The New York Times Special Supplement on Death

The New York Times begins the new year with a superb supplement called "Let's Talk About Death," with excellent articles on grief, end of life decisions,funerals, burials, and other methods for disposing of remains, writing an obituary, "death cleansing" "facing death with support, comfort, and dignity, near-death experiences, and making it easier to face all of these things and to talk to family and health care professionals about them.

What To Do With a Father's Ashes?

Reverend Danielle Tumminio Hansen is an Episcopal priest and theology professor at Emory University who specializes in "the intersection of trauma and theology." Her father's cremated remains are not, as he asked, spread in Hawaii but in her closet. In this essay, she writes that assisting in the final ceremonies of many others showed her that "ordination and a Ph.D. provide no protection from grief. They just make you vulnerable to it in a different way." Those of us storing cremated remains in corners of our home often believe our loved ones deserve something fitting and final, something more than a Ziploc bag or the cardboard box that contains it. We want to bestow an additional honor; we want to get it right. But that’s as far as we get because action would disrupt the spiritual status quo and that’s a frightening prospect. We might have to acknowledge that their mortality signifies ours, that we don’t know how or when, but one day, we too will return to dust. We might have to recognize that our faith in heaven is a little shakier than we’re letting on. We might have to own that we’re not ready to let that person go because of love or shock or unresolved conflict.

Caring for a Mother with Dementia

In Slate, Kim McLarin writes about her mother's dementia. My mother was a woman whose sharp wit and sharper tongue could be wielded either on your behalf or against your tender person, but there was no denying the weapon was formidable. To see such a woman reduced to dependency is heartbreaking. But what I feel is not just sadness. What I feel is something else.... In many ways, my mother’s life has never been this pleasant. No worrying about money, no worrying about protecting her children from the dangers of a racist society. All her needs are attended to, most desires (You want ice cream? Yes!) immediately met. My sister’s house is spacious and beautiful, far grander than any house my mother owned. More poignantly, dementia has freed my mother of a lifetime’s accumulated emotional wounds and grievances. The abandonment, the betrayal, the abuse, all largely forgotten, the pain finally softened, the memories finally dimmed. But gone too are agency and purpose and what seems to be any kind of interiority, though we can’t know this for sure. Gone is dignity, not in the sense of useless pride but in the sense of critical self-respect. Left behind is placidity atop a teeming helplessness.

Goodbye June

Kate Winslet directs and stars in "Goodbye June," coming to Netflix on December 24. She assembled an all-star cast with Dame Helen Mirren as a mother in hospice, as her family struggles with grief and with long-buried resentments and fears. Timothy Spall plays the husband who has no emotional vocabulary to express his feelings, and the adult children who struggle to process their own and find a way to support both parents are played by Winslet, Toni Collette, Johnny FLynn, and Andrea Riseborough. Flynn's character reads e.e. cummings' poem "if there are any heavens" aloud to his mother.

Tatiana Schlossberg Faces a Terminal Diagnosis

Tatiana Schlossberg comes from a family known for extraordinary gifts and unthinkable tragedy. Her grandfather was President John F. Kennedy and her mother is the only surviving member of the family who lived with him in the White House, Caroline Kennedy. Tatiana is a journalist of exceptional ability and dedication to the environment. She is married to a doctor and the mother of young children. Just after her most recent baby was born, the doctors noticed a problem with her blood. She has been in treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, ever since. And now she has been told that her prognosis is terminal. In an essay for the New Yorker, she writes:

When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe. Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

She writes about her family, about her treatment, about her parents and husband raising her children and how they might not remember her, about her first cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now Secretary of Health and Human Serivces, cutting half a billion dollars from the funding for the research that could have saved her and countless others. Please read it.

Come See Me In The Good Light — Documentary about a Dying Poet

After a terminal diagnosis, poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley found joy, poetry, and light in each other.

Happiness Expert on Why and How We Need to Think About Our Own Death

From happiness expert Arthur Brooks: As persuasive as the evidence is that thinking about your death can be a good happiness protocol, it doesn’t come naturally, as we’ve seen. Here’s some ideas to try. Meditate on your death. Try beginning each day with a version of this: “I know that in a few years, I will be dead, and a few years after that, no one will even remember my name. But I am alive this day, and I will not waste it.” This is a version of exposure therapy, a practice that helps to confront one’s fears, become more familiar with them, and, in the end, fear them less. Take stock of your true goals and plans. How many of your dreams are leading you to postpone love and happiness right now? By this, I don’t mean postponing a bit of money or any other trivial worldly reward; I mean love and relationships. For the sake of some future reward, are you neglecting your family life today? Your friendships? Your spiritual development? Envision yourself having just months to live and giving your current self some life advice.