A Personal Día de Los Muertos Journey

By Joseph Leahy

A transplant to Los Angeles since 1988, Joseph Leahy was familiar with mortality. His family was in the funerary business. His family often took him to the cemetery as a child. “I’ve spent a lot of time around death and dying,” Leahy said. It was only when he moved out West, however, that he discovered the traditions of Día de los Muertos and identified with it. His enthusiasm for the celebration was so much so that his altars were often lauded in the early years of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s annual celebrations. Today, he continues to honor its sanctity with a yearly ritual commemorating his loved ones through a personal altar made at home and with the help of his daughter. His appreciation for the sacred tradition has also influenced his work in the HIV positive/AIDS communities. Apart from his yearly personal altar, Leahy has also helped these communities celebrate the ones they’ve loved and lost through meaningful remembrance.

November 2, 2019November 2, 2019

Dia de los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) 2019

More 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.”

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October 10, 2019October 9, 2019

Judy Chicago contemplates death, and all it means, in this powerful exhibition

By Angela Haupt

Judy Chicago is well-aware she’s going to die one day — and she’s coming to terms with it. In her newest body of work, the 80-year-old feminist artist reckons with her own mortality, as well as the untimely death she fears for the planet’s threatened species and ecosystems.

“The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, consists of nearly 40 works of painted porcelain and glass, plus two large sculptures. It’s divided into three sequential sections: “Stages of Dying,” “Mortality” and “Extinction.” Chicago’s new series is “luminous,” according to exhibition curator Virginia Treanor. “I think it’s going to be a really contemplative experience. People will be moved by it, for sure.”

Here’s a closer look at five of the pieces on display.

Stages of Dying 5/6: Depression

An aged, bald woman cradles her face in her hands in this white porcelain piece, which is part of the “Stages of Dying” section of the exhibition. The figure personifies one of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages can apply both to those who are grieving the loss of someone and to those grappling with their own end. The older woman Chicago depicts is intended to represent an Everywoman, as well as the indiscriminate inevitability of death. “For so much of human history, the male figure has been the archetype of humanity,” says Treanor. “We say, ‘mankind.’ She wanted to shift that paradigm and make an Everywoman rather than an Everyman.”

Mortality Relief

A woman’s eyes are closed, her head resting on a pillow, hands clasped around a bouquet of lilies. The bronze sculpture is a self-portrait of the artist, who in the “Mortality” section of the show imagines different scenarios in which she might die. “Mortality Relief” pays homage to traditional death masks, which were used from the Middle Ages until the 19th century — before the advent of photography — to preserve someone’s likeness after death. Treanor describes the sculpture as “peaceful and serene.”

In the Shadow of Death

Thirty of the pieces in “The End” — including this one from the “Mortality” section — are kiln-fired paintings on black glass: a laborious process that requires multiple firings. Each time something’s put into the kiln, there’s a risk that it’s going to break, which means that the artist needs to be exacting. “In the Shadow of Death” is engraved with a quote from philosopher Todd May, reading, in part: “To forge our lives under the haunting shadow of death is both our reality and our opportunity,” with an emphasis on the word “opportunity.” It’s Chicago’s way of noting that there’s no need to fear death. “We have this opportunity in life because we know it’s finite,” Treanor says. “It’s going to end at some point.”

How Will I Die? #2

A woman, once again a self-portrait of Chicago, is curled into the fetal position, text wrapped around her body — “Will I leave as I arrived?” — in this kiln-fired painting on black glass. “Linking the experience of birth and death is powerful in a visual way, but also in an existential way,” Treanor says. She particularly lauds Chicago’s use of a wrinkled, aged figure. “This is classic Judy Chicago, and it’s one of the reasons I love her and her work so much,” she says. “She’s constantly pushing the boundaries. Nude women in art are a dime a dozen, right? But very rarely do we see an older nude woman. Very rarely do we see older women at all.”

Stranded

In “Extinction,” the final section of the exhibit, Chicago turns from pondering individual death to the obliteration of entire ecosystems and species. A gaunt polar bear clings to a melting iceberg in the black-glass painting “Stranded.” Other works depict elephants killed for their tusks and trees flayed of their bark. Capturing that kind of destruction requires extensive research, which Chicago has described as an emotionally draining experience. “It was interesting to hear her speak about these works, and equating the physical exertion that went into them — like multiple [kiln] firings — with the emotional toll it took on her,” Treanor says. “She said it was really gut-wrenching.”

If you go/

Judy Chicago — The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction

National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. nmwa.org .

Dates: Through Jan. 20.

Admission: $10; $8 for seniors and students; free for members and visitors 18 and under.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 30, 2019September 29, 2019

What’s a ‘good death’?

It’s not quite the peaceful drifting off I’d imagined for my dad.

By Harriet Brown

At age 86, my father had survived both colon cancer and a stroke that left him with aphasia. His mind was sharp, though, and he wasn’t depressed. A crack bridge player with a passion for Italian restaurants, he was popular at his assisted living facility even though he couldn’t speak much. He told me he’d lived a good life and wasn’t afraid of dying, and he didn’t want to go through any more medical trauma. No chemo, no radiation, no surgeries, no treatment.

His advance directive read DNR and DNI — do not resuscitate, do not intubate. No one would break his ribs doing CPR or make bruises bloom along his arms trying to find a vein. As his health-care proxy, I was completely on board. I’d read Sherwin Nuland’s “How We Die,” Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal,” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying.” Comfort would be the priority and any pain would be “managed,” which I assumed meant erased.

Up to 80 percent of Americans die in hospitals or nursing homes, and a third spend at least 10 days in an intensive care unit before they die, many of them comatose or on a ventilator. A week after his sudden diagnosis of widespread metastatic disease, my father was lucky enough to get a bed in our town’s only hospice, a homey facility staffed with attentive and experienced caregivers. The alternative would have been a hospital bed in my living room, so it was a relief to know that my father was in the hands of professionals. They would know what to do.

And they did. The nurses and caregivers were gentle as they repositioned my father in bed, explaining each move even when it seemed he couldn’t hear or follow. When he could no longer swallow they squirted morphine into his cheek and rubbed it so the medicine would be absorbed. “This will make you feel better,” they would say, and my father would turn his head and open his chapped lips like a baby bird.

But his death was not the peaceful drifting away I’d always imagined, where you floated into a calm, morphine-induced sleep, your breath came slower and slower and then simply stopped. He vomited blood over and over. A lifelong stoic who never complained of pain — even when he’d broken a hip the year before — he twitched restlessly in bed, eyes closed, his brow furrowed and his skin clammy.

The magical “managing” of pain and nausea I’d anticipated turned out to be more aspirational than real. The hospice nurse prescribed one anti-nausea medication, then another, without success. Eventually, Ativan and Haldol settled the nausea, and morphine helped the pain. My father was lucky it helped; about 25 percent of people die in pain. One caregiver confided to me, “There are people whose pain we never get under control.”

For days we watched my father’s cheeks hollow, watched him pluck at the thin blanket that was all he could bear on his body. His kind brown eyes glazed over, and some trick of the light made them look blue under his half-closed lids. Sometimes he sat up suddenly, reaching forward, and then fell back on the pillows. I knew there was a name for this behavior, terminal restlessness, that it’s common during the dying process. I knew the gurgling sounds he made as he breathed came from his body’s inability to clear secretions, and that — according to hospice — it probably wasn’t uncomfortable for him.

Leaving the hospice facility one night, I told my 81-year-old aunt that I wished I had the nerve to put a pillow over his face. “I’ll stand guard at the door while you do,” she replied. Dying is hard work. And it’s hard to watch.

On the last night, I sat with my father until the summer sky began to darken. Then I gathered my belongings and leaned over the bed where he lay unresponsive, his eyes closed, his mouth half-open. I kissed his stubbled cheek. “Dad, I’m going now,” I told him. “It’s time for you to go too.” He died a few hours later. He was alone, as most people are when they die, so I don’t know if it was peaceful, if he made a sound or opened his eyes or just stopped breathing.

After he died, I was haunted by scenes of his suffering. I remembered looking out a hospital window nearly 30 years earlier with my newborn daughter in my arms, realizing that every one of the people I saw on the street had been born. For every person walking down Seventh Avenue, a woman had borne pain that tore her body open. It was a horrifying thought.

Drugs help with the pain of childbirth, but they can’t take it away completely. It’s the same with dying.

“Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, [like] fate and death,” wrote psychologist Viktor E. Frankl in his bestseller “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He was something of an expert, having survived nearly three years in a variety of Nazi camps.

Of course, my father’s suffering was nothing like the kind Frankl witnessed. But still, death, like birth, is a creaturely process, a force that wrenches us onward without consulting our preferences or respecting our sensibilities.

In the weeks after my father’s death, I began to understand in a deeper way the meaning of a good death. No drugs took away all my father’s physical pain and nausea. But in the care he was given, the morphine, the quiet words, the repositioning and cool cloths on his forehead, his suffering was addressed even if it couldn’t be “managed.”

And that, I think, is what we all want. Not just freedom from beeping machines and needles and the cold lighting of an ICU, though that matters, too. Not just the absence of pain, which isn’t possible for everyone. But the solace of being seen and heard and acknowledged brings comfort even in the face of deep suffering.

I hope it’s something we can remember as we move toward a society where more of us can have a truly good death.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 23, 2019September 23, 2019

I will never forget my grandma’s last days, surrounded by people who were half shaman, half scientist, and all good

We expected Nana to die years ago. When she finally went, it was both sadder and sweeter than we were prepared for

By Charlotte Church

I knew it was coming; I had known it was coming for years. I had seen my friends go through it, and I had spent many hours thinking deeply about what would happen. Comforted by theories on the nature of consciousness, seduced by feasible rationales for an afterlife, sobered by the practical science of what was really going to happen, I was prepared. And then she died.

My nana had been ill for a long time. Her final diagnosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, came 12 years before she died, although the prognosis was no more than four. She had come close so many times that we had started calling her “the boomerang”. But when she went into hospital for the last time, although in our heads we constructed logical expectations of her coming back to us, in our hearts we knew she wasn’t coming home.

Losing someone close to you is something you can only really talk about once it has happened. All the cliches about grief that I had heard over the years became my reality. Half an hour after she died, my cousin Elliot and I sat in the hospital coffee shop, exhausted, paralysed, silently delirious, while a tiny white butterfly fluttered around our heads, flew a full circle above us and disappeared. Over the next week, the appearance of white butterflies comforted each member of my family at different times in some ineffable way. Despite our wildly varying degrees of faith, that delicate symbol soothed us with an understanding that she was OK: whether she was on a cloud with her brothers and parents, united on an unknown spiritual plane with a greater force as part of a universal consciousness, or just gone, she was no longer in pain.

It was very sad, of course, and that is the best it was ever going to be. The reason I say “the best” is that, if it were not for the acutely careful preparations of us all, including Nana, it could have been far worse.

Palliative care should not be as taboo or scary as it is to many of us. I would go as far as to say that it is the ultimate in wellbeing practices, when a person’s health has failed and all that can be done is care. The word “palliative” comes from the Latin pallium, a cloak, and in many ways this metaphor is apt. In the last days, a “syringe driver” delivered her a steady flow of morphine and anti-anxiety drugs that concealed the worst of her symptoms, shielded her from their effects, protected her from the pain, and even hid her from death for a few more hours or days. If she had not had that, she would have died of hypoxia on the Thursday, gasping violently for breath as she drowned in carbon dioxide that her lungs were too weak to exhale. Instead, she went on until the following Tuesday, my auntie’s birthday, not before she had me write in her card: “Life is worth living because you’re my daughter.” When she finally passed, it was a moment of peace.

(Note to doctors: if it could be called anything other than a “syringe driver”, I think everyone would be much happier. My bampy (grandfather) in particular was unnerved by the name and was initially convinced that it was going to speed up her death.)

On the Saturday, when we all first expected her to go, we played her favourite songs at her bedside: lots of Maria Callas and Ella Fitzgerald, and (who knew?!) Hot Chocolate’s No Doubt About It, a song that recounts Errol Brown’s alien visitation. We were gifted the time to rejoice with her in what made her joyful, emotional and eccentric. As she appeared to slip away, our tear-stained faces fixed around her in uncontainable smiles, sure that the hour had come, she boomeranged back again, just in time for The Chase.

Memories of moments in her final days are precious and I am gratefully aware of how lucky my family and I are to have had them. They exist because of palliative-care specialists. What a mystically unique role: part scientist, part shaman; half doctor, half priest; with careful words held equally as important as the careful drugs. Never hard-heartedly functional, and never “compulsively positive”, it is as if they are of the same station as midwives, just on the other end. I am profoundly moved by this practice. The UK is reportedly the best in the world at end-of-life care, which is cause to be proud, and there are calls from both the International Association of Research in Cancer and the World Health Organization to declare palliative care a human right.

As someone whose first close bereavement was sort-of-sweet-sad but without regret, I support these proposals wholeheartedly. I wish that all people could be treated with such deep compassion and humanity. I sincerely hope that, when it is my time to die, my family and I will be helped to prepare in the same caring, tender way that my grandmother and family were in Llandough on a long weekend in July.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 14, 2019September 14, 2019

3 Benefits Of Thinking About Your Mortality At Least Once A Day

By Shoshana Ungerleider, M.D.

As a culture, Americans—more often than not—have a tendency to avoid thinking and talking about death and dying. Yet pondering our mortality can have a profound impact on our lives.

Our health care system is set up with a single, default pathway for all medical care: aggressive, invasive treatment, no matter how old or how sick you are. For some people, this makes perfect sense and can save lives. For others, a different approach to care is required. But it starts with having a relationship with our own mortality and reflecting on what matters most in our own lives. I have seen far too many people suffer by receiving treatment that is not in line with their goals and values.

In our modern era of fast-paced life, constant digital connectedness, and a culture striving to be “doing” all the time, it’s easy to get caught up in things that don’t matter. If we can reflect on the bigger picture in life, the preciousness of each moment, we can more easily let go of things that aren’t important. I believe there are three key benefits to thinking about our mortality at least once a day:

1. You’ll be motivated to leave a legacy.

Ask yourself, what do you want to leave behind? The idea of legacy awareness is a way to connect with our own mortality as it relates to our work, loved ones, and creative endeavors. If we think about legacy as a means to transcend death, we may be more likely to invest in our health and personal development throughout life.

Artists, for example, live on long after they’re gone thanks to their creative legacy. That’s just one way of forming a legacy. Whether you are creating art, giving back to your community, raising a family, or making a positive impact on the lives of others, these are all powerful ways to leave a legacy for generations to come.

2. Life will instantly feel more precious.

Too much of a good thing decreases its value. Life is precious. It’s also temporary. Even when you’re young and healthy, your life could end unexpectedly at any time. Recognizing that life is fleeting helps us find joy and meaning in the small things—sunset and sunrise, a smile on your child’s face, a tree in the park—that sometimes get lost in the day-to-day. The people in your life can take on a new value because we realize that their lives are also temporary.

3. You’ll learn not to sweat the small stuff.

Thinking about our mortality can serve as inspiration to think more holistically about what it means to live our best life. In other words, it can move us to exercise and eat well because we only get one body. And at the same time, it’s an invaluable reminder that we only get one life, and we better enjoy it. So many of us are on a quest to find balance in our lives and define our own priorities. Remembering that we have this one life to live can help when weighing where we want to put our energy and attention.

Countless psychological studies have shown that a recognition of our own eventual ending can allow us to live a richer life—one filled with gratitude, presence of mind, and happiness. As you go through the checklist of factors contributing to your overall well-being—getting quality sleep, eating healthy food, exercising regularly, and sustaining meaningful relationships—make sure that forming a relationship with your own mortality is high on the list.

No one knew how important this practice was better than Apple’s Steve Jobs who, during his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, said, “Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

If contemplating your mortality triggers fear, consider this.

Does thinking about our own death trigger fear? According to the 2017 Survey of American Fears conducted by Chapman University, 20.3% of Americans are “afraid” or “very afraid” of dying. While for some, fear of death is healthy as it makes us more cautious (such as wearing seat belts and minimizing high-risk behaviors), some people may also have an unhealthy fear of dying, which interferes with their daily life.

Psychologist and spirituality expert Stephen Taylor looked at those who lost loved ones, and many tend to have a more accepting attitude toward death. This may result from “post-traumatic growth,” or personal growth from trauma. Others suggest that much of our fear of death stems from not wanting to lose the things we’ve built up (i.e., relationships, possessions, or status). By letting go (even a little) of fierce attachments, it can allow for valuable shifts in perspective and benefits to our well-being.

My friend and colleague, B.J. Miller, M.D., puts this in a different light. “Death is not at odds with living. You can’t get one without the other.” Whether we like it or not, death is always present. Connecting to the fact that life is defined by the fact that it will end one day will allow you to live more fully, experience deeper relationships, and provide new meaning to your days.

Next time you have the opportunity to reflect on your mortality, think about how it might enrich your life today.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 11, 2019