Torie Bosch: Grief Is Messy and Complicated

From Slate:

I didn’t blame those who were at a loss for what to say or do. It’s hard to know what’s appropriate if you aren’t particularly close to someone who loses a loved one (and even harder when the cause of death is something particularly fraught, like suicide). As a result, people often become paralyzed, and then consequently feel guilty. But that doesn’t need to be the case.

Bosch lists forms of support from best (gifts of service and time -- helping with children or pets, making meals, running errands, sitting with the grieving person), notes (handwritten letter, followed by card, email, even social madia).

People are often afraid to say the wrong thing, so they say nothing. Something is better than nothing. Just say, "I'm so sorry." Then let the grieving person talk or not talk.

Two Brothers Face Morality Together: StoryCorps

From StoryCorps: Two brothers who are best friends face mortality together. "I write down now, all the time, “If I was going to die tomorrow, what am I gonna do today?” And, um…I’d want to spend as much time with you as possible. So that’s the most important thing." They are "a package deal," even on Tinder dates. "We're in this together."

‘Transhumanist’ eternal life? No thanks, I’d rather learn not to fear death.

Arthur C. Brooks writes in The Washington Post:

Herodotus, in the 5th century B.C., recorded an account of a race of people in northern Africa who, according to local lore, never seemed to age. Their secret, he wrote, was a fountain of youth in which they would bathe, emerging with “their flesh all glossy and sleek.” Legend has it that two millennia later, Spanish explorers searched for a similar restorative fountain off the coast of Florida.

We are still searching for the fountain of youth today. Instead of a fountain, however, it is a medical breakthrough, and instead of youth, we seek “transhumanism,” the secret to solving the problem of death by transcending ordinary physical and mental limitations. Many people believe this is possible. Observing a doubling of the average life span over the past century or so through science, people ask why another doubling is not possible. And if it is, whether there might be some “escape velocity” that could definitively end the aging of our cells while we also cure deadly diseases....

The promise to end old age is exciting and mind-boggling, of course. But it raises a question: Why would we want to defeat old age and its lethal result? After all, as writer Susan Ertz wryly observed in her 1943 novel “Anger in the Sky,” “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”\

...

Perhaps while we wait for the promises of transhumanism, we should hedge our bets with a bit of transmortalism, which has the side benefit of costing us no money. Who knows? Maybe the solution to the problem of death comes not by pushing it further away but, ironically, by bringing it much closer.

At 94, she was ready to die by fasting. Her daughter filmed it.

After a spinal injury, 94-year-old Rosemary Bowen "announced to her family and friends that she had decided to terminate her life by fasting. After saying her goodbyes, she stopped eating, and in the early morning of the eighth day of her fast, she died in her sleep.

But first, Rosemary asked her daughter, Mary Beth Bowen, to film her fast. The final week of her life is now documented, day by day, in a 16-minute film, which was shown publicly for the first time Saturday at the End of Life Expo hosted by Iona Senior Services in Tenleytown."



"Rosemary had seen friends in their 90s who had slowly declined, and as far back as 1979 she wrote about her aversion to an old age with loved ones “shuffling in and out of rest homes visiting me.” When a friend ended her life by fasting, Rosemary decided someday she would do the same."


She asked her daughter to film her death by fasting.

The Failure of Long-Term Care: My family faces an impossible choice: caring for our mom, or building our future

Med student Kristina Brown writes in The Washington Post about the heart-breaking dilemma of long-term care:

Many people assume that having a disability guarantees access to a network of resources. Not so. Because my mother has an income of $36,000 from her divorce settlement, is younger than 65 and lacks a 10-year employment history, she is disqualified from receiving Medicaid (despite its expansion), Medicare and Social Security Disability Insurance. Her private insurance company, like many others, does not cover home care for daily needs. The median cost of this service, for help seven days a week, is more than $80,000 per year. Like many families, we could not afford full-time coverage. This posed a life-altering dilemma: One of us had to stay home to care for her.

With my sister away at college, I went first: At age 16, when our 43-year-old mother lost the ability to walk, my life shifted to sleepless nights and baby monitors. Her disease progressed swiftly; soon she could no longer stand, eat or bathe without assistance. For six years, I provided 10 hours of care every day....

We are starting to run out of options: We could sell our home to qualify for state assistance; I could leave medical school to become a full-time caregiver for my mother. But taking these extreme, temporizing measures would only drive us further into a vicious cycle of financial instability.