You call out to your best friend, but there’s no response. You shake them and gently nudge their shoulder before it dawns on you that they’re not sleeping. They’re lifeless. Dead. You reach for them again but the distance between you grows until they become one with the fog.

You wake up with a profound sense of loss yet strangely unburdened. You’ve had a common dream about someone dying — but in all likelihood, it has nothing to do with your friend or literal death.

Read on as we take a closer look at dreams about dying, what they mean, and if there’s reason for concern.

It’s not uncommon for terminally ill people to dream about loved ones who have died, according to a 2016 studyTrusted Source done in India. And a small 2014 surveyTrusted Source found that it’s not unusual to dream of someone you’ve recently lost.

Most people reported these dreams to be pleasant or both pleasant and disturbing. A few respondents said they were purely disturbing.

Such dreams may be part of the mourning process or a reflection of the fact that you miss someone who’s no longer in your life.

If you aren’t terminally ill or mourning a loved one, however, your dream may not really be about death at all. Instead, death may represent change or a period of transition.

When trying to interpret a dream, it helps to focus less on specific details and more on the way it made you feel. Consider how these feelings relate to what’s going on in your life.

For example, if you woke up feeling scared and anxious, you might consider whether you’re stressed out about changes in your life or fearing the unknown.

If you woke up feeling good, perhaps you’re accepting that something in your life is ending and you’re embracing a new beginning.

While it can be upsetting to dream about death, remember that dreams aren’t predictions and shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Things we dream about are often symbols for other things. So, dreaming about death could be part of the bereavement process or a representation of great change in your life.

Dreams about falling are fairly common and may represent:

insecurity or lack of self-confidence
feeling out of control
letting go or setting yourself free

The symbolism of falling may go hand-in-hand with symbolism of dying — both can represent an ending, a beginning, or both.

Death can show up in many types of dreams. Whether it’s your own death or someone else’s, there’s a good chance your dream is really about unresolved issues.

Dreams about family members dying

A 2018 study on childhood nightmares found that common themes include:

death
injury
threats to family members

When you dream about a loved one dying, it might be due to changes — whether perceived or actual — to your relationships.

Dreams about you dying

Dreaming about yourself dying could mean that you’re in a major life transition.

It might be a symbolic goodbye to a relationship, a job, or a home. It could represent a part of you that is dying or something you’d like to escape.

It could also be that you’ve been putting your own needs on the back burner in favor of everyone else. Part of you feels neglected and is vying for attention.

Dreams about celebrities dying

When a celebrity dies in your dream, it’s probably not about the celebrity. The meaning may lie in who or what that particular celebrity represents to you.

Dreams about pets dying

You may dream about your pet dying if they’re old or sick and you’re genuinely concerned about them.

But your pet may symbolize something else, such as:

comfort
security
companionship

And dreaming of your pet dying might symbolize your fear of loss of these three qualities.

Dreams about friends dying

Dreaming about the death of a friend could signify concern for that person. It could also mean that your friendship is undergoing change or that you’d prefer to be free of this person.

Keep in mind the meaning behind the dream may not have anything to do with that friend at all. Instead, it might relate to what that friend represents in your life.

Dreams about deceased loved ones

The aforementioned small 2016 studyTrusted Source found that end-of-life dreams are common. Terminally ill people reported dreaming about loved ones who’ve already passed on.

These dreams tended to be nonthreatening, and the people in the dreams were seen as they were in their prime of health. This could be a coping mechanism.

“The goal ultimately may not be to avoid having such dreams, but rather approach them with curiosity to better understand them,” Dr. Alex Dimitriu, of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine in California, told Healthline.

Recurring dreams about death can be the result of ongoing stress and unresolved issues. Try to identify the cause of stress in your waking life. Confronting the issue may help stop the dreams.

You can also ease into a more peaceful sleep by scheduling wind-down time before you go to bed. Make sure your bedroom is free of glowing electronics and other sources of light.

If you wake up in the night, use deep breathing or other relaxation exercises to get back to sleep. If that doesn’t work, get up and do something relaxing until you’re sleepy again.

If you’re having a hard time dealing with recurring dreams or ongoing stress, talk with a doctor or mental health professional. A qualified therapist can help you work through anxiety dreams.

Dreaming is a natural function of our sleeping brains. In fact, everybody dreams.

Dimitriu, who’s double board certified in psychiatry and sleep medicine, says dream content can be:

leftover remnants of the day’s thoughts and events
an ongoing subconscious theme or feeling
just random

“In my work, after thoroughly exploring conscious and subconscious explanations of dream content, sometimes we are left with no clear answer,” Dimitriu said.

He noted the importance of letting the person experiencing the dream draw conclusions, rather than plant ideas in their mind. It’s a process that can take time.

“In the case of dreams with intense content, such as dying, it is worth noting there is a lot of emotional energy to such a dream,” Dimitriu said.

“Lastly, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, and some dreams are truly random,” he added.

Dreams of someone dying can be unsettling, but they shouldn’t be taken literally. Death in a dream may symbolize the end of something and the beginning of something new.

Dreams provoke emotions — and those emotions can help you connect a dream to events in your life. But dreams can’t always be deciphered.

If you’re troubled by frequent stress-related dreams, it may help to talk things out with a qualified therapist.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 8, 2020December 8, 2020

Life Support is a new digital tool to help us talk about death

by Emily Gosling

Creative agency The Liminal Space aims to help break taboos around death and dying, through a new digital tool called Life Support.

The idea is to help people have difficult conversations, “empowering” them at a time when, thanks to Covid-19, many of us have dwelled on our collective mortality more than usual. Indeed, according to The Liminal Space director Amanda Gore, research shows that “one in five of us are thinking about death more since the outbreak of Covid-19” and that “80% of people are more likely to be thinking about death in 2020 than actually talking about it.”

The mobile-first site offers practical tips about how to discuss death, and also shares people’s personal experiences around topics such as what dying looks like, talking to someone with COVID-19 about dying, having a dignified death, talking to children about these topics, how to overcome the fear of death and more. Users can also Download and share tips that can help in starting conversations with loved ones.

The voices used on the platform include spokespeople from charities such as Compassion in Dying and Marie Curie; as well as experts in end-of-life and palliative care and people who’ve experienced different aspects of end-of-life care, who share practical advice on how to manage end-of-life decisions, such as choices they have about how and where they die.

Many of those who shared their stories for the site did so as part of death and dying-focused project undertaken by The Liminal Space in 2019 along with The Academy of Medical Sciences called The Departure Lounge, spaces including a popup in Lewisham shopping centre, south London, which were styled like airports which aimed to start a public conversation about the end of life and how we can support people to have a ‘good death’ in the future.

These have been supplemented with stories from charities such as Compassion in Dying and Marie Curie, and insights from some of the leading palliative and end-of-life care physicians, nurses and experts in the country (see ‘notes to editors’ for a full list of these experts).

The project has been supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences and a government fund run by Innovate UK, an organisation set up earlier this year to “help drive innovation throughout the pandemic,” according to Liminal Space.

“We felt it was hugely important to find a way to enable people to start having these essential conversations about end of life so that we can all be better equipped to deal with death, and more empowered to make important decisions,” says Gore.

Professor Sir Robert Lechler PMedSci, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, adds, “This year has made conversations about death and dying even more challenging with people more likely to be distanced from their loved ones. However, like so many things in the pandemic, Life Support shows that we can use digital space to enable and support those conversations to take place.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 1, 2020

End-of-life coach

— The art of dying well

For most of us, the word “doula” is firmly associated with a coach helping a mother through childbirth. A modern-day version of a traditional midwife, a doula, is not a healthcare professional, but rather a guide, whose goal is to comfort and support women in labour both physically and emotionally.

Derived from the Greek word δούλα (“servant-woman”), doula stands for a woman who lends her knowledge, experience and presence of mind during the arduous process of childbirth. In the Western world, the popularity of birth doulas started to gain traction in the early days of the reproductive justice movement back in the ’70s.

Striving for more natural and less medical experiences women turned to doulas, who’d often act as advocates for women and babies in hospitals which weren’t always friendly and accommodating.

Recent years have seen the rise to a different kind of doulas, quite the opposite of those attending to childbirth. These are “death doulas” who support people in their end-of-life journeys. Also referred to as “death midwives”, their vocation is a relatively recent phenomenon emerging as part of the mindset recognising death as a natural, accepted, and honoured part of life.

Death doulas are by no means there to assist in ending one’s life (at least in the countries where euthanasia is illegal), but rather to ease the transition both for the passing person and his or her loved ones, who stay behind/Sharon McCutcheon via Unsplash

There are remarkable parallels between being born and dying, and in both life scenarios, doula’s aim to reduce anxiety and confusion, manage the pain, and, if possible, make the experience more peaceful. Just as birth doulas are coaching mothers on birthing a baby, death doulas are coaching people on dying. They provide non-medical aid which is a mix of emotional and practical counselling that can make all the difference.

Christy Moe-Marek, an end-of-life doula from Minnesota, says that doulas emerged from the Baby Boomers, behind the natural birthing movement. They decided to take things into their own hands as far as dying goes: “They’re saying, no, I don’t want the death my parents had. We are rich in possibility, why can’t I make this whatever I want it to be?”

Death doulas – just like midwives – have been around since the beginning of humanity. Traditionally their roles were played by the wise women from the community or extended family.

However, with the disintegration of traditional societies and the extended family per se, we have lost touch with our roots as we often find ourselves helpless in the face of the imminent. Death customs and practices within families have all but vanished as palliative care was delegated to hospitals and the funeral industry was commercialised. But these days people are yearning for a better life – and death! – and this is when doula’s role becomes so crucial.

According to The New England Journal of Medicine, the number of Americans wishing to die at home rather than in a hospital environment is the highest it’s been since the early 1900s/Dominik Lange via Unsplash

They want to pass away surrounded by their family and friends, who could be overwhelmed by witnessing the final days of their loved ones while feeling helpless and powerless. The trade of a modern death doula has emerged as a response to the people’s fear of facing death and even contemplating it. Death doulas have started a conversation about dying and have, in some way, given voice to those making the transition. After all, these days many more people get a chance to linger on a bit longer despite terminal illnesses thanks to the advances in modern healthcare. In many cases, they do need someone to discuss their transition with and make it more meaningful.

Unlike death midwives of the past, our contemporaries are women (and sometimes men) old and young, coming from different paths of life. They help people on the threshold of passing to write letters to their unborn grandchildren, to arrange farewells with relatives; they may perform traditional or religious rituals for their charges or offer assurances.

Doulas bridge the gap between the dying and their families, facilitating conversations about death, explaining things and advising when it’s finally time to let go. Some say that working with a death doula opens people up to a more spiritual side of death with less anxiety and trepidation/Manikandan Annamalai via Unsplash

As death doulas are gaining more mainstream attention, there’s been an ongoing debate, whether they should provide free services rooted in the community. For instance, in communities of indigenous people or African people death doulas have continued to be a steadfast part of the culture. On the other hand, most of today’s end-of-life professionals aren’t being supported by specific communities and, thus, cannot afford to render their services for free. In big cities, where tightly-knit communities ceased to exist a long time ago, death doulas are usually hired by the family of the person nearing the end of life. Still, their responsibility remains with the dying, whether they are being attended to at home, or in a hospice.

In traditional cultures, the art of attending to the dying is passed down from generation to generation. But a skillset of a death doula isn’t “god-given”.

It is something that can be learned. These days one can learn the ways of a death doula by attending training courses or seminars. Neither in the US or Europe are there national regulatory agencies that would provide licensing and oversight. Most likely, their creation is just a matter of time. The decision to become a death doula is often made after attending a dying family member. Others translate years of experience as nurses and palliative care specialists into a new dimension, and some feel the need to make traditional passing-related rituals available to members of their communities. Groups that train death doulas are usually led by nurses and social workers who want to change the impersonal nature of the dying experience most people faces. In the US organisations like The Doula Program to Accompany and Comfort, in New York, The International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), or Lifespan Doulas and other groups train people to become death doulas.

In Russia, death doulas are virtually non-existent, because palliative care is still in its infancy, and people are culturally opposed to an open conversation about death and dying/Bret Cavanaugh via Unsplash.

However, the need to make dying less clinical and remove the fear and stigma surrounding death has become tangible. Society seems to have gradually realised that dying people, in whose shoes we’ll all end up one day, deserve greater compassion and companionship in their final days. Shelby Kirillin, an end-of-life doula, based in Richmond, Virginia, reasonably wonders “Can you imagine if a woman was going through labour and no one around her was talking about it or preparing for it? There’d be an uproar if we treated birth like we treat death”.

When it comes to dying, traditions and modernity don’t necessarily have to clash. Indigenous cultures have long regarded death as an essential part of life, and even though thanks to modern healthcare options the process of dying these days can be virtually painless, a “good death” is more than just a painless one. That being said, the emergence of death doulas is, perhaps, the best thing that’s happened to humanity in a long time.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020

Not all end-of-life decisions are covered in a will.

Here’s what else you need

By Sarah O’Brien

With the number of deaths from the coronavirus continuing to mount, your own mortality may be more on your mind than usual.

In fact, The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a rise in estate planning, according to certified financial planner Stacy Francis, president and CEO of Francis Financial.

Pandemic or not, though, part of that contemplation should include making a plan for when you die, experts say. That is, you should give thought to what would happen to your home, your bank accounts and belongings, as well as, perhaps, your dependents.

That planning should start with a will. If you pass away without one — called dying intestate — a state court generally decides who gets your assets and, if you have children, who will care for them.

“In every jurisdiction, if there isn’t a valid will, assets will pass on to your heirs by law, who may or may not be who you would have provided for in a will,” said Samantha Weyrauch Davis, an estate planning attorney and director with the law firm Hall Estill in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It also lets you name a guardian for children.”

However, a will is just one piece of an “estate plan.” An estate just refers to what you own — your financial accounts, possessions and any real estate. Putting a plan in place for those assets helps ensure that upon your death, your wishes are carried out and that family squabbles don’t evolve into destroyed relationships.

In other words, it’s partly about making things easier for your loved ones during an already difficult time.

Here’s what else you should consider if you want to prepare.

Limitations of a will

A will is a document that lets you relay who gets what when you pass away. You can get as specific as you want (you leave a certain family heirloom to a particular person) or keep it more general (you want your surviving spouse to get everything).

However, there are some assets that pass outside of the will, including retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts, as well as life insurance policies.

This means the person named as a beneficiary on those accounts will generally receive the money no matter what your will says. Be aware that 401(k) plans require your current spouse to be the beneficiary unless they legally agree otherwise.

Regular bank accounts, too, can have beneficiaries listed on a payable-on-death form, which your bank can supply.

If no beneficiary is listed on those non-will items or that person has already passed away (and there is no contingent beneficiary listed), the assets automatically go into probate. That’s the process by which all of your debt is paid off and the remaining assets are distributed to heirs. This can last several months to a year or more, depending on state laws and the complexity of your estate.

If you own a home, be sure to find out how it should be titled to ensure it ends up with the person (or people) you intend, because applicable laws can vary from state to state. Moreover, there can be other considerations when it comes to how a house is titled, including protection from potential creditors or for tax reasons when the home is sold.

A big decision

As part of the will-making process, you’ll need to pick an executor of your will (sometimes called a personal representative).

This can be a big job, experts say. Things such as liquidating accounts, ensuring your assets go to the proper beneficiaries, paying any debts not discharged (i.e., taxes owed to the IRS), and even selling your home could be among the duties undertaken by the executor.

In other words, just because you’ve known your best friend since elementary school doesn’t mean handling the challenge of being an executor is up their alley.

Where to get a will

To prepare a will, you can turn to an estate planning attorney in your local area — to ensure familiarity with state laws — or use an online option. However, be aware that not all web-based alternatives will necessarily reflect the specifics of your state’s law.

“There’s risk in doing it that way,” Davis said. “Those forms or software may not be compliant with your local law, so look at the fine print.”

If an online option ends up being appropriate for your situation, you may be able to find a form to download for free. Software will-making options can run about $60 or more, depending on what else is included. Setting up an estate plan with an attorney could run several hundred dollars to more than $1,000, depending on the complexity of your situation.

Also, you’ll need to have a witness and/or notary sign it and make the document official, depending on the state where you live. The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel’s website offers a guide to laws and accommodations in every state if in-person meetings are not permitted due to the pandemic.

Make a master list

While it can be hard to imagine your own death, picture your family having to search through drawers for your original will, documents regarding your bank accounts and other assets, and maybe even your Social Security number.

The best way to avoid forcing them to deal with that task on top of mourning is to leave an organized list of information that the will’s executor will need to settle your estate, experts say. Be sure this includes passwords so your online accounts can be accessed.

Consider a trust

If you want your kids to receive money but don’t want to give a young adult — or one prone to poor money management — unfettered access to a sudden windfall, you can consider creating a trust to be the beneficiary of a particular asset.

A trust holds assets on behalf of your beneficiary or beneficiaries, and is a legal entity dictated by the documents creating it. If you go that route, the assets go into the trust instead of directly to your heirs. They can only receive money according to how (or when) you’ve stipulated in the trust documents.

The average cost to set up a trust using an attorney ranges from $1,000 to $1,500 for an individual and $1,200 to $1,500 for a couple, according to LegalZoom.com. Doing it yourself with online software could run at least several hundreds of dollars.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 29, 2020November 28, 2020

Rethinking Black Friday to include end-of-life conversations

By L.S. Dugdale

With more than 250,000 Americans killed by Covid-19, it’s time to think about reimagining Black Friday.

Police officers in Philadelphia gave the Friday after Thanksgiving its dark name in 1966 as zealous shoppers mobbed streets and sidewalks. But it quickly came to mean a day when business owners could expect their accounts to be in the black, as opposed to in the red.

If Black Friday celebrates American consumers spending in order to live well, we could also adopt it as a day to consider what it means to die well. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus ostensibly put it, “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.”

As a physician, I’ve met countless patients who were ill-prepared for death. The “trajectories of decline” described by geriatrician Joann Lynn make it easy not to prepare. Some people live for years with chronic illnesses but feel no need to ponder their mortality. Hospital tune-ups enable them to live seemingly forever. Others enjoy relative health until being caught off guard by a deadly illness. Still others live good long lives only to succumb to dementia, which robs them of their ability to plan.

We are habituated to living with hope for intervention or cure. To accept the impossibility of treatment is to admit defeat, which most people are loathe to do.

How and where we die underscores how unprepared we are. Most Americans have never had end-of-life conversations or formalized their wishes for medical treatments at the end of life. Despite existing in some form since the 1970s, only 37% of Americans report having formalized their wishes through an advance directive. What’s more, most Americans say they want to die at home, yet roughly 60 percent die in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. There’s no question that institutional care can be a lifesaver for families not equipped to care for their loved ones at home.

If we are to realize the ideal of death at home surrounded by family, we’ve got work to do. Making a home death possible requires difficult decisions — in end-of-life conversations with family members and health care professionals — about which treatments and hospitalizations to forgo, whether homes can accommodate hospital beds, and who will do the hard work of caring for the dying.

That’s where taking a new approach to Black Friday comes in. On that day, families could pivot from giving thanks to giving thought to ending well. A simple prompt for starting end-of-life conversations might be, “Mom, Dad, if you become so sick that you can’t speak for yourself, who would you want to make medical decisions on your behalf?” And the natural follow-up would be, “Help me know how to advocate for you. Let’s talk about the benefits and burdens of particular medical interventions.” Conversation can then move to broader community-based issues such as funeral, burial, and religious or existential concerns.

It’s not the easiest conversation to have, but the payoff can be worth the effort. And since Black Friday comes every year, it’s a discussion that can build on itself over time.

A reimagined Black Friday could help Americans formalize their wishes for care at the end of life. Advance care planning documents allow people to identify health care proxies to make medical decisions if they lose decision-making capacity. Living wills specify an individual’s choice to have — or not have — cardiac resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, and other invasive procedures.

To be fair, there are good reasons why some people don’t want to prepare for death. Many of my patients fear that talk of death might “jinx” them. Some are reluctant to put their wishes in writing because they worry that doctors will give up on them. Others are concerned they’ll change their minds down the road but be too sick to say so. These concerns are real, but the potential exists for much greater harm by ignoring finitude entirely.

Reflecting on death has the potential to bring into relief that which matters most, and it can empower us to change how we live for the better. Ask anyone who is fully engaged in the process of dying. When our days are numbered, we value our relationships differently. We spend our time and money differently. We ponder life’s mysteries.

In ordinary times, we fool ourselves into thinking that the preparation for death can wait. But these are not ordinary times. When I was caring for hospitalized Covid patients this past Spring in New York City, they were frequently astonished that they had become so sick. They had not understood, as did Epicurus, that the art of dying is wrapped up in the art of living. But the pandemic has taught us that sickness and death do not happen only to other people. All of us must live with a view to our finitude.

This Black Friday, after the feasting has subsided and before the shopping begins, take a few minutes to talk with those you love about how to die well. Be frank about end-of-life wishes. Complete and sign documents.

At the same time, it also makes sense to talk about living. If Epicurus is right, to die well one must live well. And attending to what it means to live well — in light of the precarity of life — can make all the difference.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 25, 2020November 24, 2020

‘I don’t want to compete with this disease’

— What physician-assisted death is like for a family

Margaret Handley wrote the essay so her children understood their grandmother’s experience and to help others learn about physician-assisted dying.

By Meghan Holohan

It started with weakness and pain when walking. Then Jacqueline Shapiro had a deep lesion on her leg before she broke it, oddly, and doctors struggled to set it. The pain medications caused her to have bad reactions and her energy waned. Eventually doctors learned that the 85-year-old had lymphoma. She underwent three grueling months of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but it only left her exhausted and feeling worse.

“It can cause delusions and a sort of psychosis. And it just was horrible, just horrible. And it was really hard for her to get her pain stabilized,” Margaret Handley, her daughter who is an epidemiologist living in the San Fransisco Bay area, told TODAY. “If you looked at those episodes medically, they were going well, but it was just part of an escalating discomfort for her. She increasingly felt like ‘I don’t think this is a good place for me to be.’”

Shapiro worried about spending the rest of her life undergoing painful treatments that might not even cure her cancer.

“She didn’t want to be lying there dwindling while people take care of her,” Handley said.

When a palliative care doctor visited Shapiro to discuss her pain, they started talking about California’s End of Life Act. People with terminal illnesses, who meet a certain criteria, can request drugs to aid dying, according to the California Department of Public Health. Similar legislation exists in eight other states. Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit working to improve patient rights and individual choice at the end of life, recently reported that Brittany Maynard’s advocacy of “death with dignity” inspired the passage of medical aid dying laws in Washington, D.C, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey and Maine.

Shapiro met those requirements. Hearing about the option of medically assisted death seemed to lessen her burden.

Handley shared more about her mother’s death in an article in the Annals of Family Medicine.

“She told me right away after the doctor left, ‘That’s what I’m going to do — physician-assisted dying. I don’t want to compete with this disease — that’s not what I want to do with the rest of my life,’” she wrote. “I sat with her and my sadness and then, over the next few days, we set upon the logistics to put her right-to-choose into motion.”

While her oncologist thought there was a possibility that the cancer could go into remission, Shapiro wasn’t sure if she could endure more treatment. Then she spoke with a doctor from the physician-assisted dying group, who described how the process works. He noted that many people request the drugs but don’t ultimately go through with it. Handley felt impressed by how all three doctors acted when advising her mother.

“I don’t think that (the doctors’ input) affected her decision,” Handley said. “But it was also much better that she heard them and witnessed them doing their work and felt like she was part of the narrative, not outside of it.”

Shapiro loved nature and the forest. As a young woman, she spent her summers at Yosemite and lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains until age made a remote living situation a little tougher. She had a garden with plants from the forest and an ornery cat name, Darcy, named after Mr. Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice.” While she was sick, she worried about his well-being. Making the decision for physician-assisted death put her mind at ease about what would happen to her pet, her plants and her life. This allowed Shapiro to say goodbye to her family the way she wanted, watching nature shows and cat videos, enjoying one another’s company.

“We were lucky to know it was coming and to be able to say let’s have these moments together,” Handley said.

Handley and her brother sat with their mother, with Darcy on her lap. As Handley read the poem, “Evening” by Rainer Maria Rilke, her mom passed away.

“It was a really powerful experience to be able to sit with someone who is making this choice,” Handley said. “That was a good experience for us to share.”

Handley said she wrote the essay because she felt there were so few personal stories about what physician-assisted death is really like. She also hoped that by sharing the experience her three children would also better understand her mom’s choice and experience.

“I wanted to write down what happened with my mom’s decision-making so that they would understand,” she said. “I thought this was just adding a little more real personal experience of what (physician-assisted death) looks like in one given situation.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 23, 2020November 22, 2020

Why Arun Shourie concludes that the ultimate preparation for death is simply love

The former Union minister and veteran journalist’s latest book, ‘Preparing for Death’, is both a contemplation of and an anthology on death

by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Arun Shourie is an unflinching seeker. He has an exemplary ability to face the toughest questions. After a bracing meditation on the problem of suffering in Does He Know a Mother’s Heart (2011), Shourie now turns to Preparing for Death. There used to be a joke that the purpose of literature is to prepare you for the good life, while the purpose of philosophy is to prepare you for the good death. But it is hard to understand our own extinction. Broadly speaking, two diametrically opposite views are invoked to reconcile us to death. One is that we don’t really die; in some form, through an incorporeal soul or something, we continue to exist. The other unflinchingly accepts that we just are evanescent matter and nothing else. Both approaches address the question of dying by simply saying “there is nothing to it.” There is something to this strategy, but it cannot make sense of the significance of life. It seems we can either make sense of life or of death, but not of both.

Shourie’s book takes a brilliantly different pathway. The book has three distinct themes. The first, the most powerful and meditative section of the book is not so much about death as the process of dying. He documents with detail, “great souls” experiencing the often painful dissolution of their own body — the Buddha, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vinoba Bhave, and, as a cameo, Kasturba. All of them give lie to Sigmund Freud’s dictum that no one can contemplate their own death. But what emerges from these accounts is not so much the conclusion that they all faced death unflinchingly; most of them have a premonition. It is also not about capturing the moment where the good death is leaving the world calmly. It is rather what the suffering body does to consciousness, all the memories and hard decisions it forces on us.

But the relationship between the body and consciousness goes in two different directions at once. On the one hand this suffering is productive: consciousness works through this pain. On the other hand, even the most exalted soul does not escape the utter abjection of the body. The most poignant moment in this section is not the calm and plenitude with which these exalted souls face death; it is the moments where even the most powerful souls are reduced to abjection by the constraints of the body. The only one rare occasion where Ramana Maharshi ever loses his cool is in his now utter dependence on others for most basic bodily functions. The problem of dying is not that you cannot ignore the body; it is that the body does not ignore you.

The second theme of the book is to take a sharp scalpel to false comforters of all religions and philosophies that promise the everlasting soul, or the preservation of bodies only to subject them to torment in hell. This metaphysical baggage makes dealing with death harder and is a total distraction. This section is less generous in its interpretive sympathies. The third theme of the book, interspersed in various parts, is about the discipline of dealing with your own body as it is in the process of dying. The book impressively marshals a variety of sources, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its incredible imaginative exercises that make you take in the whole of existence, to Jain sources of Sallekhana, and various meditative techniques to inculcate a certain kind of mindfulness. But mostly one gets the sense that the ultimate preparation for death is simply love, something that can endow the evanescent moment with significance.

But this is a seeker’s book. It is in parts profound probing, honest but not dogmatic. Its immense value comes from the fact that the book is both a book and an anthology on death, with extracts from not just the words of those experiencing the process of dying, but an astonishing range of sources: from Fernando Pessoa to Michel de Montaigne, from yoga to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. For the politically inclined, there is an ambivalently revealing account of the Prime Minister’s visit to Shourie while he was in the ICU. All throughout, the book is laced with judiciously selected poetry: the startling moment where Gandhi recites the Urdu couplet to Manu: Hai baha- e-bagh-e duniya chand roz/ Dekh lo iska tamasha chand roz, a register you might associate more with Guru Dutt than Gandhi. There is a lot of Kabir, of Basho poetry and haikus. One stunning one: Circling higher and higher/At last the hawk pulls its shadow/From the world.

This haiku caught my attention because I happened to be reading a stunning essay by Arindam Chakrabarti at the same time, “Dream, Death and Death Within A Dream”, in Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe (2018), a volume edited by Sudhir Kakar and Gunter Blamberger, that reads as a great philosophical complement to this one. That volume has a powerful piece by another brilliant philosopher, Jonardan Ganeri, on illusions of immortality that deals with a source Shourie cites at length: Pessoa. Chakrabarti’s essay ends with the insight of Yoga Vashishtha: To be born is to have been dead once and to be due to die again. Shourie is perhaps right: Can we really unravel what it means for the hawk to pull its shadow from the world? Does the shadow reappear if it flies lower?

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Category: Death Education