dying – Page 3 – The Good Funeral Guide

Letting go

22 October 2010

Charles

3 Comments

Categories: Attitudes to death, Death; Good death, dying, End-of-life issues

Rhoda Partridge took up painting when she was 70. Now 90 she’s still hard at it. Her spirited life has also embraced scuba diving, gliding and ceramics.

In an interview in this month’s Oldie magazine she is asked:

Do you find that after 70 years you live in the shadow of death?

She replies:

Oh pouf! Pocket full of crap! I think it could even be a good experience. We are beginning to be better about death, allowing people to die quietly, not to stick needles and drips in them. It’s important that the person who’s dying is allowed to die, that you hold their hand, tell them you love them and let them go. One of my sons has promised to look after me through my death. I would like all my children to come and talk to me one at a time. But I don’t want them all moaning around me.

One man’s date with death

19 August 2010

Charles

3 Comments

Categories: dying, Humanists, Secular approaches to death, what does dying feel like?

You saw the news that Christopher Hitchens has cancer? I suppose we all wonder how we would feel and conduct ourselves were the news to be broken to us, so there is something compelling about listening to and observing someone else for whom the dread summons has come. Here are some extracts from what Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair:

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services

…

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it.

…

Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups.

Not that Hitch is turning to God, of course. Not all Christians are praying for him, either. And a lot of his political enemies are delighted. One of them concluded a blog post thus: “Happy dying, Hitch, you sick, seedy, disreputable fucking bastard.” No stranger to controversy, our Hitch.

Read the entire article here.

The sun that bids us rest is waking

3 May 2010

Charles

2 Comments

Categories: Assisted suicide, Death; Good death, dying, Good death

It’s going to be interesting to track the development of, both, the right to die and its concomitant, the responsibility to die. Old age doesn’t just become physically unendurable, it gets to be economically unaffordable, too.

The darkness is increasingly going to fall at our behest. Choosing the moment will be straightforward enough. Humans live in the future. Our zest for now resides in our expectation of what lies in store for us next. We’ll know when we want to go: no next, no point. Pass the dose, doctor.

Here’s a new poem by Fleur Adcock in this week’s Spectator:

Charon

Where is Dr Shipman when we need him
to ferry us across the fatal stream
and land us gently in Elysium?

Shipman, boatman, ferryman – whatever
the craft he plies to help us cross the river –
we seem to have been waiting here forever.

How did we get the timetable so wrong?
Things are becoming vague, and we’re not strong.
Life was OK, but it went on far too long.

When we’ve forgotten how to keep afloat,
Scoop us up, Doctor, in your kindly boat,
And carry us across the final moat.

A party for a parting

19 March 2010

Charles

No comments

Categories: ceremony, dying

Jonathan posted an interesting thought the other day: “if no-one had portrayed the pseudovictoriana we associate with funerals, can you think of anyone who would have invented it for themselves?.” It raises the question: if we were to start again with a clean sheet, how would we do them?

It’s a big question. Do funerals need to be reformed or re-visioned? Do we go on trying to make a bad thing better, or do we break the mould?

Or has the mould been broken? The so-called celebration of life led by a secular celebrant has, for those who reject organised religion, turned the tables on the well-meaningless utterances of a mumbling minister – if that’s the attitude you take to a ceremony whose ritual is the same for everyone. Modern secular funerals pride themselves on being unique ceremonies for unique people. They reject the one-size-fits-all (even though, in practice, there’s very little difference between most of them). In doing so, they overlook the great and enviable strength and comfort of the one-size-fits-all ritual, best explained by Thomas Long: “Someone we love has died, and so once again we get out our old scripts, assemble on the stage, and act out one more time the great and hopeful drama of how the Christian life moves from death to life … We do this again and again, every time someone dies, because it is important for our bodies to know the way home.” If this results in the depersonalisation of the dead person, I mean the deceased, this is not the fault of the ritual: “Jane Doe’s funeral will inevitably be Jane Doe’s funeral, and who she actually was will make a difference in the sounds and rhythms of the ritual.” All religious rituals have been refined over hundreds of years. Where they have retained their theological confidence they have evolved, as the result of tens of thousands of tweaks, into stunning theatre – as any Catholic requiem mass will testify. The religious funeral in this country is reckoned to have been discredited by timeserving duty ministers and crem cowboys: the ones who didn’t give a damn. Sure, they helped it on its primrose path. But what actually did for it was loss of ritual nerve, the desire to make the most of a pastoral opportunity, the timid wish not to give offence to non-believers: the adulteration of the ritual. For all that a fullblooded requiem mass may be, for some, an alien rite in the House of Rimmon, none but the most bilious atheist would deny that it’s a heck of a fine affair. The truth is that the Church can do a bloody good funeral – as Brother Felix will testify.

Where there’s no familiar ritual to enact you’ve to start from scratch, hurry up, make it up, improvise. Hope it turns out okay, not an incoherent flim-flam of ill-assorted elements. But risk missing the point or getting the emphases wrong or ending up with nobbut an entertainment, the triumph of the trivial over the profound. It takes a great deal more intelligence of both mind and heart to create a ceremony which effects the transformation of mourning than we see in so many of today’s so-much-better secular ceremonies. It takes rigour.

There’s a link at the bottom video to a video which illustrates much of the poverty of the modern funeral. It’s called A Party for Kath. A party for a parting, geddit? It’s a product of Dying Matters Awareness Week (don’t you dare tell me it passed you by), itself the product of the Dying Matters Coalition, which started life as a gaggle of quangos and now incorporates thousands of associated rag-tag bodies. There is much about this Coalitition that makes me uncomfortable. The way it talks down. The way it supposes talking about death to be a conversation made necessary by a life-limiting event, not by birth. The way it asserts that talking about your ‘preferences’ will make your death good. The way it implicitly advocates dying at home without acknowledging that a hospital is actually custom built to look after very ill people, and without acknowledging either that, though most people say they’d like to die at home, they tend not to if they have been involved in a home death. Frankly, the statement, “Dying Matters hopes to help make ‘a good death’ the norm for the more than 500,000 people who die in England each year” seems to me as well-meaningly fatuous as a C of E funeral.

Above all, to promote the notion that funerals should be directed by the dead seems to me to be wrongheadedness bordering on wickedness – and music to the ears of the funeral plan salespeople. The dying want their funerals to be cheap, cheerful, fuss free, not upsetting and garnished with finger food. Well, here’s a message to the dying (ie, all of us): that recipe doesn’t work if they hated you, it doesn’t work if they loved you and it doesn’t work if they were mostly indifferent to you. It doesn’t work whatever they felt about you. Say what you’d like, by all means, just as you always do before your birthday. Then butt out and leave it to them.

Only when the living engage with their duty to shoulder responsibility, to hurt and think and work, will they know what needs to be done and what needs to be said. It’s a regret to me that the Dying Matters Coalition hasn’t got the emotional and intellectual rigour to talk tough and get that message out.

Watch A Party for Kath here.

A bit discursive, this post. It needs editing. I’m not out of rigour, but I am out of time. Sorry! As for the choice of Rod Stewart – well, yes, a bit gratuitous.

The D-Word

27 January 2010

Charles

No comments

Categories: bereavement, dying, Grief, what does dying feel like?

There’s a new book out about dying and death. It’s called, appropriately, The D-Word. Now, there’s a heap of books out there about long-term care of the very ill; there’s another heap about bereavement. We don’t urgently need more of them. But there’s hardly anything out there about grim D. We do urgently need more D-books.

I didn’t feverishly tear it free from its Amazon packaging. Two reasons. I know the author, Sue Brayne, slightly. On a personal level I like her a lot. She’s absolutely not one of these too-nice-to-be-true people you can meet too many of in the death industry. She tells it as it is. We met at a conference of conjoined quangos which has now re-badged as Dying Matters. I blogged about it intemperately at the time. I sounded off in the street afterwards as I walked with Sue to the station. She made no objection to the f-word, either. I honour her for that. I very, very much don’t want to not like her book.

Second reason? The father of a good friend went to hospital a fortnight ago. After conducting batteries of tests, the people who work miracles, the doctors, had that conversation with the family where they make it gently clear that, this time, there’s no cure, just care. He’s going to die. Probably quite soon. Unthinkable? No, they all knew it would happen sometime; he’s been getting old fast recently. But thought about? Not much. Some things you don’t think about till you have to.

So what my friend, and his family, and his dad all need is somewhere to go where they can find out about this business of dying. They need information. And because news like this can make you feel very lonely, very disconnected, they need to know how it felt for others, too, so that they can set their experience in a broader context. And for all the well-meaning advice I have been able to offer them, and not very much at that, it’d be so much better to have a book to recommend.

Come to think of it, I need some advice, too, on how to conduct myself towards this dying man and his family. I like them all very much. I’ve known them for years. They are good people. It’s going to be really hard.

So: reviewing Sue’s book isn’t an exercise in judicious objectivity. Bluntly, it had better be very good or I’m going to feel badly let down.

And the good news is that it is superb.

Sue sets out her stall: “The D-Word is based on the lived, felt, human response of what it’s like to die.” Her method? To tell it “through the personal narratives of relatives, friends and carers”. Sue draws conclusions from these stories. She also gives us lots of useful information and, by doing so, a language of dying. Literally. A vocabulary. So that we can talk about it and understand the hazards of not talking about it – and the hazards of talking about it in treacherous euphemisms.

Sue covers the ground. A little potted history tells us how we got to be so death denying. She examines the value of an existential explanation – a faith (though she doesn’t cover atheism). She examines how professional carers regard dying. There’s an excellent chapter about survivors of violent or sudden death, what helped and what didn’t. She talks about both where to find support and how to give it. She tells us how to support the dying. And she tells us what dying feels like, much of which is the fruit of her years of research with Peter Fenwick. She does all this in just 165 pages. She has interviewed the best possible people, and must be congratulated on finding them. She has even tracked down one of the UK’s best and nicest undertakers, James Showers, whose definition of a funeral is, I think, both moving and brilliant. A funeral, he says, transforms “a fact – that someone has died – into a ritual that is authentic and relevant to those who were close to that person, to help them say goodbye in public and with meaning … to turn their grief into something beautiful.”

I don’t know how many copies Sue has sold yet – it’s early days. She’s just sold another. I am sending one to my friend as soon as I have posted this. Thank you, Sue.

You can buy the book from Amazon. As recommended as it gets. Find it here.

What does dying feel like? 2

15 September 2008

Charles

No comments

Categories: dying, what does dying feel like?

No one writes about death and funerals with greater wisdom, wit or feel for words than the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch.

Is that point of view disputable? I think not. But go on, dispute it all the same. Where healthy debate is concerned, there is harmony only in discord.

Following on from my last post, here’s, if you don’t know it, Tom’s poem In Paradisum. I hope he won’t be copyright-sensitive if I quote it in full. It’s in his collection Grimalkin and Other Poems.

It makes me wonder if there are any funeral workers out there who have had similar thoughts — or even supernatural experiences?

In Paradisum

Sometimes I look into the eyes of corpses.

They are like mirrors broken, frozen pools,

or empty tabernacles, doors left open,

vacant and agape; like votives cooling,

motionless as stone in their cold focus.

As if they’d seen something. As if it all

came clear to them, at long last, in that last moment

of light perpetual or else the black

abyss of requiems and nothingness.

Only the dead know what the vision is,

beholding which they wholly faint away

amid their plenary indulgences.

In Paradisum, deducante we pray:

their first sight of what is or what isn’t.

What does dying feel like?

11 September 2008

Charles

No comments

Categories: dying, what does dying feel like?

For a while, now, I have been looking for someone to tell me what dying feels like. Tricky topic, I know, all the best witnesses being dead. Silly thing to do, friends have told me, don’t waste your time.

Dr Geoffrey Garret, onetime senior Home Office pathologist, tells us what dying looks like:

Life has a genuine presence that you can only really feel as it moves from a body. That is the sole time it shows itself, through its sudden absence. Though you cannot touch it, see it or hear it … life is nonetheless something one can feel, like electricity.

It is also true to say that one does not have to be physically close to sense the microsecond when it moves on.

You’d think that hospice nurses and care home staff would have some idea what dying feels like, having watched over so many departures. You’d think that one or two might have done it themselves, vicariously.

I was about to start researching this when along comes a pretty good answer in the shape of a new book by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying. Dr Fenwick is a neurophysiologist, not a new age nutter. Difficult to roll the eyes and dismiss him out of hand.

The Fenwicks talk about ELEs – end of life experiences – when dying people become aware of the presence of friendly dead people who have come to receive them and guide them on their way. At the moment of death, a dying person will often gaze fixedly and with great joy.

They conclude that “a mechanistic view of brain function is inadequate to explain these transcendent experiences.” They refute any claim that these are drug induced experiences in dying people on the grounds that drugs give rise to altogether more psychedelic hallucinations.

The Fenwicks talk about the experiences of people miles away from a dying person who become aware of their death at the precise time it happens.

They talk about how some of the living have a continuing sense of the presence of a dead person.

They’re especially interesting about NDEs – near death experiences – especially those they term TDEs – temporary death experiences. Some survivors of cardiac arrest, brought back by CPR, experience the classic near death experience even though they are technically dead. The Fenwicks conclude: “From the point of view of science, TDEs cannot occur during unconsciousness, and yet there is some tantalising evidence that this is just when they do seem to occur.”

They conclude that consciousness may not be limited to the brain, and that, given the lovely time people have dying, “a greater understanding of what happens when we die would lead to a removal of our fear of death and open up the possibility of a new beginning, the start of a new journey.”

It’s all very intriguing and, as the Fenwicks say, worth researching further. They don’t claim to have the answer, but they are sceptical of the capability of reductionist medical science to crack the mystery.

It’s a book well worth reading. Rush out and buy it. And I’m looking forward to another, when it comes off the presses in a few days’ time. It is Gentle Dying by Felicity Warner, who heads up the UK’s only online hospice. It’s all about engaging with dying and making it a positive process, not “A losing fight with frightful pain / Or a gasping fight for breath” (Betjeman).

My neighbour’s house was repossessed yesterday. All her things are still in it. We don’t know where she is now. I rang the estate agent who, it turns out, traffics in this sort of misery daily, and, no, she doesn’t think about the feelings of the people this has happened to. If continuation of consciousness means more of the same shittiness of human nature, I’m very happy to buy into the idea of dying contentably. After that, though, please: lights out.