and then works to convert those desires into a concrete plan.

In part, that means handling all the logistics (for example, she has the legal and practical knowledge to hold a home funeral in any U.S. state), but Acciavatti says that “values-based care planning,” or helping people figure out their quality-of-life goals, is the element that she finds most meaningful.

“A big fear for many people doing advance-care planning is dementia,” Acciavatti explains, “and many people say they wouldn’t want to live if they couldn’t recognize their family members. In my process, we try and unpack that statement. What does ‘recognize’ mean? Remembering their names? Their relationship to you? Or recognizing them as people who love you even if you can’t place them?”

“Since you can’t possibly plan for every possible medical outcome and potential intervention,” she adds, “I find it’s much more useful to do the self-work to understand your values for living well and find where the line is in that way.” For example, a person might initially shy away from the idea of a breathing machine, but change their mind once they begin to consider when in their disease progression they may need one.

Once a person figures all that out, the next step is making their wishes known. Acciavatti urges her clients to have “an ongoing and evolving conversation … with your family, your doctor, with anyone who might be involved or have an opinion about your care, so that they understand why you have made the plans you have made.”

Amy Pickard, whose Los Angeles–based company Good to Go! helps guide groups and individuals through end-of-life paperwork, agrees. “Most people don’t even talk about those things, let alone put their wishes down in writing,” she says. “Imagine how traumatizing that would be if suddenly your loved one needed you to make life/death decisions for them and you never talked about it before.”

Pickard founded Good to Go! after losing her mother, an experience that left her unprepared to navigate what she calls “the death duties.” “I was stunned to learn of all the work involved after someone dies,” she says.
“When you’re grappling with an unbearable reality, which is when your fiercest cheerleader, best friend, and the one who loves you the most on the planet is dead, the last thing you want to do is spend every waking moment encountering nonstop questions about the deceased person’s life and estate.”

But how do you make a long conversation about death seem like a fun way to spend a weekend afternoon? The answer, Pickard decided, was to recontextualize advance planning as a party, complete with upbeat playlists, food, and plenty of humor. “I joke that Good to Go! is like when you give your dog a pill wrapped in cheese,” Pickard says. “The pill is confronting your mortality and G2G! is the cheese.”

“Basically, Amy saved me,” says Erika Thormahlen, a client of Pickard’s. When the two women met in Los Angeles years ago, “it was occurring to me how little I knew about my mom’s wishes for end-of-life stuff … We were a don’t-ask-don’t-tell family in a way, and my mother both always wanted to remain positive and also never wanted to be a burden.” Worried about potential awkwardness when she raised the subject, Thormahlen asked her mother if it would be okay if “my pal Amy came over and we filled out some questions together.”

When Thormahlen’s mother passed away a month after Pickard’s visit, “the dozen notes I made informed both my handling of her memorial and how I try to honor her life,” Thormahlen says. “I feel very privileged to have been there — and Amy made it this wonderful memory I often return to.”

The Good to Go! “departure file,” as Pickard calls it, includes a template for a living will (a document outlining a person’s desires for their end-of-life medical care) and a booklet covering almost everything the living will doesn’t: contact information for doctors and business associates; bills, social-media passwords; plans for children and pets; instructions for what should be done with photos, journals, and other personal belongings; and funeral and body disposition wishes, from where to distribute ashes after a cremation to whether an obituary is desired and what photo ought to be used.

“It’s basically every question that came up after my mom died,” Pickard says. “Since she died unexpectedly, I had to guess. I don’t want anyone else to have to guess.”

Clients of Pickard’s can go through the departure file on their own time or during one of her Good to Go! parties, which she throws monthly in L.A.; she hopes to take the event on the road this summer.

Over in Vermont, Acciavatti of Ending Well also says she hopes to expand her services down the line: “I want to offer everything!” she says.
“Anything someone tells me they need — if it resonates with me I want to do it. Reiki, therapeutic massage, music therapy, aromatherapy … Holding space for people to create their own rituals, tell their own stories.”

“If I’ve done my work well,” she adds, “people are dying in the manner they chose.”

Complete Article HERE!

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People are choosing to die in their beds over a hospital

By David K. Li

[M]ore New Yorkers are choosing to spend the last moments of their life in the comfort of their own home — rather than a hospital bed.

The percentage of terminally ill Big Apple residents who pass away at home has been on the increase for the past eight years.

“It’s become understood it’s more comfortable to die at home,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

“It’s become acceptable to think and plan about dying at home.”

Back in 2007, just 18.9 percent of deceased New Yorkers passed away at in their own home, according to figures compiled by the city’s Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.

That figure has been climbing every year — reaching 23.4 percent in 2015, according to the most recent data available.

“I do think it’s a trend,” said Dr. Susan Cohen, section chief of palliative care at the NYU School of Medicine. “If we’re having the conversations that will offer [home death] as an option, they will take it.”

City hospitals still remains the most preferred the place to pass. But hospital deaths have been sliding down for years — from 51.4 percent in 2011 to 46.4 percent in 2015.

While city data doesn’t specify what ailment ultimately leads to home death, palliative care researchers and medical ethicists said that dying patients are choosing comfort over more medical treatment.

In addition, data on deaths at licensed hospices in the city has risen to 5 percent from just 1.8 percent in 2011.

It’s not clear to medical professional what might have changed patients minds about where they choose to live out their last days.

Cohen – who is also director of the Palliative Care Program at Bellevue Hospital – cited the American Board of Medical Specialties’ move in 2006 to formally recognize palliative care as an official specialty.

That recognition could have eased the concerns of patients and their families about the process.

Caplan traced roots of this die-at-home trend back to the 1980s and early 1990s when AIDS ravaged America’s gay community.

“HIV led to people re-think how to care for the dying. For a gay man (in that era) being in hospital was not a comfortable place to be,” Caplan said. “There was a stigma [in a hospital] but [at home] you could be surrounded by your loved ones and friends.”

Complete Article HERE!