Archive: 2011

Pulling the plug

11 January 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Longevity, self-deliverance, suicide

I know I go on about this, but I think it important. Long, long life is getting to be a problem. Thirty years ago dying was a relatively brief, often unexpected episode. Clever medics can now prolong it – intolerably and expensively.

That last goodbye for most of us just keeps getting put off and the state has to find more and more money for more and more tottering and tumbledown folk. Not for me, I drink and smoke at lot, I’ll go down like a felled ox thank god when that big vein in my forehead goes bang. But you self-denying abstinence- and exercise freaks – how many years of decrepitude, double incontinence and dementia is it all buying you?

Here’s some food for thought, perhaps:

In the Jan Oldie magazine there’s an interview with a man called John Barnes. He’s eighty-something and fit as a flea. The interviewer asks him this question: ‘Have you found a way of coming to terms with death?’ And he replies: “You have to learn to accept that you don’t come to terms with it. Sometimes I think that people who’ve got blind religious faith and believe they’re not going to die are the luckiest. My feelings swing to extremes. Life seems marvellous when my old ramblers [he takes oldies walking] are enjoying sunshine in the country, when I’m holding an attractive girl in a dance, or when I’m entertaining a crowd of people with my songs. The rest of the time I wonder whether the NHS ought to be spending so much effort on keeping me alive.”

Over at the Morialekafa blog we read this:

Somehow I found myself last night in a discussion of what should happen to old people if there is not enough money available to keep them all alive. That is, would there ever be enough money available for health care for all, and if not, what about “death panels.”

You are all doubtless http://quotecorner.com/online-pharmacy.html aware of the claim that Eskimos would sometimes leave their old people to freeze to death when there was not enough food to feed everyone. There is little doubt that old people accepted this as a necessity and perhaps even volunteered themselves …

First of all, I doubt that anyone really knows very much about what happens to old people in the United States at this time. For example, it is clear that the suicide rate for those over 65 goes up rather sharply … I think it is entirely possible that many of these suicides are deliberate senilicides, carried out to relieve the potential burden on their survivors, but does anyone really know this? …

How much is a week of life, when one is ninety, really worth?

…

Where I worked for a time in the New Guinea Highlands, when a person is considered so old they are obviously near death, their survivors and others hold a funeral ceremony for them while they are still alive, to let them know they are respected and will be missed (also to placate their potential ghost so it will not hang around causing misfortune). These occasions, perhaps needless to say, are very emotional, the speeches can be endless, and the oldsters are sometimes overcome, weeping and even falling to the ground. This seems to me to be a more sensible and genuine way of saying goodbye and expressing grief than by feeling guilty and regretting you did not do and spend more to prevent the inevitable. [Source]

Now hop over to the excellent Death Reference Desk for a series of articles about Republicans and Tea Party nutters in the US who either out of stupidity or malignity have been confusing end of life planning (a now ex-component of the Obama Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) with death panels. [Source]

It’s a whole new ethical area, isn’t it? As abortion once was…

The International Necronautical Society

9 January 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death

MANIFESTO

We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty – that is, beauty.

3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies – by radio, the internet and all sites where its processes and avatars are active. In the quotidian, to no smaller a degree, death moves: in traffic accidents both realised and narrowly avoided; in hearses and undertakers’ shops, in florists’ wreaths, in butchers’ fridges and in dustbins of decaying produce. Death moves in our appartments, through our television screens, the wires and plumbing in our walls, our dreams. Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already.

4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft1 that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage towards oblivion, mankind’s sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways. Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.

1This term must be understood in the most versatile way possible.It could designate a set of practices, such as the usurpation of identities and personas of dead people, the development of specially adapted genetic or semantic codes based on the meticulous gathering of data pertaining to certain and specific deaths, the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual, the perfection, patenting and eventual widespreaddistribution of ThanadrineTM, or, indeed, the building of an actual craft – all of the above being projects currently before the First Committee.

Declaration on the Nature of the Future (2010) here.

Website here.

Interview with Stephen Critchley here.

Death’s a bummer

7 January 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death

I am indebted to Nurse Myra over at Gimcrack Hospital (where the nurses are pretty and the doctors are pissed) for telling me about JBS Haldane (1892-1964). Nurse Myra does a fine line in rare people, most of them bonkers, and JBS Haldane is an outstanding specimen. Find out more at the Usual Suspect.

In 1964 Haldane was found to have bowel cancer and, after surgery, wrote this plucky poem.

Cancer’s a Funny Thing

I wish I had the voice of Homer

To sing of rectal carcinoma,

Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,

Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.

Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,

It can be killed before it kills

Upon a scientific basis

In nineteen out of twenty cases.

I noticed I was passing blood

(Only a few drops, not a flood).

So pausing on my homeward way

From Tallahassee to Bombay

I asked a doctor, now my friend,

To peer into my hinder end,

To prove or to disprove the rumour

That I had a malignant tumour.

…

The microscope returned the answer

That I had certainly got cancer,

So I was wheeled into the theatre

Where holes were made to make me better.

…

A third much smaller hole is meant

To function as a ventral vent:

So now I am like two-faced Janus

The only god who sees his anus.

…

I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,

It was a snappy bit of surgery.

My rectum is a serious loss to me,

But I’ve a very neat colostomy,

And hope, as soon as I am able,

To make it keep a fixed time-table.

So do not wait for aches and pains

To have a surgeon mend your drains;

If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce

Unless you have it out at once,

For if you wait it’s sure to swell,

And may have progeny as well.

My final word, before I’m done,

Is “Cancer can be rather fun”.

Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan

The NHS is quite like heaven

Provided one confronts the tumour

With a sufficient sense of humour.

Haldane died shortly after writing this.

Smashing news

7 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Cryomation, Dead people's rights, natural burial, resomation

Here’s how a recent piece in the Daily Mail began:

Being freeze dried and smashed into little pieces sounds like the stuff of sci-fi horror movies.

But it is one of two methods of dealing with our dearly departed that could soon be available from a funeral director near you.

And in keeping with sci-fi’s often chilling view of the future, the details are not for the squeamish.

It goes on to describe the cryomation process: bodies are placed in silk bags and submerged in an alkaline solution that has been heated to 160c. Flesh, organs and bones all dissolve under the onslaught, leaving behind a combination of green-brown fluid and white powder.

It’s the sort of piece designed to excite max indignation, I suppose. The Daily Mail specialises in fury porn. But, judging by the comments at the end, the readership of this vile newspaper refuses to be stirred. There’s a characteristic if off-the-wall comment by Donna of Croydon:  Shouldn’t we addressing WHY we have no burial space? Like close the borders? (bloody foreigners stealing our jobs, choking our graveyards) But for the most part commenters show a hilarious or unsentimental indifference to what happens to their bodies once they’re dead.

For all the trainspotterly debate about the relative merits of alkaline hydrolysis and freeze-drying there is, as natural burial guru Ken West likes patiently to point out, already a greener, simpler way of disposing of bodies. Yes… natural burial.

Mail article here

Ethical schmethical

7 January 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Co-op, Co-operative Funeralcare

Here’s a question sent to money-problem solver Margaret Dibben in the Guardian. It exemplifies the utter crapness of funeral plans and the business methods of the People’s Undertaker.

Two years ago, after the untimely death of a young friend, I took out a bronze cremation plan with The Co-operative Funeralcare. I discussed it on the phone, received papers to sign and started paying £19 a month by direct debit.

I have recently lost work and am trying to cut my outgoings. When I asked The Co-operative how much longer I have to keep paying, I was told until I am 90. This was not explained to me. I am now 57 and in excellent health. If I cancel the policy, the Co-op will keep the £456 I have paid in so far.

Here’s part of the reply:

You have 33 years until you are 90 which means, if you live that long, you have to pay another £7,524 in premiums. The average cost of a funeral today is £2,700. Your only choice is to waste the £456 or keep paying.

Read the entire piece here.

Somewhere between here and eternity

7 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Art and death

I enjoyed this piece over at Obit magazine:

It’s good to be a dead leader.

Not so for Ariel Sharon, the (arguably) most influential and the (certainly) most enduring politician in Israel. Sharon has never been memorialized, has never had a funeral, and is barely mentioned anymore in Israeli political conversations. He’s also not really dead.

Into this void recently stepped an Israeli installation artist, Noam Braslavsky, 49, who held a show at Kishon Gallery in Tel Aviv this winter that enjoyed international media attention. Braslavsky created a real-life Sharon, eyes open and mechanically breathing in a hospital bed, wearing his trademark button-down blue shirt.

“People didn’t have the opportunity to mourn,” Braslavsky said. So he decided to give them that chance.

Read the entire, very well written article, here.  Good pics here.

The art of dying

6 January 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death

There’s an interesting piece over in the New York Times about an artist, Tobi Kahn who, when his mother lay dying, filled her hospital room with his paintings of flowers.

Out of that private, personal display for his mother, Mr. Kahn has built a body of work that aspires to bring solace, comfort, a kind of sublimity, to the end of life. It is by no means the only or even the primary work he does — for decades, he has been a protean, prolific artist in paint, sculpture and installation — and yet it has become a distinctive specialty.

In the aftermath of Ellen Kahn’s death, Mr. Kahn began asking clergy members, hospice workers and funeral directors what kind of art dying people wanted. He received both specific advice — no sharp edges, calmness, tones of blue, no sudden tonal shifts that might set off a hallucination — and more important, he recalls, a broader recommendation for “a certain sense of dignity, nothing soporific.”

As part of his own grieving process, Mr. Kahn dedicated 11 art projects to his mother’s memory. One of them involved designing a sanctuary and meditation room and decorating 18 residential rooms for a Jewish hospice in the Bronx. Many of those paintings depicted lakes, horizons and landscapes, themes to which Mr. Kahn has often returned in his end-of-life art.

Read the whole article here

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

5 January 2011
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: Books, celebrants, ceremony, Dead people's rights, End-of-life issues, Formality vs informality, funeral plans, Good books, Plan your own funeral

Me and the missus are getting down to some serious death planning. There’s no best time of life for doing this, of course, so long as you get it done afore ye croak. And the more I think about it, the more clearly I can see that it’s not an activity whose end result is, phew, done it. No, I think that once you start you need to, want to, keep at it, continuously revising, adding, elaborating. Which is why I’d now have all children start making death plans at the age of 8, and do something useful in their PSHE lessons. When’s too soon to introduce Mortality to the curriculum?

The process is going to be interesting and tedious. We are impelled by necessity mostly, of course, or thoughtfulness to put a positive spin on it: we don’t want to be remembered by higgledepiggledness and fly-blown filing systems. So there are the who-gets-what decisions to make, the legal stuff, and also the horrible physical phase towards the end to strategise – the advance decision to refuse treatment, powers of attorney, then, when we’re done, organs, tissues and carcass disposal. And that’s not all.

Our relicts will want to commemorate us, we reckon, in their own way, and we shall encourage them to think about the myriad ways they can do that, giving not a fig for convention. I really don’t know that any of those ‘what he/she would have wanted’ considerations apply when you’re dead, bar the religious/superstitious ones, and we don’t have any of those.

So we’ll leave it to our relicts to decide if they want or need to have funerals for us. That’ll probably depend a lot on the nature and duration of our separate demises and how they feel about us after we’ve been wheeled away with a sheet over our heads – a matter, for us, of just deserts.

What, after all, is the value of a formal secular funeral shorn of all theological rationale? It is but a symbolic farewell event and also a commemorative event. Well, there are lots of ways of saying a one-off last goodbye, just as there are uncountable ways of commemorating someone. In any case, commemoration is ongoing, lifelong, both solitary and communal. It is about contemplation and recollection with added celebration or denunciation. We start doing that when people who mean something to us are still alive. When they’re dead it’s the type and degree of missing that makes all the difference – or the type and degree of animosity.

It’s a tendency of secular funerals to try to get too much done. Done, I suspect, and dusted. Some funerals resemble holiday suitcases, bulging, straining at the zip, bursting with biography and favourite tunes. Secular funerals are best when they’re not busy, when they’re not trying to get everything tidily, comprehensively bundled; when they’re reflective and contemplative and touch on the essence of somebody. Most of them need to leave more out.

Having in mind that when the history of the world is written neither my wife nor I will get a mention, not even in a footnote, we don’t feel a great debt to posterity. It’ll be nice, though, to leave behind letters to people. Nice and necessary.

Where my two nieces are concerned my exemplar is going to be Richard Hoggart’s Memoir for our Grandchildren, published in Between Two Worlds. It’s not a grandiloquent memoir. Far from it. It is an account by a working class orphan of those members of his family that he knew in childhood. It’s family history. It tells his grandchildren where and who they came from – it’s genetic geography. And it’s important, because what we learn about blood relatives tells us a lot about ourselves and it’s necessary knowledge, as any adopted person will attest. Hoggart writes beautifully in a plain, objective style and I recommend this book to you.

Hoggart writes formally and chronologically. This morning I stumbled on a less formal sort of memoir, the nang seu ngam sop. Nang seu ngam sop? The traditional Thai funeral ceremony book. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

In Thai funeral tradition, books about the deceased are printed and distributed to people who come to pay their respects. Some are thin pamphlets, others, large volumes. The practice, mostly for those in the middle or upper classes, gained popularity in the 1880s and reached its peak in the mid 1900s. Within its pages are poems, personal writings — and recipes.

I really like the idea of this sort of ragbag miscellany. A fine commemorative and biographical item easily bashed out on a home printer. Greatly to be preferred to the sound of a celebrant revving up to 180 words a minute then blurting “XXXX was born on…”