Attitudes to death

Why doctors can’t talk about death

26 February 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Death; Good death, End-of-life issues

“Psychoanalysts believe that emotional trauma in human life is because man is not really a god and is something more than just an animal. He is a demi-god and being a demi-god is hard.  He can create and appreciate goodness, enjoy the wonder and awe of each day; teach, learn, and dream, but at the same time, he can see into the future and knows his fate.  His mind can conceive flying through the air, staying awake for days or living to be 10,000, but he is denied by the limitations of his flesh.  This results in life long stress and in order to cope man uses various psychological strategies, including repression and denial, to focus on each day and each moment and not go truly mad.

When someone becomes ill with a life threatening illness such as cancer, their ability to deny the animal part of their existence may collapse.  Suddenly they are less god than ailing beast. This can cause terrible anxiety, confusion and depression, as their personality is threatened by physical deterioration and critical coping mechanisms fail.  At these critical times, the support of a physician who understands the core balance of the human condition can be most valuable.

“However, it seems to me that doctors do not talk about death to their patients, not because they do not care, but because doctors do not know how to deal with the god, they only understand the animal.”

Source

Painted, young and damned and fair

18 February 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, funeral, History

Posted by Vole

When I think back to the days after Diana’s death I remember a strange time: hot days and a sense of shared grief lying like a miasma over the whole country. I was working for a council in those days and the queue of people, waiting to sign the book of remembrance in the lobby of the library, stretching out of the doors and into the square, seemed then and seems still quite extraordinary.

Writing about royalty and royal women in the London review of Books, Hilary Mantel describes Diana’s short life and terrible death as a sort of mythic drama. Diana was, she suggests, more royal than the royals; her life an enactment of a ritual progress. She writes that Diana:

passed through trials, through ordeals at the world’s hands. For a time the public refrained from demanding her blood so she shed it herself, cutting her arms and legs. Her death still makes me shudder because although I know it was an accident, it wasn’t just an accident. It was fate showing her hand, fate with her twisted grin. Diana visited the most feminine of cities to meet her end as a woman: to move on, from the City of Light to the place beyond black. She went into the underpass to be reborn, but reborn this time without a physical body: the airy subject of a hundred thousand photographs, a flicker at the corner of the eye, a sigh on the breeze.

For a time it was hoped, and it was feared, that Diana had changed the nation. Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief. We are bad at mourning our dead. We don’t make time or space for grief. The world tugs us along, back into its harsh rhythm before we are ready for it, and for the pain of loss doctors can prescribe a pill. We are at war with our nature, and nature will win; all the bottled anguish, the grief dammed up, burst the barriers of politeness and formality and restraint, and broke down the divide between private and public, so that strangers wailed in the street, people who had never met Diana lamented her with maladjusted fervour, and we all remembered our secret pain and unleashed it in one huge carnival of mass mourning… none of us who lived through it will forget that dislocating time, when the skin came off the surface of the world, and our inner vision cleared, and we saw the archetypes clear and plain, and we saw the collective psyche at work, and the gods pulling our strings. To quote Stevie Smith again:

An antique story comes to me
And fills me with anxiety,
I wonder why I fear so much
What surely has no modern touch?

is there any other modern death that has gripped us so tightly or affected us so much? The full article – well worth a read – can be found here.

Euphemism of the week

25 January 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death

Euphemisms for ‘died’ abound. That nasty old tell-it-as-it-is d-word — nah, we can’t be doing with it. 

In a letter to the Oldie, Chris Butler alerts us to a new one: 

The department of Energy and Climate Change’s recent ‘Impact Assessment of the Introduction of Air Quality Requirements into the Renewable Heat Incentive’ leads off with an interesting sentence: “The combustion of biomass in renewable heat generation creates, through the emissions of air pollutants, a negative externality.” This ‘negative externality’ is a euphemism for killing people.

Good question, Poppy

22 January 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Death education, direct cremation, End-of-life issues, funeral reformers

In 2010/11, 40,000 women attended NCT antenatal classes. This is on top of regular meetings with midwives and GPs. Mumsnet gets 50 million page views per month. We clearly want information badly.

So why do we prepare ourselves for birth and death so differently?

Read the whole of Poppy Mardall’s article in the Huffington Post here. 

Well done, Poppy, for getting the message out!

RIP Michael Winner

21 January 2013
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death

“If you’re dead, you’re dead, so who cares. I tell people illness is a nuisance and extreme illness is a f***ing nuisance, but you have to live with the cards you’ve been dealt. My family were put to death in the camps, so compared to that, what I’m going through is minor.

“I’m very happy to snuff it. I’ve had enough time on Earth. I’d be happy if someone gave me the plug to pull.”

Michael Winner died today. 

An Experiential Enquiry into Death & Dying

15 January 2013
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, dying, End-of-life issues

Experiential retreat run by The Sammasati Project: An Experiential Enquiry into Death & Dying — 6-10 March 2013

An intense and tender process, this workshop provides an opportunity to gather the experience, knowledge, and skills needed to prepare for our own dying. Not only will this impact how we face our own death but how we live, post-workshop, too. It allows us to experience some of the many issues which confront a person when they realise that they will soon die such as fear, shock, guilt, grief, anger, regrets, pain, loss of control, completing relationships, changing perceptions, insights, relaxation, spiritual understandings and many more. 

This experiential understanding in turn will help us to be of greater support to others in their dying process whether they are family, friends or in a professional environment if we are in the health or caring sector. It is the first module of the Sammasati Support–Person Training, which can be continued in April at the same venue.

This workshop is in the form of a retreat and will include an exploration of the mystic Osho’s vision of dying consciously and joyfully. We will experiment with a range of meditative methods, and gain an experiential understanding of the transition called dying and the practice of the bardo.

The process can provide a greater appreciation of life, of the profundity of death, and of the pivotal role of meditation throughout.

Doctor and author Michael Murphy suggests, ‘If there is no training, and [support people] have not taken conscious heed of their own loneliness and disconnection, no wonder that there is bluster and fear [about dying]. Since dying involves body, soul, and spirit… lectures or instruction manuals are inadequate since feelings are very much involved. In order to be a truly competent guide, [the support person’s] training needs to be very personal, helping him to imagine his own dying and the dying of those he loves. Only then will he be in a more comfortable position to help others, since he himself will be able to become more a witness and guide…(The Wisdom of Dying: Practices for Living).

Read some testimonials from previous participants of this workshop on http://www.maneeshajames.com/testimonials.htm and watch the video testimonials at http://bit.ly/VENer0

Cost: 
£595 – includes accommodation and food
£545 – early bird price if paid in full before 17 January 2013

Venue: Monkton Wyld Court, Bridport, Dorset DT6 6DQ

Date: 6 March at 18:00 until 10 March at 18:00

The course will be facilitated by Maneesha James and Sudheer Niet who both have extensive experience in facilitating and teaching meditation; relating or ‘being with’ skills; supporting others in the dying process and a background in nursing.

Note that, as for those wishing to participate in the entire Training, an interview with Maneesha is a pre-requisite.

Please see our Training page at www.thesammasatiproject.co.uk for more information and contact details.

Links to the retreat are also: 

https://www.facebook.com/events/569293513086711/ 

http://www.iluna.co.uk/eventdetail/13210/an-experiential-enquiry-into-death-dying.html

 

Approaching death

9 January 2013
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, dying

“You get nearer to the shore and you can actually, for the first time, not just make out this dim, insubstantial cliff, but you can see the little houses and cars moving.”

Jonathan Miller

The unintended consequence of promoting longevity

8 January 2013
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: Assisted dying, Attitudes to death, Attitudes to older people, Death; Good death, End-of-life issues

Michael Wolff describes caring for his eldery, dementing mother in New York magazine. It’s a long piece and it will concentrate your mind. You’ll brood on it.  Warning: once you start, you won’t be able to put it down. 

…what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it? 

“Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?” wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws. 

Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel—we’re given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources. 

This is not anomalous; this is the norm. 

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese, and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death’s appointment—though far, far, far from healthy.

Read it all here. 

Death in the community

17 December 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Attitudes to death, coffins

From KentOnline:

Grave concerns have been aired over a coffin maker’s presence at a late night shopping event [in Tenterden, Kent]. Andy Clarke of Wealden Coffins, who makes unique curved and painted eco-friendly coffins, said his business had as much right to be there as anyone else.

“It was quite interesting,” he said. “We had a lot of quite mixed responses. I think it surprised a few people and there were some people who avoided eye contact. We did get some people who said it’s not really very festive and it’s not necessarily something you would buy for Christmas, but we had a lot of very positive comments as well.

“I had a great number of people who said how lovely the coffins were and how it was nice to see them out in a place where you could see them. If people get annoyed by the subject of death that’s unfortunate but it’s something we all have to go through at some stage.”  [Story] 

In an email to the GFG Andy adds: “One of the main things that came across is that on the whole many people just don’t like to talk about death and the issues around it. Many of the people that we actually spoke to said how refreshing it was to see someone showing off their coffins in a public place instead of hiding them away.”

We first featured Andy back in April here. 

Andy is presently holding a competition for a new design for his Curve coffins. If you fancy a doodle, check it out. 

Quote of the day

23 November 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, Quotes

“I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.”

Source