"Don’t call it ‘assisted suicide’"

 A letter to the editors of The Washington Post from Donna Smith of Compassion & Choices objected to the term "assisted suicide."

Using the term “assisted suicide” to describe medical aid in dying is inaccurate and offensive to terminally ill individuals, who want to live but their disease is killing them. They just want the option to end their suffering peacefully if it becomes intolerable.

In fact, data from authorized jurisdictions shows one-third of terminally ill individuals who receive aid-in-dying medication don’t end up taking it, but they get peace of mind from knowing they can take it if they need it.

A New Machine for a Gentle Assisted Death

The Washington Post reports on a new machine for those who wish to have an assisted death.

People wishing to end their lives in Switzerland — one of a handful of countries that give the option — could soon have access to a new method: a 3-D-printed pod that its creator says can painlessly end someone’s life in a matter of minutes....

At the push of a button, the pod becomes filled with nitrogen gas, which rapidly lowers oxygen levels, causing its user to fall unconscious within a minute, Nitschke said. A person does not suffocate or experience distress, he said, but rather dies of oxygen deprivation after they’ve fallen asleep. In theory, the capsule can be towed to a place of someone’s choosing, said Nitschke, who described the machine as a “stylish and elegant” way to die.

Being Present for the Dying

 Ken Budd's essay On The Obligation to Prevent People from Dying Alone is a beautiful meditation of what those moments together mean to the person who is dying and the person who is there, to talk or not, to read scripture or not, just to be present. Budd, still distressed that his mother died alone, has volunteered with NODA. 

I sit quietly. The dying can feel our presence, I’ve been told. That’s the mission here. To be a compassionate human being. To provide family members — in this case the woman’s devoted daughter — with a break from their vigil. To make certain someone is here if she needs something. To ensure that she won’t feel alone and, most important, that she won’t die alone.

Grief in the Pandemic

"It shouldn’t take a pandemic to let grief run its course."

Lindsay Lee Wallace writes in "The unexpected gift of grieving in lockdown" about the welcome opportunity the pandemic gave her to have some time and space to mourn.

It was a testament to how unwell I’d been that I suddenly felt more at home.

Staying in was not only allowed, but mandated. I could eat fistfuls of cereal for every meal, wear the same sweatpants for days on end, and sleep in until the last possible moment.

I was fortunate to have a job that allowed me to work from home. Work, previously a venue of forced cheer and endless exclamation points, became softer. Every email was written with extra care—people had no idea what others were dealing with, could scarcely believe their own circumstances.

Without having to worry about colleagues at the next desk over, I could do what I needed most, and simply cry.

A Doctor Regrets Telling a Patient He is Dying

In  ‘You’re Dying,’ I Told My Patient. I Wish I Hadn’t. Dr. Daniela J. Lamas writes:

In most contexts, it is a doctor’s responsibility to tell our patients the truth, to help them to understand even the most devastating realities. But when I think about that night, I know that I added to my patient’s pain in the last hours of his life. I wish that I had done it differently. I could have paused and told him that yes, he was going to go home. I could have simply been there with him and said nothing at all. That small kindness might have done more for him than the truth.

Grief Keeps Us Close To Those We've Lost

 Steven Petrow writes in The Washington Post:

Long before my mother died, I’d read a slim book, “Grief: A Novel,” by Andrew Holleran, that long stayed with me. Holleran, whose earlier work chronicled the AIDS epidemic, creates characters for whom grief serves as a lifeline, ironic as that sounds, to those whom they’ve lost. The novel focuses on two men — an exhausted, lonely professor whose invalid mother has recently died and his new landlord, a fellow who has lost most of his friends to AIDS.

In one passage, the two characters discuss the nature of grief, ironically framing it as a way to maintain connection with the dearly departed:

The professor: “[G]rief is what you have after someone you love dies. It’s the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them. And as long as you have that, you’re not alone — you have them.”

The landlord: “But they’re gone!”

The professor: “Not if you grieve. . . . Your grief is the substitute for their presence on earth. Your grief IS their presence on earth.”

In the years since my mother died, temblors of grief have continued — sometimes on the surface, but more often deep within me. That they can come on without warning is no shock. That they pain me is also expected. The unfolding surprise has been that they no longer upset me. I’ve allowed myself to feel the pain of loss and I came to learn, albeit slowly and painfully, that grief is not to fear. If anything, it’s to be embraced. Grief had become an unexpected and comforting way to stay connected to the mother I’d lost.

Grief and Jewish Observance of Mourning

In this podcast, Simon Shimshon Rubin, Director at the International Laboratory for the Study of Loss, Bereavement and Human Resilience, author of Working with the Bereaved: Multiple Lenses on Loss and Mourning  and Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at University of Haifa School of Psychological Sciences joins Raviv Ullman and Rabbi Matt to discuss the psychological effects of losing those we love, Jewish practices that ritualize mourning, and he'll share some wisdom from Torah that’s been useful in his work.

Holding Space -- Documentary short about Death Doulas

Death Doulas Help Guide the Dying and Their Families at the End of Life

The New York Times writes about death doulas: 

In our culture, we go overboard preparing for birth, but ‘hope for the best’ at the end of life,” said Ms. O’Hara, 62, who lives in Boston and Ashland, Mass., and is the author of “Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light,” published in April. “The training was really a way of going even deeper into my own grief and realizing how I could take my own experience and help other people have a better end of life.

“I saw for myself how horrifying it is during a medical crisis and then after a death, to realize that life keeps going and needs attending to,” she continued. “As soon as Caitlin passed, suddenly it’s over and the person is gone and you have to deal with the business of living. A good doula will support you with that.”

...

“The beginning of life and the end are so similar,” said Francesca Arnoldy, the lead instructor at UVM’s End-of-Life Doula program. “The intensity of it, the mystery, all of the unknowns. You have to relinquish your sense of control and agenda and ride it out, and be super attentive in the moment.”

Unlike hospice workers, doulas don’t get involved in medical issues. Rather, they support clients emotionally, physically, spiritually and practically, stepping in whenever needed. That could be a few days before someone dies, sitting vigil with them in their last hours, giving hand massages, making snacks. Or it could be months or even years earlier, after someone receives a terminal diagnosis, keeping them company, listening to their life stories or helping them craft autobiographies, planning funerals. Prices range from $25 an hour on up, although many, like Ms. O’Hara, do it voluntarily. And like Ms. O’Hara, many have signed on to help give new meaning to their own grief while helping others in the process.

He Forgot She Was His Wife -- So He Proposed To Her Again

 From the Washington Post, a tender love story about a man who forgot he was married to his wife and proposed to her, and about the community that came together to give them a wedding. 

She didn’t anticipate that the “for better or worse” part of their wedding vows would be put to the test about seven years later, she said....In January, her husband’s mind began declining at a faster pace. And so 20 years after their romance began, with her husband’s recent proposal, it seemed like perfect timing to renew their vows, she said.

A Daughter's Tribute to Her Father

 

Phoebe Wall Howard writes beautifully about losing her dad. An excerpt:

On Monday morning, I pulled up the windows in his warm second-floor bedroom. A cool breeze blew through the trees and into his Victorian home. Leaves rustled. No freighter horns this morning on the St. Clair River. Papa loved the sound of freighter horns as ships passed Algonac.

All was silent now except for the sound of a motorcycle passing through town.

Even Papa.

He was motionless as I tapped on the keyboard. He always said I have the ability to turn mundane things in life into fascinating tales about real people — including him.

But this is his last headline.

There You Are - A Heartfelt Stop-Motion Inspired Game About Grief & Acce...

We don't "move on" from grief. We move forward with it | Nora McInerny

Helen Keller: We Bereaved Are Not Alone

 

We Bereaved Are Not Alone - Helen Keller

We bereaved are not alone.

We belong to the largest company in all the world, the company of those who have known suffering.
When it seems that our sorrow is to great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.
Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world.

So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

A Fearful Thing to Love What Death Can Touch: Yehuda Halevi

 

'Tis a Fearful Thing by Yehuda Halevi Next

‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.

Movie About Compassion as Medicine for Dementia: It Is Not Over Yet

"It is Not Over Yet" is a documentary about a Danish memory care facility that treats residents with compaassion -- nature, cake, and above all, listening to them. 

Matt Zoller Seitz's Extraordinary, Heartbreaking Essays on Love and Grief

 Film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a series of essays on rogerebert.com about the people he has loved and lost, including his second wife, his step-mother, and his mother. He writes with grace, insight, and generosity, not just toward the people he writes about but to death itself, and to us, his readers in sharing his own vulnerability. 

On April 2 of this year, I lost my mother, Bettye Seitz, with whom I had a long and contentious relationship. On April 27 of last year, I lost my second wife, Nancy, to metastatic breast cancer. That's the same day I lost my first wife, Nancy's younger sister Jennifer, to an undiagnosed heart ailment, fifteen years earlier, on April 27, 2006. Nancy and Jennifer's times of death were minutes apart. 

April 25 is the day I lost my stepmother, Genie Grant, a jazz singer and union administrator in Dallas, Texas. The year was 2009. Genie was the most benign and loving parental figure I ever knew, such a bright light that she made up for the conspicuous failings of the others. It was Genie who brokered a series of meetings between myself and my father, Dave Zoller, who had been estranged throughout my youth due to mutual misunderstandings, his own limitations as a dad, and generous doses of anti-father propaganda supplied by my mother and stepfather. Genie's diplomatic, embracing personality brought me and Dad together in a meaningful way for the first time. Her death brought us even closer, because now we had something horrible in common. "This is the month we both lost our ladies," Dad told me. It was very strange being his guide through an emotional experience that I'd had first. It wasn't how things were supposed to work. But Nancy and Jennifer's parents losing their only two children isn't how things are supposed to work, either. As John Galsworthy wrote: life calls the tune, we dance.

Rachel Brougham on Grief

 Rachel Brougham wrote about mourning the loss of her husband on Twitter.  The entire essay is well worth reading. An excerpt:

My life as I knew it changed in an instant. My future as I imagined was stolen. Grief changes your brain chemistry. It changes how you think, how you interact with others, how you work. It literally changes every single thing about your life. Think about that for a moment....You don’t “get through it.” You don’t “move on.” I carry this load every minute of every day and I hate it. I’m an over-achiever by nature and you don’t over-achieve at grief. I can’t “beat it.” Trust me, I’ve tried...I promise that someday you’ll finally be ready to throw your person’s hot sauce/shampoo/toothbrush/whatever away. And if you’re not there yet, that’s OK, too. I promise there will come a day when you can say their name and tell a story about them without tears streaming down your face. You’ll laugh again. And even have good days.

After the Fire -- poem about grief

 

after the fire :: ada limón

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.

"What is grief, if not love persevering?"

 "What is grief, if not love persevering?" This quote from Marvel's television series "WandaVision" has resonated throughout social media. On Slate, Dan Kois has a thoughtful essay comparing it to the depiction of grief in "Nomadland," a front-runner for this year's Oscars and already a multiple award winner.

The same weekend that Nomadland won its Golden Globes, a particular quote from Wandavision was making its way across Twitter. It’s a flashback from Friday’s episode, “Previously On,” in which Wanda and Vision sit in Avengers headquarters and discuss the death of Wanda’s brother. Vision notes that he can’t truly understand Wanda’s grief, but asks, “It can’t all be sorrow, can it?” Then he says the line that launched a thousand memes. It’s easy to either belittle the line or laud it as poetry, but what is the line saying, exactly? What is grief? Is it, in fact, love persevering? In a year in which over half a million Americans have died of COVID, it’s a subject much on all our minds.

 

Losing Cissie, Saving Myself: The Perils of Caring for My Wife Through Her Memory Loss

Peter Barnet's poignant memoir of caring for his wife -- and himself -- as her memory fades is Losing Cissie, Saving Myself: The Perils of Caring for My Wife Through Her Memory Loss.

"If you don’t cry, learn to. If you don’t laugh, learn to. Tears and laughter are the best tools to manage stress and win through”

Green Burials Remind Us Grief is Natural Too

 From Slate: 

Green burial doesn’t have an official definition but generally refers to a range of cemetery practices that limit fossil fuel usage and the amount of human-made materials put into the ground. More broadly, the green burial movement wants to help people approach death with a more natural, and less commercial, outlook.

Green cemeteries substitute exotic hardwood caskets with renewable wood coffins or burial shrouds, and they don’t line graves with concrete. They shun mown lawns for native grasses and trees. Some green cemeteries mark graves with native stone or plant memorial trees; others don’t mark graves at all. They reject embalming as unnatural, unnecessary, and toxic. (Embalming chemicals contribute to high rates of cancer in mortuary workers.) Green cemeteries look more like nature preserves or parks than the orderly cemeteries we’re accustomed to.

...

[Jack] Goodnoe started designing conventional cemeteries in the 1980s and began working with green cemetery movement when the movement began in the late ’90s. While Goodnoe supports greening the death industry, he also thinks that green and conventional cemeteries need to learn from each other. The green burial movement has been led by charismatic industry outsiders—academics, environmentalists, spiritual types—with big ideas offset by a lack of knowledge about cemetery management. Goodnoe recommends that “when someone wants to start a green cemetery, they partner with a traditional cemetery that can bring all the legal, grief, record-keeping elements that they’ve learned from decades in the industry.” 

Judith Viorst Remembers Those She Loved Who are Gone - But Very Much Remembered

The incomparable Judith Viorst, author of classic books for children and Necessary Losses for adults, writes in Moment Magazine about the people she loved who are no longer here, and what remembering them means. 

An excerpt:

As I count the dead, my coulda’s and shoulda’s besiege me: I should have sat with Clara and heard her stories. I should have held my baby before he died. I could have been a more welcoming sister to Lois and not been such a meanie when she cried. I could have invited my in-laws to please come inside and stay a whole week instead of a weekend. I could have made more room in my heart—and made more time in my life—for the people who came knocking at my door. I could have mustered more grace and more good humor as I barreled through my kids-career-marriage days. I could have treated my “To-Do” list as something less, far less, than a sacred document. And although I figured out some of this in time to mend my ways, the regrets I have to live with, I’ll have to live with.

Courageous Conversations: Dementia and Dying with Dignity

"He was looking at me with love" -- A Dying Man is Comforted By a Ghost

 From The Washington Post: 

A dying WWII veteran is comforted by a ghost in this touching story from a social worker. The man says that during the war after a terrible loss he saw a ghost at the foot of his bed, looking at him with love.  More than 70 years later, deeply depressed, even suicidal, he says he has seen the ghost again. 

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”