Tag: Death And Dying

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I want my hair to be fully gray.

The lives of Black folks should end with dignity

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As a Black man, these past few months I have thought a lot about dying. More than usual.

When I was young, I imagined a death where I learn that I have an incurable disease and then begin my final, glorious lap around.

The end comes in the company of family and friends and a final touch of a loving hand before my last breath. The end, in some way, resembles the very beginning of life — swaddled, surrounded by love, care and attention to every breath. There is something sacred about that first breath, the last and all in between.

When I was in college, I read about death and dying, which Emerson described as being “kind” and Socrates described as “like a dreamless sleep.” I learned that death is sacred and is a counterpart to birth. Buddhists prepare for death, because it can happen at any time — breathing is the most cherished gift of nature.

I loved my college courses. I have taught my share as well. Every time I would return home from college and enter Grace Temple Baptist Church in California with my mother, I was in the presence of people who knew things. They knew, to quote James Baldwin, rivers “ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” They knew about death and dignity, especially those who grew to be old.

I have lived long enough to know there is no promise that the end of my life will be the one I hope for — a time that involves a rocking chair and a grandchild on my knee; stories about the 50-pound trout that I caught in Lake Washington; the basketball game where I sang the national anthem and went on to score 75 points, including the winning basket; endless magic tricks.

I want to fall asleep at the dinner table but not before saying embarrassing things. I want to be seen as having wisdom worth sharing. I want my hair to be fully gray. I want to be called distinguished every now and again and crazy most often. I don’t need much praise and will settle for forgiveness for the times I’ve come up short. I want to tell stories about the 70s. I want to pass down my Marvin Gaye and Supremes vinyl. I want to tell the kids, “Lemme show you how the ‘Soul Train’ dancers busted a move in the day.”

When I would return home to visit my mother in California, there were fewer and fewer Black men in her church. One year, the men’s choir had become a trio. I know the life expectancy data for Black men, many who have suffered quietly. I know the price of things, which is why I lie awake at night out of the “reach of warm milk.” I know that I’ll be fine but not okay. My father held his grandson, my son, once, for a moment. He never met his granddaughter. I pass on my father’s fishing and military stories as best I can.

I think about death more now because I want to live well. I do not want my life to be something I beg for. I do not want to plead for my last breath under an officer’s knee. I do not want to run from a bullet. I do not want my final moments to be recorded by a stranger with a cell phone, a video that goes viral. I do not want my nurse to be in a biohazard suit. I want my last breath, my brother’s last breath, my son’s last breath, my daughter’s last breath to be cherished — just as I cherished their first breaths. On my last night, I want to feel like a child again, safe and beloved.

My friend, B.J. Miller, a palliative care physician, has made it his mission to help people live well in the face of death. He knows life, death and suffering. He says, “At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? Comfort, respect, and love.”

I have no desire to give a “last lecture” when my time comes. I’ve had many opportunities to say what I need to say. I want the last word to go to the elders; I want there to be more elders. I want the last word to go to the young Black man in middle school and the young Black woman in high school now, those who will become elders.

I want to hear the cries and laughter of the baby newly born in the neighborhood that has the most cracks in the sidewalks and a few broken windows — a community that is truly colorful and vibrant, a community that cherishes that baby. I want that child to live to be elderly. I want my current and former students to have their say.

I want us all to rest in peace. I want it never to be said that our birthright pre-determines the length and quality of our lives. The lives of Black folks should end with dignity, their final breath sacred and childlike.

If there is such a thing as a good death, and let us imagine that there is, we take our last breaths, not have them taken.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Medieval pandemics spawned fears of the undead, burials reveal

A 16th-century drawing by Hand Baldung Grien depicts a German mercenary speaking with Death. As pandemics swept Europe, stories of hungry and vengeful undead grew in German-speaking lands and may be reflected in burial practices.

By Andrew Curry

In 2014, Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was just a few days into her new job at Bern University’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in Switzerland when she was called to investigate an odd burial in a centuries-old cemetery that was being excavated ahead of a construction project. Of some 340 burials in the cemetery, one stood out: a middle-aged man, interred face-down in a neglected corner of the churchyard. “I had never seen such a burial in real life before,” says Alterauge.

Excavators found an iron knife and purse full of coins in the crook of his arm, positioned as though they had once been concealed under his clothes. The coins helped archaeologists date the body to between 1630 and 1650, around the time a series of plagues swept through that region of Switzerland. “It was like the family or the undertaker didn’t want to search the body,” Alterauge says. “Maybe he was already badly decomposed when he was buried—or maybe he had an infectious disease and nobody wanted to get too close.”

The discovery set Alterauge off on a search for more examples of face-down, or prone, burials in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Though extremely rare, such burials have been documented elsewhere—particularly in Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. They are often compared to other practices, such as mutilation or weighing bodies down with stones, that were believed to thwart vampires and the undead by preventing them from escaping their graves. But Alterauge says no one had looked systematically at the phenomenon of prone burials in medieval German-speaking areas that now constitute modern Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.

Now, in a new study published in the journal PLOS One, Alterauge’s research team reveals their analysis of nearly 100 prone burials over the course of 900 years that have been documented by archaeologists in German-speaking Europe. The data suggest a major shift in burial practices that the researchers link to deaths from plagues and a belief among survivors that victims might come back to haunt the living.

A medieval burial in a Berlin churchyard reveals a man buried face down. Prone burials increased in the later Middle Ages and may be a reaction to deaths resulting from the plague.

During the early and high Middle Ages in Europe (ca 950 to 1300), the few bodies that were buried face-down in regional graveyards were often placed at the center of church cemeteries, or even inside the holy structures. Some of them were buried with jewelry, fine clothes and writing implements, suggesting that high-ranking nobles and priests may have chosen to be buried that way as a display of humility before God. One historical example is Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, who reportedly asked to be buried face-down in front of a cathedral in 768 as penance for his father’s sins.

Archaeologists begin to see an increase in face-down burials in Europe by the early 1300s, however, including some on the outskirts of consecrated Christian burial grounds. This shift coincided with devastating plagues that swept across Europe beginning in 1347, killing millions across the continent.

“Something changes,” says Alterauge, who is also a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg.

As diseases killed people faster than communities could cope, the sight and sound of decomposing bodies became a familiar, unsettling presence. Corpses would bloat and shift, and gas-filled intestines of the dead made disturbing, unexpected noises. Flesh decayed and desiccated in inexplicable ways, making hair and nails seem to grow as the flesh around them shriveled.

Decaying “bodies move, they make smacking sounds. It might seem as if they’re eating themselves and their burial shrouds,” Alterauge says.

A 14th-century drawing depicts the burial of plague victims. German tales tell of nachzehrer (loosely translated as corpse devourers), and wiedergänger (“those who walk again”), which may have been inspired by mass deaths resulting from the plague.

As medieval Europeans tried to explain what they were seeing and hearing, they might have seized on ideas about the undead already circulating in Slavic communities of Eastern Europe: “We don’t have [the concept of] vampires in Germany,” Alterauge says, “but there’s this idea of corpses which move around” that is imported into western Europe from Slavic areas to the east not long after the first plague outbreaks take place in the mid-1300s.

A logic behind the undead

Before the 1300s, medieval stories in German-speaking Europe described helpful ghosts returning to warn or help their loved ones. But in an age of epidemics they took on a different shape: revenants, or the walking dead.

“This shift to evil spirits takes place around 1300 or 1400,” says Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study.

Turning to medieval folklore for clues, Alterauge and her co-authors found tales of nachzehrer, loosely translated as corpse devourers: restless, hungry corpses that consumed themselves and their burial shrouds, and drained the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.

“Historical sources say nachzehrer resulted from unusual or unexpected death,” Alterauge says. “There was a theory someone became a nachzehrer if he was the first of the community to die during an epidemic.”

In pandemic-era Europe, the legend had a compelling logic: As the victim’s close relatives began developing symptoms and collapsing within days of the funeral, it must have seemed as if they were being cursed from the grave.

“The background of all these supernatural beliefs must be the sudden deaths of several individuals from one society,” says Toplak. “It makes sense that people blamed supernatural spirits and took measures to prevent the dead from returning.”

Equally feared at the time were wiedergänger, or “those who walk again”—corpses capable of emerging from the grave to stalk their communities. “When you did something wrong, couldn’t finish your business in life because of an unexpected death, or have to atone or avenge something you might become a wiedergänger,” Alterauge explains.

The new study reveals an increase in the number of bodies placed face-down on the edges of Christian cemeteries between the 14th and 17th centuries. The researchers argue that, in this part of Europe at least, burying people face-down was the preferred way to prevent malevolent corpses from returning to do harm.

Other archaeologists say there could be other explanations. In a world ravaged by deadly pandemics, burying the community’s first victim face-down might have been symbolic, a desperate attempt to ward off further calamity.

“If someone got really sick, it must have seemed like a punishment from God,” says Petar Parvanov, an archaeologist at Central European University in Budapest who was not involved in the study. “Prone burials were a way to point out something to the people at the funeral—somehow the society allowed too much sin, so they want to show penance.”

The next step, says archaeologist Sandra Lösch, co-author of the paper and head of the department of physical anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bern University, would be to look at the face-down burials to find if there are clearer links with disease outbreaks. By analyzing the ancient DNA of individuals in prone burials, for example, it might be possible to sequence specific plague microbes, while isotopic analysis of victims’ bones and teeth “might show traces of a diet or geographic origin different from the rest of the population,” offering another explanation for their out-of-the-ordinary burials.

Because local excavation records are often unpublished, Alterauge hopes more evidence will emerge in the years to come as archaeologists re-examine old evidence or look at unusual medieval burials with a fresh perspective. “I definitely think there are more examples out there,” she says.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Unpredictability of advanced heart failure complicates end-of-life care, doctors say

Some people with advanced heart failure live for a long time, while others don’t. That uncertain timeline poses challenges for doctors, their patients and families dealing with end-of-life care.

“We’ve had for cancer for many years, which have been used to make sure that end-of-life patients get high-quality care,” said Dr. Rebecca Hutchinson, a hospice and palliative medicine specialist at Maine Medical Center in Portland. “With , we don’t have those indicators.”

That discrepancy motivated Hutchinson and five colleagues to conduct in-depth interviews with 23 cardiologists and across Maine about treating people with advanced failure.

The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found “prognostic uncertainty” of advanced heart failure complicates how doctors care for patients for several reasons.

“Heart failure is marked by frequent exacerbations where patients can get pretty sick and then recover back to baseline or pretty close back to baseline,” said Hutchinson, who led the study. “At some point, one of those exacerbations usually marks the beginning of end of life, but it’s not always easy to tell. Are you in one that’s close to end of life or are you in one where there’s going to be a recovery?”

That, she said, forces doctors to balance the desire to prolong life against the possibility that more treatment will do no good and cause unnecessary suffering. The uncertainty often makes it harder for patients to recognize the reality of their disease, and harder for doctors to discuss the situation with them, the study found.

“Doctors told us that patients with heart failure frequently don’t realize that this is a terminal disease,” she said. “That makes it harder to have the end-of-life conversations early to make sure we’re giving them care that’s consistent with their values.”

According to American Heart Association statistics, an estimated 6.2 million U.S. adults have heart failure, where the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. About one-tenth of those are classified as advanced heart failure, where usual treatment is not effective but the remaining life span is hard to predict.

The study also examined differences in urban and rural areas, where patients may have less access to medical specialists and quality in-.

“That’s good and bad,” Hutchinson said. “Patients in tend to have less aggressive (unnecessary) interventions at the end of life, but it’s bad in that they may not have access to life-prolonging therapies.”

Hutchinson said the findings emphasize the need for better methods to calculate a patient’s prognosis and determine a patient’s values so that end-of-life care matches what the patient wants. Regardless, she said, —medical help to relieve the symptoms and stress of a serious illness—should be part of the plan.

“Palliative care really shouldn’t be tied to a prognosis,” Hutchinson said. “A lot of people associate palliative care with end-of-life care and hospice, but it’s really not.”

That point alone makes the study worthwhile, said Dr. Diane Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and a professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

While people choosing hospice must agree to relinquish insurance coverage for life-prolonging treatment, she said, “palliative care has no such restrictions. You can get it whether or not your disease can be cured, whether you’re going to live with it for 20 years or whether it’s progressive. Eligibility for palliative care is based on need—symptom distress, family exhaustion, uncertainty about what to expect—and not on prognosis.”

Meier, who was not involved with the new study, said changing the mindset is particularly important for heart patients, who may have years to live but face issues such as depression, anxiety and social withdrawal. She said all of that can be helped by palliative care, which research shows can improve quality of life and symptom control in people with heart failure.

“The important take-home message is we offer both life-prolonging treatment and palliative treatments meant to improve quality of life and day-to-day functioning—at the same time,” she said. “We need to replace our either/or mindset with a both/and model.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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5 Ways To Make Your Dog’s Last Days Their Best Days – DogTime

By Maggie Clancy

Grieving over the loss of a pet is traumatic. But sometimes, it can be even harder when we know that our dogs don’t have much time left. Anticipatory grief is real, and it’s a completely normal emotion to feel.

Dogs are very intuitive, and your grief may be contagious to your ailing pet. Perhaps instead of spending your remaining time with your canine companion in a state of grieving and sadness, you can make the rest of your dog’s life as comfortable and wonderful as possible.

Here are some tips on how to make your dog’s last days the best that they possibly can be.

Create A Bucket List

Dog parent Riina Cooke made the decision to make a bucket list for her terminally ill Boxer, and it helped her with the grieving process tremendously. From a cheeseburger to a pedicure, she filled her dog’s remaining time with fun and happiness.

What makes your dog ecstatic? Is it taking luxurious car rides? Hanging out with some of their favorite friends?

Create a list of what your dog loves to do best, and cross off as many as you can as long as your dog’s health and safety permits.

There’s nothing better than seeing your pup at their happiest, and there’s no better way to remember them than in that state, as well.

Go All Out With The Food

If your dog’s vet agrees that certain people foods are okay for your dog to ingest, give your pup the tastiest, most decadent food possible.

When my childhood dog, a nine-year-old Cocker Spaniel, was suffering from a myriad of ailments, we gave her steamed rice and steak every night for dinner. Some nights, her dinner was fancier than what the humans of the household were eating.

Ask your vet which foods are appropriate, and start making Fido gourmet meals.

Indulge In All Forms Of Pampering

Go buck wild with any and all forms of pampering, especially anything that will relax and soothe your dog.

Have a dog masseuse come to your house. Go to a dog bakery and get them the most outrageous dog cake you can find.

You can even go a little less traditional route and do things like take your dog to a pet communicator or psychic to hear what they’re really feeling. You may not be a believer, but it will probably be a fun experience and a fond memory.

Get Educated On Pain Management

This may not be the most fun part of the list, but it’s crucial. If your dog is suffering, it may not always be apparent that he or she is in pain. Educate yourself on the signs of pain in dogs.

If your dog hits a point of extreme pain or a point where you cannot take care of your pup yourself, it may be time to consider dog hospice care. Much like human hospice care, dog hospice care is from the comfort of your own home.

You can work with your vet on things like administering medications and deciding if and when it’s the right time for euthanasia.

Allow Your Friends And Family To Help You

In order for you to be in the right state of mind for when your dog is nearing the end of their life, you should have a solid support group. Talk to friends who know your dog well, family, and a veterinarian you can trust.

Many animal hospitals also offer support groups. By having this ring of support for yourself, you will be able to effectively and lovingly support your pooch through this painful time.

Letting go of a dog is never easy, but you can make it as positive of an experience as possible for both you and your dog.

If you’ve gone through the grieving process of a dog passing away, what did you do to make your dog’s last days their best? Do any fond memories bring you comfort? Let us know in the comments below!

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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This was how Santa Muerte was adopted by Mexican culture

This devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of kitsch art.

The cult of the skeletal image, as it is practiced today, emerged in the middle of the 20th century, but has its antecedents in the viceregal period, according to the anthropologist Katia Perdigón.

According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for their prayers and the veneration of the skeletal image, which you might think was adopted into Mexican culture. However, it has a long history in Mexico.

In an interview that the INAH conducted with the anthropologist Katia Perdigón, she says that Santa Muerte has its antecedents from colonial times. Although for many the word «death» is a taboo that when mentioning it produces silence, admiration and fear.

The doctor in Social Anthropology, and a pioneer in studies on Santa Muerte, mentioned that this “icon comes from macabre dances and some Greco-Latin designs, hence the presence of the scythe, the mantle and the balance, to mention a few elements ”.

By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the “good to die” and continued to worship the image of death.

Since the Colony, it was sought to evangelize devotees and converts so that they had a «good death». Reason why at that time you could see large sculptures with the skeletal image that went out in procession on Good Friday. Of these great sculptures, at least three are preserved in the country: the Holy Death of Yanhuitlán, which is visited in the former Dominican convent of that Oaxacan town; and known as San Bernardo and San Pascual Bailón, in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, respectively, said Katia.

«In colonial times, the Catholic Church saw this veneration as heresy towards the skeletal image of death. According to inquisitorial documents from the 17th and 18th centuries that I was able to consult, retaliation was not directed at the people involved, but at the action itselfEven in 1797 a chapel was razed to the ground in the town of San Luis de la Paz, where this cult was practiced, ”said Perdigón Castañeda.

By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the «Good to die» and they continued to worship the image of death.

“Thus a totally different iconography emerged, for example, the macabre dances and the representation of the Triumph of Death turned into something else, in such a way that they are retaken to carry out political mockery, this was started by the cartoonist Gabriel Vicente Gahona (‘Picheta’) in the southeast, and years later José Guadalupe Posada did it, with the image of La Catrina ”.

According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for its prayers and veneration of the skeletal image, which one might think was adopted into Mexican culture.

«The same,» the anthropologist continued. (Santa Muerte) housewives approach her, that doctors or policemen; However, at the end of the nineties, yellow fever has linked its cult to outlaw groups or people who live or work in the streets, after it was reported that the kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, alias “El Mochaorejas”, captured in that decade, He was devoted to the image.

The researcher concluded that this devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of art kitsch.

Why the celebration of Santa Muerte on the Day of the Dead

Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that the idea of ​​this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained in the collective consciousness.

Endoveliko, who is a follower of Santa Muerte, says that in Ecatepec Santa Muerte is celebrated because it was on those dates, 17 years ago, that the Congregation that began to organize in the area. Each altar celebrates its anniversary on a different date, and they wanted to take advantage of the Mexican celebration to combine it with their foundation.

He believes that both parties are related: remembering the deceased and venerating Santa Muerte are ideas that have always been combined, Endoveliko considers. “Our celebration is eminently from here because since prehistory so much of Europe and here in America, peoples have always worshiped death with different names, different languagesHere, death was worshiped from the Olmecs, Teotihuacán, the Mexica ”, he explained.

But believe that for a while it went out and tried to silence this cult. Although with the freedom of ideologies in the Mexican Constitution, these beliefs reappeared.

Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that in the collective consciousness The idea of ​​this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Relearning how to die

By Richard Smith

Kevin Toolis, author of the beautiful My Father’s Wake, would agree with the surgeon Atul Gawande that we have forgotten how to die. Toolis’s core argument is that his forebears on an Atlantic-lashed island off the west coast of Ireland had a familiarity with death that meant that they knew how to die. Unfortunately, what he calls the Western Death Machine has destroyed that familiarity, leaving us with an existential dread of our inevitable mortality. But he ends the book with a call for rediscovery of how to die, although recognising that “It’s harder than you think to break away from the blinding of the Western Death Machine. In fact, it’s the work of a lifetime.”

The book is constructed around the death, wake, funeral, and burial of Sonny, Toolis’s father, an ordinary but much loved man who had 300 people at his funeral. (As I read that, I thought of funerals I’ve attended with just one or two people and of David Bowie being whisked off without any funeral.) Sonny, who had spent much of his life away from Dookinella, the village where he was born, returned there to die. The dying and those who care for them are not alone: family, friends, villagers, and children are there.

Toolis describes standing beside his unconscious dying father: “We were becalmed. Waiting for his heart to stop, the wake, his funeral, the church, the grave. Waiting for the death of this very ordinary man. Waiting, I thought, to start again. Resume Life. As it turned out, nothing else I have ever done or will do was more important than those precious days.”

Those days were precious because Sonny retaught Toolis how to die. Toolis had experienced the horrors of the Western Death Machine when his brother died young of leukaemia. He could make no sense of that death and launched into a desperate attempt to make sense of death by, as a journalist and filmmaker, interviewing families in Northern Ireland and Palestine whose family members had been killed by terrorists or the Israeli army or whose children had blown themselves up. These experiences produced powerful reports and films but no equanimity with death.

Sonny’s death and wake merged into each other. Given the last rites he died, and his sister and daughters washed the body and prepared him for his coffin. They washed the body of their father as the mother and wife of Hector washed his body after he was killed by Achilles; throughout the book Toolis draws parallels with the Iliad, emphasising how what is happening in rural Ireland has been happening across the world for thousands of years. There was no question of Sonny being spirited away to a funeral home. 

With Sonny dressed and in his open coffin the wake could get into full swing. It would last until he would be carried to the church and then up the mountainside to his grave, two days and a night. Sometimes wakes would last longer if family had to return from abroad. Everybody is welcome at the wake. Toolis didn’t recognise many of those who came. Children play around the coffin. Everybody touches the corpse, and most kiss him. Food and drink are served. People talk about farming, the price of sheep, the weather, but they also tell stories. Death often features in the stories. Toolis hears one young man tell the story of working in a rich home in Essex and finding the owner having hanged himself.

An elderly woman tells the story of having to bury her stillborn child in the unconsecrated ground reserved for suicides and the stillborn. “Sonny’s corpse, his touchable deadness,” writes Toolis, “had made it harder to deceive ourselves of the shiny lies of daylight. So for a few hours, at least, we were free of the constraints of our daily dissembling….In those close watching hours upon the corpse a portal had opened, too, amongst the living, and we spoke without fear on the nature of what each had seen and felt on the shores of life and death.”

Perhaps the most surprising line in the book is a teenager saying to other teenagers after they have left a dance at 3 in the morning: “Shall we go back to the wake for the craic?” Many people outside Ireland are now familiar with the Gaelic word craic, which Wikipedia defines as “a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation.” It’s unthinkable that teenagers in London would go to a room with a corpse for fun. It would be thought indecent. But at the wake the teenagers play “the ring,” one of the wake games (which were also played in the Iliad), which are a mixture of violence, kissing, and “libidinous foreplay.” 

Death, as Toolis observes, can be a great aphrodisiac: “The coldness of a corpse has its own perverse existential aphrodisiac; nothing so encourages the animal within us, the hunger for sexual consummation, the need of the comfort of another warm body, than death’s present denial. We affirm ourselves in heat and flesh.” A central argument in the book is that by learning how to die we also learn how to live and love.

Once the wake is over, Sonny is carried to the church and then up the mountain to the grave that has been dug by local people. Toolis carries the coffin, along with his sisters (a development in the tradition). “The carrying of the dead, into and from the church altar and onto the grave, rests on the shoulders of their kin, hopefully their sons. To be carried by those of your own house to your grave is an ancient tribal blessing—a life and death hope, that you will multiply and prosper, bear children, die amidst your family, your community, and still be loved at the end of days. To carry the weight of your own dead, to link arm to shoulder with your brother pall bearer, whoever that might be, shuffling forward in three sets of pairs, in sight of the congregation, is another communal rite of the wake, another fusion of the individual within the wider community.”

There is nothing romantic or sentimental in Toolis’s account of his father’s death, wake, funeral, and burial, but already these traditional customs are disappearing in Ireland and are unknown in the big cities. Can they ever come again? Toolis ends his powerful book with a chapter on how to defeat the Western Death Machine and this challenge:

“You cannot step twice into the same river, ever newer waters flow around and beneath your feet. And we cannot all go back to the island, listen daily to the cowboy songs and the ‘deaths’ on the radio, and live on and die in the last full gatherings of this ancient Celtic rite. But we can carry much of the Irish Wake with us in our hearts. A rite that survived the fall of Troy and a thousand generations before the rise of the Western Death Machine can easily survive the retransplantation back to our cities of glass and concrete. We need to find our way again with death. To be human is to be mortal, and to be mortal is to love, live and die amidst the lives of everyone around you on the island or in the city. And to embrace rather than deny our mortal fate.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How Death Doulas Have Adapted End-of-Life Care Amid COVID-19

By Ilana Kaplan

Christy Marek, a certified end-of-life doula, has seen firsthand the added stress that terminally ill individuals have had to endure because of the pandemic. One client had been living at home but decided that her health was putting too much added stress on her family. “She had considered going into a facility just so that she could get the level of support that she needed as she was becoming bed-bound,” says Marek, who is based in Minnesota. But the client found herself at a crossroads: she had to choose between the possibility of dying alone in a facility (upon admission, patients were required to quarantine alone with no visitation for two weeks) or continuing to rely on family care while spending the rest of her time at home.

Marek made several phone calls to facilities to advocate for her client. “I said, ‘What if she doesn’t have two weeks? What are you going to do?’” Marek recalls. Ultimately, her client ended up getting 24-hour home care, but it wasn’t her first choice. “People are then dying at home because the last thing they want is to go into a facility,” says Marek. “They don’t have time to quarantine for the amount of time that [facilities] need.”

For centuries, doulas have been assisting with childbirth, providing emotional, physical, and educational support during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. But there aren’t just doulas for the birthing process: over time, both officially and unofficially, end-of-life doulas have emerged to help individuals with palliative care and support their families through the grief that comes with losing someone. A 2017 study found that women who had continuous support during their labor—whether from a nurse, doula, or partner—reported a more positive birth experience. It seems likely that the same kind of constant emotional support from a death doula would have an equally positive effect on processing the grief around passing.

In a year when death and grief have become a constant, the palliative care process has reached a new level of complexity amid COVID-19. End-of-life doulas have always strived to be a support system for those who are terminally ill, but in 2020 the people who take on that responsibility have been challenged to think outside the box when it comes to caregiving. They’ve had to help their dying clients make unimaginable choices between risking virus exposure and spending their last days alone. They’ve also had their presence questioned at a time when their skills could be most valuable.

Alua Arthur, an end-of-life doula and founder of Going With Grace, has been trying to encourage clients to focus on what they do have control over, even when the world feels full of uncertainty. “Because they’re getting close to the end of life, I remind them that there are some things that are still firmly within our control,” says Alua. “[I have them] look at what it is that we’re trying to control and where the control actually exists. She has her clients work on “cultivating presence and practicing adaptability,” along with “exercises, like finding our feet and consistently planting our feet firmly on the ground [and] becoming present.”

Communication and connection have been the most challenging variables for doulas and their clients. Many in-person meetings with clients and their families have gone digital. For Arthur, FaceTime and Zoom have become essential for helping with clients’ health-related questions when she can’t physically be with them. “Family members [can] scan body parts through a video call, show me and say, ‘Does that look normal?’ Or, ‘She’s breathing like this, does that sound normal?’ And [they] hold the phone up [for me to hear] somebody’s breathing pattern.” That way, even if Arthur is not with the client, she can make an informed decision as to whether they should call the doctor. Arthur has also hosted webinars to help people experience grief and facilitate rituals for transitioning. She has helped coordinate with funeral homes to livestream funerals for clients so that more family members could participate.

For clients who are in assisted-living communities or the hospital, nurses often act as a bridge on behalf of doulas. Janie Rakow, a recently retired end-of-life doula and former president of the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), has been raising money for baby monitors for local hospitals so that doulas can keep in touch with their clients, talk to social workers and chaplains, and even play music. “Nurses and medical staff have been integral in helping doulas make sure they connect with families and play music until the end,” she says.

Omisade Burney-Scott, a full-spectrum doula based in North Carolina, has been encouraging her clients to “think about how you show up energetically when you can’t show up physically.”

“Because I’m a Southern Black woman, there’s so much ritual involved with death and dying in the South with Black folk,” says Burney-Scott. “It’s beautiful, it’s complex, but it’s highly ritualized.” Grieving has generally involved a lot of face-to-face interactions and “people coming to your house dropping off casserole after casserole,” so during the pandemic Burney-Scott has tried to help her clients try to find alternate activities that will create a similar feeling of closeness and community. One client with relatives spread throughout the United States and Europe had lost two family members and was looking to honor the deceased. “My question for this person was, ‘Where are they from? What are the things that are meaningful for your family? What are the things that you all love to do together?’ And one of the things that we talked about was food and how much food is a core part of their family culture.” Since their family already did a Zoom session every Sunday, Burney-Scott suggested that they make a dish that everybody in the family loves for their meeting. “Then, when you come to the Zoom call, y’all eat together and honor this person or these people who’ve made their transition,” Burney-Scott says.

End-of-life doulas also help their clients navigate and find support within a racist healthcare system. A 2017 study from Academic Emergency Medicine on implicit bias revealed that White patients were favored, especially by White doctors. Coronavirus has been two times as likely to kill Black and Latino people than White people. In June, Arthur was a panelist for a talk where she and other Black death doulas, along with grief and funeral professionals, discussed the implications of a “good death” in a racist society. More than 2,000 people signed up for the webinar, which touched on the “implicit bias that exists against Black workers, Black deceased and patrons of their families.” “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say that racism or race should not be a factor in how we care for people at the end of the day,” says Arthur. “But in order for us to effectively care for people in the afterlife, we have to honor the reality of their lived experience. That includes race, their physical ability, [their] ability to hear, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, and every little part of themselves. We’re honoring a life, so we have to look at the whole life.”

Burney-Scott has been helping members of the Black community process continued grief after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and amid continued police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Grief is not an emotion that is mutually exclusive to physical death,” says Burney-Scott. “So what I have found is that there’s been an unrelenting nature to the grief that we’re all experiencing right now with the pandemic, with COVID-19, but also with racism and white supremacy.” Burney-Scott has been looking to her spiritual background to provide support for others. “My role in that has been to provide instructions and support around how to create your own altar, how to open your space and yourself up to either meditation, prayer, or conversation with your ancestors to ask for support for these families who have experienced the unimaginable,” she says.

More than ever, it’s been necessary for doulas to focus on possibility and opportunity as a way to keep their clients comforted and connected. Still, the challenges of limited physical interactions and restrictions due to COVID-19 have transformed their jobs. In the meantime, end-of-life doulas are doing everything they can to be there for their clients.“We support and empower,” Arthur says. “Why? Because we don’t want people to feel alone in the process. How? We show up.”

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