Any pet owner will tell you that losing them is as great a pain as losing any member of the family. It’s in these moments we’re at our most vulnerable. One brave photographer has taken on the task of capturing such fragile moments in a series that documents owners struggling to cope in the last moments of their animal’s life.
Ross Taylor’s powerful new series is one that’s sure to bring a tear to the eye of any pet owner. His inspiration came after being “profoundly moved” by witnessing a friend struggle with the deteriorating health of her pet and her subsequent decision of euthanasia. The collection of images, he says, explores the intimacy of the human-animal bond, specifically “the last moments before and after the passing of a pet at home with their owner.”
Leigh Zahn fights back tears as she lays with her dog, Spencer, in her lap a final time, just moments after Spencer passed.“She’s always been my companion. Coco was there for me when he was on deployment,” said Rebecca Cassity, as she fights back tears. Her husband, Drew, was in the military. Dr. McVety reassures her with a hug and consoling words: “This is better treatment than any one of us would get.”
The images were taken in Tampa Bay, Florida throughout 2017-18 and involved working closely with the families involved. The pet owners seen in the images were aided by veterinarians from Lap of Love, a pet euthanasia service that allows for a peaceful passing at home. Founded by Dani McVety, the organization has been working with Caring Pathways, all of whom Taylor expresses utmost gratitude for. “It couldn’t be done without their willingness to participate and belief in the project… They have my respect,” Taylor said.
In one of the most intense moments I’ve ever witnessed, Wendy Lehr cuddled beside her dog, Mimosa, shortly after she passed. The muffled sounds of her cries filled the empty room as she nuzzled against her face. She cried out: “Oh my baby, oh my baby. What am going to do without you?”“It’s tough saying goodbye,” said Carrie Peterson after she dropped sunflowers over the grave of her dog, Asia. The smell of freshly turned earth is what I remember and how peaceful Asia looked within it.
While difficult, the at-home euthanasia process can be one that mitigates some of the painful reality of the end of life. It’s worth noting that the vets I’ve worked with are some of the most compassionate people I’ve met and always offer the families a chance to have a respectful moment afterwards with their beloved pet. It’s in stillness of these moments that I sometimes felt the most emotional for everyone involved.
Bob Zahn touches his dog, Spencer, just moments after the dog passed. His wife, Leigh, left the room immediately, as it was too much for her to take. “She’s going to take it harder maybe than the loss of her parents. Your parents can tell you when something’s wrong, but your dog can’t.”Vanessa Gangadyal consoles her son, Ian, 8, while her husband, Michael Gangadyal, pets their dog, Ally, shortly after its passing.“When I was sick, she knew something was wrong,” said Bob Lutz about their dog, Heidi, who looked up at them moments before she was euthanized due to recent substantial declines in health. His wife, Cindy, added: “she helped take away our pain.” At right, watching, is their other dog, Winnie.
If you were as moved as we were by this powerful series, you can see more of Taylor’s work (some of which saw him nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) at his website and Instagram.
It is common wisdom that nobody ever wished he’d spent more time at the office when he’s at death’s door.
That certainly makes sense, but Michael Ent, a social psychologist at Towson University, did what researchers do when confronted with unproven beliefs. He wondered if it was true. Then he tried to find out.
He and Mary Gergis, a nurse who also teaches at Towson, asked hospice nurses what dying people really talk about at the end of their lives. The 124 nurses from the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association who responded to an online survey said patients are often more consumed with worries about how their families will fare after their deaths than they are with their own fates. They are about as likely to savor lives well led as to grapple with regrets. Many are worried about legacy and finances, a sign, Ent thinks, that some of them do indeed wish they’d worked more, or at least done a better job of managing their money.
Ent said the information, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Death Studies, could be helpful to caregivers. Some may be reluctant to push patients to engage in “life review” — end-of-life discussions of life history that have been shown to help alleviate anxiety and depression. “Sometimes patients might feel that it’s intrusive for a stranger to start asking them about their personal lives,” Ent said. However, if patients bring up some of the topics the nurses mentioned, that could be an opening for a deeper conversation.
Ent, whose wife is a nurse who has worked with hospice patients, said he was interested in what we could learn from the dying. Most of the academic studies he was able to find were more focused on practical aspects of support for the dying than on trying to harvest their wisdom. He couldn’t find anything about which subjects were on their minds. He read The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, written by a Buddhist hospice founder, but Ent wanted to do something more concrete and systematic. He read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, also written by a hospice worker, and particularly questioned the top regret: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Again, Ent was skeptical. “I couldn’t imagine that being a top deathbed reflection,” he said.
For the survey, Ent and Gergis asked the nurses to list up to five “reflections” they heard most frequently from hospice patients. He concedes it would have been better to talk to patients themselves, but said privacy rules make them harder to reach. The nurses’ answers covered a wide range, from regrets to pride to faith in an afterlife. “I don’t want to be a burden” was a common sentiment, and many patients worried about how survivors would cope after they died. Some wished they had taken better care of themselves. Some said they were ready to go, while others wished for more time. They were thinking about whether their lives had mattered.
Ent categorized the comments and found that concern about loved ones was the most common response. Half of the nurses mentioned it. Regrets — these included people who thought they’d worked too much — came up 42 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent for gratitude. Concerns about legacy were cited by 29 percent of the nurses. Some of those people wished they had achieved more. About the same number of nurses said patients often said they were not ready to die (29 percent) as said they were ready (28 percent).
Ent said that the survey results show that hospice workers may want to spend more time allaying patients’ fears about how their deaths will affect family members.
He also thinks that research on what dying patients regret could help healthy people plan for the inevitable. Maybe fewer of us would be “blindsided” by our deaths if we talked more openly about mortality. Better financial planning could prevent many of the worries about unpaid bills.
In 2008, Sister Rose Mary Dougherty created a Companioning the Dying training program. She started with a few basic principles. One was to help caretakers learn to become better listeners. “It’s sitting with a loving alertness,” she says.
By Debra Bruno
In the United States, there’s probably no better way to spoil cocktail party chatter than by introducing the subject of death, dying or the end of life.
Yet, in the same way that the birth process went from a doctor-run event to a movement in which women took charge of their own pregnancies and deliveries, there is growing interest in thinking about the dying process. In part, that’s because the large population bulge of boomers is reaching a point where the end seems not that far away. But also, many people have had the experience of sitting at the bedside of a dying person without the slightest clue what to do.
And increasingly, classes, seminars, and programs are available that try to help people understand how to comfort those in the last stages of life.
Sister Rose Mary Dougherty, 79, a member of the religious order School Sisters of Notre Dame, calls this companioning the dying and she decided to make it a focus when, years ago, she found herself sitting at the bedside of a dying priest who was a friend. Next to her sat another friend, also a priest.
She watched as the two priests sometimes prayed and sometimes were quiet, together, doing nothing at all. At one point, the priest sitting next to her turned and said: “I don’t know what a priest should do anymore. I don’t know what I’m to do here, but I can be here. Maybe that’s my final vocation.”
That’s when it hit her: Even people trained in comforting feel a sense of helplessness when a friend or family member is dying. But she also resolved to do something about it.
So in 2008, Dougherty created a nine-month Companioning the Dyingtraining program, based in Baltimore. Today, the program provides instruction for hospice workers, caregivers, volunteers and family members on how be with someone in their final months or days.
Companioning the Dying concentrates on something that nearly everyone will have to face at some point in their lives. In the past, it was common for elderly family members to live with their adult children as they aged. Their last days were spent at home, surrounded by loved ones.
Society is different now, at least in many places in the industrialized West, where a youth-focused society has pushed end-of-life concerns mostly out of sight. As a result, people can feel unprepared — even panicked — when they have to deal with end-of-life issues.
“We’ve lost the place of dying,” says Jan Booth, a hospice nurse who also helps out with the Companioning the Dying program. “How do we bring aging and illness and dying into some kind of context that doesn’t change the grief that’s inherent, but changes our capacity to be with it?”
Dougherty started with a few basic principles. One was to help caretakers learn to become better listeners. “It’s sitting with a loving alertness,” she says.
Dougherty, now emeritus program director of Companioning the Dying, lives in her order’s residence in Baltimore. Her voice is weakened by Parkinson’s disease, yet her piercing blue eyes demonstrate the same alert presence that she teaches.
Companioning the Dying has something of the feel of group therapy — with readings, exercises and discussions — in which participants can talk freely and without judgment about anything they might have experienced with the dying, Peter Fitz, 75, says. He wanted to get involved in hospice volunteer work and did the program three years ago.
“Every death, and every person, is different,” says Fitz, a retired English professor. “The crucial part is to find out, with the individual not only on any given day or a particular hour or minute,” where they are. The task, then, is “emptying out your suggestions for people and learning to listen in a different way.”
Those “suggestions” can often end up being the worst thing people can do, says Sallie Tisdale, author of “Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them).” People often say things such as “Are you sure the doctor knows what he’s doing?” and “God always has a plan,” she says. “Please don’t say those things.”
She suggests something similar to the Companioning program. “People ask me how to prepare. I say, stand at the doorway and take a self-inventory. Try to drop your own agenda. If the person says, I want to eat ice cream and watch a Yankees game,” just accept that, and do that for them she says.
Lourdes Salazar, a caretaker by profession who also volunteers for her church, St. Camillus in Silver Spring, says that one exercise her Companioning the Dying group did was to choose a day and behave as if it is your last day on Earth. She went out to lunch with her son and told him what she was doing. “I never realized how wonderful it would be to have a lunch with you on my last day,” she told him.
One of the main advantages of Companioning the Dying say participants, is the way it helps them all appreciate their own lives. “When you change your concept about the meaning of death, your life changes,” Salazar says.
Even a nurse who has spent most of her career working with terminally ill children and their families has found that the experience of the course helped her when she was faced with five nearly consecutive deaths in her own family. Janet Will says she thought she was experienced in handling difficult situations. But having the Companioning program allowed her to focus on her own grief and avoid the role of the professional.
“The people who love you the most don’t want to see you grieving any more,” Will says. “Where do you go with that?”
Xaverian Brother Michael McCarthy says that his group ended up being a “tremendously rich melting pot” of people from all walks of life. The group covered details such as what is involved in the dying process, but it also offered time to reflect on being compassionate with oneself even as you help someone else.
It’s not about taking a person’s blood pressure, he says. “You’re going to be present, and if you’re not present with yourself, then your presence isn’t going to be as meaningful” to the dying person.
Peter Fitz remembers visiting a man at a hospice in Baltimore. Fitz didn’t know him. The man was in a “highly agitated” state and couldn’t speak. Fritz asked him if he could nod his head. “Can I take your hand?” he asked. The man nodded yes. The two held hands until the man finally fell asleep.
“In a funny way, he gave me comfort, too,” Fitz says. “It’s an experience that in some important way we shared.”
‘They say you’ve got three months to live.” These were the words I spoke to my then-fiancé when I was 23 years old after learning that his cancer – malignant melanoma that spread to his liver, lungs, pancreas and brain – was likely to be fatal.
At the time, my only experience of “the end” was watching my parents disappear into a room where my grandparents were lying, and of seeing an empty rabbit hut at the end of our garden after the loss of a pet.
When I was 17 years old my father was paralysed from Hodgkins Lymphoma but, after a stem cell transplant, he defeated the odds and made a miraculous recovery. So, I had faith in the power of modern medicine over mortality.
However, not this time.
I was practically still a child when a doctor ushered me into a private room, whilst my soon-to-be husband, Eoghan, was in a chemotherapy session, and revealed his prognosis. I asked if I could be the one to tell him, and they readily agreed.
Perhaps, even doctors will do anything to avoid saying the T-word. Terminal.
In the next three months, I had a crash course in end-of-life conversation: the jargon, the euphemisms and the social awkwardness.
I froze with fear when I walked into the chemo ward and heard another patient ask my partner, “Have you ever thought about euthanasia?” But, in a way, that was better than the wall of silence.
After my husband died three weeks after our wedding day, even my closest friends evaporated or became stiff in my company. In the next few months, as I rebelled against my grief – drinking too much and becoming promiscuous – nobody dared challenge me or raise the topics I ached to discuss.
What on earth are you doing?
Do you really think this is helping you?
How does it feel to marry a man who is dying?
…Do you want to die too?
Do you know what to say when a friend’s loved one dies? Have you thought about the day your own parent, partner or best friend may no longer be visible? How would you discuss it, in a way that would be supportive, constructive, and even light-hearted?
If you don’t know the answer, you’re not alone.
A new study from the Royal College of Physicians in the UK has urged medical professionals to improve their bedside manner when it comes to discussing death, after identifying that “timely, honest conversations” about patients’ futures are not happening. However it’s not only doctors who need to become more comfortable with these conversations.
It’s been suggested that millennials are the generation most fearful of death, unlike our grandparents, raised through world wars, who learnt that life can be short. As medicine advances and life expectancy increases, we prefer to think of death as our “future self’s problem”.
But is postponing the inevitable increasing our terror of it?
As psychologists report a rise in young people presenting with anxiety linked to death, it’s time for honest, open, educational conversations about loss of life, and how it can look. Its not enough to be aware of Facebook’s ‘death policy’, warn experts.
“Death is still a certainty even if people are living longer,” says clinical psychologist Renee Mill from Sydney’s Anxiety Solutions CBT.
“When treating anxiety, exposure is what works and avoidance increases the problem. Talking about death or visiting a dying person will decrease your fear of death and make it easier to accept that it is a part of life. Every funeral we attend, no matter how hard, actually helps to reduce anxiety in this way too.”
And, it’s never too early to think about the end. “Planning in life is important,” says Mill. “We plan our careers, we save, we want to buy property – end-of-life is another part we need to plan. It means we get our wishes fulfilled and gives guidance to our loved ones who otherwise have to pick up the pieces.”
In a good way, change is happening. Since 2017, the multimedia project We’re All Going to Die has encouraged people to embrace their immortality and use it to empower their lives, through educational films and festivals.
The award-winning podcast, GriefCast, hosted by comedian Cariad Lloyd whose father died when she was a teenager, sees entertainers speak with startling honesty – and surprising humour – about death, from the logistics of palliative care and funeral plans to the long-term effects of bereavement.
When we can talk openly about death, we may also increase our chances of reducing suicides. To help people to help each other, Lifeline offer an online course in QPR – the equivalent of CPR for people experiencing a suicidal crisis.
As part of the training – which only takes an hour and costs $10 – people are urged not to tiptoe around the conversations. Instead, be direct: “Do you feel like you want to die?”
In our social circles, we need to discuss worst-case-scenarios. Do you have a will? Do you have death insurance? Are you an organ donor? As an Australian immigrant living 16,000 kilometres from my parents, I always have enough money in my bank account for an emergency flight home. Because, nobody lives forever.
It’s confronting but it’s necessary
During my book tour, I cried on stage for the first time whilst discussing my journey from a 23-year-old widow to a 34-year-old wife and mother of two. Because, for the first time in a decade, I have reached a place where I can talk about my experience of death – and really be heard.
I shared the reason I light a candle in my bedroom every evening and say a prayer: help me to act from a place of love, not fear.
“If my dad’s cancer comes back, on that day I will light that candle,” I said, “If my husband, who is here with my newborn, dies and I am widowed again then I will light that candle to remind myself to act from a place of love.”
We need to talk about death to be active participants in the full spectrum of life: so we can decide who to be when a doctor pulls us into a private room, when we answer the phone to bad news, when we say goodbye for the last time.
We are so scared of death, we don’t discuss what an honour it is to watch someone die; to be present – really present – when someone takes their last breath, to lean in and breathe them in, to put your head on their chest as their heart stops beating and kiss their skin as it transforms.
Nothing so alters a person as learning you have a terminal illness.
Ronni Bennett, who writes a popular blog about aging, discovered that recently when she heard that cancer had metastasized to her lungs and her peritoneum (a membrane that lines the cavity of the abdomen).
There is no cure for your condition, Bennett was told by doctors, who estimated she might have six to eight months of good health before symptoms began to appear.
Right then and there, this 77-year-old resolved to start doing things differently — something many people might be inclined to do in a similar situation.
No more extended exercise routines every morning, a try-to-stay-healthy activity that Bennett had forced herself to adopt but disliked intensely.
No more watching her diet, which had allowed her to shed 40 pounds several years ago and keep the weight off, with considerable effort.
No more worrying about whether memory lapses were normal or an early sign of dementia — an irrelevant issue now.
No more pretending that the cliche “we’re all terminal” (since death awaits all of us) is especially insightful. This abstraction has nothing to do with the reality of knowing, in your gut, that your own death is imminent, Bennett realized.
“It colors everything,” she told me in a long and wide-ranging conversation recently. “I’ve always lived tentatively, but I’m not anymore because the worst has happened — I’ve been told I’m going to die.”
No more listening to medical advice from friends and acquaintances, however well-intentioned. Bennett has complete trust in her medical team at Oregon Health & Science University, which has treated her since diagnosing pancreatic cancer last year. She’s done with responding politely to people who think they know better, she said.
And no more worrying, even for a minute, what anyone thinks of her. As Bennett wrote in a recent blog post, “All kinds of things . . . fall away at just about the exact moment the doctor says, ‘There is no treatment.’ ”
Four or five times a day, a wave of crushing fear washes through her, Bennett told me. She breathes deeply and lets it pass. And no, psychotherapy isn’t something she wants to consider.
Instead, she’ll feel whatever it is she needs to feel — and learn from it. This is how she wants to approach death, Bennett said: alert, aware, lucid. “Dying is the last great adventure we have — the last bit of life — and I want to experience it as it happens,” she said.
Writing is, for Bennett, a necessity, the thing she wants to do more than anything during this last stage of her life. For decades, it’s been her way of understanding the world — and herself.
In a notebook, Bennett has been jotting down thoughts and feelings as they come to her. Some she already has shared in a series of blog posts about her illness. Some she’s saving for the future.
There are questions she hasn’t figured out how to answer yet.
“Can I still watch trashy TV shows?”
“How do I choose what books to read, given that my time is finite?
“What do I think about rationale suicide?” (Physician-assisted death is an option in Oregon, where Bennett lives.)
Along with her “I’m done with that” list, Bennett has a list of what she wants to embrace:
Ice cream and cheese, her favorite foods. Walks in the park near her home. Get-togethers with her public affairs discussion group. A romp with kittens or puppies licking her and making her laugh. A sense of normalcy, for as long as possible. “What I want is my life, very close to what it is,” she explained. And deep conversations with friends. “What has been most helpful and touched me most are the friends who are willing to let me talk about this,” she said.
On her blog, she has invited readers to “ask any questions at all” and made it clear she welcomes frank communication.
“I’m new to this — this dying thing — and there’s no instruction book. I’m kind of fascinated by what you do with yourself during this period, and questions help me figure out what I think,” she told me.
Recently, a reader asked Bennett if she was angry about her cancer. No, Bennett answered. “Early on, I read about some cancer patients who get hung up on ‘why me?’ My response was ‘why not me?’ Most of my family died of cancer and, 40 percent of all Americans will have some form of cancer during their lives.”
Dozens of readers have responded with shock, sadness and gratitude for Bennett’s honesty about subjects that usually aren’t discussed in public.
“Because she’s writing about her own experiences in detail and telling people how she feels, people are opening up and relaying their experiences — things that maybe they’ve never said to anyone before,” Millie Garfield, 93, a devoted reader and friend of Bennett’s, told me in a phone conversation.
Garfield’s parents never talked about illness and death the way Bennett is doing. “I didn’t have this close communication with them, and they never opened up to me about all the things Ronni is talking about,” she said.
For the last year, Bennett and her former husband, Alex Bennett, have broadcast video conversations every few weeks over YouTube. (He lives across the country in New York City.) “What you’ve written will be valuable as a document of somebody’s life and how to leave it,” he told her recently as they talked about her condition with poignancy and laughter.
Other people may have very different perspectives as they take stock of their lives upon learning they have a terminal illness. Some may not want to share their innermost thoughts and feelings; others may do so willingly or if they feel other people really want to listen.
During the past 15 years, Bennett chose to live her life out loud through her blog. For the moment, she’s as committed as ever to doing that.
“There’s very little about dying from the point of view of someone who’s living that experience,” she said. “This is one of the very big deals of aging and, absolutely, I’ll keep writing about this as long as I want to or can.”
The sunrise burns off the morning mist over the remains of trenches in the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont Hamel on November 09, 2018 in Albert, France.
Despite growing up in a death-denying culture, place and time in Canada, pretty long past the days where dead bodies were openly displayed and waked at a family home instead of a funeral home, I have come as far as my 57th year (starting this week) with an openness to conversations about death and dying not normally heard among my peers.
There are many experiences that may have contributed to this. Perhaps being born in November, the Month of the Dead, just two days after Remembrance Day, had an impact. Being named after Ireland’s Deirdre of the Sorrows (not intentionally, my mom assures me) who is said to have died by suicide, perhaps by having her head smashed on a rock by the passing royal chariot (nice touch), may have played a part in my ability to banter about death more freely than others.
Becoming a Catholic, when I was 15, introduced me to ways of ritualizing death and praying for the dead just in time to help me cope with the deaths of seven of my high school peers in three separate car accidents and my stepbrother’s death by suicide a year later.
I also credit my love of excellent rock music for giving me a healthy outlook on death. Take Pink Floyd, for instance.
“And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it, you’ve gotta go sometime.”
Lying in bed (just like Brian Wilson did) as a teenager, falling asleep, high, with giant headphones blasting these lyrics into my brain, coupled with Trooper’s, “We’re here for a good time, not a long time,” has pretty much described my approach to death, and therefore life, or my approach to life, and therefore death.
It’s that approach, 14 years of parish ministry and more that I have been bringing to what’s called a “Social Innovation Lab.” In this case, the laboratory includes 25 or so palliative care clinicians, social activists, consumers, policy and system leaders, health care leaders and change agents from across Canada to concentrate for six solid days on one question: “How can we change the culture of our health system so the palliative approach, which creates a truly person-centred system, becomes the norm across the whole system?”
This “Palliative Care and Complexity Science Laboratory” is what brought me to be sitting in a circle of a dozen or so residents from a local seniors’ apartment building with three palliative care doctors, discussing monothanatophobia — the fear of dying alone. Although the word itself was brand new to me and all of the people who accepted our invitation to come and discuss it, the concept wasn’t.
We chose our topic after reading about the man who died alone in Hamilton’s social housing recently and went undiscovered for a couple of days before a woman below found some of his remains leaking into her apartment. Nobody wants that to be the story of their last days alive — or dead — on Earth.
There is strong evidence to show why we need to be more intentional about building community now and in the days ahead. Data about living situations from the 2016 Canadian census show for the first time that the number of one-person households has surpassed all other types of living situations. More than a quarter of all households were people living alone.
Applying the principles of palliative care means having conversations about living, not dying. It’s more than making sure community exists to support people in their final days of life. It’s also making sure people are connected while they’re living in a way that respects privacy yet decreases social isolation so no one dies alone.
One great read I recommend on the topic of death and dying is “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You,” by Dr. Kathy Kortes-Miller.
With an essential chapter for anyone on social media called, “Posting, Tweeting and Texting: Dying in a Digital World,” I urge you to make this a holiday gift to your family so you can “out” the conversation of death and dying to make it, as Kortes-Miller says, a logical extension of our living.”
I’m uncomfortable with death. A staunch atheist who grew up Christian, I used to believe heaven or hell awaited me on the other side. It took years of anxiety attacks and therapy to come to terms with mortality, with there being nothing afterward, and I find peace by not thinking about it.
But tonight, the whole point is to think about it. The mortician warns us that at any moment, someone’s dead body could interrupt the show. Even mine.
Tim Lilyquist coolly gives the omen to the 25 or so seated at the Chapel of Angels Mortuary in Grass Valley. His death-positivity group Posy-Filled Pockets is just beginning its October presentation. The projector screen reads: “Death. Everyone’s doing it.”
It’s not like we’ll see a literal dead body (though if we hear commotion in the back, Lilyquist says it could be because of that). A fresh corpse would remind us that, even though we’re all here to laugh, learn and contemplate our unexistence, death strikes at any time. Tonight’s topic of discussion: the afterlife.
Lilyquist and founder Rachel James open the night by defining death positivity, which boils down to allowing death to be a part of everyday conversation, even if it’s scary.
“Death is something our culture is extremely weird about,” James told SN&R. “We don’t talk about it, we don’t plan for it, and anyone interested in it is considered morbid or weird when it is the only personal experience besides birth really that we all have.”
Four speakers gave talks that were funny, morbid and informative. One made a case that seances, mummies and telephones were ways humans tried to call up the dead. Another theorized that water is a parasite that infects and animates our otherwise lifeless bodies. She used The Stuff as a metaphor. In the ‘80s B-horror movie, railroad workers discover a tasty, yogurt-like substance growing out of the ground, which they package and sell like hotcakes. It turns out, it’s alive and mass-consumes its consumers. To add to the strangeness, she offered everyone water before she started. Sneaky!
In the modest church space, it felt somewhere between awkward youth group night, lo-fi Ted Talk and a giggling gathering of goths. But it’s more than that. At the front of the show, James told the crowd that the talks are meant to lure you into the workshops—the less peculiar part of the project—where they help people with more pragmatic issues related to death, including how to create a living will, who to call first when a loved one passes, and eco-alternatives to embalming. You know, stuff we should be planning for, but our culture’s aversion to death gets in the way.
Posy-Filled Pockets cofounder Tim Lilyquist found his calling as a mortician.
Several recent studies confirm this. One in 2017 by caring.com showed that only four out of 10 Americans have a trust or living will. A 2013 survey by the Institute of Medicine showed that 90 percent of Americans thought it was important to have end-of-life discussions with their loved ones, but only 30 percent did. And a 2013 Pew Research Center report showed that 47 percent of Americans have experienced a death in their lives.
If listening to macabre presentations softens people enough to start planning for death in a responsible way, then James says she feels like she’s succeeded.
Though Posy-Filled Pockets started in 2016, it went on hiatus that year when James found out that her father was diagnosed with Stage 4 esophageal cancer. His death, and her similar diagnosis a year earlier, made much of what she advocates become crystal clear.
DEADx Talks
Death positivity is now a national movement. One of its most prominent figures is Caitlin Doughty, a mortician who wrote a morbidly funny memoir titled Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and founded the death acceptance organization called Order of the Good Death, which shares death-positive content online and hosts similar gatherings to Posy-Filled Pockets.
James was one of the first people to join the Order. At the time, she was the editor-in-chief of Atlas Obscura, an offbeat travel site with her own personal focus often being on death-related destinations, like an abandoned brothel in Lassen County that is rumored to be haunted.
“I’ve always been drawn to [death], and I think for most of us who are in the death industry, it’s because we experienced death in early age or had an experience that left us with a lot of questions,” James says.
In 2015, James’ surprise breast cancer diagnosis led her to move back to
Cofounder Rachel James, one of the first to join the Order of the Good Death, was a travel writer and editor for an obscure travel magazine called Atlas Obscura.
Grass Valley, her hometown. She put writing on hold and got a double mastectomy while in her second trimester with her now 3-year-old son.
She’s in remission now. The experience was shocking, but James says it showed her death wasn’t an abstract concept.
“I had never thought about a [living will], or anything like that,” James says. “How can I be so involved in this topic and still not have thought about the practicalities of it for myself? It kind of got me more serious about the topic.”
Later that year, she met Lilyquist. As a kid, he imagined himself as a homicide detective, but with no real interest in law enforcement and a dead-pan sense of humor, it transmuted into death industry work, which he’s happy doing. He says he enjoys the questions folks have regarding his career choice, like what happens in the cremation process.
“Once I started working at the mortuary, I saw how widespread it was that people considered death a taboo subject,” Lilyquist explains. “Especially the topic of grief. It definitely helped expose me to a greater variety of how it’s affecting people.”
James insisted that he co-host a death-themed monthly event that was distinctly Grass Valley. The initial Posy-Filled Pockets was a success, something James wasn’t sure about at first, since the Nevada County small town is no Los Angeles or San Francisco, where similar Death Salons are sometimes held at convention centers.
Lo-fi elements are part of its charm. Many of the speakers aren’t professionals, including Courtney Williams, who’s spoken twice at Posy-Filled Pockets. Once about how “fashion kills” (about people wearing dresses dyed with arsenic, for instance) and a second time about her ex-husband’s suicide.
“People are normally uncomfortable in mortuaries,” Williams says. “You think it’s probably an awkward conversation so maybe people won’t be raising their hands and laughing about stuff. People were really engaging with the information, which was surprising to me.”
In 2019, Posy-Filled Pockets have several themed events and workshops lined up, a new website, new speakers and a podcast in the works. Lilyquist and James are resurrecting their efforts to get people talking about death.
But after watching Posy-Filled Pocket’s presentation, I realized that death-positivity isn’t just about thinking about the end; It’s about cracking jokes, finding weird stories to spin and studying all the oddball edges of this scary seemingly straight-forward topic, and having fun with something we are told is in no ways fun.
It is pretty strange that we all eventually cease to exist one day, and why not celebrate that? My dog, who’s blissfully unaware of death, will never know the joy of laughing at her mortality.
