“Families that live and purchased their homes there never once thought there would be a funeral home and the reminder of death on a daily basis.”
Mayor Dennis Michael speaks for the townspeople of Rancho Cucamonga, California, in opposition to plans to open a funeral home.
“The end of life can be big drama, that’s for sure. In nearly a decade of doing this work, I’ve witnessed momentous final decisions; conversations carried on with mysterious, unseen figures; visions of the afterlife; and eleventh-hour forgiveness. We release each other–one back to the seen, known world and one into the unseen, unknown–and are ourselves released.”
Dying got so protracted and difficult it became necessary to invent the living will — a list of opt-ins and opt-outs during the last days/weeks/months. If you haven’t made one, you know you should.
What a living will does not record, because it doesn’t need to, is something we also all need to decide for ourselves, preferably as far in advance as possible. It is: what will we do if the prognosis is terminal, but we are offered chemotherapy?
It’ll mean balancing side-effects against time bought. It’ll mean a very down-to-earth discussion with the doctor. And it’ll be vitally important that we don’t kid ourselves, the side-effects may not be worth it.
Most people, according to this article, do kid themselves. In a survey, over 1,100 patients with a recent diagnosis of stage IV lung or colon cancer who had opted to receive chemotherapy were asked what their expectations of their treatment were. 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of colon cancer patients reckoned that a cure was “very likely,” “somewhat likely” or “a little likely”.
In other words, they misunderstood why they were receiving chemotherapy. And they’re all dead.
Doctors know that people can be unrealistically optimistic in the face of an insuperable tumour. There’s this idiotic notion that cancer is a test of character, it can be defeated by willpower (and only losers surrender, presumably). Yes, we can easily delude ourselves.
The survey also reveals that patients who awarded their doctors best scores for communication were the ones with the most wildly optimistic expectations of their chemotherapy.
Dying Matters is surveying its members to see what they think about how well it’s doing. The GFG was one of the first 100 orgs to sign up to Dying Matters.
Statements on the survey (5 possible responses from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree) include:
The Dying Matters Coalition has helped highlight the need for more open discussion around dying and death.
Dying Matters has produced some helpful materials and events for coalition members.
Dying Matters has kept coalition members well informed and engaged in the work of the coalition.
To be honest, we’re not especially aware of the work of Dying Matters here at the GFG, and that could well be an oversight. It’d be interesting to know what you think.
We didn’t cover the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebrations on 1 & 2 November. Perhaps that was an oversight. It’s a colourful and intriguing festival of great interest to Westerners. Those from cultures influenced by Protestantism tend to be a bit tongue-tied in their relationships with their dead.
The Dia de los Muertos is much envied by those who feel that their own culture has forgotten how to commemorate the departed. But is it culturally informative, or is it no more than a cultural curiosity?
Held to coincide with the Feast of All Souls, the Dia de los Muertos is the result of the incomplete colonising of a pagan festival by militant Catholics. Its origins are Aztec and it possesses a quality of incoherence which seems not to bother anyone very much. In its original Aztec incarnation the Dia expressed the belief that the living and the dead co-exist. Christian teaching, on the contrary, tells us that our dead go far, far away.
Our own Hallowe’en is, of course, the product of another such marriage of incompatibles, in this case between Christian All Souls and the pagan Samhain, held at that time of the year when the door to the Otherworld opens wide enough to allow the souls of the dead to return for a brief time. Again, not at all Christian.
In an increasingly secular society, where the spectrum of spiritual beliefs is very great, it is useful to have the examples of other cultures to plagiarise and adapt – repurpose, to use the modern idiom. We can probably expect to see a growth in the variety of commemorative observances as people increasingly find the courage to do whatever it is they feel they need to do no matter what anyone else might think.
Maurice Saatchi, for example, breakfasts every day with his dead wife, Josephine Hart, at her grave. He’s not a fan of the moving-on/closure school of grieving. He says, “In my view, to move on is a monstrous act of betrayal and to come to terms with — I think I’d call that an act of selfishness.”
Saatchi’s wifes’s death has even enabled him to redefine his own identity: “The reality of it is that she is me, I am her, we are one . . . I am Josephine Hart, I can put it no stronger than that. It is no different now from what it has always been; we have always been one person.”
The on-trend hinterland between the living and the dead is currently that occupied by zombies. Of ancient African origin, contemporary portrayals of zombies are derived from the slave culture of Haiti, where, according the Amy Willentz, ‘the only escape from the sugar plantations was death, which was seen as a return to Africa, or lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa) … The zombie is a dead person who cannot get across to lan guinea,’ and is thereby condemned to an eternity of backbreaking toil in the sugar plantations under the rule of cruel overseers.
Wilentz goes on: ‘There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias.’
Leaving aside industrial dystopias (together with ghosts and angels), let’s finish by considering the living dead – those kept alive by modern medicine; those who inspire all the debates we’re having these days about assisted dying.
The Liverpool Care Pathway has come under fire in recent months. Doctors have been prescribing it without consulting some families. Hospitals have been incentivised to apply it to living dead people in order to effect economies in healthcare.
The Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust received £1.03m for doing just that in the last financial year.
Silvan Luley, who is unofficially known as the deputy director of Dignitas, says he is concerned that under current Swiss law the association cannot offer assisted suicides to individuals who are “perfectly healthy”.
Luley said: “The more restrictive you design a law, the more difficult you make it for people to access a dignified end in life, the more people will turn to ghastly methods.
“I can try to talk people out of it. I can try to show people alternatives, but if somebody does not enjoy the sunlight, the smell of freshly cut grass in the morning any more, then what do you do then?”
Full article in the Sunday Times here. (£)
Suzie Howie was a showbiz publicist in Australia. She died a few days ago aged 63. Here are some extracts from her last message:
I have had a terrific life and am so grateful for the fun, the excitement and the wonderful people who have been part of it.
Couldn’t have done it without the love of my creative husband, Paul Taylor, and the warmth and love of his family, who have given me so much affection and support – and that includes the first Mrs Taylor, Maggie Pinkney.
My clever and amusing doctors, Gaynor Simmons and Bob Millar, who have guided me through the last seven years of breast cancer and best of all shown me that death is just a part of life. I am so grateful to them, as it has meant that I have genuinely accepted this and taken joy from all my life.
Please note – that after 30 years of media calls, press conferences, before and after drinks and all those opening night parties — enough is enough. There will be NO funeral, and certainly no memorial. I am very happy to just float away when called.
Thank you everyone – and enjoy life. I have.
More here.
There’s a good death piece over at the New York Times that you might like. It’s by Bess Lovejoy, author of the about-to-be-published Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. Here are some taster extracts:
Over the last century, as Europeans and North Americans began sequestering the dying and dead away from everyday life, our society has been pushing death to the margins … The result, as Michael Lesy wrote in his 1987 book “The Forbidden Zone,” is that when death does occur, “it reverberates like a handclap in an empty auditorium.”
The erasure of death also allows us to imagine that our mortal trivialities and anxieties are permanent, while a consistent awareness of death — for those who can stomach it — can help us live in the here and now, and teach us to treasure what we already have. In fact, a study by University of Missouri researchers released this spring found that contemplating mortality can encourage altruism and helpfulness, among other positive traits.
Though there’s no deserved namecheck in what follows for Jon Underwood, Ms Lovejoy observes:
“Death cafes,” in which people come together over tea and cake to discuss mortality, have begun in Britain and are spreading to the United States, alongside other death-themed conferences and festivals (yes, festivals).
Whoops, Ms Lovejoy omits to namecheck, also, this festival and this festival. You begin to suspect that Britain is at the forefront of something here.
Ms Lovejoy concludes:
It’s never easy to confront mortality, but perhaps this year, while distributing the candy and admiring the costumes of the neighborhood kids, it’s worth returning to some of the origins of Halloween by sparing a thought for those who have gone before. As our ancestors knew, it’s possible that being reminded of their deaths will add meaning to our lives.
Find the complete article here.
Much attention has been accorded to Eben Alexander’s account of his recent near-death experience. While NDEs are two a penny, this NDE was experienced by a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, no less. This lent Alexander’s NDE a clear edge in terms of credibility. It is easy enough to write off the NDEs of ordinary people as delusions.
The particular point of interest here is the current debate among neuroscientists about whether consciousness exists separately from the brain. A number hypothesise that it does, but none has managed to prove it. Eben Alexander, man of science, claims he decidedly has:
“I know that many of my peers hold as I myself did to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it.”
In the Guardian, Peter Stanford acknowledges the human need to believe that death is not the negation of life:
From the time the first Neanderthal sat next to the lump of dead protein that had been his or her mate and realised that something had to be done about the smell of rotting flesh, we have wanted there to be something more, something beyond death. When that body was put into a ditch, or pushed over a ledge into a ravine, the one left behind looked into the void and ached.
He concludes: ‘[Alexander’s] account contains just about heavenly cliché known to humankind.’ In a comment under the piece, hermionegingold avers: ‘i suspect, if it exists (which i doubt) it’s probably a lot like milton keynes.’
Blogger Pharyngula at Science Blogs quotes from Eben Alexander’s account of his heavenly journey:
Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.
Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.
Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.
Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language.
The answers were:
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong.”
Pharyngula’s conclusion is: “Here’s a deep message for you: brain damage can persuade you of the truth of some real bullshit.”
In the Daily Telegraph, Colin Blakemore, Professor of Neuroscience and Philosophy at the University of London, shares Pharyngula’s scepticism, but with more civility. He concludes his piece with the story of the nobleman who asked the Zen Master Hakuin:
“What happens to the enlightened man at death?”
“Why ask me?” said Hakuin.
“Because you’re a Zen master.”
“Yes, but not a dead one.”
At the top of this post is a TED talk by GFG hero Peter Fenwick, who has a very open mind about continuing consciousness. Do listen to it if you have nine minutes and twenty-five seconds. You won’t find yourself wishing the time back as you lie dying, I promise.
I am filming with Bernard Underdown, Gravedigger of the Year, at Deerton Natural Burial Ground. We are standing beside one of Bernard’s freshly-dug graves talking with ever-so over-egged animation about graveyard myths and superstitions. We exhaust the topic, look over to the camera, and the cameraman says, “Lovely. Perfect. Again, please.” In answer to our mildly miffed expressions he explains, “Car. That car. Sorry.” The noise of a passing car has intruded on the microphone. Bernard and I dig deep into our reserves of flagging spontaneity and reprise.
On the other side of the burial ground I see five people arrive, then stand and survey the ground and chat contemplatively. It is starting to rain and they put their umbrellas up.
One of the group detaches herself and comes over to us. It is Wendy Godden-Wood, the owner. Bernard and I come to the end of our re-take. We’re on a continuous loop now, we ready ourselves to start again. The cameraman says “Great. That’ll do.”
Wendy explains that the four people have come to buy plots. They are mooching, looking for the spot they like best, the spot where they’d like to spend eternity.
People say we’re a death-denying nation. Don’t know about that.
