Category: Talking about death

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There’s No Right Way to Mourn

The ‘grief police’ wield lamentable shaming tactics.

By Sian Beilock

When Kobe Bryant died on Jan. 26, there was an outpouring of grief for the legendary N.B.A. champion. Sports fans placed bouquets of flowers at his high school and held a vigil outside the Staples Center. Shaquille O’Neal, his friend, rival and former Lakers teammate, cried on TV while giving an emotional tribute.

Much of this grieving also took place on social media. His widow, Vanessa Bryant, wrote a powerful tribute on Instagram that was “liked” by more than nine million people. So did Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul. Grief is no longer private these days, which lets us mourn together. But doing so also allows people to publicly shame how others deal with loss.

“Cancel the games. Cancel the Grammys.,” one person wrote on Twitter. Another criticized those who brought up the rape allegation against Bryant in their commemorations: “Some people have no respect for the dead.” This is part of a broader phenomenon. These “grief police” enforce murky standards of who should be sad, when they’re allowed to be and to what degree. They insist that our grief must be overwhelming and ubiquitous, and for all parts of our lives to be put on hold. This isn’t just problematic in the moment; introducing guilt into the grieving process can negatively impact others’ ability to heal.

Something similar happened at Barnard College where, in December, we were forced to grieve in the media spotlight after one of the newest members of our community, the first-year student Tess Majors, was murdered. I have spent my career researching anxiety and worry, and I was struck by a commonality among people on campus: Amid their feelings of heartbreak, members of our community were worried about how others would perceive their specific form of grieving.

I wasn’t aware of students policing others’ grief, but the perception that this was happening still had an effect, especially given the media attention around the tragedy. One student told me that, in the midst of her deep sorrow, she also felt guilty about feeling eager to write her final papers and was worried she would be judged for not mourning in the “right” way. Another student mentioned that she didn’t know Tess Majors personally and was feeling all right, even looking forward to a long-planned family trip over break, but was going to keep this thought to herself.

I bet some of the N.B.A. players who were eager to play in the wake of Bryant’s death also had mixed feelings — because they are being judged. LeBron James was skewered online for not immediately posting about his friend and mentor: “Why are you not posting Kobe? I never liked LeBron because he is always FULL of himself,” one person wrote on social media.

Public grieving doesn’t happen in a single community where there are shared social norms for how to react, like sitting shiva or walking in a second line. If bereaved players are slow to comment publicly, should we call them out? Must everyone who has ever met Bryant say something in public? When people with vastly different lived experiences come together around a public death, there is no real shared understanding of what is appropriate; this is why the grief police wield such power in calling people out.

Unfortunately, introducing blame into the grieving process causes people to question whether they are dealing with loss the right way and to feel guilty about what they do, say and feel. Recent research has linked guilt in bereavement to a wide range of mental and physical difficulties, including depression. So how, in the age of communal and public mourning, do we grieve and not let the grief police undercut how we feel? How do we continue to perform at our best with heavy hearts?

Everyone responds to death differently, and it’s psychologically healthy to focus on parts of our identity that are not touched by tragedy. It is O.K. for a grieving athlete to play an important game; the same goes for a student who wants to take her finals in the wake of a campus tragedy. Research on resiliency shows quite clearly that people who express (and value) different aspects of who they are tend to be psychologically stronger. For example, their role as an athlete, student or parent provides another outlet to express themselves if they experience a setback or loss in one aspect of their life, or if one of the ways they identify themselves is called into doubt.

Embracing the fullness of our identities in no way represents a lack of respect or a blindness to the gravity of a tragedy. Quite the opposite: It is only through this process that we can effectively take care of one another, including those who have been most affected.

Despite my expertise in this subject, I have had to force myself over the last month to realize that, even in mourning, I have to juggle life as a college president, a researcher, a mother, an athlete and a friend — not only for my own health and mind-set, but also for the well-being of those around me. When the grief police arrive, we need to give ourselves license to express positive emotions and affirm other aspects of ourselves that we value outside of the tragedy. Doing so means we will feel more in control and cope better down the line.

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Dates With Death

When My Time Comes

Diane Rehm poses for a portrait at her home in January. After more than three decades and thousands of programs, she’s stepping away from the broadcast microphone.

By Amy Kepferle

“My mother begged to die,” Diane Rehm writes in the preface of her new book, When My Time Comes: Conversations about Whether Those Who Are Dying Should Have the Right to Determine When Life Should End.

“There was no hope of recovery,” she continues. “There was nothing more they could do to ease her pain or to keep her comfortable. She died suffering.”

Rehm, a beloved National Public Radio talk show host and bestselling author, wondered why she’d had to watch her mother endure the horrific effects of non-alcohol-related cirrhosis for so long, and why she didn’t have the right to choose when she’d had enough.

The subject again became personal in 2014 when her husband of 55 years, John Rehm, decided to end his life when the side effects of Parkinson’s disease became overwhelming. He couldn’t use his hands, could no longer feed himself or use the bathroom on his own, and slept for most of the day.

“Because John could not receive medical aid in dying, he had to starve himself and go without medication for 10 days, until he died,” she relates during a chapter focusing on an interview with palliative care physician, internist and geriatrician Christina Puchalski. “I as his wife could do nothing but watch him suffer.”

Puchalski’s take on Rehm’s story is an interesting one. Although she has plenty of compassion for those who are facing their final journey, she has concern that in states where assisted suicide is legal—like Washington, Oregon, Maine, Vermont, California, New Jersey, and Colorado—people might be too quick to seek medical aid to quicken their deaths. She believes palliative care and hospice care can help with pain and symptom management, and can also be done with dignity.

“Are we giving a message that when you get to that point, there’s not a lot of opportunity for meaning and purpose and joy?” Puchalski asks.

At 83 years old, Rehm is a clear proponent of the right-to-die movement. But in When My Time Comes, she uses her interviewing prowess to explore the topic in ways that go beyond a simple “yes” or “no.” She questions terminal cancer patients—one of whom moved to Oregon so she’d be able to end her life on her own terms—and widowed spouses, doctors, death educators, reverends and Roman Catholic priests, constitutional law professors, attorneys and politicians for their opinions.

It’s heady reading, especially when hearing from those who know they’re running out of time. But it’s also a reminder that life is fleeting, and that it’s better to let your family and loved ones know what you want before its final chapter.

At the end of the book, Rehm even talks to her grandson, asking him to record their conversation on his iPhone for posterity. She then tells him that if she’s terminally ill and there is no reasonable expectation of her recovery from mental or physical disability, to let her die and not be kept alive by artificial means and heroic measures.

During “A Conversation with Diane Rehm” Tues., Feb. 11 at Sehome High School, the retired radio personality will be in conversation with local author Phyllis Shacter, who—like Rehm—watched her spouse choose to die via Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED) rather than live into the late stages of Alzheimer’s. The discussion is sure to be a fascinating one, and may help give attendees a clearer look at the bigger picture.

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The Pitfalls Of Extending Life And Prolonging Death

Humans have had to face death and mortality since since the beginning of time, but our experience of the dying process has changed dramatically in recent history.

Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that death used to be sudden, unexpected and relatively swift — the result of a violent cause, or perhaps an infection. But, he says, modern medicines and medical technologies have lead to a “dramatic extension” of life — and a more prolonged dying processes.

“We’ve now … introduced a phase of our life, which can be considered as ‘dying,’ in which patients have terminal diseases in which they are in and out of the hospital, they are dependent in nursing homes,” Warraich says. “That is something that is a very, very recent development in our history as a species.”

Prolonging life might sound like a good thing, but Warraich notes that medical technologies often force patients, their loved ones and their doctors to make difficult, painful decisions. In his new book, Modern Death, he writes about a patient with end-stage dementia who screamed “kill me” as a feeding tube was inserted into his nose.

“This is probably one of the encounters that I had in residency that I have been unable to shake from my memory,” Warraich says. “I think if you ask any physician, any nurse, any paramedic, they’ll have many such stories to tell you.”

Interview Highlights

On the importance of having a healthcare proxy, living will and advanced directive

One of the biggest problems that we face in not only modern society, but in societies of olden times as well, is that people have always been very afraid to talk about death. In many cultures it is considered bad luck to talk about death and it is thought to be a bad omen. I think to some extent that extends to this very day. But … I think having a living will, having an advanced directive, or perhaps most importantly, having a designated healthcare proxy, someone who can help transmit your decisions to the team when you’re not able to do so, is perhaps the most important thing that we can do for ourselves as patients and as human beings.

On giving CPR and knowing when to stop giving CPR

One of the things about CPR, Terry, is that almost everyone in medicine knows how to start CPR, when to start CPR, really what to do in CPR under even complex situations, but the one thing that almost no one really teaches us, and there are no guidelines for, is when to stop CPR. I think in some ways that is one of the biggest challenges that we in medicine face all the time. …

I was actually working in the hospital last night and it was about 3 in the morning and I was called by one of my other colleagues who was another cardiology fellow, he asked me, “Haider, I need your help. I have a patient that we are doing CPR on,” and he wanted some help from me. So I walked over to the intensive care unit, and the patient was in her 60s. … There was an entire team in the room doing chest compressions on this woman, and they had been doing it for an hour and a half at that point, much, much, much longer than most CPRs last. …

At the same time while this CPR was ongoing, the patient’s family member, her daughter, was outside the room, and she was crying. … Even though we could give her all the information … that wasn’t perhaps what she was looking for, because what we were asking her to think about or to do was one of the hardest things anyone has to ever bear, which was, “Do you want us to stop CPR?” And that’s the type of thing that I don’t think any of us can ever prepare for, especially when it’s our parent that’s involved.

On why he wrote a book about dying

I really wanted to find answers to some very, very basic questions, like what are the implications of the sort of life extension that we have achieved? What is the role of religion, not only a patient’s religion but a physician’s religion when it comes to dealing with the end of life? How is social media affecting how people experience the end of life? …

So many times I’ve found myself in the room where there are people who were so much more experienced in life than I was, yet knew so little about death and dying. And so I wanted to write a book so that people could go into those really, really difficult places and feel like they’re armed with information, that this isn’t a completely foreign territory for them and that in some way could help them navigate and deal with the sort of difficult situations that lay ahead for them.

On the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act

It is very unfortunate that health is so politicized in this country, because it doesn’t have to be. Health and wellness aren’t red or blue, and they shouldn’t be, but unfortunately that is where we are. I hope that when policies are being enacted in DC, patient’s voices, those who have benefited from the ACA, those who have gained insurance, those voices are not lost in the midst of all of this political activity.

On immigrating to the U.S. from Pakistan

Dr. Haider Warraich has written medical and opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

I came to the United States in 2010 and [until now] have only lived in an America in which Barack Obama was the president. I think in some ways Trump’s victory has really shaken me, because of how invested I was in the idea that America is a special place, it’s a truly multicultural society. And I’m still trying to understand, I think like so many others, just exactly what happened. Especially as a writer and as a physician I’ve tried to separate myself from my identity as a Muslim. I’d rather be known as a physician/scientist/writer who happens to be Pakistani, rather than a young Pakistani Muslim immigrant who happens to be a doctor and a writer, but I don’t know. Given how things are changing, I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to set that narrative for myself. That’s a scary thought — to live an identity that is so politicized even when you wish for it to not be.

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Facing the Fact of My Death

As a child, confronting my mortality was terrifying. Now it is an opportunity.

Mr. Yancy is a philosopher and professor.

By George Yancy

As a young boy, I recall very clearly telling my mother with an innocent defiance that I wished that I had never been born because I will die someday. I can’t recall her response, but I’m sure it worried her and left her feeling hurt. But I was frustrated, angry, afraid. While I knew that people died, it had suddenly dawned on me that I would be among them, that I will die someday. It was an epiphany — one I would rather have not had. I recall thinking, “I didn’t sign up for this. Who is playing this terrible joke on me?”

Strange, I realize, but there I was — a child, elated to be alive, feeling the warmth of the sun on my brown skin, playing with friends in the streets, eating ice cream, celebrating birthdays, enjoying unconditional love shown to me by my mother and my older sister. Why did I have so much joy and shared love just to someday have it all taken away, gone forever? And I understood “gone forever” to mean never ever existing again. Done! Kaput! It made absolutely no sense to me.

I experienced the fact of my death as a cosmic slight. I could not get it out of my head. Even at that young age, I began to feel the heavy weight of my finitude. I couldn’t put it down, even though I wanted to. Death was now too close.

It was dreadful. That sense of unthinking longevity, invulnerability, cavalier confidence — hell, just being a child — gave way to a deep and frightening reality that I could not control. The childlike omnipotence collapsed and left me facing an abyss. The abstract fact of death had become personal. I had come to realize that not a single moment is guaranteed, not another breath, another blink of an eye, another hug from my mother or clash with my sister.

As I grew older this feeling of existential dread stayed with me — of being thrown into existence without any clear sense of why we’re here, of wondering whether or not God exists, whether or not the cosmos has any meaning beyond what we give it, whether or not we have immortal souls, whether there is anything to be discovered after death or whether death is the final absurd moment of our being. I was like the French-Algerian existentialist Albert Camus, who wrote of having “conscious certainty of a death without hope.”

As an adult, this uncanniness goes unabated; it has not stopped. There are times when, like the 17th-century thinker Blaise Pascal, I feel trapped between two infinities of meaninglessness. In his unfinished work, “Pensées,” Pascal writes, “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the small space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me. I wonder why I am here rather than there, now rather than then. Who set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?”

The fact of death is like a haunting. It frequents me, entangled in everything I do: It’s just beneath my pillow as I sleep, strolling next to me as I casually walk from one class to the next, inserting its presence between each heart beat in my chest, forcing its way into my consciousness when I say “I love you” to my children each night, assuring me that it can unravel the many promises that I continue to make, threatening the appointments that I need to keep. This sense of haunting is what the Harvard professor Cornel West calls the “death shudder.” Of this “shudder” in the face of death, he writes, “Yes, dread and terror were involved, but also perplexity. Exploration. Where does nonexistence take you? What does it mean to be stripped of your own consciousness? How do we live with the idea that we are always tantalizingly close to death? At any moment the bridge can collapse.”

I continue to shudder. Yet there is something about facing the fact of death that invites us to double back, to see our existence, our lives, differently. The scholar Mark Ralkowski, reflecting on Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death,” writes: “In rare moments, we can be returned to ourselves by an experience of anxiety (Angst), which disrupts the tranquillity of the everyday world by emptying it of its usual significance and meaning. In these moments, none of our projects or commitments makes sense to us anymore, and we see that we are committed to roles prescribed to us by das Man” — which means “the they” or “the crowd.”

I want my students to experience one of those “rare moments,” to consider the short duration of their lives. To get them to think differently about our time together, to value their lives differently, I make a resolute effort to remind my students that all of us, at some point, sooner or later, will become rotting corpses. That, I explain, is the great equalizer. No matter how smart, brilliant, wealthy, beautiful and fit you are, no matter how great your MCAT, LSAT or G.P.A. scores, no matter your religious or political orientation, we will all perish.

After hearing this, students will often become completely silent. There is a sudden recognition that something has been haunting our joy, our unquestioned and collective happiness, our sense of “permanence.” It is palpable. No matter how many times I’ve decided to remove the veil, the sting of our collective finitude continues to hit me, along with the reality of bodily decomposition and putrefaction. The unspoken reality of death, which is the haunting background of our lives, shakes my body; I mourn for me and my students, and humanity.

Yet a clarity emerges. My students and I see each other differently, perhaps for the very first time. We are no longer simply students and professor, but fragile creatures and mysterious beings who have been dying from the moment we were born in a universe with no self-evident ultimate meaning. Something as previously uneventful as sitting next to one’s fellow classmate takes on unspeakable value. That shared understanding, vulnerability and mutual recognition of collective destiny makes our time together even more joyful, even more precious.

I’m not sure if the “death shudder” will ever abate while I’m alive. And I am no closer to understanding the fact that I exist or why I must die. I don’t seem to be able to achieve the necessary adjustment, the solace of acceptance. In his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” Wittgenstein helps to give voice to something mysterious about our being: It is that we exist, and that we will die, which is so uncanny. It is that both life and death are inextricably braided together that elicits the shudder. And the shudder and the uncanniness point beyond mere facts. They function, at least for me, as gestures, as intimations of a beyond, that enthrall my soul.

So, sooner or later I will die. I’m assured that it will happen. I know that if you are reading this article 100 years from now, I will no longer exist. I will have paid the debt for the gift of being. Death is our collective fate. Yet so many of us fear to talk about it, fear to face it, terrified by the idea of nonbeing. But we must face our destiny, our rendezvous with death. Indeed, the concept of death is a deep and perennial theme in philosophical and theological-religious thought; it is one of the Big Questions. As the philosopher Todd May writes, “Of course, most religions don’t claim that we don’t die. But there is, for many religions, a particular sense in which we don’t really die.”

It is in this spirit of exploration that I will interview 12 deeply knowledgeable scholars, philosophers and teachers, one each month, about the meaning of death in their respective traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism and others. I will be asking questions like: What is death? Why do we fear death? Is death final? Do we have immortal souls? What role does death play in how we ought to live our lives?

The objective is not to find definitive answers to these eternal questions, but to engage, as my students and I try to do in our classes, in a lively discussion about a fact that most of us would rather avoid, and move ourselves a little closer to the truth.

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Finding the freedom to live and die well

By Mary Matthiesen

When people learn that I work with a hospice agency, many think I spend every day focused on death. In fact, we spend much more time focusing on quality of life and supporting what matters most to those we serve. This is one of the many lessons I learned from my mother as she was dying 15 years ago — a lesson that continues to inspire my life and my work.

My mother accepted her death with grace, and told those she loved that she loved them. She lived her final days at home, aligned with what mattered most to her.

Like my mother, most Americans expect their families to carry out their wishes for end-of-life care. However, 75% admit that they have never clearly articulated those wishes, and their children are often afraid to ask. As a result, while 80% of people say they would like to spend their final days at home with support, in reality, the vast majority die in institutions.

As hard as my mother’s death was for me as her daughter, I take great solace that we were empowered to support her wishes because she took charge of her own health care decisions.

Her actions also inspired me to consider and share what really matters to me for the end of my life — and all the days between now and an unknown then. Doing so made me feel lifted, lighter, and full of new energy for life. That experience in turn motivated me to help others make the most of their lives, and to prepare for their own future care.

In 2016, I joined Mission Hospice, with the goal of raising awareness of end-of-life issues within the areas of San Mateo and Santa counties. Mission Hospice was founded in 1979 by a group of nurses, neighbors, and friends who were dedicated to improving end-of-life care for their community — helping patients live their final months to the fullest by providing compassionate support to them and their families.

I believe deeply in the kind of care we can offer as a nonprofit hospice — which has become the rarity rather than the norm, both in California and nationally. Our commitment to patients over profit means we can offer alternative and complementary therapies that ease pain and increase quality of life. We can offer grief support for those in our community who need it. And, although hospice is a Medicare-covered benefit, we can serve patients regardless of their insurance or ability to pay. All of this thanks to the support of our incredible community of donors.

As a nonprofit, we also offer community education — opportunities to learn and talk about something we will all face. Every week, Mission Hospice hosts workshops, grief support groups, author readings, movies, and other opportunities to discuss life and death.

Together with local senior and health care nonprofits right here in Menlo Park, Mission Hospice led a coalition dedicated to creating a more compassionate community for people facing serious illness, death, and bereavement. Over the last few years, this group has offered dozens of free “Take Charge” advance care planning workshops throughout the Peninsula, helping people consider and express what’s most important to them, and then doing all that’s possible to ensure that loved ones and medical professionals can support their wishes.

In teaching others that we can each have the power and courage to choose the kind of care we hope for, I am following the lead of my mother — who was quite frankly the last person I expected to learn this from. Facing the reality of our mortality isn’t easy stuff, and it’s much bigger than a form or a single conversation. Yet it can give both the living — and the dying — great freedom in the end.

We’re all in this life and death thing together. By talking about what we want, learning the facts, and supporting each other along the way, we can truly be part of a community that cares — about living and about dying well. In the end, what matters more than that?

Mary Matthiesen, a Menlo Park resident, is chief strategy and integration officer for Mission Hospice in San Mateo. She is the author of “Dying to Make a Difference: One woman’s liberating journey to heed life’s call after her mother’s death and the legacy that’s possible when we do.”

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When Your Best Friend Dies

How to grieve and minimize the feeling of loss

By Gary M. Stern

Josh Koplovitz, an attorney based in Woodstock, N.Y., communicated with his best friend Lester Fensterheim nearly every day. They first met in 1999 and connected over their love of tennis. The two played tennis together and occasionally poker, socialized with their spouses and developed a strong bond. On Aug. 1, 2017, 74-year-old Fensterheim felt a pain in his face, suffered a minor stroke and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died three months later on Nov. 4.

Koplovitz misses Fensterheim terribly and feels a void over his death and the loss of their friendship. “I was drawn to Lester, and he was drawn to me and the friendship developed,” Koplovitz said. Fensterheim was a “magnetic personality,” said Koplovitz., adding: “When you came into his presence, you felt an unmistakable connectivity, as if he was saying to you, ‘You are a special person.’ He taught me to be more accepting of people than I otherwise would have been. He had a basic love of humanity.”

When Fensterheim took ill, Koplovitz visited him frequently at home and provided considerable emotional support. He did everything he could to help his best friend as he started to suffer from his illness, which helped ease the pain of Fensterheim’s death. Now, Koplovitz focuses on the “the good times and the relationship we had, not that he’s gone. It makes me sad, but I’m grateful for what we had.”

The Challenges of Grieving When a Best Friend Dies

Recovering from the loss of a best friend can be thorny, complicated and difficult in ways that are different than the death of a spouse or parent. The death of a best friend strikes one’s mortality, making you realize that death is unavoidable and inevitable. Moreover, there’s no accepted way to recover from the loss of a best friend, and there are few support groups or grief circles offering assistance.

“When we lose a best friend, we are losing someone who gets us, someone who is witnessing our life, so it’s a huge loss,” explained Shasta Nelson, author of Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendship for Lifelong Health and Happiness. “Best friends offer rewards. We get positivity, empathy, joy, memories, a play partner and a conversation partner.”

The effect of losing a best friend is “devastating,” Nelson noted. In fact, it can be harder, in some ways, than losing a spouse. “When we lose a spouse, we sit at the front row of the funeral. We get cards and are listed in the obituary,” she said. But when a person suffers the loss of a best friend, there are no sympathy cards and no validation for the loss.

Minimizing the Loss of a Friend

Jackson Rainer, a Decatur, Ga.-based clinical psychologist and author of Life After Loss: Contemporary Grief Counseling and Therapy, said grappling with the loss of a dear friend is complicated because “there’s no place for the bereaved to put their grief. A best friend’s relationship is very personal, but different from family or a spouse.”

Moreover, there are expected ways to accept sympathy and solace for the loss of a parent or spouse, but a best friend’s death is “idiosyncratic, eccentric, contained between the two. It’s not something publicly acknowledged or understood,” Rainer said.

It takes time to deal with the grief that stems from the death of a best friend. “Grief has its own timetable. Grief isn’t quick; it’s a slow process,” Rainer added.

Nelson recommends these three tips to help minimize the loss of a best friend:

  • Contact other friends who attended the funeral and organize a get-together every year on the day of the best friend’s death to honor the loss.
  • Share with other close friends what the loss of your best friend means to you; don’t keep your feelings locked inside.
  • Jot down thoughts in a journal about memories of your friend, which can help you work through your feelings and grief.

If your grief doesn’t subside, the loss can trigger depression. “You know you’re depressed when you’re numb to experience and feelings,” Rainer said.

And there’s no magical elixir to end the depression. “Put one foot in front of the other, stay in motion, say what you feel and find someone who is willing to serve as witness for your loss,” Rainer urged.

Honoring the Friendship

Grief comes in waves, but if the sadness turns into depression, it could be time to meet with a therapist to talk these feelings out. Talk therapy, Rainer suggested, helps a person come to grips with the depression and loss.

One trap in grappling with the loss of a close friend is the expectation that other people will acknowledge or appreciate the loss. Often, that doesn’t happen. “The relationship of a best friend is so unique that it’s hard for others to understand it,” Rainer said.

“Give yourself permission to realize what a huge loss this was,” said Nelson. Take an entire year and turn it into a grieving period, where you gradually accept what this loss means to you.

Creating rituals honoring the loss of an intimate friend can soothe the pain. Anything that reminds you of the friendship — a photo or a ring, perhaps — vivifies the friendship and may help ease the pain.

“None of your other friends can replace the friend you lost. But this loss is an invitation for you to keep deepening other friends in your life,” advised Nelson.

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How to Be Eco-Friendly When You’re Dead

Standard burial and cremation take tons of energy and resources. So what’s the most environmentally sound way to deal with a dead person?

By SHANNON PALUS

When Phil Olson was 20, he earned money in the family business by draining the blood from corpses. Using a long metal instrument, he sucked the fluid out of the organs, and pumped the empty space and the arteries full of three gallons of toxic embalming fluid. This process drains the corpse of nutrients and prevents it from being eaten by bacteria, at least until it’s put into the ground. Feebly encased in a few pounds of metal and wood, it wasn’t long until all the fluid and guts just leaked back out.

Most of the bodies Olson prepared in his family’s funeral home would then be buried in traditional cemeteries, below a lawn of grass that must be mowed, watered, sprayed with pesticides, and used for nothing else, theoretically until the end of time.

Cemeteries “are kind of like landfills for dead bodies,” says Olson. Today, as a philosopher at Virginia Tech, his work looks at the alternatives to traditional funeral practices. He has a lot to think about: The environmentally friendly funeral industry is booming, as people begin to consider the impacts their bodies might have once they’re dead. Each year, a million pounds of metal, wood, and concrete are put in the ground to shield dead bodies from the dirt that surrounds them. A single cremation requires about two SUV tanks worth of fuel. As people become increasingly concerned with the environment, many of them are starting to seek out ways to minimize the impact their body has once they’re done using it.

There all kinds of green practices and products available these days on the so-called “death care” market. So many, in fact, that in 2005 Joe Sehee founded the Green Burial Council—a non-profit that keeps tabs on the green funeral industry, offering certifications for products and cemeteries. Sehee saw a need to prevent meaningless greenwashing in the green burial world. “It is a social movement. It’s also a business opportunity,” he said. So what’s the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of a body? It all depends on your preferences.

For those who still want to be be buried, a greener approach may include switching out the standard embalming fluids made of a combination of formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol, with ones made of essential oils. And instead of a heavy wood and metal box that will take years to degrade and leave behind toxic residue, there are now Green Burial Council-certified biodegradable cedar caskets.

Others are choosing to forgo the casket completely and opt for what’s called a “natural burial,” involving only a burlap sack buried in the woods. If you don’t have a forest handy, in some cities bodies may soon be placed in an industrial sized compost bin, and turned over to create fertile soil.

That’s the idea behind the Urban Death Project, which envisions a three-story downtown cemetery for bodies: a stylized pit of sorts, filled with carbon-rich material. Microbes decompose the bodies into a compost. It is a green practice, but not simply a utilitarian one: Urban Death Project bills itself as “a space for contemplation of our place in the natural world.” Bodies are “folded back into the communities where they have lived,” the website explains.

For those who might have opted for cremation rather than burial, there are green alternatives to that as well. Currently on the market is a method called “green cremation” that uses a pressurized metal chamber and bath of chemicals. The technique started out as a way to dispose of lab animals at Albany Medical College, and it is now legal for use on humans in just eight states.

In this method, also known as alkaline hydrolysis, bodies are dissolved into a liquid that is safe to flush into the sewage system. Overall, the process uses 90 percent less energy than traditional cremation—though it will skyrocket a funeral home’s water bills. “It uses a ton, a ton, of water,” says Olson. According to an alkaline hydrolysis system manufacturer, about 300 gallons per human body. Olson thinks recycled “grey water” could be used to cut down on the water waste. But he wonders: “Will families say, ‘I don’t want grandma dissolved in dirty dishwater’?”

Olson says that it’s not necessarily the green-ness of this new cremation that appeals to people. It’s how gentle it seems. “Burning grandma in fire seems to be violent,” he says. “In contrast, green cremation is ‘putting grandma in a warm bath.’”

And that perception is generally far more important to people than the eco-friendliness of the process. Even projects that put the environment front-and-center emphasize the feeling of a pleasant exit, and a lasting connection to the Earth.

So what does Sehee look for in a truly green burial? Something that works to actively conserve rural land. The council awards three leaves—the highest rating available—to burial plots that not only eschew embalming fluid and vaults, but double as conservation spaces. A three-leaved process does away with nearly every environmental concern related to burial and cremation and works to keep land free of development and pesticide.

Ultimately, which eco-friendly exit you choose is mostly about personal comfort. And if the choices seem daunting, it’s worth remembering: Even the most energy-intensive acts of burial pale in comparison to the carbon footprint you’re leaving right now.

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