Tag: Grief and Grieving

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Remembrance

Remembrance – a poem by Emily Bronte

Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
That noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring:
Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along:
Sterner desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven;
No second morn has ever shone for me:
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.

But when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy;

Then did I check the tears of useless passion,
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And even yet I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in Memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

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Strippers pole-dance to appease the dead

DRESSED in miniskirts barely covering their hips, the two girls took to the neon-lit stage and moved vigorously to the loud pumping pop music. Their job: to appease the wandering spirits.

As the temple facade in the background changed colour from the fireworks lighting up the Taiwanese night sky, the show climaxed with pole-dancing and striptease in front of an audience consisting of men, women and children.

“This is hard work but I need to make a living,” said 18 year-old En En, out of breath after stripping for the crowd during the recent religious festival.

En En had just earned Tw$3000 ($100) for her act, which began on stage, but ended as she mingled with the audience, letting men touch her for tips.

Folk religion in Taiwan is a unique mixture of the spiritual and the earthly, and one of its most remarkable manifestations is the practice of hiring showgirls to perform at festivals, weddings, and even funerals.

The girls work on “electronic flower cars” – specially designed trucks equipped with light and sound equipment that can become a stage, allowing them to travel to performances often held in smaller cities and rural areas.

“The groups attract crowds to our events and they perform for the gods and the spirits to seek blessings,” said Chen Chung-hsien, an official at Wu Fu Temple, a Taoist landmark in north Taiwan’s Taoyuan county.

“They have become part of our religion and folk culture.”

At 26, Chiang Pei-ying is already a veteran performer with nearly 20 years of experience, travelling across Taiwan with her father and two sisters for their family business to entertain audiences – both alive and dead.
TAIWAN-CULTURE-RELIGION

A dancer performs during a temple festival in northern Taiwan. Picture: AFP

Ms Chiang made her debut when she was in kindergarten because she liked singing and dancing on stage and has become a celebrity performer with her sisters, charging up to Tw$80,000 for a 20-minute show.

She said she enjoys her line of work, even if she has to deal with some odd requests from customers such as walking around coffins and singing for the deceased at funerals.

“I’ve watched this since I was little so it’s nothing peculiar for me. Performing for the dead is just like performing for the living people,” she said.

“They liked to sing when they were alive and their relatives thought they would have liked to have somebody sing for them in the end. For me, I get good tips and I hope I am accumulating good karma too.”

Other performers, however, make much less money and tend to be more discreet about their job, especially those who still do striptease despite risking arrest.

Stripping nude is rarely seen in public now because it is a criminal offence, but partial stripping is still performed at festivals, private parties and funerals, people in the business say.

“Some people like going to hostess clubs, so when they pass away their relatives arrange striptease to reflect their interests while they were alive,” said Chiang Wan-yuan, Pei-ying’s father and a 30-year veteran in the business.

It is difficult to imagine a similar show going on outside a European village church, and some local critics have dismissed the practice, which emerged in the 1970s, as shocking and vulgar.

Others, however, see it as a natural extension of a traditional folk culture lacking in the sharp separation of sex and religion often seen in other parts of the world.

Marc Moskowitz, an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, said the practice evolved out of the special Chinese concept of “hot and noisy”, which brims with positive connotations.

“In traditional Chinese and contemporary Taiwanese culture this signifies that for an event to be fun or noteworthy it must be full of noise and crowds,” said Mr Moskowitz, who shot a documentary “Dancing for the Dead” in 2011.

He added most people who watched his work appeared to enjoy it and recognise this practice as an “interesting and unique cultural phenomenon,” which to his knowledge is only found in Taiwan.

“As I watched these performances I came to appreciate the idea of celebrating someone’s life to help assuage the feelings of grief,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

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Starting Over

I have this great opportunity to cross post, here, a posting I made this morning on my sex advice site, Dr Dick’s Sex Advice.

Name: LD
Gender: Male
Age: 38
Location: Atlanta
How do you jump back into the game when your partner passed away suddenly? Getting really horny but its still awkward to actually do it.

Good question, LD. You say you’re feeling awkward. Why exactly? Is it because you’re out of practice with the whole dating thing? Are you concerned that people might think you’re jumping the gun, trying to get back into the game before your partner is cold in the grave? People can be pretty heartless about this. Or, is your awkwardness associated with your grief?

Grief has a profound effect on every aspect of our lives. Yet there is hardly any literature on the effects grief has on our sexuality. To my mind, grief is the leading causes of sexual dysfunction for those who have experienced the death of a partner.

Allow me a bit of time here for one of my pet spiels. Healing and helping professionals often misdiagnose grief. I want to make one thing clear, grief is not depression. Treating grief with an antidepressant is counterproductive. It can actually take away the impetus to resolve the grief and get on the rest of one’s life.

Making sure that you have processed your grief may eliminate some of your awkwardness you are currently experiencing. This is something I’m pretty familiar with. A good portion of my private practice is with sick, elder and dying people and their friends and family who survive them. I know the impact a terminal illness and dying process can have on the surviving spouse or partner. We often go into survival mode, shutting down so much of ourselves in an effort to have the strength to cope with this life-altering experience. Of course, trying to kick-start our life afterwards is often a monumental effort. Without the support and guidance of a professional or a group of similarly challenged people, some of us just sink to the lowest common denominator.

I believe in the resilience of the human spirit. I believe that we can honor our dead and continue to live and love. It sounds to me like you have a desire to get on with your life, LD, to fill the void, to make new connections, but you simply don’t know how. Acknowledging that fact is a real good place to begin.

Perhaps you could start by reawakening your sexuality through self-pleasuring. Reconnect with your body and the joy it can bring you. Reestablishing a social life will no doubt follow, slowly at first. But the inevitable tug of the need for human-to-human contact will draw you, if you let it. Remember the best testament to those who have died is to continue to celebrate life itself.

Allow me to draw your attention to my latest book, The Amateur’s Guide To Death And Dying; Enhancing The End Of Life. Actually it’s more of a workbook then a text and while its primarily target are those currently facing their mortality it’s not exclusively for them. Concerned family and friends, healing and helping professionals, lawyers, clergy, teachers, students, and those grieving a death will all benefit from participating in the interactive environment the book provides.

Of special interest to you will be Chapter 6, Don’t Stop. My good friend and colleague, Dr Cheryl Cohen Greene, joins me in presenting this chapter on sex and intimacy concerns. Like I said above, there is a dearth of information about this timely topic for sick, elder and dying people as well as those who are grieving. So I am delighted that my book helps break this deafening silence.

I hope you take the time to write back, LD. I’d very much like to keep tabs on how you are doing.

Good luck

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Exhibit gives cultural views on death

— Saerom Yoo

Death is universal. But the way people deal with it is not.

This fact is the basis of an exhibit that opened recently in downtown Salem.

Salem Health and the Salem Multicultural Institute partnered to put on the End of Life exhibit in the World Beat Gallery, homing in on the process of dying from a cultural perspective. The three cultures highlighted are Hispanic, Russian Old Believer and Micronesian.

Dr. Nancy Boutin is medical director of Salem Health’s Salem Cancer Institute as well as the Palliative Care Program. She said the three groups are among those the hospital staffers see most often.

In the twenty-something years Boutin has worked in Salem, the cultural diversity of patients has greatly increased. At the same time, the provider community has not.

So the exhibit was a way to educate the medical professionals on beliefs and customs around end of life. The hope is that greater awareness will help medical personnel be more sensitive to the needs of different cultures.

“I am aware now that, despite my best intentions, I’ve done things that probably have caused discomfort, if not actual pain, to families,” Boutin said. “Just because I didn’t know.”

So that’s how this exhibit was conceived, but it has the potential to start meaningful conversations for the general public, too.

Graham Morris, executive director of Salem Multicultural Institute, says death is not something people like to talk about. But families might benefit from doing so. Questions surrounding where and how you’d like to die, organ donation, cremation and burial are a few topics to think about.

The exhibit won’t provide you textbook information on where the three cultural groups land on those issues. In fact, you’ll notice that there are differing opinions within the same general group.

“We’re not looking to provide hard answers,” Morris said. “We’re here to start conversations.”

The information for the exhibit comes from interviews with people who live in the Mid-Valley, which offer a sense of authenticity.

And while the featured cultures originate in vastly different parts of the world, there are some key commonalities in the way they think about death.

Extended family members gather around food in an event prompted by death, for example. People have a desire to die with forgiveness and peace in their hearts, whether it’s in personal relationships or with a higher being. They also want to die or be buried on their home turf.

The exhibit, which is on the second floor of the Reed Opera House in downtown Salem, requires a lot of reading. The most visual aspect is an example Day of the Dead altar, which is used in Mexico to honor the deceased. The display includes colorfully decorated skulls and yellow marigold petals.

If you take the time to read through the information, you’ll learn that hospice isn’t an attractive option for people in Latino cultures, possibly because the Spanish word “hospicio” means orphan asylum.

In Ukrain, death is not accepted until all options for recovery have been tried and the person has actually died.

Those in Micronesian communities may not agree with organ donation because of beliefs that alteration or intrusion into the body could harm the soul.

I asked Boutin how she thinks the exhibit might influence the way she and her staffers serve patients. There wasn’t a straight answer — and perhaps for the better.

Cultural education offers a wider understanding of different people’s needs and beliefs. It doesn’t prescribe routine practices. Death is too personal for that.

Both Morris and Boutin agree that the exhibit, while it is about end of life, is just the beginning.

Complete Article HERE!