Category: Death Curiosities

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Grieving families find hope after Labrador adopts orphaned bulldog litter

Pixie with her adopted bulldog puppies.

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[F]or a couple of hours on Dec. 10, the Phelps family felt like Christmas came a little bit early at their home in Henderson, Kentucky.

Their two Labrador Retrievers, Lil and Pixie, had given birth to two healthy litters, with Lil having her puppies just about a week shy of Pixie. When Amanda Phelps discovered Pixie had given birth, she called her family with the news and they hurried over.

But in the time it took Amanda to run back into her house to shower and come back outside, Pixie’s puppies had disappeared. It was later discovered that the Phelps’ other dog had attacked and killed Pixie’s litter.

“I was devastated,” Amanda said. “But the worst part about it was seeing Pixie so devastated. She was crying and searching everywhere for her puppies and they were gone. ”

Amanda and the rest of her family did their best to care for the remaining litter, but also try and comfort the now grieving dog that couldn’t stop walking around their property, frantically searching for her puppies. She knew in time Pixie would heal and so would the rest of the family. But on that cold Saturday afternoon, Amanda wondered how a day that started with joy could end with so much sadness.

“It was something that didn’t make any sense,” Amanda said. “But I told myself, ‘Things happen, and things happen for a reason.’ I just didn’t know what that reason was.”

Over the next 24 hours, Amanda faced her fair share of grief and tears as she cared for Pixie and the other little newborn puppies.  But the Phelpses, along with another unsuspecting family, received the miracle they didn’t know they needed thanks to the help of a stranger.

Similar circumstances, different families

Little did Amanda know, over 400 miles away in a small town in northeast Ohio, another family was grieving a similar loss on the same day.

Katie and Dan Weese, along with their three sons, of North Ridgeville, Ohio were celebrating the arrival of a new litter of English Bulldog puppies from their 3-year-old bulldog, Indy. The family took Indy to their local veterinarian’s office to have the puppies delivered by C-section. Their 6-year-old son, Dylan, shot video of the birth.

“Indy was his best friend,” Katie said. “They went everywhere together. He was counting down the days until she had her puppies.”

Indy appeared to be recovering smoothly following the surgery, and was given the all-clear to go home to care for seven new puppies.

But not long after the Weeses gathered Indy’s puppies and helped them start nursing, they realized Indy had stopped breathing.

Dan started CPR, and Katie put their children in the car to rush back over to the veterinarian’s office. Dan realized before they got to their destination that Indy was dead.

“It was just so unreal,” Katie said. “It was instantaneous. One minute we were celebrating these healthy pups, the next we’re getting ready to bury our family dog.”

But the family didn’t have much time to grieve, now that they had seven hungry puppies who were motherless. Katie drove to the local pet store to buy feeding supplies while Dan stayed home to help their three sons make sense of what had just happened.

“Later that day, Dylan doubled over with what looked like a stomach ache,” Katie said. “I asked him what was wrong, all he could say was ‘I’m just so sad.’ And that was when we realized we needed to all cry and let what happened sink in. It was therapeutic. But then we knew we had to get work, because we had our work cut out for us.”

The Weese family worked around the clock to feed the puppies, but they knew this was only the beginning of a long journey. After one round of feeding was done, they had to start preparing for the next.

Later that night, Dan posted something on their Facebook page — Red, White and Bulldogs — detailing what had happened to Indy that day. Red, White and Bulldogs also has its own blog and has a large following.

“I needed to talk about what happened,” Dan said. “I needed to write about it. Writing and talking to people is what helps me grieve the most, and I wasn’t doing it to try and draw attention to the situation, but mainly to help me process the day.”

‘It felt like fate’

Meanwhile, in Horse Cave, Kentucky, Macy Grubbs was casually scrolling through his Facebook feed, seeing what his friends and family were up to. Grubbs breeds Labrador Retrievers, and the Phelpses used one of his Labradors as the sire for both Pixie and Lil — so the Phelps family was on his mind that day, knowing that Pixie had lost all of her puppies.

Grubbs, who also grew up with English Bulldogs, follows several different breeders on his feed, including Dan and Katie Weese. He stumbled across the post Dan had made about losing Indy.

He read the post about the now orphaned bulldog puppies in Ohio and asked himself, “What if?”

“I couldn’t believe it happened on the same day, it felt like fate that I had seen it,” Grubbs said. “I knew there was a grieving dog in Henderson, and these seven motherless puppies in Ohio, and if we timed it right, we could make it work.”

Grubbs thought it over, and then sent a message to Dan.

“Hey guys I am terribly sorry to hear of your loss. I want to throw an idea your way, it may or may not help. I have a lab that gave birth yesterday and she lost her pups. She is grieving and producing milk like crazy. If you’re interested it might be worth a try. If we can help let us know,” Grubbs wrote.

Both Dan and Katie read the message and were conflicted. It sounded too good to be true, but if it worked, it could be the answer both families needed this holiday season.

“I thought, ‘This is just too crazy.’ I said to Dan, ‘This family wants to give us their dog to feed our puppies. That’s kind of weird, isnt it? And I saw they were from Kentucky, and I thought that was weird too. Why would some strangers want to come to Ohio and help us?”

From Kentucky to Ohio

Dan decided to take a leap of faith and call Grubbs. After all, what else did he have to lose?

“I remember Macy answered the phone, and I immediately calmed down after hearing his gentle, Kentucky accent,” Macy laughed. “Right off the bat, he called me brother and I knew this was a man who wanted to do something out of the kindness of his heart.”

The two men made arrangements for the families to meet the next day. Grubbs and Amanda, with Pixie in tow, made the almost seven-hour drive to Ohio to see if Pixie could help the orphaned bulldogs.

After their introductions, what happened next was what all three parties described as nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

“Pixie just laid right down and started licking and cleaning those puppies like they were her own,” Amanda said. “She knew exactly what to do.”

Katie and Dan said they had no way to predict if the plan would work. Dogs can sometimes reject their own puppies, let alone adopt a litter outside of their own, Katie said.

“I think we were all just hoping and praying that this would work,” Dan said. “We had nothing to lose but everything to gain at that point.”

And gain they did. Amanda and Grubbs left Pixie with the Weese family, where she will stay for the next four to five weeks as the puppies continue to nurse and be nurtured by Pixie.

Unexpected blessings 

Pixie has settled in just fine, Katie said, and has gained some new friends of her own.

“Our boys adore her,” Katie said. “They’ll take her outside and run with her through the woods. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye when she goes back to Kentucky, but I’m predicting because of this, we’ll be getting a big dog of our own in the future.”

Amanda and the rest of her family miss Pixie, she said, and are counting down the days until she makes her trip back home to Henderson. But she knows that Pixie getting her puppies back was the best, and most unexpected, miracle she could have asked for.

“We were two families mourning in the same way, but we found a way to find some hope through what happened,” Amanda said.

Grubbs said his reasoning for reaching out to the Weese family was pure instinct, and hoped that reaching out would bring comfort to not only Pixie, but the families, too.

“One of the first things Macy said to us was what he believed, which was the part of scripture that says ‘Love thy neighbor.’ And that’s what he did, he showed us love in a way we can’t repay,’” Dan said.

The Weese family got another unexpected blessing from this journey, too. Their son Dylan was adopted, and Pixie’s adoption of their seven bulldog puppies has hit closer to home then they thought.

Dylan Weese, 6, plays with Pixie.

“People keep telling us this is such a great story, but the link connecting Dylan with this story has been one of the greatest blessings out of this,” Katie said. “He keeps asking us if we can adopt Pixie, because we adopted him. And even though he knows now that it doesn’t exactly work that way, I think he understands what a blessing adoption is, because he saw Pixie do it with these puppies.”

All three families agreed that they are looking forward to the exact same thing in the next couple of weeks.

“I really just can’t wait to see this yellow lab running around, with seven chubby bulldog puppies running after her,” Katie laughed. “I think that will bring a smile to anyone who sees it.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Nine weird and wonderful facts about death and funeral practices

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It might not be something you want to think about very often, but it turns out that the way we treat our dead in the modern age is heavily influenced by the way our ancestors treated theirs.

When you look at death and funeral practices through the ages, repeated patterns of behaviour emerge, making it easy to see where some of our modern ideas about death – such as keeping an urn on your mantelpiece or having a gravestone – have come from.

So here are nine surprising facts about death and funeral practices through the ages:

1. Some prehistoric societies defleshed the bones

This was done with sharp knives. And we know this because human skeletons buried during this period show the traces of many cut marks to the skulls, limbs and other bones.

During the medieval period, bodies that needed to be transported over long distances for burial were also defleshed – by dismembering the body and boiling the pieces. The bones were then transported, while the soft tissues were buried close to the place of death.

2. Throwing spears at the dead

During the Middle Iron Age, “speared-corpse” burials were a pretty big deal in east Yorkshire. Spears were thrown or placed into the graves of some young men – and in a couple of instances they appear to have been thrown with enough force to pierce the body. It is unclear why this was done, but it may have been a military send-off – similar to the 21-gun salute at modern military funerals.

3. The Romans introduced gravestones

As an imported practice, the first gravestones in Britain were concentrated close to Roman military forts and more urbanised Romano-British settlements.

Back then, gravestones were more frequently dedicated to women and children than Roman soldiers. This was most likely because Roman soldiers were not legally allowed to marry, so monuments to their deceased family members legitimised their relationships in death in a way they couldn’t be in life.

After the end of Roman control in Britain in the fifth century, gravestones fell out of favour and did not become widely popular again until the modern era.

4. The Anglo Saxons preferred urns

During the early Anglo-Saxon period, cremated remains were often kept within the community for some time before burial. We know this because groups of urns were sometimes buried together. Urns were also included in burials of the deceased – who were likely their relatives.

5. Lots of people shared a coffin

During the medieval period, many parish churches had community coffins, which could be borrowed or leased to transport the deceased person from the home to the churchyard. When they arrived at the graveside, the body would be removed from the coffin and buried in a simple shroud.

6. And rosemary wasn’t just for potatoes

Sprigs of rosemary were often carried by people in the funeral procession and cast onto the coffin before burial, much as roses are today. And as an evergreen plant, rosemary was associated with eternal life. As a fragrant herb, it was also often placed inside coffins to conceal any odours that might be emerging from the corpse. This was important because bodies often lay in state for days and sometimes weeks before burial, while preparations were made and mourners travelled to attend the funeral.

7. Touching a murderer could heal

Throughout early modern times, and up until at least the mid 19th century, it was a common belief that the touch of a murderer – executed by hanging – could cure all kinds of illnesses, ranging from cancer and goitres to skin conditions. Afflicted persons would attend executions hoping to receive the “death stroke” of the executed prisoner.

8. There are still many mysteries

For almost a thousand years, during the British Iron Age, archaeologists don’t really know what kinds of funeral practices were being performed across much of Britain. And human remains only appear in a few places – like the burials in east Yorkshire. So for much of Britain, funeral practices are almost invisible. We suspect bodies were either exposed to the elements in a practice known as “excarnation”, or cremated and the ashes scattered.

9. But the living did respect the dead

Across time, people have engaged with past monuments to the dead, and it is common for people to respect older features of the landscape when deciding where to place new burials.

Bronze Age people created new funeral monuments and buried their dead in close proximity to Neolithic funeral monuments. This can be seen in the landscape around Stonehenge, which was created as an ancestral and funeral monument – and is full of Bronze Age burial mounds known as round barrows.

And when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, they frequently buried their dead close to Bronze and Iron Age monuments. Sometimes they dug into these older monuments and reused them to bury their own dead.

Even today, green burial grounds tend to respect preexisting field boundaries. And in at least one modern cemetery, burials are placed in alignment with medieval “ridge and furrow”. These are the peaks and troughs in the landscape resulting from medieval ploughing.

Complete Article HERE!

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A good death

Yong Nie had no papers, no contact with family – and one last wish.

By Kate Legge

[F]or 20 years Yong Nie dodged Australian authorities by lying low, staying out of trouble, earning cash in hand through odd jobs, sleeping rough and keeping to himself. But when he developed an aggressive cancer, the game was up. Gaunt, jaundiced, his once dark hair streaked grey, the 68-year-old illegal immigrant turned up at the emergency department of Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital doubled in pain and fearing deportation. But instead of being thrown out, locked up and shipped off, he was welcomed by palliative care staff who took him in as one of our own.

The good death at the heart of this story confirms the generosity of ordinary people performing exceptional acts of compassion without triumphalism or reward because this is what they do every day. Few of those who crossed Nie’s path during the two months he spent at the inner-city hospital founded by the Sisters of Charity will forget him. They couldn’t cure his disease-ridden body but they worked tirelessly to heal a terrible burden in his soul. Those drawn to fulfil his dying wish came from different faiths and countries. There were doctors, nurses and social workers employed in this Catholic health service; monks and volunteers from the Nan Tien Buddhist temple near Wollongong; a Chinese community cancer support agency and Australian Embassy officials in Beijing. Racing against death’s advance, they embraced this fringe dweller who had fallen foul of officialdom with gracious gestures that celebrate the humanity of frontline carers while reminding us how lucky we are to live in a country where goodness thrives.

Yong Nie had not spoken to his wife or ­daughter since leaving the sprawling Chinese port city of Tianjin two decades ago bound for Australia, possibly on a business visa. It was a mission that went awry, humiliation eventually driving him to a flimsy existence with no fixed address, floating on the margins of a society he failed to join. The longer he hid from his family in silence, the harder it was to bridge the distance. He had no Medicare card, no identifying papers, no tax file number, no information about next of kin, and savings of $72.46 when he was admitted to palliative care in May. “There was nowhere else for him to go,” says ­Professor Richard Chye, director of the Sacred Heart palliative care unit at St Vincent’s. “We could not put him on the street. His cancer had spread to his liver; it was too late for treatment.”

Amid grim accounting of refugees around the world as well as those in offshore detention centres closer to our shores, here is an oasis where generosity of spirit is blind to colour, creed and ­citizenship. It doesn’t matter where you’ve come from, since everyone in these wards is contemplating death and energies are focused on journeying comfortably and peacefully to this end. “From a healthcare perspective we were not obliged to report him as an illegal immigrant,” Chye insists. “We provide spiritual care and support and if we reported him to the authorities he would have a lot more emotional angst and worry.”

With only a smattering of English, the patient spent the first week alone, sick and scared as social workers and nurses tried to gently tease out details that would help them look after him. “His biggest fear was that he would be kicked out of hospital,” says Michelle Feng, a Chinese-born nurse who speaks Mandarin. “But I reassured him that was not going to happen.” As luck would have it, her husband emigrated 16 years ago from Nie’s home city, southeast of Beijing. Concerned mainly with alleviating his physical duress, she did not pry. “He told me he’d lost contact with his family, that he had not spoken to them since he came to this country. I was curious,” Feng concedes.

“How can you have a father or husband and no contact? Maybe he was afraid to contact them,” she wonders before dismissing these niggling thoughts. “For me, a patient is a person. They all have their own needs and we have to adapt to them. He is a ­person who has been living underground but I didn’t ask the reason. I don’t know why. At the end of life everyone deserves to be treated as a human being. Really, we don’t have a lot of time.”

Prof Richard Chye with St Vincent’s Hospital palliative care unit staff; at right, Michelle Feng (white shirt) and Trish McKinnon (in black).

Social worker Trish McKinnon arranged for Mandarin-speaking volunteers from the Chinese community support group CanRevive to visit “Mr Nie” so they might better understand his circumstances and needs. Although he had inhabited a shadowland of sorts, he counted a few as friends. He’d helped a single mother in the Chinese community and for many years he’d served as a volunteer at the Nan Tien Buddhist temple, an hour from Sydney. There he got to know Stanley Wong, who came here from China 24 years ago. They cooked together for temple functions. Wong speaks limited English but tells me “we help each other”. Informed of Nie’s rapid decline, he arranged a roster of hospital visits with another Buddhist so that there would be bedside company for him almost every day.

Dr Kate Roberts, a passionate young member of staff, recalls witnessing the turnaround in the patient’s demeanour as the threads of connection were drawn together. “In the first week he had zero visitors. He was severely jaundiced, hardly speaking, and a ­little suicidal. He used to say, ‘Send me back to China or send me to a train station and I’ll sit there until I die’. But then people from the Nan Tien temple began to trickle in and he began to smile. He did a 180-degree switch.”

Michelle Feng says the presence of the Buddhists calmed him. “He’d been so worried and anxious and not able to sleep. But from the first time the Buddhists came to pray around his bed he told me, ‘The worry is gone’. ” He began to eat, requesting white rice congee — a simple dish of boiled rice with no seasonings — for every meal. Feng brought him pickles from home to flavour his food. Stanley Wong arrived with nourishing broth. Gradually Nie gained the confidence and courage to express his urgent desire to reconcile with the family he’d left behind.

Before coming to hospital he had approached the Red Cross for help in contacting his wife and daughter but the search had drawn a blank. Wong says Nie was “too scared” to approach any other agency. But the longing to make amends troubled him deeply. “He realised he was coming to the end of his life and his final wish was to contact his ­family,” says McKinnon. “He was too ill to travel and he had no passport so everyone went out of their way to achieve the goal of a man who was going to die. A reaffirmation of family began and there was this wonderful confluence of palliative care principles and Buddhist acceptance.”

The notion of “existential resolution” is ­central to the Sacred Heart unit’s philosophy of minimising pain and discomfort in the dance towards death while resolving emotional agitation and distress. “We try to ensure patients are physically and emotionally calm and prepared, ensuring peace at the end of life, so we try to assess appropriate information without being intrusive,” says McKinnon.

Once members of the palliative care team became aware of how much a reconciliation with his family meant to Nie, they enlisted the support of Wong, who had a friend who knew somebody in Tianjin, a vast metropolis with a municipal population of more than 15 million. Feng told Nie the city had grown and developed like topsy since his departure but hopes were pinned on the location of his elder brother, a secondary school physics teacher. Wong’s messenger found him within four hours of posting an alert on a missing person’s site.

This breakthrough led to an exchange of phone numbers for Nie’s wife and daughter, as well as news of a granddaughter, now four years old, and the revelation that Nie’s sister, who is based in Hong Kong, was visiting her son in Melbourne. She tells me through her English-speaking granddaughter that she had no idea of her brother’s whereabouts for the past 20 years: “He disappeared.” Those intent on facilitating a reunion stayed clear of the details that had conspired to keep members of this family apart. Feng set up the Chinese version of Skype so Nie could communicate with his wife and daughter. “It was quite amazing,” she recalls. “His wife and daughter were in tears. Everybody was crying. I didn’t want to intrude.”

A plan took shape for getting them to ­Australia. Wong shared the view of Sacred Heart staff that reconciliation would not only console the patient but also salve the heartache and bitterness of relatives bewildered by his unexplained absence for two decades. “He left his ­family. No contact. No money,” Wong says, still perplexed, even though he knows a little of the gambling problems that beset his friend. “He lost money. He couldn’t face them.” Now was not the time for recriminations. “They were very upset, very angry. It was very difficult. I told his daughter, ‘You should come and see your father otherwise you will never see him again’. ”

Wong collected money to help with the reunion. He pleaded with Nie’s wife and daughter to make the trip, convinced they would feel lighter for this rare chance to say goodbye. “I told them this was a time for forgiveness. Now was the time to put everything away, all the unhappy ­stories to one side so they could feel peace.” As Nie’s health deteriorated, hospital staff wrote to the Immigration Department to hasten visitors’ visas issued by embassy staff in ­Beijing. “It was absolutely amazing,” McKinnon says of the frantic efforts to expedite their journey before Nie took his last breath. Wife and daughter arrived at the hospital and were accommodated in a room near his. “We were so anxious about it. From my point of view this was unfinished business and I was sure that a reaffirmation of the family connection would help enormously … I walked them along the corridor to the room, explaining his physical state to prepare them. It was quite ethereal. When they walked in, he introduced them to us. He said, ‘This is my wife. This is my daughter.’ It was an absolute statement of connection,” she recalls.

“There were tears. They were quite overwhelmed by the face-to-face intimacy but they were pleased this had happened. There was not a lot of discussion about the intervening years. This was not the time to trawl through the past. Obviously there was grief from the missing years but there was no castigation at all, just a real sense of solidarity at the end of life.” Nie’s wife brought with her a yellow cloth inscribed with Chinese characters and laid it under his head. Wong explains this Buddhist tradition encourages serenity in death. “This releases the body and brings peace and silence before people pass away.”

Nie died the next morning. A senior monk from the Nan Tien temple was called in to lead prayers and chanting in the room where he lay. “It was very beautiful,” Wong says of his friend’s final hours. “I think we should all become Buddhists,” laughs McKinnon. “It was a wonderful outcome in every way.” Nie’s daughter accompanied the body to the temple for cremation and before their return to China they visited Nie’s sister in Melbourne. Another link mended in this long broken chain.

Complete Article HERE!

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In death reunited: 75 years after Pearl Harbor attack, Anderson brothers of Dilworth, Minn., will rest together in USS Arizona

By Helmut Schmidt

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[J]ohn Anderson somehow survived the bloody mayhem of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

But in that attack, Anderson, a crewman on the USS Arizona, lost his twin brother, Jake.

Jake was among 1,177 sailors and Marines from the battleship who died, many of whom were entombed when the ship sank in minutes after a bomb touched off a massive explosion in one of the magazines.

Throughout an active and full life, Anderson carried the guilt of not being able to find his brother.

Now, in death, the brothers from Dilworth, Minn., will be reunited.

Anderson’s cremains, along with those of another man who survived that attack 75 years ago, will be interred by Navy divers in the No. 4 turret of the Arizona on Wednesday, Dec. 7.

Their cremains will join those of about 1,100 sailors and Marines entombed in the wreck.

“When you grow up in the shadow of a hero, you don’t always realize a hero is there,” one of his sons, Terry Anderson, 53, of Roswell, N.M., said Friday, Dec. 2. “We have a great sense of pride.”

Karolyn Anderson, 73, said that it’s been a difficult year since her husband’s death Nov. 14, 2015, at the age of 98.

“This is what John would want. I want to do that for John, and Jake. It’s very sad for me, but I’m honoring his wishes and his memory,” the Roswell woman said of her husband of 47 years.

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“For years, John was hesitant to even talk about Jake, He always carried a guilt burden that he couldn’t get Jake. And finally one day, I said ‘John, you never really mention Jake, why is that?’ And he said. ‘I always felt funny that I lived and he didn’t. I always wondered why I was spared and he wasn’t.’ He just felt like he let himself down, and Jake down as well as the rest of the family.”

John and Jake Anderson were born Aug. 26, 1917, in Verona, N.D. Their family later moved to Dilworth, where the twins grew up and graduated from high school.

Both joined the Navy in March 1937.

John Anderson began his Navy career on the USS Saratoga, then transferred to a destroyer. He was in China when it was attacked by the Japanese.

“That left an impact on him. He had pictures of a Chinese refugee column machine gunned by the Japanese. Pretty graphic stuff,” Terry Anderson said.

Pictured from left are the battleships USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and the USS Arizona, after the attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. (U.S. Navy photography provided by the Naval Photographic Center)
Pictured from left are the battleships USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and the USS Arizona, after the attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.

In 1940, he was transferred to Hawaii and eventually to the Arizona.

John was a member of a crew manning one of the ship’s 14-inch turret guns, and Jake’s station was an anti-aircraft gun. John Anderson also had the duty of setting up chairs for Sunday morning worship services on the Arizona’s deck. After setting up the chairs on Dec. 7, he went below deck to have breakfast when he heard a “kaplunk,” looked out a porthole and saw planes bombing nearby Ford Island, he told columnist Bob Lind of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.

“They started hearing machine gun fire and explosions going off, and Dad went to the porthole of the ship out of the mess hall and that’s when he saw the Japanese planes flying by and he saw the orange balls and he knew the Japanese were there, because he had seen them in China,” said another son, John Anderson Jr., 47 of Carlsbad, N.M..

John Anderson said in accounts after the war that he then headed for his post, all the while looking for his brother, Jake. He made it to his gun turret, but before he could help load it, a bomb hit the turret’s top, bounced off and penetrated the deck. The resulting explosion killed many of the crew.

Shortly after, the forward ammunition magazine with 1.5 million pounds of gunpowder blew up, virtually splitting the Arizona, and leaving dead and dying men everywhere, he told Lind.

As the ship began sinking, a senior officer ordered Anderson onto a barge taking wounded men to Ford Island, and they picked up wounded men on the way.

Once on the island, Anderson commandeered another boat to go back to the Arizona with a shipmate, Chester Rose. On the way, they pulled survivors from the harbor, but then the small craft was hit and wrecked, and all but John perished.

“He talked about this guy Rose many many times, about how he lost his life trying to help, go back to the ship. After (many) years, he was able to locate the family and tell the family what happened to Rose,” John Jr. said.

John Anderson was wounded, but swam to land and grabbed a rifle and two bandoliers of ammunition. He then jumped into a bomb blast crater on Ford Island and told Lind that he thought, “Let ’em come!”

In a 2014 article, he told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the next day a Marine patrol told him survivors of the Arizona were to gather on a nearby dock for a head count.

“Everybody I saw there had rags around their heads,” Anderson said. Bandages covered their arms, skin was scorched and hair was burned off. “Beat up something awful.”

Travis Anderson, 45, of Kurtistown, Hawaii, said his father passed on a very memorable lesson learned on that horrible day.

“I don’t remember what we were doing, but he said there’s a reason for rules and doing things the right way, and I kind of smarted off to him and he told me to listen,” Travis Anderson said. “He told me a story about a man locked up on the Arizona. He was in the brig and no one could find the key. Boy, that just hit me like a ton of bricks. That they were trying to get that guy out of there and they didn’t have the key. Pay attention to what you’re doing and do things right. I carried that with me the rest of my life.”

John Anderson joined the destroyer USS Macdonough, and fought in 13 major battles across the Pacific.

After his discharge in 1945, he worked as a movie stuntman and took night classes in meteorology. A friend later convinced him to join the Navy Reserves, where he served for another 23 years.

anderson4

While in Hollywood, he met and worked with John Wayne and also worked on the set of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas staple, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Anderson moved to Roswell, where he was “Cactus Jack,” a disc jockey playing mostly country music. He met Elvis Presley and Eddie Arnold in that job.

Anderson later became a television meteorologist and a real estate agent.

“He went after it. He lived life to the fullest. It was like reading a Hollywood book. He really lived. I could just go on and on,” Travis Anderson said.

“He was a wonderful man, very charismatic. He was bigger than life,” Karolyn added.

The interment ceremony on the Arizona is unique in that it is the only ship in the U.S. Navy where the cremated remains of a survivor are returned.

“It will be a chance to say goodbye to dad and a chance to reflect on Dec. 7. A day we should never forget,” John Jr. said. “It will be a time … to thank God for all he did.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Ancient Americans Mutilated Corpses in Funeral Rituals

By Tia Ghose

A skull exhumed from the Lapa do Santo cave in Brazil shows evidence of modification such as tooth removal. Hundreds of remains from the site show that beginning around 10,000 years ago, ancient inhabitants used an elaborate set of rituals surrounding death.
A skull exhumed from the Lapa do Santo cave in Brazil shows evidence of modification such as tooth removal. Hundreds of remains from the site show that beginning around 10,000 years ago, ancient inhabitants used an elaborate set of rituals surrounding death.

Ancient people ripped out teeth, stuffed broken bones into human skulls and de-fleshed corpses as part of elaborate funeral rituals in South America, an archaeological discovery has revealed.

The site of Lapa do Santo in Brazil holds a trove of human remains that were modified elaborately by the earliest inhabitants of the continent starting around 10,000 years ago, the new study shows. The finds change the picture of this culture’s sophistication, said study author André Strauss, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

“In reconstructing the life of past populations, human burials are highly informative of symbolic and ritual behavior,” Strauss said in a statement. “In this frame, the funerary record presented in this study highlights that the human groups inhabiting east South America at 10,000 years ago were more diverse and sophisticated than previously thought.” [See Images of the Mutilated Skeletons at Lapa do Santo]

The site of Lapa do Santo, a cave nestled deep in the rainforest of central-eastern Brazil, shows evidence of human occupation dating back almost 12,000 years. Archaeologists have found a trove of human remains, tools, leftovers from past meals and even etchings of a horny man with a giant phallus in the 14,000-square-foot (1,300 square meters) cave. The huge limestone cavern is also in the same region where archaeologists discovered Luzia, one of the oldest known human skeletons from the New World, Live Science previously reported.

In the 19th century, naturalist Peter Lund first set foot in the region, which harbors some of the oldest skeletons in South America. But although archaeologists have stumbled upon hundreds of skeletons since then, few had noticed one strange feature: Many of the bodies had been modified after death.

In their recent archaeological excavations, Strauss and his colleagues took a more careful look at some of the remains found at Lapa do Santo. They found that starting between 10,600 and 10,400 years ago, the ancient inhabitants of the region buried their dead as complete skeletons.

But 1,000 years later (between about 9,600 and 9,400 years ago), people began dismembering, mutilating and de-fleshing fresh corpses before burying them. The teeth from the skulls were pulled out systematically. Some bones showed evidence of having been burned or cannibalized before being placed inside another skull, the researchers reported in the December issue of the journal Antiquity.

“The strong emphasis on the reduction of fresh corpses explains why these fascinating mortuary practices were not recognized during almost two centuries of research in the region,” Strauss said.

The team has not uncovered any other forms of memorial, such as gravestones or grave goods. Instead, the researchers said, it seems that this strict process of dismemberment and corpse mutilation was one of the central rituals used by these ancient people in commemorating the dead.

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Festival of dying: is your ‘death literacy’ lacking?

Lying in a satin-lined coffin or wearing a bondage hood may help you face up to your inevitable demise

 

The Sydney Festival of Death and Dying aimed to spark conversations about mortality.
The Sydney Festival of Death and Dying aimed to spark conversations about mortality.

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[N]othing could evoke more gut-wrenching melancholy than Syrian musician Adnan Baraké playing the oud in a dimly lit boat shed at a festival of death. At least, that’s what I’m thinking right up until the moment a foghorn bellows ominously from some distant ocean liner, swamping us entirely in a sombre aura of doom.

It’s the opening ceremony at the inaugural Sydney Festival of Death and Dying – and it’s only going to get more macabre.

Held this past weekend, the festival was billed as three days of workshops, lectures, and performances that “do justice to the full spectrum of what is at stake in mortality”. Presented by Dr Peter Banki, he has compiled a line-up of peers such as anti-death-phobia advocate Stephen Jenkinson, designer of posthumous fashion Pia Interlandi, and president of Dying with Dignity NSW, Dr Sarah Edelman.

Together, they aim to illuminate all angles of death and dying: living with grief, dying at home, the afterlife, visions, suicide, and voluntary assisted dying, among others.

Nobody close to me has died, and my “death literacy” is lacking – I have a lot to gain from a weekend like this. In curatorial advisor Victoria Spence’s terms, I’m here to “build muscles in relation to mortality”.

Death is and perhaps always will be taboo, but it’s something we need a lot of help preparing for. Before we become a parent, we have months to get ready: we read books, we go to classes, we shop, we see a counsellor. When someone dies though, it’s often unexpected – but there are ways we can make the process easier, and they usually begin with a conversation. Or in this case, a festival.

Victoria Spence is a civil celebrant, consultant and former thespian. She begins her session – Developing Your Mortality Muscle – by explaining her objectives: to help us be aware of, and understand, our physiological responses to loss.

Death may cause us to fight, flee, freeze or submit, she says, but one response is pretty much guaranteed: shock. We react to death by abruptly drawing in breath; and in the rituals that surround death, we metaphorically hold it in. But if we’re prepared, if we learn to breathe, we can be properly present.

“When somebody dies, you put the kettle on,” she says. “That’s how you be with your dead.”

Having physical proximity with the deceased – being privy to their new smells, witnessing physical changes – activates a physiological response, changing the way we view our dead and encouraging the grieving process.

The Sydney Festival of Death and Dying allowed participants to get up close and personal with the accoutrements of death.
The Sydney Festival of Death and Dying allowed participants to get up close and personal with the accoutrements of death.

Victoria says being physically intimate with death can be crucial: bathing your dead person, or clothing them. Another way to be intimate is through language. We sit in groups to exercise our vocabulary of condolence: “I’m sorry”, “You’ll get through this”, “You will heal in time” – my phrases seem to avoid the moment, while others engage with it: “How does her death make you feel?”

Next we’re given the chance to get up close and personal with the accoutrements of death. I slink into a satin-lined coffin, and as the lid is repositioned I imagine the sound of dirt raining down on me. This experience builds no bridge to death, the same way being wrapped in toilet paper for Halloween brings me no closer to the experience of mummification. But it does make me wonder about alternative burial rites.

In another session, Dr Sebastian Job creates a simulation where participants “face the worst” ahead of time. By inflating a balloon until it bursts we experience a symbolic death, he says, allowing us the opportunity to process death anxiety and life regret. He hopes this jolts us from social paralysis into affirmative action.

Have you ever thought about what song you want played at your deathbed? Peter Roberts is a music thanatologist; he plays music for people who are at the end of their life. In this session he discusses how music can help dying people to let go – and several have during his service.

Tempo tempers breathing, and tone and timbre can quell fear, he explains; his use of vowel sounds, not words, can offer uncomplicated companionship, and provide the dying an opportunity to abandon their pain-riddled bodies and follow with their mind, travelling peacefully with the harp’s melody.

 


 
Palliative care physician Dr Michael Barbato has devoted a significant part of his life to the exploration of dreams and visions at the end of life. He believes that we overlook the mystic elements of death and dying simply because they appear too “fringy”.

He quotes a study that found up to 50% of respondents believed their dying loved one was experiencing unusual visions. The study quoted was his own – the Palliative Medical Journal refused to publish it because, he says, it was too fringy. His talk is entertaining and peppered with emotive stories, but it lacks the scientific substance I require to get into the moment.

Dr Peter Banki, the festival director, believes proximity to death can make us feel alive. He says we often use words such as pain, fear and submission when describing death. One of his workshops, Thresholds and Lust, is an intersection of both his festivals – this Festival of Death and Dying, and his prior Festival of Really Good Sex. It is designed to playfully evoke death-related emotions from willing participants.

A bondage hood is placed on my head, suffocating my senses. My partner manipulates my head and body, she runs her hands over my arms and head (submission). I can’t help but wonder what everyone else around me is doing – are they watching (fear)? The heat bakes my gimp head like a potato jacket, while my body is uncomfortably contorted on the pungent floorboards (pain). I tap out.

I’m not yet ready to yield to the vagaries of dying, whether real or imagined, by the festival’s end – but I do notice I’ve begun cultivating a relationship with death that I’m thankful for. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve also observed friendships forming, information exchanged, and future plans being made – the festival of death has facilitated the birth of a community. We are all dying, after all.

Complete Article HERE!

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Dia de los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) 2016

[M]ore than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death.

It was a ritual the indigenous people had been practicing at least 3,000 years. A ritual the Spaniards would try unsuccessfully to eradicate.

A ritual known today as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

The ritual is celebrated in Mexico and certain parts of the United States. Although the ritual has since been merged with Catholic theology, it still maintains the basic principles of the Aztec ritual, such as the use of skulls.

Today, people don wooden skull masks called calacas and dance in honor of their deceased relatives. The wooden skulls are also placed on altars that are dedicated to the dead. Sugar skulls, made with the names of the dead person on the forehead, are eaten by a relative or friend, according to Mary J. Adrade, who has written three books on the ritual.

The Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during the ritual. The skulls were used to symbolize death and rebirth.

The skulls were used to honor the dead, whom the Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations believed came back to visit during the monthlong ritual.

Unlike the Spaniards, who viewed death as the end of life, the natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake.

“The pre-Hispanic people honored duality as being dynamic,” said Christina Gonzalez, senior lecturer on Hispanic issues at Arizona State University. “They didn’t separate death from pain, wealth from poverty like they did in Western cultures.”

However, the Spaniards considered the ritual to be sacrilegious. They perceived the indigenous people to be barbaric and pagan.

In their attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Spaniards tried to kill the ritual.

But like the old Aztec spirits, the ritual refused to die.

To make the ritual more Christian, the Spaniards moved it so it coincided with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 1 and 2), which is when it is celebrated today.

Previously it fell on the ninth month of the Aztec Solar Calendar, approximately the beginning of August, and was celebrated for the entire month. Festivities were presided over by the goddess Mictecacihuatl. The goddess, known as “Lady of the Dead,” was believed to have died at birth, Andrade said.

Today, Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico and in certain parts of the United States and Central America.

“It’s celebrated different depending on where you go,” Gonzalez said.

In rural Mexico, people visit the cemetery where their loved ones are buried. They decorate gravesites with marigold flowers and candles. They bring toys for dead children and bottles of tequila to adults. They sit on picnic blankets next to gravesites and eat the favorite food of their loved ones.

In Guadalupe, the ritual is celebrated much like it is in rural Mexico.

“Here the people spend the day in the cemetery,” said Esther Cota, the parish secretary at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “The graves are decorated real pretty by the people.”

Complete Article HERE!