Attitudes to death

Better dead than alive

16 September 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, cemeteries, Embalming, funerals in other cultures, Post mortem photos

Going through my stats, researching for a blog post, I saw that someone had clicked through a link I did not recognise. So I clicked through myself and found this wonderful account of embalming excellence at Harlem-based Owens Funeral Home “where beauty softens grief” . I used it in a blog post so long ago I’d forgotten. If you didn’t see it way back then, enjoy it now. If you recall it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it again. The quality’s good enough to go full screen.

What a wonderful selling point this funeral home has: “I’m the guy who puts the smile on your face. Other places you just look dead.”

On a related theme, I’ve just stumbled on another article describing cosmetic treatments for the dead. While a certain amount of beautification goes on in UK funeral homes (it reflects well on an undertaker’s standards of care), we do not have over here the ritual (ordeal if you like) of the open casket visitation. So while, when thinking forward to our own funeral, we customarily conclude with the reflection that we won’t be there, Americans don’t. Because they will. And, of course, they want to look good and they’re bound to worry that they mightn’t. “People used to say, just throw me in a pine box and bury me in the back yard,” says Mark Duffey, president and CEO of Everest Funeral, a national funeral planning and concierge service. “But that’s all changing. Now people want to be remembered. A funeral is their last major event and they want to look good for it. I’ve even had people say, ‘I want you to get rid of my wrinkles and make me look younger’.”

“I’ve had people mention that they want their breasts to look perky when they’re dead,” says David Temrowski, funeral director of Temrowski & Sons Funeral Home in Warren, Mich. “Or they’ll say, ‘Can you get these wrinkles out?’ It’s all in humor, but I think people do think [more] about what they’re going to look like when they’re dead and lying in a casket.”

“My brother’s a plastic surgeon and I joke with him all the time that funeral directors were doing Botox long before any doctor thought of using it,” says John Vigliante, owner and manager of the Branch Funeral Home in Smithtown, N.Y. “Or at least we use a material that’s similar. We‘ll inject tissue fillers into the lips, the nose, the cheeks, above the eyebrows, the chin, and the hands. It’s the same concept as Botox and dermal filler.” … Lips are plumped, cheeks are filled and contoured, and hollowed hands are injected with filler to give them what Vigliante calls “a nice fuller appearance.”

Read the full article at newsvine.com here.

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Better read than dead

15 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral customs, funeral trends, Grief, Immortality, memorialisation

When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country.

In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There has been nothing since. I had £250 riding on it for an article I was commissioned to write about… I’ve forgotten. Ah well, where Eulogy has gone we shall surely follow. Ink to ink, ashes to ashes.

Over in the New World, Funerals Today goes from strength to strength, it seems (I’ve never read it).

Cruel and all too usual

15 September 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, euthanasia, Good books, medical interventions in dying

There’s a good, long piece in the Huffington Post by Lloyd I Sederer, a doctor, describing his mother’s decline and death. He describes a problem which is going to become more and more common.

Longevity is not all it’s cracked up to be. If we are lucky enough live into ripe old age, our dying may well be a protracted and unbearable ordeal prolonged beyond humanity and reason by attentive medics. That’s why more and more people are going to Switzerland to swallow hemlock.

It’s something society needs to address with some urgency. The problem is already big and it’s going to get huge.

Here are some extracts from the Huffington piece. I’m sure they’ll impel you to read the whole thing.

My mother died on a Monday a few weeks ago. We buried her, in the Jewish tradition, the next day. But we lost her more than a year before when a cardiac event she survived robbed her brain of the oxygen that sustains it and ushered in a dementia that took her away well in advance of her death.

The mental torment of dementia is what gives it its unique cruelty. As horrific as the psychic pain of dementia is, I wonder if it gets the recognition it warrants. Medical care has come to appreciate the crucial importance of mitigating physical pain but mental pain, no less agonizing, has yet to receive its proper due. Psychic pain is equally distressing as physical pain, and to make things worse, for dementia it has few good remedies.

I know death was a relief for my mother — a desired end … She also had made her wishes perfectly clear years before in her health care proxy and power of attorney. She understood, though never used the term, what dying with dignity meant.

…decisions abound during the process of first declining then dying. Not to mention the often tortuous decisions about money, there are decisions about treatments: how should someone be treated for their illness as well as the cascade of complications that frequently befall someone as their immunity diminishes and their infirmity increases. There are decisions about care taking … the most well known decision is whether to DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), but the questions are far more nuanced, as a rule. Here is where a living will or health care proxy is a blessing.

My mother’s time was ushered in after she fractured her hip trying to climb out of bed during a night of terror we could only infer was from her distress. But here is a story about American medicine that needs to be told.

The fracture was discovered some days after it occurred when she was rushed to the hospital with trouble breathing. I received a call from the physician’s assistant to the chief of orthopedic surgery. My mom had a hip fracture but the bone had not been displaced from its socket … She was in no pain. The PA said they wanted to operate, to place a set of screws in her hip … I called back to say no and soon received a call from the surgeon himself to urge me to proceed with the surgery.

That moment was a wake up call for our family. We asked ourselves what would give mom the best moments of life and experience in the time she had left? We realized that goal would be best achieved if we placed her in hospice care. This may sound oxymoronic, but when the time comes give it a try. Fundamental to hospice, contrary to common understanding, is how to make the most out of what time remains, not how to deny care or bring life to a rapid conclusion.

Fighting death and disability at the end too often steals what few moments of actual life remain for someone facing imminent passing. For my family, it was human kindness and eschewing aggressive and dubious treatments that enabled our mother to savor at least a few good moments while still on this earth. But thankful as I am for that I still wonder, until we have more miracles in medical care, is there a better way than the path we are so stubbornly now on?

Find the entire article here.

Rite and trite

14 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, ceremony, funeral customs, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures

There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian about funeral rites in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Here are some tasters:

Life expectancy in Tudor England was mid thirties, and about a third of children died before attaining the age of ten. Mortality was very much in the air and on the streets, what the Book of Common Prayer described as “divers diseases and sundry kinds of death.” … Before modern times the unjust and random nature of fate was inescapable. Death was no stranger, and contemplating your end was not an exercise for a retreat, but the inevitable consequence, half the time, of going out in the streets. In the midst of life you were in death … Death’s carriage delivered us, in the end, to the public crematorium of the 1970’s, with its Terylene curtains, cheesy music, elaborate floral tributes, and shuffling, embarrassed mourners. Death still comes to us all, but now as a sanitised stranger.

Most interesting, though, are some of the comments left by readers. Here’s a sample:

This summer I visited the convent chapel in the aragonese castle on Ischia.
What I thought at first to be toilets, were in fact the penultimate resting places of deceased nuns, whose corpses were seated on these bowls as corruption removed the flesh slowly from the bones and the fluids drained away. To be constantly reminded of their mortality, the other nuns would visit this apalling spectacle daily, many of them sickening and dying themselves as a result of the germ-laden atmosphere.

Give me sanitation and terylene curtains any day.

Existences of null consequence seems to be the modus operandi of modernity. Organs in bodily transition – no future / no past a linear journey from birth to death with no stops and seeming little point.

This seems to that ino our “yoof” obssessed culture we journey into invisibility and then pass away pointlessly. The links to the past and the future give us meaning in the present.

I’m fascinated how you could write a fairly extended piece on the BCP Funeral Service without mentioning the Funeral Sentences ?.

So I will.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

What language. If I don’t have these words said at my funeral, I shall return to haunt CiF [Comment is Free]  belief !

Read the entire piece here.

Friendship

2 September 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, Formality vs informality, funeral food

A delightful account here from the funeral in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, of Sir Frank Kermode, eminent literary critic and, most important, very nice man, by John Naughton. It was, says Naughton, “elegant, moving, celebratory and only slightly elegaic. I think he would have approved.” Fittingly, “Afterwards, there was a splendid tea in the Senior Combination Room.” How very Cambridge!

“Ursula [Owen] told a lovely story about a trip she and Frank had gone on together — to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, where he had been invited to lecture. When they settled into their seats on the plane, Frank opened his folder and realised that he’d brought the wrong text. So they checked into their hotel and he then calmly reconstructed the missing lecture, walked out and delivered it.”

But what I enjoyed most was this reflection by Anthony Holden on the nature of friendship, the value of which is enhanced by the fact that it was delivered by one supremely analytical brain and endorsed by another:

“At the end of his eulogy, Tony said something that rang true for all of us. “What I did to earn Frank’s regard”, he said, “I’ll never know”. Me neither. To be granted the friendship of such a great man was a wonderful privilege. So I’ll just count it as one of my blessings and leave it at that.”

Read the entire post here.  More about Sir Frank here, including his thoughts about death: “Death may be, is likely to be, a little too early or a little too late.” And (another) very nice tribute to Sir Frank, again by John Naughton, here.

Making the best of old age

24 August 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral plans

On a slow news day, I quite enjoyed this piece by Jane Miller in my favourite newspaper:

Many of us have been possessed at times by thoughts that the life we are living is not the real one, but some botched job we somehow fell into, provisionally as it were, fine for the time being, until we’ve decided what we really want to be or do.

Old age certainly sorts that out for us. Saying to yourself that this is it, all it was ever going to be, has its consolations, allowing us to shed the frustrations of a lifetime of try-outs.

…

In Coda, the book written by playwright-Simon Gray when he was dying of lung cancer, he ended one chapter with the words: ‘I wish there were a way of just dissolving in the sea, without having to go through the business of drowning first.’

I like that idea, but my absence from my own death and my own funeral robs both of a good deal of interest. My funeral is not, after all, a family occasion I shall be required to organise. And what will be the point of it, anyway, if I’m not at it and in a position to check who has made the effort to turn up and who has not?

Read it all here

Teen Undertaker

23 August 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, funeral directors

The media loves death and funerals — wacky music, funky coffins, all that sort of stuff. Best of all, the media loves to find people working in the funeral industry who do not conform to the common conception of deathworker as  inhabitant of a dark and terrifying otherworld. Normal people; people like us. Better still, people who are young. Best of the best, beautiful young women.

If the effect is to educate the public about the reality of funeral service, all well and good. Last week’s Channel 4 programme, Teen Undertaker, served this purpose pretty well, I believe. It follows two teen undertakers, Laura and Paul. It panders, yes, but it also reveals responsibly.

There’s one bit that made my eyebrows rise. I wonder if yours will, too.

Catch it on 4 oD here.

Who we are is what we mean to others

20 August 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, bereavement, funeral food, Grief

Here are some extracts from a cheering story in the Newburyport News, Massachusetts which has set me thinking about the nature of identity and community.

My father, Arthur Allen, died at the age of 63 on Aug. 2. My dad was the embodiment of compassion, duty, style and bravery. He was the guy fighting for the rights of the victims; he was the man campaigning for a friend; he was a proud member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts; he was a humble member of the Byfield Protection Fire Company No. 1; he was an EMT [Emergency Medical Technician], EMT trainer and swim instructor for underprivileged children; he was a promoter for the annual Firemen’s Ball; he was an organ donor; he was the chairman of the Mass. Aeronautics Commission; he was president of his own business, Security Team; and he was the one who enjoyed doing magic tricks for kids. He was always ready to buy you a meal and even quicker to pick up the tab. He was a true friend to many, my greatest supporter and my mom’s best friend. My dad was a great thinker who spoke provoking truths about our lives, towns, country and times.

…

He was a collector of people and a fixer of troubles. I think it was his own painful childhood, being orphaned at 12, that made it possible for him to connect with injured people and drove him to find ways to alleviate their pain. He was living proof that a person could rise above their problems and make a positive difference in this world. He wanted to help others find their way to healing, too.

…

Who could step up and make sense out of this senseless loss. Who would comfort my mother, my sister, his sister, the people? I felt alone, overwhelmed, and in a dark place.

Then a funny thing happened.

Messages started pouring into our home from friends, families, neighbors and acquaintances. Stories of who my father was and how much he meant to so many were shared in person, by phone, by mail, and even through Facebook postings and poems. Food flowed from every nook and cranny. Pictures of holidays, vacations and events were shared. Children were playing in the yard with my father’s dog. Friends and foes united in grief were hugging in the living room. I heard laughter coming from my parents’ kitchen. I heard my mother laugh. Ready or not, the healing had begun. How was this possible?

It was my dad’s extraordinary love of life, the love he shared with others, the love he instilled in me that was coming full circle home. I was not alone; we were not alone. He was right there with us in the words, deeds and memories shared by others. In the end, it was the positive energy my father sent out into the world that led his family through the dark days of his loss. It was his powerful last lesson for us.

Read the entire story here.

Two new websites I like a lot

22 July 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: ashes, Attitudes to death

Two interesting new websites for you today. Both are labours of love, and both are run by nice, intelligent people.

The first is homegrown ScatteringAshes.co.uk. It’s a resource for people who, once they’ve got the ashes back from the funeral director in one of those plastic cartons, wonder what on earth to do with them. It can take them a long time to get their heads around it. It can take a long time, as a family, to agree. And, of course, they wonder what their options are. So Richard Martin, impelled by his own experience of bereavement, has created for them a sort of Ashes Central where they can survey their options and pick up some good tips about what sort of ceremony might best suit them. In his own words: “The site was born out of experience and a desire to tell people that they can celebrate a life in their own way. Often people can hold onto ashes for a couple of years or more before they decide what to finally do. By which time the funeral director is not at hand to guide you. Hopefully we can.” It’s well informed, comprehensive and a work in progress. Do write to Richard, if you feel the urge. He’s a ready learner who wants to do the best he can. His is a good idea and I think it deserves to do well. He runs a nice little blog, too. Well worth subscribing to.

The second site is US-based. It is the creation of Felix Jung, like Richard an industry outsider, who is much influenced by the work and thinking of Thomas Lynch. It’s called DeadAdvice.com and is reminiscent of the site established by Bill Drummond, MyDeath.net, where people can plan their own funerals. Whereas MyDeath is now a mature site, and has been infiltrated to an extent by jokers and drunks, DeadAdvice is very young and as yet has few postings. It is a place where people can write letters which address the Big Questions. In Felix’s words:

“Am I a good person? Have I been living a meaningful life? Am I spending the time I’ve been given wisely and well? In trying to answer those questions, I began thinking of the advice people have given me… and of the advice I might give others.

“Every letter on Dead Advice begins with the same first sentence: “Now that I’m dead, I want to tell you a few things.”

“Imagine, for a moment, that you have just died. If you had to look back over the arc of your life as it stands today, what stories would you tell? What lessons would you share, what things might you regret or confess?”

I’m really going to enjoy watching these two unfold.

ScatteringAshes.co.uk

DeadAdvice.com

Tahara

21 July 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, Nokanshi, Tahara

In his excellent book Curtains, Tom Jokinen quotes US undertaker BT Hathaway on the subject of home funerals. Hathaway reckons a home funeral suits “the 5 per cent who have money, time, resources, education and political and emotional will.” With preconditions like these, how come it ever got as high as 5 per cent? Hathaway concludes: “It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families.”

Poetic? I’m not sure about this elegant disparagement. Jokinen draws his own wrong conclusion: “This is of course the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle.” Here we have an overstatement. You don’t have to grow a tree to make the coffin, neither do you have to plant your own jute to make the lining.

But convenience is a seductive thing. And time is of the essence. A dead body is potentially a chaotic, eruptively ugly thing; it makes a lot of sense to call the experts in and keep a safe distance. And we reflect here that, when people die, those who loved them urgently want the body back from wherever in the world it conked out. They want this with a fervour which arguably defies reason. This may be not so pronounced in the UK, where dead soldiers were buried where they fell as late as the Falklands war. But in the US the historic clamour to have the body returned led to a stream of dug-up coffins coming back, once hostilities were over, from the battlefields of the first and second world wars.

So: distance matters. The body must come home. Propinquity is good. But closing the distance and engaging with that body? NO!  At the last, we need our cordon sanitaire, cowards that we are. Here we record the loss of the lesson of the teachings of all the great religions that the dead body should be treated as an object of veneration.

At the end of his book Jokinen begins to reap the harvest of his experiences as an undertaker’s understrapper. Here’s what he says:

“Instead of deflecting a confrontation with death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt, in fact, but in favour of it. An act with a meaning.”

Later the same day he meets his wife for supper. “I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

In other words, he finds the middle ground between doing it all (the home funeral) and doing nothing: giving in to “the impulse to fix grief through shopping.”

A lot of religious law has to do with physical and emotional health. Much law relating to diet has been rendered obsolete by simple advances in hygiene. Leviticus is for that reason looking decidedly old hat these days, and pigs unfairly deprecated. But a number of Jewish practices, however ritualised, retain their (thank you, Mr Hathaway) poetic value because they promote healthy grieving.

Sitting shiva, for example. Taking yourself out of the loop, telling your employer to get stuffed and staying at home for either seven or three days after the burial. Time exclusively spent getting your head around it but, importantly, time which is bounded. Got to be good.

And then there’s the work of the chevra kadisha, the little community team that performs the tahara – the ritual preparation of Jews for burial. This involves the right prayers, of course, and also the washing and dressing of the body with immense respect, concluding with an apology to it should anything done have offended it.

I’m not making a pitch here for the return of the splendid and formidable laying-out woman. All I would observe is that, if a dead body is held precious, then it makes good emotional sense to play a part, under the eye of experts, in getting it ready for burial.

There’s a very good little video film which talks about the work of the chevra kadisha and shows the tahara performed in a funeral director’s mortuary. I’d embed it if I had the skills. If you want to skip straight to the tahara, start 6 ½ minutes in.

Click here.