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There’s a very nice piece in the New York Times about a brother and sister who devised an ingenious way of keeping tabs on their ageing and determinedly  independent father. Here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

My brother and I created a shared Google calendar — an online calendar in which we could both make entries from wherever we happened to be. Each time either of us spoke to our father, we marked it in the calendar — what time of day it was, how he sounded, what we spoke about.

The upshot was that we had an excellent record of how he was — whether he was getting out, if he was cheerful or feeling low, changes to his medicines, any falls he said he had had. The calendar also allowed us to make sure that one of us spoke to him just about every day.

At the time, I was glad we kept the calendar because it helped us to cope with a difficult situation. Now I’m glad for a different reason: it helps me remember small details about him, the little things that slip out of memory, that fade with time. Laughs, tears, worries, frustrations, joy and love — it’s all in the calendar.

Do read it all here. 

From the i. More in the Telegraph here. 

Hat-tip to Michael Jarvis

In the US, The Onion mischievously reports: 

NEWTOWN, CT—As the nation continues to mourn the women and children who lost their lives in last month’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association has reportedly joined the outpouring of support for families of victims by sending each household a bereavement gun basket. “On behalf of everyone here at the NRA, we extend our deepest buy cialis 60 mg sympathies to your family during this difficult time, and hope you enjoy this complimentary assortment of the finest semi-automatic weapons and ammunition.”

Unfazed by caterwauling from the usual bedwetters, milksops and NDC types, the NRA has just released an app for mobile phones which enables you to shoot at coffin-shaped targets:

Sad news here from the New Straits Times: 

THE traditional Chinese coffin is not a popular option for funerals anymore mainly due to its daunting size and medieval shape.

New Cham Fei Casket operator, Cham Swee Hung, 36, said the demand for mui fa koon choy, which in Chinese means plum blossom flower has dropped as it is costly to hire a crane for the burial.

“In the olden days, there were many relatives, neighbours and friends who were ready to be mobilised as pall bearers but today, few people want to carry a heavy coffin up the steep hills for burial,” he said.

Cham added that his only clients are a small number of conservative families, who would make a special request for the mui fa koon choy.

Despite the lower demand, Cham, who is the second generation in his family to run a funeral parlour business, still maintains a workshop off Jalan Jelapang in Chemor here.

Cham said his company has been the sole provider for such coffins in the state for over a decade now.

“We used to have competitors but they eventually stopped producing such coffins when the demand for them dropped,” he said.

Besides having to contend with less orders, Cham also had to keep up with the rising cost and scarce availability of suitable timber.

“The wood used to produce the mui fa koon choy are from Jelutong trees in Sabah which can fetch RM1,200 per tonne,” he said.

Among Cham’s employees are Chan Leah, 65, who entered the trade as an apprentice more than 40 years ago.

“Each coffin is carved out from a single block of timber, with a diameter of not less than 60cm (24 inches) and cut into four wooden blocks. The pieces are then whittled down and sanded into the distinctly curved shapes before being re-assembled with nails.

“Everything is done manually with no assistance from machines except for an electric saw and carving tools,” he added, noting that there were only a few craftsmen in the country who still continued with the trade.

“Many have left due to the difficult work and poor wages,” he said.

Another employee Foo Fatt Lim, 63, said there had not been any new apprentice in the field for over 20 years now.

“This trade will be lost when people like me pass on as today’s youth would not choose this as a career,” he said. “Today’s youth are also unlikely to choose this career path.

“No one wants to inherit our skill or knowledge,” he said,

The Natural Death Centre Charity proudly presents:

The NDC Death Café

Film Event

2.30pm – 5pm

Sunday 24 February 2013

London NW2 6AA

(near Willesden Green underground station)

Suggested donation : £5  

As part of this Death Café, young documentary filmmaker Olivia Humphreys will show her 20 minute film  ‘Noctuaries’. Josefine Speyer, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Natural Death Centre, will host the event.

Come and join us for a free flowing conversation around the topic of dying, death and bereavement. Whilst sitting comfortably in a relaxed setting, drink tea and eat delicious cake or sandwiches and enjoy an open, respectful and confidential space for discussion, free of discrimination where people can express their views safely.

To participate, please email a note to Josefine at josefine@josefinespeyer.com with your name and phone number and how you heard about the event. She’ll send you an email to confirm your place. Thanks!

Filmmaker Biography:

Olivia Humphreys is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in London, and recently completed a Masters in Screen Documentary at Goldsmiths. Her graduation film won the Royal Television Society award for Best Postgraduate Factual Film and the Best Documentary award at Exposures Film Festival. Her films have been screened in over forty festivals worldwide.

Synopsis:

“In the ten years since my mother’s death, my family and I have had frequent, vivid and profoundly moving dreams about her. ‘Noctuaries’ looks at how each of us has responded to these dreams, and how they have formed part of our grieving.”

The Natural Death Centre (Registered Charity
 Number 1091396) needs your support. It relies entirely on donations and book sales. Established in 1991, it is a social, entrepreneurial, educational charity that gives free, impartial advice on all aspects of dying, bereavement and consumer rights, including family-organised and environmentally friendly funerals. It runs a helpline and sells the new Natural Death Handbook.

www.naturaldeath.org.uk

www.deathcafe.com

From the Sunday Times, 13 January:

Punters in Taiwan are betting on when the terminally sick will die. According to the China Press newspaper, more than 10 syndicates have been set up in senior citizens’ clubs in the city of Taichung to bet on the longevity of cancer patients. The paper claims that gamblers even include doctors and patients’ families. 

Bookies seek permission from the families and gambler and then visit the patient to assess their condition. Minimum bets are around £40, but some punters have reportedly placed stakes as high as £200,000. If the patient dies within a month, the bookies win. But if they cling on for between one and six months, the gamblers win three times their wager and the families get 10%. China Press says police are investigating. 

Someone

someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie
eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea
scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last
shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out
spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass
someone today is leaving home on business
saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortege
someone is paring his nails for the last time, a precious moment
someone’s waist will not be marked with elastic in the future
someone is putting out milkbottles for a day that will not come
someone’s fresh breath is about to be taken clean away
someone is writing a cheque that will be rejected as ‘drawer deceased’
someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar
someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast
someone is making rash promises to friends
someone’s coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined
who feels this morning quite as well as ever
someone if asked would find nothing remarkable in today’s date
perfume and goodbyes her final will and testament
someone today is seeing the world for the last time
as innocently as he had seen it first

Dennis O’Driscoll

From a letter by Roger Mortimer, onetime (horse) racing correspondent of The Sunday Times: 

Racing has always contained some odd characters not invariably on the side of the law. One such was John Stewart who, when times were bad, used to do a bit of housebreaking in the Kensington area. One afternoon the flat owner caught Stewart at it (there was no racing that day because of a hard frost) and Stewart lost his head and killed him. 

He was caught, tried and sentenced to death. To his horror he found that he was going to be hanged on Derby Day (1928). He applied to the Home Secretary to have the execution put off til after the race but the stony-hearted individual declined to intervene. 

As the awful little procession left the condemned cell for the scaffold, Stewart interrupted the parson’s droning prayers to advise all present to have a really good bet on Felstead. They were his last words. Felstead won the Derby at 33-1. 

From a report by Andy Bull in The Spin:

Congratulations to Rangana Herath, the roly-poly Sri Lankan spinner whose 12 wickets at 33 each against Australia have bumped him up to fourth in the ICC’s Test bowling rankings. Herath took three for 47 in the fourth innings last Sunday, an exceptional feat for a dead man. 

Herath, according to those two impeccable news sources Twitter and Wikipedia, passed away in a car crash in Sydney on Friday night. Concern grew back in Colombo, and word of the tragedy spread so far and wide that Herath himself was woken at 2.30am by a phone call from his team-mate Tillakaratne Dilshan, asking him whether rumours of his demise had been exaggerated.

Herath’s was, undoubtedly, the best performance by an un-dead cricketer since Aubrey Smith made seven for Sussex against the MCC back in May 1890, shortly after the South African paper Graff-Reinet Advertiser had published “much regretted news of his decease” from “inflammation of the lungs”.

The old year is dead and buried (thank you, gentlemen). The lights are on once more in the GFG-Batesville Shard. We’re back at our desks. And we’re full of zest and zing.

We hope you are, too. You have our best wishes for success, happiness in 2013 and the survival of your new year resolutions for, well, at least another week.

We’re in for a spellbinding twelve months.  We look forward to what’s going to happen. We don’t pretend for a minute to know what that’s going to be – predicting commercial and cultural trends in Funeralworld is a mug’s game. Nobody knows anything.

But it’s likely that it’s cultural trends which are going to define the direction. That’s our hunch. Societal attitudes to old age as longevity prolongs the twilight years. Re-modelled responses to death in an increasingly secular, material society.

We look forward to debating what we observe. We hope you’ll join in.

We hope you’ll want to spark debate, too. This blog is open house to everyone with something to say. The only thing we stand for here is openmindedness.

Do get in touch.