Category: Death Curiosities

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Funeral Home Gets A Therapy Dog To Help Clients Cope With Grief

By Dina Fantegrossi

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Experiencing the loss of a loved one is devastating. It is the most stressful, disorienting and agonizing event we can suffer through. For some, the process of planning and attending the memorial services for their deceased companion is more than they can bear.

One White Plains, NY funeral home has found a way to ease that burden, if only for a short while.

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Ballard-Durand Funeral Home has an extra staff member who provides a special kind of comfort to grieving clients. Her name is LuLu and she is a therapy dog. The majority of the facility’s clients have heard about their one-of-a-kind employee and specifically request Lulu’s services when they come in.

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Matthew Fiorillo, the president of  Ballard-Durand Funeral Home, told NBC Today that he came up with the idea of getting a therapy dog during a particularly stressful visit to the airport. Fiorillo’s flight had been canceled and he was battling the anger and anxiety of the situation when a Maltese trotted past with its owner. Just the presence of a dog was enough to soothe his rising tension.

A wave of calmness washed over me and after it happened I was like, wow, that was really powerful!

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Fiorillo began researching the logistics of incorporating a dog into the delicate practice of funeral services. Lulu the Goldendoodle officially came on board the team in May of 2015. Like many dogs, she instinctively senses where, when and how she’s needed most. Fiorillo told NBC Today:

She’ll park herself right next to an older person to let them pet her one minute and the next she’s prancing around with kids. It’s been really impressive to watch.

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Lulu is a calm, sturdy beacon of support for those whose lives have spun suddenly out of control. Her presence allows otherwise stoic men to weep, and gives brokenhearted children the chance to laugh again.

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Fiorillo also takes comfort in Lulu’s companionship. The funeral services profession is highly stressful and very emotional. Sometimes a replenishing hug from Lulu is just what he needs to help him release his own emotions and better serve his clients.

Humans need to touch. Even just petting her can be a subtle distraction from the tremendous amount of grief people are going through.

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For those who take comfort in spirituality or the belief in a higher power, Lulu’s ability to “pray” is astonishing. Chelsea Sules lost her 25-year-old brother on June 17. Her grief was stifling, but within minutes of meeting Lulu, she found herself laughing once again. She told NBC Today:

Lulu was with us for both of the wakes and out of nowhere we see her kneeling on a bench with her head down and praying in front of my brother’s casket. It blew us away.

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Want more Lulu? Visit the Ballard-Durand Funeral Home on Facebook to see more photos and inspiring messages of hope in the face of loss.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphe review – how to cope with death

This study of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, and how they coped with the mystery of extinction, is also a memoir about brushes with mortality

By 

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Katie Roiphe: ‘I think if I can capture death on the page, I’ll repair or heal something. I’ll feel better.’

Katie Roiphe begins her study of writers in their last hours with the story of a near-death experience: her own. At the age of 12 she began coughing up blood, but decided not to tell anyone – not her parents, or sisters, or doctor. She had in fact developed acute pneumonia, and after an operation that removed half of a lung she came out of hospital weighing 60lb, “too weak to open a door”. Ever since that narrow escape, death became her obsession, but one that continued to defy understanding or articulation. Who could make sense of such a thing? Her answer: great writers, specifically great writers as they approached death’s door. “I think if I can capture death on the page, I’ll repair or heal something. I’ll feel better. It comes down to that.” This mini-memoir, and a coda, are the most compelling parts of The Violet Hour. They bookend a sequence of five case studies of writers whose thoughts on mortality are often arresting, sometimes moving, yet never add up to a coherent vision of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing”.

Roiphe (above), an essayist, teacher and contrarian, is a woman up for a challenge. Her most recent books – a study of literary unions, Uncommon Arrangements, andIn Praise of Messy Lives, a scattershot broadside against the way we live now – reveal her tough, unbiddable, non-ingratiating character. Fittingly, her first subject is Susan Sontag, a writer whose personal and intellectual fierceness could be Roiphe’s model. Sontag’s determination to outface death became part of her legend. She had already survived cancer, twice, when she was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2004. Believing herself to be “exceptional”, she rejected the evidence, adopting a get-well-or-die-trying attitude that caused intense anguish among the people who cared for her – her son David, friends, nurses, hired hands. She took up cudgels once again, enduring chemo and the dangerous procedure of a bone marrow transplant. The treatment caused her shocking physical agony. At this point I couldn’t help thinking of Woody Allen’s line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Susan Sontag with her son. David, in 1967.
Susan Sontag with her son. David, in 1967.

Sontag is an extreme case – and the only woman – in this book. Her example is unlikely to make Roiphe, or anyone, “feel better” about death. Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, adopted the opposite approach. Even as a young man he disliked the idea of “prolonging life at all costs”. Stricken by an inoperable cancer of the jaw, he refused any painkillers other than aspirin. “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly,” he said. Was his stoicism a better, braver way to face the end? As Larkin wrote in “Aubade”, “Death is no different whined at than withstood”. His disciples believed that Freud had no terror of the end, but Roiphe wonders if he protested his indifference too much: he may have been trying to persuade himself that he didn’t care.

Shadowing Roiphe’s book is a tentative desire to find something consolatory – a truth, a meaning – in death. Can writers teach us how to die? The uncertain, provisional nature of her project is evident. Instead of a continuous narrative, she writes in discrete floating paragraphs, as if conducting a philosophical investigation. Either that, or she doesn’t quite know how to structure her argument. Maurice Sendak, a writer and illustrator she has revered from childhood, described death “as if it is a friend who is waiting for him”. He suffered a heart attack at 39, but lived on till his 80s. He owned Keats’s original death mask and would take it out “to stroke the smooth white forehead”. When his lover died, Sendak drew his corpse, obeying the creative instinct “to turn something terrible into art”. Here Roiphe does get at something useful, which is the consolation of work: “For the time it takes to draw what is in front of you, you are not helpless or a bystander or bereft: You are doing your job.” (I would take “or bereft” out of that sentence.)

John Updike, characteristically, worked unto the last, writing some of his most poignant poems (in Endpoint) from his hospital bed. Like Freud, he cleaved to stoicism in considering death, but unlike him had sought comfort in religious faith and sexual adventure, the latter his way – or at least his characters’ way – of cheating mortality: “If you have a secret, submerged, second life, you have somehow transcended or outwitted the confines of a single life.” In an almost too-perfect illustration of his twin drives we learn that Updike plotted Couples, his great novel of adultery, while in church – “little shivers and urgencies I would jot down on the program”. The oddness of this chapter, however, concerns what happened between Updike’s family during his last illness. His first wife Mary and their four grown-up children seem to have come a cropper under the Cerberus-like vigilance of his second wife Martha. The children felt that Martha, perhaps with her husband’s tacit agreement, restricted their “alone-time” with Updike. This is interesting as gossip, but I can’t see how it enlarges our understanding of the writer or his work.

Dylan Thomas in 1946.
Dylan Thomas in 1946.

Even less illuminating is the record of Dylan Thomas’s bibulous last days in New York, swaggering – or staggering – from hotel to pub to hospital and thence into a coma. Roiphe notes that myths have clustered around his death, and the causes of it. Some still argue that he “wasn’t an alcoholic”. Seriously? Put it this way: if Dylan Thomas was not an alcoholic then his was an even more horrifying personality than at first appears. Addiction would at least explain, if not excuse, his lechery, his flakiness, his self-pity, his self-loathing, his tendency to steal from his friends, and the fact that he had written only six poems in his last six years. At 39, Thomas is the youngest to go of this small assembly and the one whose death I felt least inclined to lament.

The Violet Hour does, however, rally at the end. For reasons the author doesn’t entirely understand she seeks an interview with James Salter, then 89 years old, and nearly the last Great American Novelist. To her surprise he agrees to talk. Perhaps it is her contact with a living subject, perhaps it is Salter’s wry, Delphic way with words, or the fact that he came close to death as a fighter pilot in Korea, but something is unlocked by their encounter and Roiphe at last identifies what her quest has been about – not death but the fear of death: “The knowing you are about to die. The panic of its approach … That’s what I’ve been trying to write my way through.” It returns her to another formative moment in her life, the sudden collapse of her father – a heart attack in the lobby of his building – and her belated realisation that he must have felt pain in the minutes before he died. She is excruciated by the idea of his pain, and that he may have panicked. “The idea that he didn’t have time to be afraid had consoled me.”

This book is Roiphe’s haunting but muddled attempt to come to terms with the mystery of extinction. Her father died, and she will never know what he was going through. Salter, who died last year, knew best: “Don’t dwell on it.”

Complete Article HERE!

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The Son of a Funeral-Planner Explores His Dad’s Grieving Process

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Jesse grew up observing grief. He learned the most about it from his dad, a man who seemed not to express much at all. Here is how.

Lou was walking alone when he died of a heart attack. He was my dad’s brother-in-law, but they seemed more like best friends. My dad was Lou’s best man in his wedding, they’d talk politics, and they played music together. So, when my dad was put in charge of Lou’s funeral, it was no surprise that it became a multi-act musical tribute. Lou’s kids played, neighborhood kids got up, my mom and I performed.

We held in our tears during the funeral, since we had to perform. But then the final act began. It was a recording of Lou on piano and you could hear him breathing. I think it goes without saying that the last thing you expect at a funeral is to hear the dead person breathing. And so mom began to cry. I began to cry. Outside, as the funeral let out, we supported each other, sobbing. My dad remained inside, arguing with the sound crew.

At that point in our lives, my family had been been playing in my dad’s funeral band for several years. This was the fifth funeral my dad had planned. But what started as a genuine attempt to honor the departed had become hard for me to understand. I wondered if somewhere along the way to funeral director, my dad had lost his ability to grieve.

* * *

You could say it all begins with Johnnie. He was my dad’s older cousin and they were close. Johnnie was a charming kid who wore patches from yoyo competitions, did trick-dives off the diving board. When Johnnie would visit for the weekend, my dad looked forward to sharing a room.But there was also a darker side to Johnnie’s life. His mom was the daughter of a military officer and came from an abusive background, a tradition she seems to have passed on. There were rumors that she whipped him with belts and threw him against walls. When he was 1 year old, he had a broken leg, cause unknown.

Once Johnnie turned 18, he took off. No one heard from him for years, though snippets came down the grapevine that he had grown his hair out, discovered heroin. And then just like that, Johnny reentered my dad’s life. “I went out to one of the first fiddler conventions,” my dad told me, “and I got out there kind of early. I saw a guy dumpster-diving for food, and I took a closer look, and it was my cousin Johnnie.”

They spent the day together, talked about Johnnie’s family. My dad offered him a place to live and Johnnie accepted. But before long, alcohol starting disappearing from the house. I was a baby, my dad could be gone for long periods of time, and my mom, who had once dated an alcoholic, felt uneasy about the situation. “He had that, I don’t know how to say it, this jive, the lying, the part that I had been dealing with for so long with somebody who had that kind of addiction.”

My dad asked Johnnie to move out and once again he disappeared. From what we know, the rest of his life was spent doing odd jobs, battling addiction, getting arrested, and studying the Bible with a men’s Christian group. Then, on his 50th birthday, after relapsing, he went to Big Sur and killed himself under the stars. My dad took it hard. He asked Johnnie’s mother if they were going to have a funeral and she refused. She accused Johnnie of taking his own life just to get back at her. So my dad picked some songs, wrote a eulogy, and put on a funeral himself.

“Chat, rap, talk, spinning the yarn, that was Johnnie’s gift wasn’t it?” my dad’s eulogy began.

My mom and I joined my dad up front. We played an old folk song called “Hobo’s Lullaby” (I knew it because my dad would sing it to me before bed). The rest of the funeral went well. People stayed and ate dinner. Dad didn’t cry. He didn’t seem sad. He circulated around the room, calm, cracking jokes. But in the weeks that followed the funeral, he stopped singing “Hobo’s Lullaby.” When I’d ask for it before bed, he’d say, very nicely, “I can’t sing that song.”

I could tell something was going on for dad. I didn’t realize it then, but that song, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” was a brief window into my dad’s sadness. And then, just like that, it shut again.

* * *

A few years after Johnny’s death, my grandmother had a stroke and the process began again. This time the death took many months and my dad was put in charge of caretaking. Day by day, her body and mind broke down. He was by her side when she died. Soon after, we discovered that my grandmother had planned her own funeral. She not only requested specific songs, but specific people, including the family funeral band, to sing them. My dad arranged the performances and pushed us to practice. Then the day of the funeral arrived and to the surprise of everyone but my grandmother, 300 people arrived. We shook with nerves as we played. The audience clapped.

Afterwards, we packed the minivan with equipment and barely made the reception in the backyard of my grandfather’s house. People shook our hands and complimented us.

Once we played her funeral, the expectations were set. We played when my Uncle Tom died. We played when my grandfather died. And a funny thing happened, the more tragedy struck, the better we got. By the time Lou died, we were ready to really put on a show. But that window into my dad’s grief didn’t reopen and I was left wondering, once again, what was going on inside my dad’s head.

* * *

Years passed, we continued to play funerals. But as I got older, moved out of the house and struck out on my own, I began to resent my dad’s demands. I started dating, and I began to wonder why I had difficulty showing emotion. I knew it had something to do with my dad and that angered me. I decided: no more family band. I went on strike. And then a few more years passed, more dating, and I began revisiting the most important deaths and funerals of my childhood. And as I did so, I came to see my dad’s emotions, and mine, in a new light.

When I went to my mom and asked her about my dad, she told me something that happened to her the last time she was on stage. She is a very nervous person and when she’s performing with my dad, she searches the audience for someone she finds reassuring. But this time, during “Amazing Grace,” she did something different.

“I started looking around at different people and I could see that they were very moved. There was part of me that felt I did it right, using my own feelings to portray this song, to sing it, but also recognizing the effect my singing had.”

This got me thinking. Maybe, for my dad, performing is about experiencing grief. Maybe he can feel loss by seeing it in others; a kind of grief by proxy. Could that be it?

The final answer came later.

My girlfriend was driving and I put in a recording of the family band. As the music played, my parents’ voices coming through the tinny speakers, the emotion that swept over me came as a surprise. I felt proud. I watched my girlfriend’s face as the music played, hoping the music would bring tears to her eyes. “Listen to this one,” I said. “You can hear my uncle breathing. This one has my cousin on it.”

As I searched her face for a reaction, I remembered what my dad gets out of these performances. Yes, he feels pain and loss. He feels sadness. But it’s the performance that does that. It’s the performance that allows him to see his own pain through someone else’s eyes. And just like my dad, I was seeking this from my girlfriend’s reaction, this many years later.

And so, if I should lose someone close to me, here’s what you can do. Watch me play, let the music move you, and let me watch the music move you. Come up to me afterwards and let me shrug in modesty, crack a joke. Let me pretend I don’t care. But let me think, secretly: Yes, I’m the son of a funeral planner. Yes, I play in the Family Funeral Band.

Getting to know my dad in a deeper way allowed me to learn something about myself. We are not macho men, but we aren’t liberated men, either. Somehow, we learned to circumvent the emotional limitations of masculinity by performing our grief. It’s a work-around, we know.

It’s the best we can manage, for now.

Complete Article HERE!

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The top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.

By MARY BROPHY MARCUS

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Heart disease and cancer still top the list as the leading causes of death in the United States, but the gap is closing between the two. A new report out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looks at the shifting trends in Americans’ health and mortality, and the conditions most likely to take lives.

In 2014, a total of 2,626,418 deaths were reported in the United States, and the age-adjusted death rate decreased 1 percent to a record low.

Bob Anderson, chief of the CDC’s Mortality Statistics Branch, told CBS News the 15 leading causes of death in 2014 remained the same as in 2013.

“We all have to die of something at some point. When you’re looking at these categories you have to account for the fact that there are competing risks, but you can’t avoid death,” said Anderson.

Why the list, then?

“We want to create a society where we live as long as we can, as healthy as we can,” he said. Crunching the data provides researchers with information that will help develop prevention programs, he explained.

Anderson, who oversaw the production of the National Center for Health Statistics report, shared some insights into the top ten:

1. Heart disease

While heart disease has topped the list for years now, the actual number of deaths and the death rate for heart disease has come down by quite a bit over recent decades, said Anderson.

“The decline goes back about 50 years. For trends in heart disease, you see a substantial increase from the beginning of 20th century to 1950 or so, and then it starts to come down. It mirrors the rise and decline in smoking in the United States

“What we’ve seen in last 20 or 30 years is rapid decline in heart disease. The decline has been fairly rapid and rapid enough so it’s sort of overshadowed the aging of the population,” said Anderson.

However, a new study published this week in JAMA Cardiology, by Kaiser Permanente researchers, shows that the decline in deaths from heart disease and stroke has slowed, nearly leveling out since 2011.

2. Cancer

Cancer has seen a gradual rise in deaths over time although death rates have declined gradually since 1990. While smoking cessation’s perks were pretty quickly reflected in a drop in heart disease-related deaths, the increasing number of cancer deaths reflect the longer term damage smoking can do, as well as a growing aging population.

“Cancer tends to occur a little bit later, it’s a more chronic issue. It kills you later than heart disease does on average,” said Anderson. “You see this increase in cancer mortality — a lot of it is lung cancer.”

He noted that the gap between heart disease and cancer deaths has narrowed substantially over time.

3. Chronic lower respiratory diseases

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), largely due to smoking, makes up the majority of deaths in this category. It also includes deaths from chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma. Again, smoking earlier in life or throughout life plays a large part in respiratory disease deaths, including secondhand smoke-related illnesses.

4. Accidents

Motor vehicle accidents, unintentional drug overdoses, and accidental falls and other injuries make up this category.

“The largest proportions of these are motor vehicle accidents and drug overdoses,” said Anderson, noting that this category does not include intentional overdoses that lead to suicide. The number of accidental drug-related deaths has been on the rise amid a growing epidemic of heroin and opioid painkiller addiction.

Deaths from motor vehicle accidents declined when seat belts and car seats for kids were mandated. “They have made a huge difference,” he added.

5. Stroke

Cerebrovascular disease, or stroke, is not considered heart disease — it involves blood vessels.

“Stroke is centered on the brain, heart disease is centered on heart. Both infarction, a blockage in blood vessels leading to the brain, and hemorrhage due to things like brain aneurisms, are included,” said Anderson.

This is another category that has dropped substantially, he added.

“For a long time cerebrovascular disease was the third leading cause of death and now it’s at five. Smoking and healthy behaviors and our ability to treat these diseases have had an impact. We’ve gotten very good at treating cardiovascular disease generally and that’s had an impact on both heart disease and stroke deaths. It’s a combination of both prevention and treatment,” Anderson said.

6. Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease has climbed up the list.

“A lot of the increase we’ve seen has to do with better diagnosis. Folks who work on this have come up with better diagnostic criteria. Some of these [deaths] may have in previous years been reported as dementia, which goes to a separate category,” said Anderson.

But not all of the increase has to do with better diagnosis and reporting, he noted.Alzheimer’s risk tends to increase with age, so as there have been substantial declines in heart disease and stroke, more people are living to older ages and developing Alzheimer’s.

7. Diabetes

Diabetes has bobbled up and down on the top ten list over the years.

“It hasn’t changed a whole lot over last 10 years or so. There are different risk factors. Some are inherited, like in type 1 diabetes. Much of type 2 is associated with obesity. Diabetes is also connected with other diseases, such as cardiovascular disease,” said Anderson.

He said diabetes-related deaths are likely under reported — physicians may not make it the primary cause of death on a death certificate, but “if you look at any mention of diabetes on death certificates, cases where it’s a contributing factor, the numbers are much much larger.”

There are about 76,000 deaths caused by diabetes each year, but it is listed as a contributing factor in death on close to 245,000 death certificates annually, Anderson said.

8. Influenza and pneumonia

“You have to be careful here,” Anderson said. “These are not all flu-related deaths. We combine influenza and pneumonia because we use this combination category for flu mortality surveillance. Perhaps as much as 20 percent of deaths in this category are actually associated with the flu. A lot of these deaths are elderly folks who, say, have a stroke and are in the hospital and may develop pneumonia from being in a static position.”

He said that the deaths that specifically mention flu tally only about 3,000 to 5,000 deaths a year. The deaths in this category associated with flu tend to fluctuate by flu season, but the numbers due solely to pneumonia stay pretty stable over time.

“The fluctuations in this category help us determine the effects of flu season on mortality. So that’s why these two are combined,” he explained.

9. Kidney disease

This category includes chronic kidney issues, including kidney failure or end-stage renal disease.

“A large proportion of this category is renal failure. Some are probably related to diabetes in some way, or heart disease and heart failure, and high blood pressure. It’s always been on the second half of the list, at least in recent memory,” Anderson said.

10. Suicide

Suicide is the nation’s 10th leading cause of death, and the number of cases has been on the rise. “The rate of suicide has gone up nearly steadily since 1999,” Sally Curtin, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, said when the latest figures were released this spring.

“It has typically been there between number 10 and 15, but occasionally it has popped up into the top ten and it’s something we’re keeping our eye on,” said Anderson.

Other causes

Blood poisoning, chronic liver disease and Parkinson’s disease didn’t make the top 10 list, but aren’t far behind.

“Parkinson’s is a fairly important category. It’s one of those that’s gone up — the numbers have increased over time,” Anderson said. It wasn’t on the list in the year 2000, for example.

A study out earlier this year also suggested medical errors can be blamed for a significant number of deaths each year, although they were not included on this list. Anderson said many physicians likely do not report medical errors on death certificates.

Another significant cause of death, HIV/AIDS, has been declining since its peak in 1995, but the disease still takes a high toll among men in certain age groups. For men ages 25-34, HIV/AIDS was the 8th leading cause of death in 2014.

Life expectancy

The report also found that life expectancy at birth is 78.8 years, unchanged since 2012. Life expectancy rose for black males, Hispanic males and females, and non-Hispanic black males. Life expectancy shrunk for non-Hispanic white femalesfrom 2013 to 2014, possibly due to a rise in opioid use and suicide.

Preliminary data for 2015 suggest the death rate is going up. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted the numbers earlier this month. They are based on a preliminary look at 2015 death certificates. The overall death rate rose to nearly 730 deaths per 100,000 people last year, from about 723 the year before.

“I think, ideally, what we would like to see is people living well into their nineties and even early 100s in relatively good health, and dying as things just kind of wear out. That’s what I’d like to see,” Anderson said. “That’s one of the reasons for creating these lists.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Can You Die of Laughter?

While laughter provides plenty of health benefits, laughing uncontrollably for a longer duration carries health risk for individuals with heart ailments.

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Laugh your way to good health. This is one piece of advice that often works in improving overall well-being. A good hearty laugh can work wonders in relieving stress. There is no better feeling than being with someone who makes you laugh. However, it appears that laughing too hard continuously may not be as good as it seems.

The British Medical Journal in its recent report highlights the ill-effects of excessive laughing in people suffering from various medical conditions. The research was carried out by University of Birmingham’s R. E. Ferner and Oxford University’s J. K. Aronson.

  • A normal laugh where there is no excessive sound is indeed good for the cardiovascular system. However, excessive laughter causes the blood pressure to increase substantially, putting too much pressure on the heart. A defective heart due to medical conditions like coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure (CHF) may not be able to handle such excessive pressure.
  • Intense laughter also increases the heart rate considerably, which patients with heart conditions are unlikely to tolerate for long. To put it simply, a faulty heart might not be able to sustain the increased heart rate associated with hard laughter.
  • Excessive laughter can also be fatal to people affected with cerebral aneurysm. Laughing out vigorously can considerably increase intracranial pressure (ICP refers to pressure inside the skull). This can cause the aneurysm to burst, which may lead to stroke. Even people with other neurological disorders are advised to avoid uncontrollable laughter to keep complications at bay.

Laughter-induced Asthma

  • People suffering from asthma should also stay away from laughing too hard. In one study, patients noticed that their symptoms laughing too hard(chest pain and coughing) worsened due to excessive laughing. However, it was observed that laughter-induced asthma wasn’t a case of medical emergency.
  • Also, the patients reported that when they can manage their asthma well, symptoms do not flare up when laughing for a longer duration. This means that exacerbation of symptoms due to laughter indicates that asthma is not being managed properly. Nevertheless, intense laughter may trigger asthma attacks. Hence, patients ought to take a cautionary approach when it comes to laughing loudly.
  • Laughing too hard also puts excessive strain on the chest muscles. Hence, people affected with respiratory conditions such as collapsed lung are often advised to avoid laughing loudly.

Laughter-induced Syncope

  • It is observed that intense laughter increases the breathing rate and when this continues for a longer duration, say for 10 to 15 minutes, it can be risky even to healthy individuals.
  • People have experienced shortness of breath during fits of laughter. There also have been reports of people losing their consciousness temporarily (for around 3 to 5 minutes); some have blacked out for a few seconds due to unrestrained laughter. Experts warn that excessive laughter tends to cause hyperventilation, which carries health risk but is unlikely to result in death.

A fit of hysterical laughter can also cause hernia to bulge out. Jaw trauma such as a dislocated jaw can also be one of the side effects of laughing too much. Excessive laughter is also responsible for triggering cataplexy, a condition that is marked by sudden temporary loss of muscle function.
Dr. Martin Samuels, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical, opines that extreme strong feelings related to sorrow or happiness stimulate an area of the brain corresponding to fight or flight response. During a fight or flight response, chemicals like adrenaline are released into the body. Too much of adrenaline can be detrimental to health, particularly the heart. So handling emotions (good or bad) in a better way is necessary to manage overall health.

Death from Laughter

  • There also have been confirmed reports of people laughing their way to death. In one instance, in 1989, Ole Bentzen, a Danish audiologist while watching a heist-comedy film A Fish Called Wanda went into uncontrollable fits of laughter. He began laughing so intensely that his heart started beating very fast and the heart rate was found to be fluctuating between 250 to 500 heartbeats per minute. This eventually caused cardiac arrest.
  • In another instance, in 1975, Alex Mitchell from England had uncontrollable fits of laughter while watching a television episode of Goodies, a popular British comedy series telecasted during the 1970s. He laughed hard non-stop for 25 minutes, which left him breathless due to severe heart failure. Later, it was found that Alex was a patient of long QT syndrome, a rare congenital heart disorder. This heart ailment may also have contributed to his death.

On the whole, experts say that contributory factors such as an underlying medical condition are likely to have played a role in causing deaths due to laughter. However, the fact remains that laughing too hard for long, although not fatal, can cause breathlessness.

Keep in mind that continuous fits of laughter can be risky but that doesn’t mean you should avoid laughing altogether. A good hearty laugh on a daily basis is in fact considered an elixir of life but make sure that the laughter-inducing moments do not leave you out of breath.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Decision to Stop Eating at the End of Life

Stopping Eating and Drinking to Regain Control at the End of Life

By Angela Morrow, RN

hospital food

The decision to voluntarily stop eating and drinking at the end of life is a choice a patient makes with the intent to hasten the dying process.

Is It Suicide?

No. This is a choice made by patients who are already at the end of their life. A dying person will naturally lose interest in food and fluids and progressively become weaker. When the dying person decides to stop eating and drinking altogether, the process of progressive weakness leading to death occurs days to weeks sooner than would happen if the person were to continue eating and drinking.

To learn more about this expected loss of interest in food and drink, read Where Did Your Appetite Go?

Why Would a Dying Person Choose to Stop Eating?

Most people who choose to voluntarily stop eating and drinking do so to regain or maintain some control over their situation. Reasons people give for making this decision include the desire to avoid suffering, not to prolong the dying process and to take control over the circumstances surrounding their death.

What Kind of Patient Chooses to Stop Eating?

According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, which surveyedhospice nurses in Oregon who cared for patients who chose to voluntarily stop eating and drinking, the typical patient is elderly and considers himself to have poor quality of life.

Do Persons Who Choose to Stop Eating Suffer?

Overwhelming evidence says no. The same study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 94 percent of nurses reported these patients’ deaths as peaceful.

The cessation of eating and drinking is a normal part of the dying process that typically occurs days to weeks before death. Once the body becomes mildly dehydrated, the brain releases endorphins which act as natural opioids, leading to euphoria and often decreased pain and discomfort. When a dying person voluntarily stops eating and drinking, the same process occurs, and they may report feeling better than when taking in nutrition.

Very few patients complain of feeling hungry or thirsty after the first couple of days. Mucous membranes may become dry as dehydration sets in, which is why some patients may want to moisten their mouth with drops of water for comfort.

See: Acts of Love: Caring for a Dying Loved One.

When death by voluntarily stopping of eating and drinking was compared with death resulting from physician-assisted suicide, nurses reported that patients in the former group had less suffering and less pain, and were more at peace than those in the latter group. Nurses reported that both groups had a high quality of death, which sounds strange but means that their deaths proceeded with lower levels of pain and struggle.

How Long after Does Death Occur?

Once a person stops eating and drinking, death usually occurs within two weeks. The person may continue to take small amounts of water to swallow pills or moisten the mouth, and these small sips of fluids may prolong the dying process by a couple of days.

See: The Dying Process: A Journey.

Is Voluntarily Stopping of Eating and Drinking Right for Me?

This is likely a question you never thought you’d ask. But if you are, be sure to discuss this with your physician. She will likely want to make sure that there aren’t treatable conditions, such as depression or untreated pain, that are contributing to your decision. She may also refer you to a social worker or a member of your religious organization (if applicable) to discuss this decision further.

No one can tell you whether you should voluntarily stop eating and drinking. Depending on your quality of life, amount of suffering and personal belief system, you can decide if this choice is right for you.

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Fear of death underlies most of our phobias

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Some people focus their fear of death on smaller and more manageable threats.
Some people focus their fear of death on smaller and more manageable threats.

Awareness of our mortality is part of being human. As author and existential philosopher Irvin Yalom said, we are “forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom and, inevitably, diminish and die”.

There is growing research exploring the overwhelming anxiety that the inevitability of death, and our uncertainty about when it will occur, has the power to create. A social psychological theory, called terror management theory (TMT), is one way to understand how this anxiety influences our behaviour and sense of self.

Coping mechanisms

According to this theory, we manage our fear of death by creating a sense of permanence and meaning in life. We focus on personal achievements and accomplishments of loved ones; we take endless photos to create enduring memories; and we may attend church and believe in an afterlife.

These behaviours bolster our self-esteem and can help us feel empowered against death. For some, however, periods of stress or threats to their health, or that of loved ones, may result in ineffective and pathological coping mechanisms.

These people might focus their real fear of death on smaller and more manageable threats, such as spiders or germs. Such phobias may appear safer and more controllable than the ultimate fear of death.

We might take endless photographs to create a sense of permanence.
We might take endless photographs to create a sense of permanence.

This makes sense because when we look closely at the symptoms of several anxiety-related disorders, death themes feature prominently.

When children experience separation anxiety disorder, it is often connected to excessive fear of losing major attachment figures – such as parents or other family members – to harm or tragedy from car accidents, disasters or significant illness.

Compulsive checkers repeatedly check power points, stoves and locks in an attempt to prevent harm or death. Compulsive hand washers often fear contracting chronic and life-threatening diseases.

People with panic disorder frequently visit the doctor because they’re afraid of dying from a heart attack. Meanwhile, those with somatic symptom disorders, including those formerly identified as hypochondriacs, frequently request medical tests and body scans to identify serious illness.

Finally, specific phobias are characterised by excessive fears of heights, spiders, snakes and blood – all of which are associated with death. Phobic responses to seeing a spider, for instance, typically involve jumping, screaming and shaking. Some researchers argue these extreme responses could actually represent rational reactions to more significant threats, such as seeing a person with a weapon.

Priming death

More evidence for the TMT hypothesis comes from studies showing that death anxiety is capable of increasing anxious and phobic responding.

Compulsive hand washers
Compulsive hand washers

These studies use a popular “mortality salience induction” technique to prime death anxiety in people with other anxiety disorders. The technique involvesparticipants writing down the emotions that the thought of their own death arouses, as well as detailing what they think will happen as they die and once they are dead.

Spider phobics primed like this had increased reactions to spiders, such as avoiding looking at spider-related images, when compared to spider phobics not primed with death. And compulsive hand washers spent more time washing their hands and used more paper towels when primed with death.

Likewise, those with social phobias took longer to join social interactions. After they had been reminded of death, they also viewed happy and angry faces as more socially threatening – as these faces indicate judgement – than neutral, seemingly innocuous faces.

Is fear of death normal?

Given that we are all going to die at some point, death anxiety is a normal part of the human experience. For many of us, thinking about death can evoke fears of separation, loss, pain, suffering and anxiety over leaving those we love behind.

According to terror management theory, this fear has the power to motivate a life well lived. It stimulates us to cherish those we love, create enduring memories, pursue our hopes and dreams and achieve our potential.

Death anxiety is a normal part of human experience.
Death anxiety is a normal part of human experience.

Death anxiety becomes abnormal when it forms the basis of pathological thoughts and behaviours that interfere with normal living. Many obsessive-compulsive hand washers and checkers spend significant amounts of time each day in ritualistic behaviours designed to reduce the threat of dirt, germs, fire, home invasion or threats to themselves and loved ones.

Similarly, those with phobias may go to extreme lengths to avoid what they fear and react with extreme distress when confronted with it. When these thoughts and behaviours lead to impaired functioning, anxiety is no longer considered “normal”.

Treatments, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, for a range of disorders may need to incorporate new strategies that directly address death anxiety. Without such innovation, the spectre of death may tragically haunt the anxious across their lifespan, until it is too late.

Complete Article HERE!