Can you help?
By Caroline Iandoli Living funerals are gathering in popularity as more people are approaching death with a more positive frame of mind, taking the opportunity to celebrate with the people they love and have been important in their lives. It also means friends and relatives who might not be able to attend the funeral […]
The Home Death Movement
I’ve been reading an interesting research report published last month in Australia. Its title: Bringing our Dying Home: Creating community at the end of life. It examines how networks of unpaid carers can supplement the services of professional carers and enable dying people to die at home. It shows that the lot of unpaid […]
To accept what cannot be helped
A very good account here by Ann Hulbert of her mother’s response to being told she had an incurable cancer: Two years ago this coming June my mother—“an 80-year-old in a 60-year-old’s body,” the pulmonologist told her—was ambushed by a diagnosis of Stage IV adenocarcinoma of the lungs … In the windowless examining room at […]
A time to die
Every week in the Spectator magazine Peter Jones takes an occurrence or development in contemporary society and politics and considers it in the light of what the ancients did when faced with the same circumstances. This week he considers the art of dying. I’d now bung you a link but I can’t: the Speccie does not […]
Materialism gone mad and the what’s-it-all-about question
Here’s an interesting piece by Peter Popham in the Independent, first published in May. I’ve only just found it. He begins by talking about Christopher Hitchens, who has oesophageal cancer, and how impending death has reconfigured his identity: “…when the bitter laughter dies away, there is Hitch, locked away from healthy us, in a land […]
Demos report: Dying for Change
There’s a report just out from Demos on death and dying (why don’t we get chronological and say dying and death?). It’s by Charles Leadbeater, somewhat of a hero of mine, and Jake Garber. It’s called Dying for Change. It comes out at the same time as the National Council of Palliative Care’s The Missing […]
Broken survivors
Superb if gruelling documentary examining end of life issues from PBS. One of the contributors is Judith E Nelson, professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and associate director of Mount Sinai Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit: The burdens of intensive care can be very, very heavy, and the outcomes are often not […]
At the end
I was struck by the sweetness of this in the Victoria Times Colonist (Deaths and Funerals): “Life provides a puzzle for us when we outlive our friends, when we forget our memories, and when the new technologies pass us by, but we are ever loved when we remember our manners and treat others with love […]
Practicalities and suicide pacts
Here’s a highly recommended post over at the Exit blog: Heartache of a death not shared — a helium suicide fails. It discusses this story as reported by the Times: Early one morning in September, William Stanton heard footsteps coming up the stairs of his cottage in Somerset. He knew who it was and panicked. […]
The sun that bids us rest is waking
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 […]
