Category: Talking about death

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The truth is that death and life are the same music

The terrain of dying is so swampy, too. We’re afraid of getting drawn into the quicksand of offence and emotion.

By Hilary Harper

[A] friend talked to me recently about his wife’s dying. Not her death, though it’s close, but the process of her dying, which has been going on for years and has undergone many changes. They have four children, and it is hard. It’s cancer, and it’s not being kind. It has metastasised into her brain, affecting her memory. She can’t walk more than a few metres. It stills her hands when she wants to draw or play music. But what made his tears well up was not the hard things, but what they were learning as her dying unfolded.

“It’s …” he hesitated. “It’s beautiful.” He seemed surprised, as if he ought to be ashamed of saying something so antithetical to how people imagine dying is. We think it’s dark and ugly; embarrassing, like poverty or bad breath. It’s inescapably physical: you can’t buy your way out of it or network yourself away from it or neutralise it with intellect. It’s not aspirational. It’s the ultimate failure, the inability to hold onto something most of us take for granted every time we inhale.

The terrain of dying is so swampy, too. We’re afraid of getting drawn into the quicksand of offence and emotion. What if we say the wrong thing? What if we accidentally tell the truth about something it might be kinder to lie about, at the end? I lost two babies mid-pregnancy, and after that, something fell away from me, some weight about death. Now I feel like a strange emotional carrion crow, settling my wings next to the grieving or bereaved, comfortable in the miasma of sadness and loss. I’m much better at listening. I was happy to talk to my friend about his wife’s dying, because he wanted to talk about it, and because it is a beautiful story, but also because it calls out to my grief, which has softened but not diminished.

He still works a few days, and he’s organised a roster of friends and neighbours who make sure his wife is OK and has everything she needs within arm’s reach. The kids spend a lot of time at home, experiencing their mother’s long last days. Part of his wonder and gratitude come from the fact that the family is sharing their experience. My friend knows that people who care are there when he can’t be, and that life, in some sense, is going on. Music is being played, and heard.

And the rest of the joy I saw sprang from his sense that his wife was stripping back the unnecessary things from life, the pettinesses and distractions, and becoming more prepared for death. She was remembering old arguments and tensions, wondering why she’d ever thought them worth the effort, and letting them go. “It’s like we’re falling in love all over again,” he said. It’s tempting to think of this as a parable for death being able to renew life, to spark a fresh fire of living even in those close to it. But the truth is that death and life are the same music, played for the same ears, but heard differently depending where you’re sitting. Some only hear the tuning up. My friend and his wife are hearing the whole orchestra, swelling to the climax.

Complete Article HERE!

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The New Stages of Grief: 5 Tasks, No Timeline

What bereaved survivors wish they’d known about the grieving process

[B]ereaved people often brace for the so-called stages of grief, only to discover their own grieving process unfolds differently. The stages of grief — popularized from earlier theories put forth by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and later modified by others — initially described responses to terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. While some find those responses relevant to coping with death, psychologists increasingly believe that the idea of “stages” oversimplifies a complex experience. And grieving survivors seem to agree.

“When we’re confronted with emotional chaos, we yearn for clarity, and the Kübler-Ross stages of grief serve as a kind of road map,” says Robert Neimeyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Memphis who studies grief. “But it’s more accurate to think about phases of adaptation rather than stages of grief. And they overlap rather than fall in sequence.”

No two people mourn the same way. The grieving process is shaped by one’s relationship to the deceased and the nature of the death, Neimeyer says. For example, “non-normative losses” — sudden or untimely deaths (accidents, homicides, deaths in youth or life’s prime) — tend to trigger more intense anger and disbelief, and longer depression.

What all survivors share: Death presents challenges, from processing the loss and coping with grief symptoms through reformulating a relationship to the late loved one — tasks that can take months and years to work through.

Grief task #1: Acknowledging the Reality of Loss

The finality of death is always a shock, even after a known terminal illness. After helping her 62-year-old husband battle a brain tumor for four years, Maureen McFadden thought she’d girded herself for his eventual passing. “A nun warned me that for all the pain I’d already gone through, I would not be prepared for what grief is. She was right,” says the Brooklyn, New York, widow. “Even though I understood the outcome when he was first diagnosed, I had no idea that I was still hoping. When someone dies, you’re just not prepared for that, because humans don’t know how to live without hope.”

It wasn’t until after the busy period of nursing, funeral planning, and the memorial services that the truth struck — “as if I’d been shot,” McFadden says. Later, one of her husband’s physicians told her that people who are constantly at a dying loved one’s side often have the hardest initial response. “He said they seem to hold an unarticulated belief that just by virtue of their presence and determination, they will keep the person alive,” she says. “The eventual death seems like a terrible failure.”

Accepting that death is real (and not your fault) isn’t the same as being OK with it. It merely means absorbing the truth of what has happened. This can be as difficult and painful as smacking through the first high breakers at the ocean’s shore. For some people, acknowledgment happens quickly; others remain in disbelief for months or years (or experience disbelief in periodic bursts).

What helps:

Experiencing the rituals of death. Lise Funderberg and her sisters allowed someone else to organize a quick memorial service because “we were so out of it, floating in Jell-O.” Looking back, she wishes they had done it themselves. “We didn’t even put anything in the papers. I wish we had known how a ritual of closure is really important for everyone in the community of the deceased, everyone who loved him,” says the author of Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home. “It’s not like we would be doing another one.”

Knowing there are no shortcuts through grief. “Grief can begin even before death, during caregiving. But grief doesn’t end until we do,” says Sherry E. Showalter, a social worker in Tarpon Springs, Florida, who’s the author of Healing Heartaches: Stories of Loss and Life.

Practicing your faith traditions. Some research shows that survivors with a spiritual life tend to absorb grief more quickly, possibly because — psychologists believe — people who eventually find meaning in loss are generally better able to cope with it.

Grief task #2: Weathering the stress of separation

Mourning brings many physical and emotional hallmarks: crying, being unable to cry, sleeplessness, not eating, numbness, feeling forlorn, withdrawing socially, and so on. The exact mix is different for everyone.

Anger is a common response, especially to a violent or untimely death. “My anger was so primal and intense, that this good person, my dad, had to die. It was illogical. I was mad at the world. I even thought, ‘Why couldn’t it have been my mom?’ who was already sick and not a contributing member of society,” says Harriet, a San Francisco producer whose father died at 69 after a cancer diagnosis.

Intense emotions can be a way to “hang on” to the deceased person, bereavement counselors say. It’s a tangible connection to the person who died. “It feels like power, like life,” one widow says of her white-hot anger. Letting go of the emotion, or learning to live with it, can feel like letting go of the person who died. Naturally, there can be a built-in reluctance to do that.

Another confusing emotion: Relief. “I felt horribly guilty that I was so relieved when my mom died,” says the daughter of an alcoholic. Caregivers, for example, often feel surprise (and, in turn, guilt) that they feel a lifting of a physical and/or emotional burden when caregiving ends. This is a natural response that’s separate from the sadness of losing the person. It’s entirely possible, and normal, to feel two such different emotions at the same time.

What helps:

Letting yourself experience turbulent emotions rather than shutting them down. “Wallowing is good,” says Cherie Spino, a mom of four in Toledo, Ohio, whose mother was killed at age 69 by a drunk driver. “You have to go through it, dwell on the person and your sadness, cry.”

Redirecting anger. Within a few years of her dad’s death, Harriet, the producer, “used my rage to fuel my passion” for a new project about cancer.

Asking what the deceased person would suggest. Maureen McFadden, whose husband died of a brain tumor, says she partly transitioned out of anger when the thought struck her, “What would Jim want from me?”

Reading about others’ experiences. Literature about grief can point out common threads. Survivors often point to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis.

Seeking bereavement support. Professionally led support groups or individual counseling provide skilled guidance as you navigate confusing or painful emotions. The goal isn’t to make the feelings go away but to help you embrace their purpose. Some people are ready immediately for this kind of help while some come to it long after the loss, and others do fine on their own.

Grief task #3: Adjusting to Everyday Life After a Loss

After the funeral and burial, mundane life patterns such as shopping and working must eventually resume, now in altered form. “Everyday life” often leaves survivors experiencing long-term reactions on top of the more familiar emotional and physical manifestations of grief.

Most common: yearning (intense longing for the person who has died), stress, and depression. These can prevail whether the relationship was happy or turbulent.

“Whatever unresolved issues you have, they get magnified and are elusive at the same time; you feel alone in the world,” says Ellie, whose parents and sister all died within five years. “I felt so isolated in my grief.”

What helps:

Not rushing yourself. “Being without my parents knocked me down and kept me down for a long time; it was as if something had been severed in me,” says Ellie. “Time and new experiences helped, but it was mostly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.”

Ignoring the “grief police.” Don’t let others rush your adjustment. Turn a deaf ear to the well-meaning comments people make that miss the mark — including “It’s time to move on.”

Getting help as needed with practical tasks. Handling finances, cooking, yard work, and so on can swamp a bereaved person, especially if they’re unfamiliar duties. This just adds to stress and prolongs pain.

Inching toward new ways of doing things. One woman who had a standing Saturday morning long phone call with her late mother felt bereft at that hour each week. “I switched my walking time to then and called my sister while I walked, which shook up my routine and dulled the pain.”

Not expecting you can medicate the pain away. Antidepressants have a place in helping someone who has a chemical imbalance causing depression. But antidepressants can also impede the grieving process, and they can’t remove the yearning that’s associated with depression. The goal should be to think about the deceased with less pain, over time, and to derive a measure of comfort from such thoughts.

Grief task #4: Revising your relationship to the deceased

Your relationship to the person who died doesn’t end with his or her death; it changes. “The goal of grieving is not to let go but to find a way to hold on with less pain,” Neimeyer says.

Simon Ruben of Israel’s University of Haifa describes the grieving process as being “two-tracked,” with two processes happening simultaneously. On one track, we cope with the visible symptoms and emotions (anger, depression, sleeplessness, and so on). On the other track, less obvious but equally important, we’re working to reframe our relationship to the loved one who has died.

Nobody forgets a loved one. The question is, how do we hold him or her in our memory, our rituals, and our conversation in a way that’s manageable, possibly even comforting, rather than painful?

What helps:

Reminiscing aloud. “Loss is so taboo in American culture. You’re supposed to have a funeral and move on,” says Jennifer Amandari of Los Angeles, who lost her mother when she was 16 and then lost an infant daughter six years ago. “But not talking about the person stunts your ability to heal and work the loss into your life.”

Having your grief witnessed. When psychologist Robert Neimeyer’s teenage son got choked up at Thanksgiving on realizing he was seated in his late grandmother’s chair, the table conversation came to a halt. Rather than rushing the awkward moment, someone shared his own memory of her. “We all began to recall ‘Gloria stories,’ and it was a beautiful moment that allowed us to continue a connection to her,” Neimeyer says.

Reflecting on the legacy of the person who died (alone or with others). How did he or she inspire you? What was his or her life’s meaning and purpose? Questions like these help shape a perspective on the seeming meaninglessness of death.

Following rituals that celebrate or honor the deceased. Victorians made an art of the rituals of remembrance, from wearing black and jewelry made from the hair of the deceased to producing funeral cards and postmortem photography. Such traditions help survivors maintain a connection and continuity. Family members join Lisa Byers of Toledo, Ohio, on an annual visit to the grave of her late husband, who died of a heart attack at age 46. Patti Anderson, who lives in Cincinnati, joins her out-of-state sisters in annual trips for their mother’s birthday. They’ve turned it into a memorial to her, complete with a special dinner devoted to reminiscing. Another family sends balloons aloft on the anniversary of their father’s death — followed by a dinner at his favorite restaurant.

Creating a memorial. Cherie Spino and her sisters plan to make a wall hanging from scraps of their mother’s clothing that they’d saved. Others have found solace in creating scrapbooks or PowerPoint presentations with old photos, symbolically lighting a Caring candle and posting a dedication, or planting a tree or garden.

Grief task #5: Rewriting the storyline of your life

“Grief is more than an emotion; it’s a process of reconstructing a world of meaning that’s been challenged by loss,” psychologist Neimeyer says. When our life is closely entwined with another’s, and that person dies, it’s as if a main character in a book dropped out. How can future chapters be rewritten so the book makes sense?

And yet there must be a rewrite, because life is a narrative. An important part of grieving is to gain a perspective on the meaning of the loss and to reconstruct a world in which you can live effectively afterward. Who will now do the things that your loved one once did for you? Who will you confide in about your promotion or your child’s first steps? Will you ever be able to walk into a hospital or nursing home again? Be able to love again? How has the meaning of your life changed?

One challenge: This involves integrating the reality of death into a cultural system that likes to pretend death doesn’t exist.

What helps:

Finding compassion in the workplace, one’s place of worship, and social organizations. It can be incredibly useful to reintegrating into life after a loss to have it acknowledged, rather than ignored without comment. Example: a manager stepping forward to say, “I’m sorry for your loss; let’s talk about what you feel like tackling now.”

Putting your life story on paper. Neimeyer has his patients write the chapter titles of their life stories. Then he asks them to reflect, in writing, on specific questions: How did you organize the flow of your self-narrative? What are the major themes that tie it together? If you were to give a title to your self-narrative, what would it be?

Recognizing that you’re not the same person as before. Losing any loved one is a transformative experience. Expect and embrace change, rather than avoiding it and expecting to return to your “old self.”

Expecting the intensity of your grief to vary. “Whenever I go to a funeral, I cry and cry now — for my own loss,” says one woman. Mother’s Day, birthdays, and anniversaries can ignite surges of depression years later — or there may not even be an obvious trigger.

Being open to help. It’s worth noting that there may be a syndrome called complicated grief, in which grief reaches a point where therapy can be useful. Is prolonged grief a new psychological disorder? Many psychologists now think so and want to see it become a recognized disorder. But more relevant than labels is being open to help if you feel stuck.

A “Happy” Ending?

Important point: Completing these five tasks doesn’t “end” the grieving process. They may never be fully completed. Grief isn’t a disease, after all; it’s a transition.

“Grief is like a room we may enter or leave again and again, for years,” psychologist Robert Neimeyer says. “The character and quality of grief may change across time, but it remains available to us as a resource that we can revisit.”

That positive word, resource, is a deliberate choice: “Being able to revisit earlier losses and their implications for us can enrich our lives and make our narrative more coherent about who we are and how we got to be who we are,” Neimeyer adds.

“I still feel such a sense of loss,” says writer Lise Funderberg of her father’s death in 2006. “But qualities of that experience were incredibly moving — the compassion and charity shown to me and witnessed by me. It’s strange to hold two opposing ideas in your head: that an experience can be horrible and yet have good effects. Things were stirred up by my dad’s dying that are pretty incredible and life-affirming. I now know that if you’ve loved a person, you will always grieve them. It just changes over time.”

Complete Article HERE!

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This Nursing Professor Is On a Quest to Improve End-of-Life Care, Worldwide

Nursing professor Cathy Campbell aims to expand palliative care practices in places around the world where it’s existed only informally.

By Christine Phelan Kueter

[E]ach week, as she sits at the bedside of dying patients, University of Virginia nursing professor Cathy Campbell remembers the bad old days of end-of-life care during her early nursing practice in the mid-1980s.

Staff didn’t know how to treat patients, their bodies addled by pain and disease, and treatment had less to do with pain management than with beating back deadly illnesses, she recalled. Even for patients who were moments from passing away, there was great reluctance to offer relief with drugs like morphine and Demerol, so as not “to hasten death.” But death in hospital intensive care units, with wires and tubes snaking from patients’ every orifice, was painfully common.

“There was always this great tension between compassionate care and the cure, the cure, the cure,” said Campbell, recollecting her early years as a nurse in a Florida Veterans Administration hospital, “and at that point palliative care wasn’t very good, and the things we did to patients weren’t very good for them, either.”

While the memories still smart, Campbell’s relieved when she considers the expanse of modern palliative care, and the growing understanding that “there is such a thing as a good death.”

But drugs and technologies aside, palliative care remains rooted in compassionate presence. That might mean that light chit-chat, passing ice to the bedridden, or quietly holding a griever’s hand. It also might mean answering loved ones’ frank and probing questions – What does death look like? How do you know if he’s in pain? Does she know we’re here at all? – or recommending medication adjustments for pain, based upon observed distress.

Many times, though, Campbell’s just there, palms up, offering herself as a witness and a comfort.

“This is what I want to do, where I want to be,” said Campbell, a nurse for 31 years and a palliative care scholar for 25. “The day of death is one day, but there are a lot of other days to provide support in between.”

But if palliative care has more recently expanded into America’s consciousness, beyond our borders its practice is spotty at best, and absent at worse. That absence is felt most acutely in the world’s poorest, most rural regions where chronic illness and death from diseases like HIV and AIDs, malaria and tuberculosis are common.

In many areas, palliative care is anemic due to too few providers. In South Africa, for instance, the patient-nurse ratio is 417-to-1, a reality that pushes many tasks onto community health workers who provide the majority of rural patients’ care. Among those workers – local individuals, some trained, who do home visits and provide a conduit to nurses in charge of vast geographic territories and literally thousands of patients – palliative care knowledge is even less common.

Most community health workers have basic training in bathing and turning bed-ridden patients; perhaps know how to take vital signs, like blood pressure and pulse; and may, too, know something about vectors of disease transmission for some of the region’s most deadly diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV. But palliative care, Campbell said, is “learned on the fly,” even as it’s an increasingly robust part of their job.

Those gaps in knowledge are due to the fact that palliative care concepts haven’t become fully integrated into overseas’ nursing curricula. It all adds up to a perfect storm, Campbell said, even in this era when the World Health Organization has declared access to palliative care “a human right.”

Given these twin realities, Campbell said, a movement to buttress community health workers’ education, skills and reach is afoot, and Campbell is in the thick of the march. She just received a two-year Fulbright Scholarship to augment the bare-bones understanding of palliative care as it exists in two rural provinces of South Africa and Thailand, and how best to broaden it with the support of community health workers.

Campbell’s years of work as a faculty mentor and researcher at UVA’s Center for Global Health have provided invaluable insight into the many issues and tremendous potential of community health workers in rural communities. This summer, Campbell will mentor a team, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Venda, of Center for Global Health University Scholars for a fourth year of longitudinal research on community health worker engagement in community care.

With the Fulbright, Campbell and her UVA research assistants will conduct focus groups with 60 rural community health workers across Thailand and South Africa to discuss the cases they see and document how they handle them, in order to determine what types of educational and training programs make the most sense. Their ultimate aim is to expand palliative care practices in places where it’s existed only informally.

Campbell has already observed community health workers’ appetite for training in palliative care in particular – “they’re eager for it,” she reports – and in many cases, the most experienced and seasoned workerss are likely to receive training and education and then return to their peers to train them.

Community health workers, Campbell said, are the linchpin to expanding developing nations’ palliative care reach into the rural communities that need it.

“We can train CHWs to do more, because they’re really the ones doing the work,” Campbell said. “They’re a community treasure.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Feminism, politics and death: my mum died the night Hillary Clinton lost

They may seem like unrelated events but the end of Clinton’s campaign and my mother’s life made me reflect differently on my own political career

‘Quality of life for Mum was also about quality of life for her daughters – and, honestly, I just always thought she’d make it a little longer.’

By

[M]y mother died the night Hillary Clinton lost. These might seem like two very unrelated events – and you’d be right about that. But for me, and my somewhat particular circumstances, I’ve found a plethora of meaning about life and death, feminism and politics.

See, it was also the night I was due to be sworn in as a councillor for my local city council. It was my first political foray and I’ve reflected on the start of my own political journey while on the other side of the world a smart and skilled female politician saw the end of hers, with our whole gender brutalised by a despicable Trump. And though Mum doesn’t know it, all my political guts I got from her.

Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 days before the 2016 Australian federal election. Dad called me from Canberra to say he had taken Mum to hospital and she had acute pneumonia. I was going through the processes of my Labor nomination for council elections. With days to the federal election, every spare moment I wasn’t working I was door-knocking and pre-polling.

I don’t remember that first conversation with Dad. I do remember the call the next day when Dad told me Mum had terminal cancer (as well as acute pneumonia) and the cancer had spread through her ribs, spine and pelvis. I was at my desk so I booked a flight home and, as I headed out the door, asked a colleague to cancel me out of every election activity I was signed up for.

Breast cancer is a disease that inflicts itself predominantly on women. It’s also one of the most misdiagnosed cancers around. Mum had her last mammogram only months earlier and it hadn’t appeared. I grew bitter quickly.

At the same time this was a federal election where it was one bloke versus another bloke versus another bloke, and women barely seemed to get a mention. I had volunteered the bulk of my time on campaigns to support female candidates in tough Victorian seats, none who won. I sat bedside my mother who taught me everything and watched women largely erased out of public life.

On Sunday 3 July, a day after the federal election – Mum was only in the second week of a disastrous five week stint in hospital – my journal shows compassion draining out of me:

I suspect I will grow rough and battle hardened and unforgiving from this. A part of me hopes I will. Perhaps I will grow ruthless and mean and brutal like life and that might make me powerful like men. I don’t think Mum will like the new me. I’ll have an excuse to be mean now, finally.

I thought at length about quitting the council race. We didn’t know the timeline Mum’s cancer was working to, although we’d been told up to 24 months for stage four breast cancer. I was enjoying caring for her and all her needs. But quality of life for Mum was also about quality of life for her daughters – and, honestly, I just always thought she’d make it a little longer.

So I ran my council campaign in between working full time and flying back home to care for Mum, alternating every second weekend with my sister. Offering a parallel world to my campaigning life, my life with Mum gave me such relief. I loved the quiet nights I shared with her. From the carer’s bed in her room, I would lie facing her and would listen for her breathing as her lungs drew in air from her oxygen tank.

In late October, I won the third and final spot at the council ward elections; Mum went back into hospital and I flew home again.

While nothing can prepare you for the death of a parent I did everything I could to prepare myself. I read memoir and non-fiction (by women) and I talked with women who had experience, both personal and professional.

In the final days, as Mum slept sedated, I read A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir. It was the 50th anniversary of the translation of the French feminist’s account of her mother’s death. The months of that death also mirrored my mother’s own: a few long weeks over October and November.

De Beauvoir’s mother’s death was frightening to me because it was everything her maman didn’t want. She wasn’t ready for death and her medical wishes were not respected: the doctors operated on her even though she had begged de Beauvoir that she wouldn’t let them touch her body. Her final moments were full of pain and distress. De Beauvoir wasn’t even there as she had slept through the panicked phone calls from her sister.

I was not watching the US election results that afternoon and evening in November. Mum was at Canberra’s public hospice set amongst beautiful gardens and overlooking Lake Burley Griffin. For the last few days she had been heavily sedated. Mum’s breathing changed late in the afternoon and we knew, not long now.

In academia, philosopher Michel Foucault called it a “heterotopia”, but most of us might think of it as a bit of a headfuck, a space or place in time that has more meaning or relationship to another space than it might first appear. As my mum lay dying, I was in a room full of strong women with her. My cousin brought in the bad news from the US and I slumped in my chair beside Mum, overwhelmed by yet more insurmountable grief. I thought if I was back in Melbourne, if my mum wasn’t dying, I’d be at my council ceremony right now and Hillary might even have been winning – but here I was in this awful parallel universe that happened to be real.

Mum died that night. A little after midnight, I woke from a light doze and Mum was turned slightly in her bed, facing me and she had stopped breathing. I leaned in close and checked for a pulse on her wrist. Her skin was so perfectly warm. The family all woke and we said our goodbyes.

I stayed with Mum’s body till morning. I picked out clothes for her as the nurses cleaned and dressed her. Then finally watched on as they – “are you ready for this?” – put Mum’s body into the transport bag. I followed the nurses as they pushed her bed down the hallway to the cold room, where I thanked them and having already said my goodbyes, left for my car and for my first day without my mum in a bleak, bleak new world.

In the months after, it was through the company of women, and particularly women who have lost their mothers, that I have found my feet again. I haven’t turned bitter and mean as I once thought or hoped I would. My feminism is softer with new compassion but also bolder with new militancy.

I’m still finding my political feet, but I’ve been elected to a council with majority women membership plus we have a female mayor and CEO too. At every council meeting I reflect deeply on the values, learnt from my mother, that drive my decision-making even if at times they won’t make me popular.

I don’t see much of Hillary in the news these days, which I’m thankful for. It reminds me of Mum each time and when I do, bystanders watch me dab at my eyes and think she must really have liked Hillary. Little do they know – that was the night my mum died.

Complete Article HERE!

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The things dying people care about reveal a lot about how to live

In the end, only one thing matters.

By Corinne Purtill

[A]sk people to imagine what they’d say if they knew they were dying and most would have words of sadness, fear, and regret. But new psychological research bolsters what chaplains, hospice workers, and others who spend a lot of time in the company of those approaching the end of life have long known: the process of dying is a complicated one, with room for moments of profundity and light alongside fear and darkness.

In a series of experiments documented in the journal Psychological Science, researchers compared the blog posts of terminally ill people and the last words of death row inmates to the words of healthy people asked to imagine themselves writing near their death.

The people actually approaching death used more positive terms and fewer negative ones to describe their emotions than those imagining the experience. In the blog posts—all from real people who eventually died from their disease—emotions grew more positive as death approached.

It’s not a perfect study—people with unspeakable regrets or fears may be less inclined to publicly chronicle their final days than those who do not. But there are a few reasons why death may be more terrifying as a distant abstract than an immediate reality.

People tend to overlook or discount the psyche’s ability to adapt to new circumstances when imagining the future, according to research from the Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Because we don’t properly account for our own resilience when envisioning future calamities, we tend to think that we’ll feel sadder, for longer, than we actually do.

Even amid the trauma of a terminal diagnosis and the discomforts of the dying process, the mind can adapt to find pleasure in the comforts available. And when we believe we have less time to live, whether due to age, illness, or external threat, we subconsciously adjust our priorities to favor those things closest to home. Research has found that old people, young people with serious diagnoses, and people living in uncertain political climates vastly prefer time with old friends and family over new contacts and experiences. The depth of these connections bring meaning to the final days of life in a way that can be hard for healthy people in an externally-focused, future-oriented mindset to comprehend.

It’s inaccurate to portray the close of life as a universally positive or peaceful experience. “We die the way we have lived,” says Barbara Karnes, a hospice nurse who has written extensively on the dying process. “I think it is human nature to look for love, connection, and meaning. We don’t necessarily have to be dying to do that. Dying gives us the opportunity, the gift of time, to reach out, but many do not take that opportunity.”

Death focuses us on what we care about most. But we don’t have to wait until the end is imminent to live as if each day matters.

“If there is any great difference between the people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it’s this: They know they’re running out of time,” Kerry Egan, a Harvard Divinity School-trained hospital chaplain, writes in her book On Living. “They have more motivation to do the things they want to do, and to become the person they want to become…. There’s nothing stopping you from acting with the same urgency the dying feel.”

Complete Article HERE!

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10 things to read when you’re grieving

By Joshua Barajas 

[M]y father died nearly 10 years ago, and it was Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” that pulled me through.

At first, I wanted to hide in a foxhole, isolated with my own emotions as I processed the loss of my father. I withdrew from college and friends and would, on some occasions, drag a chair to the far corner of the backyard and cry.

Several books helped me navigate the process of grieving, but it was Didion’s memoir, which documented the year following her husband’s death, that offered the most solace. I’ve since read the book every year since my father’s death, long enough to memorize its passage about how “grief comes in waves.”

This week, the NewsHour asked its staff for recommendations of books or poems that helped them survive a period of loss. In their own words, here are 10 suggested reads for those who are grieving.

“Gathering the Bones Together,” by Gregory Orr

“The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems”

“This poem is the perfect distillation of the sense of loss, grief and darkness in the moment; best I’ve ever read. Written as he reflected on having accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident when they were young boys.”

— Morgan Till, foreign affairs senior producer

“A Prayer for Owen Meany”

“A Prayer for Owen Meany,” by John Irving

“Within a year of my mother’s death I read Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I wasn’t consciously looking to cope with my grief, though Irving has long been a favorite of mine for the way his characters deal with sudden, random loss of one kind or another.

I unexpectedly came across a passage that so completely explained what I was feeling that I’ve since shared it with friends who’ve lost loved ones:”

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

— John Yang, correspondent

“H is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald and “The Once and Future King,” by T.H. White

“H Is For Hawk” and “The Once And Future King”

After my stepfather died, I picked up naturalist Helen Macdonald’s book “H is for Hawk,” which is about how, after her father died, she dealt with it by learning to train a deadly bird of prey. Training a goshawk was a kind of escape for her, which was an impulse I understood. In “H is for Hawk” you also learn that T.H. White, who famously wrote the Arthurian novels, was a falconer. It was after this that I reread White’s book about King Arthur as a young boy, called “The Once and Future King.” I love this passage in there:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

–Elizabeth Flock, reporter and producer, arts

“When Breath Becomes Air,” by Paul Kalanithi

“When Breath Becomes Air”

“My sister died suddenly when I was six and she was 19. Over the last three decades, different books, songs and movies spoke to me as I learned to carry her loss. A book that I recently found helpful was ‘When Breath Becomes Air.’ The perspective that book conveys — a thirty-something man in the prime of his life preparing to succumb to terminal cancer — provides solace to the people he leaves behind. It’s a voice we don’t always have the luxury of hearing or the courage to listen to, but Kalanithi reminds readers to share life with loved ones until the final moment comes calling and to summon the strength to carry their memories forward.”

–Laura Santhanam, data producer

“In Blackwater Woods,” a poem by Mary Oliver

“New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1”

“For me this poem reminds me that in the grand scale of time, our short blip of existence is fleeting, but that doesn’t mean we should disengage from loving and caring for others and for the planet fully. Instead, it argues that we should engage completely and recognize that each moment we have is rare and amazing. While that makes saying goodbye harder, it’s because we spent the time we had the most fully. It’s a reminder to me to live in the moment and not fret about abstractions in the past or future — a reminder to love completely. And a reminder to me that earth will live on when humans disappear, and that there is different type of beauty in the long term growth and energy of a life-harboring planet.”

–Dave Berndtson, broadcast news assistant

The Harry Potter series

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”

“When I’m grieving I turn to the Harry Potter series. They envelop me in the comfort of my childhood and allow a full escapism. I can escape with whichever one I’m in the mood for or read the entire series – yet again – if I really need to feel comforted. There’s something about turning to the books I read as a kid that help me push through grief, particularly these because they explore grief, death and love so much.”

–Alison Thoet, anchor assistant

Writing on your own

“I tried Joan Didion’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’ It didn’t work for me. The most cathartic was writing it down. It took two days after the cremation at a hut on the coast and then I let all 5000+ words out. I haven’t read it since. Maybe I will when I hit the 10-year mark. It sucks less with time, but different things suck now about it: grandfather’s absence, etc. It’s a crappy club to gain membership to earlier than your peers but admission to it was beyond my control.

–Hari Sreenivasan, correspondent

“Sea Fever,” by John Masefield

“Salt-Water Poems & Ballads”

“This poem is a beauty that helped me with the loss of my father, who was in the OSS in WWII, and the CIA from its inception to 1973; he also always loved to sail. There is a pragmatism and joy in ‘Sea Fever’ that I feel embodies my father’s spirit. It was a way for me to share with the guests at his funeral and his memorial a piece of who my father was. I still have his sextant. He knew how to sail by the stars for navigation, and he believed in sailing four hour watches through the night, because that’s how it’s done. Sea Fever explains a hard life well lived, and how the call of the sea pulls the sailor back. I see myself as that last companion, the laughing merry rover, seeing my father off on his last voyage, to a rest he well deserved. I truly believe in celebrating the life and not mourning the death.”

–Bill Swift, Student Reporting Labs

“You Are A Badass: How To Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living An Awesome Life,” by Jen Sincero

“You Are A Badass: How To Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living An Awesome Life”

“My great grandma would send me inspirational quotes every other morning, and I depended on them to get through the day. She died in October, and after that I drifted to this book to feel that same stimulation of encouragement. I wanted to read something that didn’t make me sad — and would redirect my thinking. Self help is a genre I’m not too familiar with, but this book reads unusually raw and honest. And it forces you to confront how an unfulfilled life can lead to depression. This book gave me great advice.”

–Courtney Norris, producer

Complete Article HERE!

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When a Pet Dies, Helping Children Through the ‘Worst Day of Their Lives’

Reading age-appropriate books about a pet’s death, like this one for ages 4 to 8, may be helpful in getting a child over the grief.

By JULI FRAGA

[T]he loss of a pet is often a child’s first experience with death. Understanding the unique ways that children view pets and respond to their passing can help parents to ease the grieving process.

Joshua Russell, an assistant professor of environmental science at Canisius College in Buffalo, who has studied the effects of pet loss in children, explained that for many children, pets are more than just animals. “Many kids describe their pets as siblings or best friends with whom they have strong connections,” he said.

In a study of 12 children ages 6 to 13 who had lost a pet, published in the journal Environmental Education Research, Dr. Russell found that even years after the pet’s death, some children still described the loss as “the worst day of their lives.” He also discovered that children come up with unique ways to rationalize their pet’s passing and that the way a pet dies influences how children grieve.

“Children, in particular, have a distinct sense of existential fairness around whether or not an animal lived until an appropriate age,” Dr. Russell said.

Like adults, children more readily accepted their pet’s death when it was expected in some way. For example, children were less affected when they knew in advance that the animal would have a short life span. They seemed to know that a fish or hamster, for instance, would not live as long as a dog or cat. When an animal was sick, they generally agreed that euthanasia relieved the pet of its suffering. If an animal is terminally ill, parents can help prepare the child by talking about the impending loss, as well as the feelings of sadness it will evoke.

This book is written for children ages 8 to 13.

Yet when pets died in tragic and unexpected ways, the loss was harder for the child to accept. “When a pet dies suddenly, it highlights the unpredictability of the world. It tells children that the people and animals they love can die without warning,” said Abigail Marks, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who specializes in childhood grief.

Of course, a child’s age and developmental level affect how he or she understands death, and a child’s grief looks very different from an adult’s. Children do not always cry or immediately show emotion. But this does not mean they are not deeply affected by the loss.

“Kids under the age of 5 will have a hard time understanding that the pet is gone forever because it’s difficult for them to grasp the concept of death,” said Jessica Harvey, a psychotherapist in San Francisco who specializes in pet grief.

One way young children may express their grief is through play. After the loss of a pet, they may pretend, for example, that a stuffed cat or dog became ill and passed away. Parents can help their children through the grieving process by actively participating in this type of imaginary play.

Reading age-appropriate books about pet death may also be helpful. “Goodbye, Brecken,” by David Lupton, for children ages 4 to 8; “Kate, the Ghost Dog: Coping With the Death of a Pet,” by Wayne L. Wilson, for ages 8 to 13; and “Memories of You,” by Erainna Winnett, for ages 7 to 12, are some examples.

School-age children will often have questions about the animal’s death, and the back-and-forth that ensues may open up larger conversations about love, loss and what happens after we die. When telling a school-age child about a pet’s death, Dr. Marks recommends being honest about what happened. Doing so lets a child know that it is not taboo to talk about death or painful feelings, which can set the stage to process other sorts of loss in the future. Parents should also validate any emotions that arise as the child mourns.

She said that a child’s grief would ebb and flow; they may cry one minute and then resume playing or talking about other things the next minute. Parents should be more concerned if a child has nightmares, increased anxiety or difficulty sleeping. If these symptoms persist, psychological counseling may help.

…and of course, our personal favorite.

Dr. Marks said it was also important for parents to follow their child’s lead. “If they are asking about the details of the pet’s death, it’s a sign that they want to talk about it,” she said. “They are looking for your comfort.”

For many children, it is also important to have a goodbye ritual. “Rituals around death are some of the most meaningful ways we have of recognizing someone’s life, but these ceremonies aren’t societally defined for pet death,” Dr. Marks said. Families can create their own rituals, like having a small memorial service, scattering the pet’s ashes, planting a remembrance tree or creating a photo album.

“This is a way to process the loss and to honor the role that the pet had in your family,” Dr. Marks said.

Complete Article HERE!