Tag: Death Meditation

Posted on

‘I want to stare death in the eye’:

why dying inspires so many writers and artists

By &

It may seem paradoxical, but dying can be a deeply creative process.

Public figures, authors, artists and journalists have long written about their experience of dying. But why do they do it and what do we gain?

Many stories of dying are written to bring an issue or disease to public attention.

For instance, English editor and journalist Ruth Picardie’s description of terminal breast cancer, so poignantly described in Before I say Goodbye, drew attention to the impact of medical negligence, and particularly misdiagnosis, on patients and their families.

American tennis player and social activist Arthur Ashe wrote about his heart disease and subsequent diagnosis and death from AIDS in Days of Grace: A Memoir.

His autobiographical account brought public and political attention to the risks of blood transfusion (he acquired HIV from an infected blood transfusion following heart bypass surgery).

Other accounts of terminal illness lay bare how people navigate uncertainty and healthcare systems, as surgeon Paul Kalanithi did so beautifully in When Breath Becomes Air, his account of dying from lung cancer.

But, perhaps most commonly, for artists, poets, writers, musicians and journalists, dying can provide one last opportunity for creativity.

American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak drew people he loved as they were dying; founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, while in great pain, refused pain medication so he could be lucid enough to think clearly about his dying; and author Christopher Hitchens wrote about dying from oesophageal cancer despite increasing symptoms:

I want to stare death in the eye.

Faced with terminal cancer, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, if possible, more prolifically than before.

And Australian author Clive James found dying a mine of new material:

Few people read

Poetry any more but I still wish

To write its seedlings down, if only for the lull

Of gathering: no less a harvest season

For being the last time.

Research shows what dying artists have told us for centuries – creative self-expression is core to their sense of self. So, creativity has therapeutic and existential benefits for the dying and their grieving families.

Creativity provides a buffer against anxiety and negative emotions about death.

It may help us make sense of events and experiences, tragedy and misfortune, as a graphic novel did for cartoonist Miriam Engelberg in Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person, and as blogging and online writing does for so many.

Creativity may give voice to our experiences and provide some resilience as we face disintegration. It may also provide agency (an ability to act independently and make our own choices), and a sense of normality.

French doctor Benoit Burucoa wrote art in palliative care allows people to feel physical and emotional relief from dying, and:

[…] to be looked at again and again like someone alive (without which one feels dead before having disappeared).

A way of communicating to loved ones and the public

When someone who is dying creates a work of art or writes a story, this can open up otherwise difficult conversations with people close to them.

But where these works become public, this conversation is also with those they do not know, whose only contact is through that person’s writing, poetry or art.

This public discourse is a means of living while dying, making connections with others, and ultimately, increasing the public’s “death literacy”.

In this way, our conversations about death become more normal, more accessible and much richer.

There is no evidence reading literary works about death and dying fosters rumination (an unhelpful way of dwelling on distressing thoughts) or other forms of psychological harm.

In fact, the evidence we have suggests the opposite is true. There is plenty of evidence for the positive impacts of both making and consuming art (of all kinds) at the end of life, and specifically surrounding palliative care.

Why do we buy these books?

Some people read narratives of dying to gain insight into this mysterious experience, and empathy for those amidst it. Some read it to rehearse their own journeys to come.

But these purpose-oriented explanations miss what is perhaps the most important and unique feature of literature – its delicate, multifaceted capacity to help us become what philosopher Martha Nussbaum described as:

[…] finely aware and richly responsible.

Literature can capture the tragedy in ordinary lives; its depictions of grief, anger and fear help us fine-tune what’s important to us; and it can show the value of a unique person across their whole life’s trajectory.

Not everyone can be creative towards the end

Not everyone, however, has the opportunity for creative self-expression at the end of life. In part, this is because increasingly we die in hospices, hospitals or nursing homes. These are often far removed from the resources, people and spaces that may inspire creative expression.

And in part it is because many people cannot communicate after a stroke or dementia diagnosis, or are delirious, so are incapable of “last words” when they die.

Perhaps most obviously, it is also because most of us are not artists, musicians, writers, poets or philosophers. We will not come up with elegant prose in our final days and weeks, and lack the skill to paint inspiring or intensely beautiful pictures.

But this does not mean we cannot tell a story, using whatever genre we wish, that captures or at least provides a glimpse of our experience of dying – our fears, goals, hopes and preferences.

Clive James reminded us:

[…] there will still be epic poems, because every human life contains one. It comes out of nowhere and goes somewhere on its way to everywhere – which is nowhere all over again, but leaves a trail of memories. There won’t be many future poets who don’t dip their spoons into all that, even if nobody buys the book.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Death came a knocking- Ruthie Foster

Death came a knockin’
You know that death came a knockin’ on the mama’s door
Singin’ come on mama, ain’t you ready to go
And my mama stooped down, buckled up her shoes
And she moved on down by the Jordan stream
And then she shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

You know that death came a knockin’ on the sister’s door
Singin’ come on sister, ain’t you ready to go
And my sister stooped down, buckled up her shoes
And she moved on down by the Jordan stream
And then she shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

You know that death came a knockin’ on the brother’s door
Singin’ come on brother, ain’t you ready to go
And my brother stooped down, buckled up his shoes
And he moved on down by the Jordan stream
And then he shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

You know that death came a knockin’ on the neighbor’s door
Singin’ come on neighbor, ain’t you ready to go
And my neighbor stooped down, buckled up his shoes
And he moved on down by the Jordan stream
And then she shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

You know that death came a knockin’ on the preacher’s door
Singin’ come on preacher, ain’t you ready to go
And my preacher stooped down, buckled up her shoes
And she moved on down by the Jordan stream
And then she shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

You know that death came a knockin’ on my front door
Singin’ come on sister, ain’t you ready to go
So I stooped down, buckled my shoes
And I move on down by the Jordan stream
And then I shout “Hallelujah, done, done my duty, got on my travelin’ shoes”

Posted on

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.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders Life and Death: ‘What Is the Point?’

In his 1996 book about death, Herbert Fingarette argued that fearing one’s own demise was irrational. When you die, he wrote, “there is nothing.” Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there ourselves to suffer it?

Twenty years later, facing his own mortality, the philosopher realized that he’d been wrong. Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it. Fingarette, who for 40 years taught philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had also written extensively on self-deception. Now, at 97, he wondered whether he’d been deceiving himself about the meaning of life and death.

“It haunts me, the idea of dying soon, whether there’s a good reason or not,” he says in Andrew Hasse’s short documentary Being 97. “I walk around often and ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all?’ There must be something I’m missing. I wish I knew.”

Hasse, Fingarette’s grandson, turned the camera on the philosopher in the last months of his life. The two were very close—when Hasse was a child, Fingarette would invent stories and record them on tape to send to his grandson, who lived 300 miles away, so that he could listen to them before bed. “My grandfather was one of the most thoughtful men I’ve ever met,” Hasse told me.

Being 97 is a poignant film that explores the interiority of senescence and the struggle of accepting the inevitable. Hasse quietly observes the things that have come to define his grandfather’s existence: the stillness of time, the loss of ability, and the need to come to terms with asking for help. “It’s very difficult for people who have not reached a state of old age to understand the psychology of it, what is going on in a person,” Fingarette says.

In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and becomes overwhelmed with grief.

Hasse made the artistic choice to omit his voice from the film, so while he was filming the scene, he had to stifle the urge to comfort his grandfather. “It’s very difficult to watch anyone in that kind of pain and not be able to console them, especially someone you love so dearly,” Hasse said. “I found myself sitting just a few feet away from him, unable to reach out because there was a camera between us. All I wanted to do was put a hand on his shoulder, embrace him, be with him in his pain.” After what felt to Hasse like an eternity, the filmmaker handed his grandfather a tissue to wipe away his tears. The scene ends just before this happens.

Fingarette died in late 2018. Just weeks earlier, Hasse had shown him the final cut of the documentary. “I think it helped give him perspective on what he was going through,” he said. “He loved talking about what a mysterious process it had been to film all these little moments of his life and then weave them together into a work that expressed something essential about him.”

The day before he died, Fingarette uttered his final words. After spending many hours in silence with his eyes closed, Hasse said, his grandfather suddenly looked up and said, “Well, that’s clear enough!” A few hours later he said, “Why don’t we see if we can go up and check it out?”

“Of course, these cryptic messages are up to interpretation,” Hasse said, “but I’d like to believe that he might have seen at least a glimpse of something beyond death.”

In the film, Fingarette admits that there “isn’t any good answer” to the “foolish question” of understanding mortality. “The answer might be … the silent answer.”

Posted on

There is beauty and joy at the end of life, too

By Sarah Gray

What people don’t understand is the beauty and joy to be found at the end of life. When I tell people I work at a hospice, they often say “that must be so hard.” But my favourite thing is hearing people’s stories, their experiences, their successes, their failures – the things that life has taught them. I love helping them share these stories with their family members. It helps the family members keep their loved one alive in their memories after he or she dies.

I had a husband of a resident come in six months after she had died to say that he received a Christmas card from her, written to him while in hospice. He was tearful, but so incredibly grateful for this gift. He said the card helped keep her alive for one last Christmas.

Hospice workers encourage conversations about things that want to be said and heard. We create time for families to connect, laugh and cry together. Mostly, we help create a legacy of the resident that will remain with their family.

We have helped someone write letters to each of her children. We have sung favourite songs, played favourite games. We have celebrated birthdays, births, marriages, vow renewals. We have rolled people in their beds out onto the patio to sit in the sun. Often, this is their first time outside the four walls of a hospital or bedroom in months. How amazing it is to have such a thoughtfully designed building that can make this possible – feeling the warmth of the sun directly on their skin, hearing the birds chirping from the nearby feeder and breathing in the fresh air. I see how it provides the resident and their family with a sense of normalcy. This is where the best conversations happen. Families can forget, for a moment, about what is to come, and just enjoy the present.

Hospice is a place that collects nurses and personal support workers such as me. The emotionally challenging work we do weans out the people who think it’s just a job. You do not just show up for a shift, put in the time, and clock in and out. You are responsible for providing this human being, who has lived a whole life, with the care and dignity they deserve as they finish it. We help ensure that all loose ends are tied. Sometimes, these things are big, such as arranging a visit from a miniature pony that one of our residents used to show. Sometimes they are small, such as staff sitting at the bedside of a resident who doesn’t have any family, holding their hand, so they don’t die alone.

I have spent time working in hospitals, in long-term care and in the community as I searched for a place where the work that I did matched my beliefs of patient-centred care and individuality. After my first day at the hospice, I knew I had finally found my match. The loss of the residents we care for like family does not take a big piece of us with them but, rather, fills us with purpose and joy. The work we do gives us so much back that the word “rewarding” doesn’t even scrape the surface.

I began working at the hospice in May, 2017. As much as I love the work and what we accomplish, I could never have imagined needing it myself. Shortly after I started, my father was diagnosed with cancer. Soon we were faced with the decision I have seen so many other families struggle with: Do we settle for adequate care in the comfort of our home or do we move to the hospice where we will receive excellent care but in an unfamiliar location? The decision was easy for me, but not so much for my mom. She was afraid that moving him to hospice meant she was giving up her ability to care for her husband. But my mom was relieved to discover that she could still conduct much of the care, even in our facility. She did not have to sacrifice one for the other. With the 24/7 nursing and physician support, Dad – after eight months of suffering from his illness – finally had some peace.

During this time of comfort, he was able to give back to us something we will carry with us forever. He called us all in, on his last good day, told us all how much he loved us and reassured us that he never suffered. He was able to leave me with a recording, telling me what our relationship meant to him and that he would be with me through all of the big life events that he would now miss.

The hospice isn’t a place where people come to die. It is where they come to live – to live well for the little time they have left. It is a place of celebration, connection, comfort and support. It is a place of safety for the dying and the grieving. Experiencing such care with my father has only fuelled my passion to ensure that as many people as possible can have a similar experience.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

To Die Is Different From What Anyone Supposed

Art, philosophy and mortality.

By Joseph Kugelmass

At an overlooked moment in his Essays, Michel de Montaigne writes that “life itself is neither a good nor an evil; life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.” Yet it’s hard for anyone to reckon, before the point is moot, how much good and evil one life shelters in its span. No matter what we do while we’re alive, there’s plenty that we leave unfinished, or that we gape at while it goes awry. There are mistakes that we still might have enough time to mend. Hamlet got it backwards: it’s not death, but life, that “puzzles the will” with its ironies and uncertainty.

Every now and then, however, people manage to outlive themselves. Convicts serving life sentences do, for example, which is why “Folsom Prison Blues” is such a savage, luminous song. Mortally ill people sometimes end up in an equally uncanny position. Leo Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilych, on his deathbed, glimpses the ugly truth of his life: “It occurred to him that what had formerly appeared completely impossible to him, that he had not lived his life as he should have, might be true. It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away—that they might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right.”

Russian literature is full of people like Ivan. Prince Myshkin (in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot) eventually realizes that “for a long time now, he had not been talking about what he needed to talk about, and had not been doing what he needed to do.” The horror of this realization breaks his spirit, and he succumbs to seizures and catalepsy, dead to the world. A quieter storm breaks over Lambert Strether’s head in The Ambassadors, by Henry James: “I’m too old…What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion.”

Outcries of regret like these carry an emotional charge for us, the audience, that can be hard to explain. Is the finality of death, prison, or old age really profound just because—to quote Michel Houellebecq—the goal of life’s been missed? Critics have spent their whole lives on the works of Henry James only to conclude that “the idea of ‘too late’” was some kind of regrettable obsession on James’s part (see, e.g., Berthold 1983). After all, the curtain does have to fall, sooner or later.

Fortunately, these epiphanies that reach us from death’s farther shore aren’t really bemoaning lost opportunities. Instead, they are bits of fire carried down from those Olympian peaks where life appears as it really is: a frenzied circus of petty motives, bootless efforts, and misunderstandings. Death is the greatest moral agent in all of life. It boils each individual down to her most generous acts; nothing else survives. We are the sum of our gifts to the people who will outlive us. Thus it does matter what a dying man decides to regret. His regrets, useless to him, are the bitter correctives that we survivors may choose to adopt.

Literature’s stuffy cousin, philosophy, is always playing a game of death. The philosopher tries to abstract truths about life from human experiences, impartially, as if she hadn’t lived them herself. Baruch Spinoza famously wrote that philosophy should consider the world sub specie aeternatis, “from the perspective of eternity.” Erasmus, in The Praise of Folly, paints a vivid picture of Menippus (who, supposedly, lived on the moon) doing just that: 

“If a man like Menippus could look down from the moon and behold those innumerable rufflings of mankind, he would think he saw a swarm of flies and gnats quarreling among themselves, fighting, laying traps for one another, snatching, playing, wantoning, growing up, falling, and dying. Nor is it to be believed what stir, what broils, this little creature raises, and yet in how short a time it comes to nothing itself; while sometimes war, other times pestilence, sweeps off many thousands of them together.”

It’s a comical picture, but there’s a great deal of forgiveness in it as well. When it’s our turn to die, there’s no longer any reason to stay angry at people who loved us, or cheated us, or whom we envied. Recrimination and bitterness lose their impetus. The facts of life don’t alter just because we die; if we lived forever, we’d still behave like idiots from time to time. But the fact of death, seen clearly and steadily, drags many other things with it into the light. At the moment of his death, when he’s murdered, Lester Burnham (in American Beauty) “can’t feel anything but gratitude for every moment of my stupid little life.”

Philosophy as we know it began when Plato sat down and tried to make sense of the murder of Socrates; the vicious Athenians who killed him to preserve their monopoly on morals become, in The Republic, simple cave-dwellers frightened of sunlight. Their cruelty is pardonable blindness; in order to write about the death of Socrates, in a fashion that honored his greatness, Plato had to make peace with his teacher’s executioners.

We tend to think of “objectivity” as a cold, rational perspective that doesn’t take sides on questions of morality. We associate it with empirical observation and scientific testing. That’s a tremendous misunderstanding. To be objective is to grasp something as a whole. It lays bare the threads that connect a senseless murder in Reno with a “fancy dining car” on a passing Folsom train. It’s realizing, as Plato did, that Socrates couldn’t have become so widely known and admired in a city less dangerous to him than Athens. It means remembering, like Ivan Ilych, the impulses towards something better that one felt, repressed, ignored, all for the sake of a life not worth living in the first place.

Walt Whitman wrote, in his “Song of Myself,” “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” For, as he says in the preceding line, “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” To see that, instead of just divining and proclaiming it, is the work of philosophers: those few who teach themselves to die with eyes open.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Vancouver photographer offers solace to those dealing with death

Grief Narratives website allows users to reflect on the end of days

Josh Neufeld documented his father’s death through a series of photographs called “Meeting Mortality.”

By John Kurucz

Josh Neufeld has a special affinity for turkey necks.

It’s not that they taste particularly good, nor were they a staple on his plate since childhood.

Neufeld’s late father Dietmar loved the neck. It was his go-to whenever turkey was served at a holiday meal.

Dietmar died in September 2015 after a brief battle with cancer.

Thanksgiving dinner that year was the first family gathering after Dietmar’s death.

“I sat in his spot and in his honour, I ate the whole neck and blubbered like a buffoon because it was like ‘OK, this is our life now,’” Josh recalled. “It’s four Christmases later, but still that feeling doesn’t change. It sucks.”

Outside of the culinary nod, Neufeld continues to pay tribute to his father in a manner that’s profoundly personal, yet completely universal.

Neufeld’s website Grief Narratives invites people the world over to share their photos, thoughts, feelings and emotions as they experience death in their own unique way.

The online platform has garnered interest across Europe and as far away as South Africa.

The site was born partly out of Neufeld’s experience photographing the end of his dad’s life, a project called Meeting Mortality.

Across roughly 30 photos, Neufeld documented the final 19 days of his father’s life in hospital.

“My dad never did see the photos, which really messes with my head,” said Neufeld, a professional photographer by trade.

Neufeld hatched the idea in the spring of 2015 upon visiting a dying relative in California. His uncle was simultaneously battling Parkinson’s disease and cancer and sat the roughly 50 family members down to prepare them for the end.

“You walk away from a conversation like that and you’re like, OK, that really realigns priorities and shifts perspective and helps you look at life a little differently,” Neufeld said.

Volunteering at a hospice was to be Neufeld’s next step but Dietmar fell ill before his son could find a volunteer placement.

Dietmar was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on July 13 and died Sept. 9. He was 66. He was the department head of classical, near eastern and religious studies at UBC, an avid cyclist and loved taking the piss.

“Him and I would spend hours out by the fire chatting,” Neufeld recalled. “He could go deep about anything religious and he taught ancient Greek language. But then he could also sit there and shoot the shit about the most meaningless, stupid stuff.”

Documenting the end was done so with his Dietmar’s blessing. He also came up with the name “Meeting Mortality.” Neufeld discussed the idea with his mom and three sisters and got buy-in, though not totally.

“My oldest sister doesn’t really like to look at those photos,” Neufeld said. “But I think they just understood where it was coming from.”

Neufeld has since gone on to photograph the end of days for other families. Last year, he interviewed 22 people about their experiences confronting mortality, taking photos as they spoke.

He hopes to expand Grief Narratives into a multi-media platform where users can pay tribute to loved ones via text, photos, video and other media.

It’s a project not necessarily intended to normalize death, but to give community and a space to reflect for those who need it.

“I hope it becomes something people use and find value in,” he said. “I’m trying to show people that it’s an option. It’s not going to be for everyone.”

Neufeld’s work can be seen online at griefnarratives.com and joshneufeldphotography.com.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!