Tag: Death Talk

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For loved ones, scattering of ashes becomes a healing journey

By BOB TEDESCHI

Scatter_ashes

On a January afternoon in 2013 when an oncologist first raised the possibility of Evan Scofield’s death, his mother Susan Scofield half-jokingly asked what she should do with his body. He was 25 at the time.

“Not my body, my ashes,” he told her. “Scatter me.”

He died six months later at age 26, and over the past three years his mother has honored that wish, enlisting a group of his closest survivors to scatter his ashes, if not to the four corners of the earth, something close to it.

They were also asked to write about the experience, and their tributes are collected on a website, ScatterEvan.com. It’s a testament to his life, of course, but it testifies, in particular, to a remarkable posthumous gift he arranged for his loved ones.

“I told him what I thought I’d do with all of his ashes and he said ‘No, not that,’” Scofield recalled during a recent phone call. “He said ‘You go to Scotland,’ because we’d talked a lot about hitting the Scotch distilleries together. With everybody else, his attitude was that they would know where to go.”

They did.

Evan’s ashes have found their way to the Ganga River, a rain-soaked garden in Kyoto, the Gulf of Alaska, a fjord in Iceland, and a lake on New Zealand’s south island.

Less exotic spots have also been quietly consecrated: a burger joint in LA, a Weezer cruise, the American Museum of Natural History.

“He was a very unusual person,” as his mom put it.

“He kept saying every year from age 7 on that we should go to Thermopylae for vacation. We said stop it; we’re not going to Thermopylae,” she said. “He loved anything to do with the ocean, and Vikings, and ancient history. Epic literature was his thing.”

He also had a thing for narwhals, so his friend Marc Seedorf saw to it that some of him ended up in Iceland in November 2014. Seedorf was joined by Evan’s close friend Alexander Maxwell and Evan’s partner of seven years, Ursula Strauss, who was a unifying force in the project.

Seedorf’s description of the experience ended with this passage:

“It was the most beautiful landscape I had ever witnessed. A house sat on the hillside with no view of another building in sight. We spent all day hiking the surrounding hills, learning, drinking fresh glacial water. After leaving one of Evan’s Buddhas on a window sill in the house, we found a spot on the shore for the scatter. I poured the ashes of my best friend in my hand and let him go into the water. All that I wanted when we were exploring Iceland was for Evan to be there to tell us about the Vikings that had once traveled those seas. To watch him climb some rocks he probably shouldn’t be climbing and somehow manage to come away unharmed. To sing us songs and translate the story of the northern lights at night. I feel very overwhelmed as I write this. With sadness and nostalgia. With anger. But I will be forever grateful that even after he was gone, Evan still made sure I was part of his adventure.”

There is danger, of course, in making too much of one community’s approach to memorializing a loved one. And Scofield does not for a moment suggest that this group’s decision is somehow prescriptive for others. Few would have the means to raise $45,000 in donations for the project, as they did, for instance.

And yet.

n ways, the “Scatter Evan” project embodies a sentiment that appears to be gathering momentum in the broader popular culture, outside the context of death. For the past decade or so, psychologists and philosophers have promoted the wisdom of buying experiences, not things, given the often deeper and longer-lasting emotional impact that experiences can offer.

Rather than leaving behind a monument or objects that might offer solace to survivors, ashes have become a conduit for a more experience-based connection to those who have died.

None of these things necessarily change the trajectory of a survivor’s mourning, said Holly G. Prigerson, who teaches and researches grief and end-of-life care, among other things, at the Weill Cornell Medical College.

“People always ask about burial rituals and whether they’re therapeutic and promote bereavement adjustment or not,” she said. “Sometimes, as may be the case here, how surviving loved ones memorialize the deceased is more an indicator of their adjustment than a promoter of it.”

Scofield said the project “gave us another focus and another form of communion with a group of people. Even for those who just donated money, it gave them an opportunity to feel like they did something, so they felt like they weren’t just completely powerless.”

The official final scatter will happen this summer, at the family’s summer gathering spot in Cape Hatteras. They will build a pitfire on the beach and throw in the rest of his ashes, his urn, and a Buddha statue Evan had been carving. He asked her to burn it, just as he asked her to let go of any personal belongings that might become a shrine, as he put it.

An unofficial last scatter will follow at a later date. “We’re holding a little bit left,” Scofield said. “We’re going to Thermopylae.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Right to die: Should ‘mature minors’ have access to doctor-assisted death?

MPs wrestle with sensitive moral and legal questions in crafting new physician-assisted death law

By Kathleen Harris

A woman holds the hand of her mother who is dying from cancer during her final hours at a palliative care hospital in Winnipeg in 2010. A woman holds the hand of her mother who is dying from cancer during her final hours at a palliative care hospital in Winnipeg in 2010.
A woman holds the hand of her mother who is dying from cancer during her final hours at a palliative care hospital in Winnipeg in 2010.
A woman holds the hand of her mother who is dying from cancer during her final hours at a palliative care hospital in Winnipeg in 2010.

This week’s parliamentary report on the right to die has put a profound moral and legal question to federal legislators: Should children suffering from incurable illness be allowed to end their own life with the help of a doctor?

Among the 21 recommendations from the joint panel of MPs and senators is one to allow “competent mature minors” to request a physician’s help to die.

The committee tabled its 70-page report Thursday called “Medical Assistance in Dying: A Patient-Centred Approach.” It suggests a two-phased approach, with an initial phase allowing doctor-assisted death to adults 18 years and older and then expanding it to mature minors within three years.

Dr. Derrick Smith, head of psychiatry at Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital and chair of the physicians’ advisory council of Dying with Dignity Canada, said it is right to determine the capacity and competence rather than the arbitrary age of someone making such a “momentous decision.”

Age is ‘arbitrary’

“Some people who are 21 do not have the capacity to consent and some people who are 14 do,” he said. “It’s really artificial to try and have an age as a cut-off point. You’re much better off going with something measurable like capacity to consent. If the cut-off is 18 and we’re prepared to let people 18 have physician-assisted death, why would we want to have 17-year-olds suffer interminably?”

The committee’s recommendation to include mature minors has generated much controversy, with critics insisting it goes far beyond the parameters set out by the landmark Supreme Court decision on Feb. 6, 2015, that struck down the ban on assisted death.

But Smith believes the discussion should go even further — to include young children.

“The committee isn’t going to address that, but as a society we should,” he said. “Obviously a five-year-old is not going to be able to give consent for something like that, but should we allow a substitute decision maker like the parent to say, “Johnny’s had enough suffering. I think it’s time that we assist him to terminate the suffering.”

Conservative MP Mike Cooper, who filed a dissenting report with three of his fellow caucus members, said including minors deviates from the “clear road map” set out by the Supreme Court. He called it “illogical” that someone not old enough to vote would be old enough to decide to die.

“What this does is open the door for someone under the age of 18 who may have an underlying mental health issue to be able to access doctor-assisted dying, and I don’t think anyone would think that’s a good thing,” he said.

To date, Belgium and the Netherlands are the only two countries that allow minors to obtain medical assistance in death. There is little research or data on how it has worked so far, and Cooper said Canada is heading in a dangerous direction.

Uncharted territory

“I think there are risks when you’re talking about minors; about their ability to have capacity, a full appreciation of the consequences,” he said. “Most jurisdictions have not gone down this road, and I think from a policy standpoint we’re entering uncharted territory and we should proceed with a great deal of caution.”

Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, who co-chaired the committee on medical assistance in death, said the Supreme Court decision was based on two adults with physical conditions, but the report “hugs closely” to charter rights of all Canadians, including minors and the mentally ill.

“What other issues could come up and should be in the legislation to ensure that Canadians’ rights are protected in the spirit of the charter, in the spirit of the decision?” he said. “We looked at how age could be a charter issue, ability could be a charter issue, capacity could be a charter issue.”

While the issue has drawn bitter political battle lines, it is also dividing Canada’s medical community.

Dr. Dawn Davies, medical director of the palliative care program at Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and chair of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s bioethics committee, believes the panel should have stuck to consenting, competent adults. She said it’s “premature” to set a three-year deadline to include minors.

In most cases, palliative care can mitigate and manage the pain and suffering of patients, yet she is one of fewer than 20 full-time pediatric palliative care physicians across the country.

“Until we can improve that, I have very grave concerns, because I think a lot of adults are asking for assisted death out of a sense of control … but I think in the case of children, we don’t even know what their issues are.”

Court challenges expected

Davies expects that requests from minors could wind up in court with challenges from medical professionals, child protection services or even relatives.

She could not predict how many minors would actually seek medical assistance to end their own lives, but in her experience most terminally ill patients want to live to reach milestones such as birthdays or graduation.

But she worries about young people who may have devastating injuries, like quadriplegics whose life-altering experience causes despair.

“In many cases, people do go on to live productive, fulfilling lives, and I really worry about new catastrophic injuries for minors — that possibly leading to requests,” she said.

Davies said with advancements in pain management and end-of-life care, the issue is less about preventing pain and suffering and more about control over ending one’s own life. She calls that a “real departure” for human beings.

“For myself, I’d say it goes beyond being a physician. It is such an about-face for our whole society that one person will be able to take the life of another person for any reason,” she said. “I just don’t think personally that I would ever be comfortable with that.”

The Liberal government has until June 6 to pass new legislation on doctor assisted death.

Complete Article HERE!

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Funeral Flower Terminology

File under:  Funeral Fun Facts

Funeral Flower Terminology

Sending sympathy flowers to a family in mourning is a great way to show your support and contribute to the funeral arrangements. However, it can be difficult to know what kind of funeral flowers to send or what each type of bouquet entails.

This quick guide to funeral flower terms and options should help give you a clearer understanding of what kind of choices are out there—and what funeral flower etiquette dictates you should do.

  • Arrangement: The arrangement is what shape and style the funeral flowers will be delivered in. Some of the options include basket arrangements, vase arrangements, wreath arrangements, cross arrangements, and pedestal arrangements, just to name a few.
  • Blooming Plant: If you want to send something that will last longer than cut flowers, a blooming plant is a good choice. These potted plants come with a bright floral bloom.
  • Casket Blanket: This “blanket” of flowers is draped over the casket to provide a visually stunning effect.
  • Casket Scarf: Instead of an entire blanket, some families choose to decorate a casket with a smaller scarf of flowers that can be artfully arranged.
  • Easel: If a wreath or cross arrangement of funeral flowers will be on display, you may need a frame to hold it up and provide a visual centerpiece. These can be rented or provided by most funeral homes.
  • Filler: Most flower arrangements are made up of several large and beautiful flowers, surrounded by what is known as “filler.” Ferns, fronds, baby’s breath, and other less expensive items help to make the arrangement look nice and full without making it too costly.
  • Flower Bearer: As the name suggests, this individual is similar to ring bearer/flower girl in a wedding, and walks before or after the casket carrying flower tributes.
  • Flower Car: A special vehicle may be needed to transport the flowers to the cemetery or funeral home for a secondary service.
  • Grave Blanket: This display can be made of flowers, ribbons, greens, and other floral fillers to cover a newly laid grave. It is meant to be temporary.
  • In Lieu of Donation: Some families would prefer not to receive funeral flowers, and ask instead that you make a donation to a charity or other organization instead.
  • Potted Plant: Not all funeral flowers have to be floral in design. Many families prefer the lush greenery of potted plants, which can be blooming or made up of ferns and other non-floral designs.
  • Spray: The most common type of funeral flower, a casket spray is an arrangement of florals and leafy greens that is designed to be displayed on the top of a closed casket.

For a more detailed list of what types of funeral flowers are available and what is appropriate to send to the family, you may want to contact a florist directly. Most of them have considerable experience working with funeral displays and will be able to direct you toward the best options for your relationship to the family and your budget.

Complete Article HERE!

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Video Game Review: ‘That Dragon, Cancer’

A couple built a game inspired by the life and loss of their young son. I’m a bereaved father who played it. Here’s my experience.

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Around the time Amy and Ryan Green’s third child, Joel, turned one, he was found to have AT/RT, an aggressive pediatric cancer of the central nervous system. Surgery, radiation, and aggressive chemotherapy were employed, but another tumor emerged anyway. Initially given four months to live, Joel lived another four years, until the cancer finally killed him in March 2014.

Ryan is a video game developer, and Amy is a freelance writer. Their desire to memorialize their son led them to take a groundbreaking step: to create a video game about Joel’s life and death, and their experience of living through that process. The result, That Dragon, Cancer, was released for Macintosh, PC, and the Ouya console on January 12th, 2016, with a Linux version coming soon.

First, disclosures. I was an early backer of That Dragon, Cancer on Kickstarter, and backed it at a level that allowed me to place artwork by my daughters Carolyn and Rebecca into the game. Furthermore, my daughter Rebecca died of brain cancer on her sixth birthday in June 2014. So the topic is very close to me personally.

That Dragon, Cancer isn’t a game, by most definitions of that term. There are no structural barriers to advancing, no opposing forces to overcome, no points to score nor prizes to unlock, and no way to influence the outcome. The only choices you can make are how much of the content to experience, and how quickly you move through the storyline. It is, to my eyes, much closer to a movie than a traditional game, but the control the player exerts over pacing and discovery makes it far more engaging and affecting than any movie I’ve ever seen.

In the end, That Dragon, Cancer is something for which we don’t have a convenient term. It’s a window into other lives that says far more in its two hours than most other forms of media could manage in four, and might even have created a new genre of video games combining that personal window with a console. For the sake of convenience, I’ll continue to refer to it as a “game” and those who experience it as “players,” but I wish I had more honest words to use in their place.

As for a review, it’s difficult to discuss without lessening the impact of the game. I initially debated whether to explain the backstory but eventually came to realize that – just like in a movie one watches repeatedly over the years – knowing how the story ends actually heightens, not lessens, the game’s effect. Your heart breaks for the Greens even as their hearts do not break, in their moments of unknowing hope. Then, when the hopes go unfulfilled, your heart breaks anew.

The game presents itself in a heavily stylized 3D, with human figures looking almost like cartoons of rough carvings, and lacking facial features (other than eyeglasses on a couple of characters), a technique that makes the entire experience curiously more intimate. The constantly shifting viewpoint allows the player to be both observer and participant, evoking the feelings of being both a close confidant to the Greens and of taking their places. Most of the dialogue comes from Amy and Ryan, in their own voices. The spare soundtrack shifts effortlessly between from one mood to another, always illuminating the moment without overwhelming it.

The music, like the dialogue and the scenes we’re presented, can only be described as honest—not in the sense of accurate in the details, but of being fundamentally truthful. What’s remarkable is how clear-eyed the Greens are in every aspect of the journey. Even their anger, disgust, and envy—with each other, with themselves, with the world—are all presented without varnish, but also with judgment. As difficult as it must have been for the Greens to be so open, it must have been doubly hard to avoid excusing or condemning themselves.

So, too, are the Greens very honest about their faith in, and doubts about, God. A fair portion of the game presents their hopes that God will heal where medicine could not, as well as their growing fear that Joel will not survive. The two threads entwine and comment on each other as the game moves into its final levels. What astonished me was how That Dragon, Cancer presents these questions of faith with such clarity and neutrality that you can legitimately see this aspect of the game as either a powerful affirmation of the power of faith, or as a scathing indictment of the futility of faith, based solely on the Greens’ words and how they are presented.

This is but one of the many levels on which the game operates. It challenges you to endure the immediate events of the story even as it provokes intense reflection on what we believe and how we believe it. The game leverages its medium brilliantly, using common game mechanics to comment on the nature of the Greens’ challenges, and employing artful design to weave disparate emotions together—sometimes with great subtlety, and other times quite jarringly. There are radical, unannounced shifts in time and perspective, in which thoughts and scenes jump across hours or years. It’s an astonishingly accurate portrayal of how stress, fear, and grief disrupt the sense of linear time, both in the moment and when looking back in memory.

I’ve asked other players of That Dragon, Cancer about their experience in playing the game, few if any of whom have been through similar experiences in real life. I found that most of them had to take a break from playing the game partway through, and all of them took their break on the same level of the game—the level that was, according to Ryan, the nucleus of the entire game; and those who didn’t take a break said that level was the point where they almost did.

This is a gift that the Greens have given, possibly unintentionally, to those who play That Dragon, Cancer. Because as you go through this journey with the Greens, you always have the final say on whether things will progress or not. You can walk away from the game and do something else, secure in the knowledge that nothing is happening. You can stop short of Joel’s death, if you must. That’s the real benefit of being a game player: you can make that choice. You can decide to pause for a while, to reflect on what you’ve felt and regather your emotional reserves, while time does not progress and Joel gets no closer to dying. Families like the Greens, or like mine, didn’t have the luxury of a pause button.

It’s understandable if a reader’s first reaction is that playing the game sounds scary. I was honestly terrified as I started That Dragon, Cancer for the first time, not sure if I’d be able to get through it in one piece. But I was glad I’d played. It wasn’t easy. There were moments that shortened my breath and made my throat ache with sorrow. Parts of the story are legitimately harrowing—but other parts are peaceful, contemplative, thought-provoking, even joyful. Some moments are all of those things, and more, all at once. For me, the game became a prism through which to examine my grief and my relationship to it, refracted through the Greens and their story, and I was profoundly touched by it.

That Dragon, Cancer is an astonishing look at how one family dealt with the most piercing questions of life and death. It’s a difficult journey for anyone to take, whether or not they have suffered loss, but it’s an astonishingly complex and human work of art that I was honored and grateful to be able to take with the Greens. The thoughts and emotions I experienced while playing That Dragon, Cancer still linger with me, and I expect they will for a long time. If you’re ready for a video game to make you smile and weep and smile as you weep, to show you a family’s life with unflinching honesty and a complete lack of sentimentality in the face of some of life’s most difficult passages, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Complete Article HERE!

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Going green in life and death

A push towards alternative, eco-friendly death practices

A push towards alternative, eco-friendly death practices

There’s a quiet revolution under way in the American death industry, moving towards a future in which natural composting, water cremation and even a so-called ‘mushroom death suit’ might be as socially acceptable as conventional coffins and cremation.

Current burial practices pose significant environmental risks. To counter their effects, a group of funeral professionals, artists and academics have started proposing eco-friendly alternatives. But the endeavor requires engaging a normally death-phobic public in a wider discussion about dying as a natural process — something rebel mortician Caitlin Doughtystrives to do. Doughty, a Los Angeles undertaker with a self-confessed “proclivity toward the macabre,” is the founder of the aforementioned group, which she calls The Order of the Good Death.

It’s about trying to lift the “veil of secrecy and shame cloaking death,” she writes in her best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. “A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death,” she says.

For her next book, Doughty is exploring the idea of eco-friendly death practices because she believes current practices are unsustainable. “This is about the future of the dead body and its disposition,” she says.

For now, traditional burial and cremation still dominate the death industry, each with about half of the market, according to 2015 estimates by the National Funeral Directors Association. Both processes carry environmental risks. Traditional burials, where an embalmed body in a wooden coffin is sometimes placed in a concrete or metal vault, require more than 30 million board feet of hardwood, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete and over 800,000 gallons of carcinogenic formaldehyde embalming fluid every year in the U.S., according to the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Southern California. Cremation requires burning a body in temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit for three to four hours — a process that requires as much energy as a 500-mile car trip and releases harmful gases into the atmosphere, says Doughty.

Options for eco-friendlier death practices include natural or green burials, in which a body is lowered into the ground wrapped simply in a biodegradable coffin or shroud, allowing it to decompose naturally and quickly. The concept is a simple one and is actually what was widely practiced before the modern funeral industry as we know it took over.

“It’s a greener way of looking at death,” says Suzanne Kelly, who helped establish New York State’s second municipal natural burial ground at Rhinebeck Cemetery, in the Hudson Valley. She chairs the Cemetery Committee and has recently published a book calledGreening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth.

Conventional death practices are not just polluting, Kelly says, but disaffecting because people feel separated from earth and nature. “Green burials are not just about the environment, but also about generating new meanings around death.”

Other experimental burial options gaining momentum include the Urban Death Project, which proposes leaving bodies in the open air to decompose naturally to soil, with the help of microbes and materials such as woodchips. The natural composting of dead bodies would take place in a custom-built, three-story facility that could hold up to 30 bodies at a time, says project founder and director Katrina Spade.

Spade said inspiration struck about five years ago when she was contemplating her own mortality. “The current options we have for our bodies after death are, at the very least, underwhelming and at the most toxic, polluting and not meaningful.”

Natural decomposition will allow people to “contemplate our place in the natural world” because many people feel there’s something important about being connected to nature both before and after we die, says Spade. She and her team are currently beta-testing the composting technology, and they hope to raise around $35,000 to build a prototype in Seattle this April.

Still another offbeat burial method is the Mushroom Death Suit, or Infinity Burial Suit. Created by Jae Rhim Lee, a visual artist and research fellow at Stanford University, the suit is embroidered with mushroom spores that help to decompose the body. The mushroom spores also remove toxins from the body, which normally releases more than 200 environmental toxins into the soil when buried, says Lee. After beta-testing is complete, the suit will go on sale in the middle of this year at a target retail price of $999.

Some alternative options are not so far off. Bio Cremation, also known as alkaline hydrolysis or cremation by water, is now available in seven states, including Florida, Minnesota and Oregon. The process uses water and lye to break down the body into its chemical components, leaving a residue similar to traditional cremation. Bio Cremation, however, uses 90 percent less energy than traditional cremation and is considerably cheaper, says Doughty.

Psychologically, it’s an easier concept to accept as well, Doughty believes. “Many people prefer the idea of a watery grave to a fiery one,” she says.

Spade of the Urban Death Project echoes this view. “I like fire — but only when I’m sitting next to it with a beer,” she says.

While eco-friendly options for the afterlife are gaining traction, they still account for only about 3 percent of burials in the U.S. today, says Doughty. Institutional and legislative barriers are a big reason for their low numbers. Many funeral directors see the American funeral industry as a sacred institution to protect and are very interested in keeping the status quo, she says.

“A huge barrier to greening up our death practices is the stronghold of the trio of chemical embalming, the modern casket and the burial vault,” adds Kelly of the Rhinebeck Cemetery Committee. But she is positive that the green burial movement is gathering momentum. “It’s building steam riding a wave with other alternative death and end of life movements like home funerals, death cafes and hospices,” she says. Death cafes host events where people can meet up and discuss death over tea and cake — something that spread in popularity from Europe.

The American funeral industry isn’t the only one to blame, says Spade. “Ninety percent of what’s holding our society back in terms of having eco-friendly aligned funerals is a cultural denial of death.”

Spade says, “If we talked about death more comfortably, we’d be dying better and also be able think about what we want for our bodies after we die.”

Complete Article HERE!

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On death and dying at home

By Pat Webdale

Pat Webdale

On display at the Dutton House in the Shelburne Museum in Vermont is a wooden cradle several feet long. A thin blanket covers the bottom.

The cradle that sits in front of the fireplace was used to keep elderly persons who were close to their demise warm and comfortable near their family. It was once a common practice when most ill and elderly persons died at home.

It also reminds me of my own grandmother.

Several people died in my grandmother’s home. I witnessed my Grandma Gert as the caretaker of her mother, my great-grandmother. I remember watching my grandma and her daughter, Aunt Helen, helping the older woman to the bathroom. There were no bedside commodes delivered by hospice yet. Each woman held great-grandmother under one arm. She was 87 years old. We would give her sips of water and hugs and fix her pillows. She died peacefully at her daughter’s home.

Grandpa Mike was the next recipient of Gert’s loving care. My dad would come over to help him walk around the living room to keep his skin free from irritation. I was present in the house when Grandpa died. Grandma herself was not so fortunate as to die in her home. After breaking two bones and becoming incapacitated, she died in a nursing home. I did get to visit my maternal and paternal grandmothers in their respective nursing homes.

Thirty years later, my mother-in-law, suffering from terminal cancer at age 72, was able to stay in her own home until the end of her life. She had the companionship of her sister until a week before she died, when she went to a hospice house for respite. One night I had the privilege to stay overnight and care for her in her hospice room. When the next day dawned, it was Mother’s Day. All of the family gathered for a party in the common room. We gave her gifts and enjoyed dinner. Mom died two days later.

A decade later, my father, 85, needed acute care. The family gathered to talk about putting him in a nursing home. We decided to first have a visit with a hospice volunteer. I sat in the living room with my dad and wished out loud that he would die peaceably, and not languish for many days. At that very moment he took a last breath. He was able to pass away with his oldest daughter, me, close to him.

My own mom always said she did not want to go into a nursing home. It is amazing that she was able to fulfill this wish. She lived on her own for 11 years after my father died. Her home was a few doors away from my sister, who was mom’s baby. Susan took extraordinary care of our mom. She drove her to the senior center and took her to the library and grocery shopping. I am sure this TLC is why mom lived so long. At the age of 91, my mother suffered a heart attack and we did call 911. She went into a hospital and put up with various tests and X-rays. I stayed overnight with her for the duration of the stay. The staff told us that she was not going to rally and recover, as pneumonia had set in. An ambulance returned her to her beloved home. Again we called on hospice. She left the easy chair she was sitting in and went to bed, her mind made up. Her four children were with her almost constantly. A few grandkids came to visit; one was a nurse who took her final vitals. I was the kid who gave her the morphine. My sister is the one who heard her last breath as I slept in another room.

I think about that cradle once in a while. Maybe when my time comes, I can prevail on my son-in-law to build one for me. I will snuggle in with my Pottery Barn faux fur blanket. Maybe I can still ask for a glass of Cabernet. That would be nice.

Complete Article HERE!

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What the words of a dying doctor taught me about life’s meaning

BY REBECCA RUIZ

when-breath-becomes-air

When I learned of the late Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air, which published earlier this year, I felt drawn to its premise. A young doctor with great ambition receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and reports back from the twilight of his life on his quest to seek and find meaning.

Feeling unsure of my own purpose in life, I wanted Kalanithi’s journey to become a beacon to guide my own wandering. Perhaps, I hoped, he might be some kind of oracle.

But that is not the design of Kalanithi’s gripping, emotional book. You, dear reader, are not meant to passively observe Kalanithi’s final moments, glean his wisdom and walk away feeling assured in your path.

Instead you will bear witness to his yearning, suffering and grace. You will watch as lung cancer annihilates his dreams of becoming a renowned neurosurgeon and doctor-philosopher. You will ask yourself if you’ve ever worked as hard as Kalanithi, who commits himself to relentless hours as a medical resident performing high-stake surgeries — even as he tries to dodge death.

As unbearable as that sounds, the pull of this narrative is magnetic. More than a year into parenthood, I hadn’t finished a single book — yet I could barely put down When Breath Becomes Air. Almost nothing else felt as important.

That the book demands your presence is a credit to Kalanithi’s captivating prose. Whether he is describing in vivid detail a midnight hike in the Eldorado National Forest (“pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky”) or his desire to bridge the worlds of literature and neurosurgery (“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force”), Kalanithi’s sentences are both urgent and poetic.

Others in a similar position might be tempted to sanitize their life. Here’s a man who is candid about his marital troubles. He confesses that he finds himself drifting into becoming a doctor who just goes through the motions:

All my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize — they all returned, vengeful, angry and inexorable.

Kalanithi even admits that he suspected cancer months prior to the official diagnosis. His account would have been richer with an exploration of why he dismissed those prescient instincts, but the reader can’t fault a man who has so little time for self-examination.

When Breath Becomes Air is an imperfect book, but it draws its power and permanency from those limitations.

Kalanithi died before finishing the memoir in March 2015, at age 37. His final passage is a moving dedication to his infant daughter (and is followed by an explanatory epilogue from his wife). But before he writes those tender words, he leaves the reader with a gift of their own:

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect stage. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

Kalanithi makes no attempt at reassurance. The end is not tidy or filled with comforting platitudes. He makes no effort to find a reason in his death. I had read every page with anticipation, waiting for Kalanithi to share adages born of introspection and tragedy, I had missed the point all together.

Kalanithi’s wisdom lay in wrestling with the toughest questions humans can ask of themselves, even if they go unanswered. That bravery, standing at the edge of the abyss with fortitude, is what gives us meaning. And it’s what made Kalanithi a courageous doctor and human being.

When Breath Becomes Air is essential reading in a world where we try so hard to exercise control over the unpredictable. While the miracles of science and technology are worthy of our praise, we lose something vital when we forsake ambiguity for certainty.

Kalanithi understood that we learn who we are when we remain still in moments of confusion and crisis, when we pause to ask the terrifying questions. And then we keep moving forward even when it feels impossible.

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” Kalanithi wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

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