From Rob Delaney's Book About His Son's Death

From the New York Times: For Delaney, the pain of a loss that comes from such love is not something be avoided. No one gets a free pass when it comes to grief. “That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to unhappiness,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid even though you will forever miss this person, you will forever ache for them. The grief will weave into your life and will be a part of your tapestry. It’ll leave and it’ll come back, but the sooner we get hip to that the sooner we’ll be able to be happy, in snatches, here and there. And that’s OK. That’s life.” Delaney's book is A Heart that Works.

Lydia Polgreen: What My Father’s Death Taught Me About Living

"The shortcomings that seemed so glaring when I was young suddenly faded because I could see how the story worked out. The things he failed to provide were nothing compared with what he had given me: the raw materials for a life filled with adventure, connection and meaning. A belief in the fundamental goodness of people across all kinds of difference. A commitment to trying to understand the world and make it understandable to others." What My Father’s Death Taught Me About Living

Baking Recipes from Gravestones

The Washington Post writes about Rosie Grant, who bakes from recipies so important to the women who loved them so much they had them engraved on their gravestones. "They're to die for," she says. Baking delicacies by the deceased has become somewhat of a hobby for Grant. It’s unusual, to be sure, but fulfilling. “Cooking these recipes has shown me an alternative side to death,” said Grant, 33. “It is a way to memorialize someone and celebrate their life.” Before she stumbled upon her first recipe, she had never heard of cooking instructions on graves. It is not a commonplace sentiment for a headstone, she said, but there are certainly a sprinkling of them out there. And once she got a taste, she made it her mission to find more.

The Art of Dying: Peter Schjeldahl 1942-2022

Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl has died, and in remembering him, many people referred to his 2019 essay, "The Art of Dying," written after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Of course, as it could only be, it is a meditation on life, on memories of the past, on appreciating the pressent, on some regrets ("I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them"), on acceptance.

[When I got the news from the doctor] I was at the wheel of my first brand-new car since 1962, a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on. I wanted for nothing. I want for nothing. The other night, I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester, with two hundred thousand miles on it, dirty and falling apart. (That’s diseased me now, I suppose.) But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street.

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here. Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.

"Nature Has Its Way of Ending Life. I’m Changing the Manner and the Time" -- Voluntary Assisted Death

From Rachel Handler in New York Magazine's The Cut: A few weeks ago, my partner Adam’s grandpa David called to let us know he was proceeding with his plan to have a peaceful, dignified death. David had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s ten years earlier, and in the last two years, as his mobility and quality of life had slowly declined, he’d been openly considering what is commonly referred to as voluntary assisted death (VAD)....On that Wednesday morning, we spoke for about 20 minutes, and I peppered him with questions about the logistics and decisions behind his planned death. I recorded the conversation, because I knew that Adam would someday want to hear it — he’d told me earlier he was worried that without me (obsessive, exhaustingly curious) by his side in Chicago, he (calm, normal) would forget to ask all of the questions he wanted to ask of David....I found his decision to die on his own terms fascinating, brave, terrifying, devastating, infuriating, and awe-inspiring. Selfishly, I wanted to understand everything about that choice. Some coomments from David: I started the process two years ago. I didn’t know whether or not I’d need it. That’s why we buy insurance; you may never need it, but if you do, you’ve got it. But it changed when my eyes no longer worked and I couldn’t control my fingers. That’s when I said, “I have to go.” ... I’m not the least bit scared. I’m scared if I don’t do it — that’s my fear. That’s why I am calling the people I know to say good-bye. I want them not to be scared for me. I’m not happy I’m doing it. It’s contrary to my belief about life, which is so precious, so unique, so wonderful. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to leave this wonderful world, leave you and Adam, and what life’s about. But I don’t want to end up like people I’ve watched die. It is brutal. That’s where I’m going. And I have a choice not to do it. I have a choice to be remembered as being alive, and not looked at with pity. Climbing the hill of life is challenging but marvelous. The way down is slippery. Literally. It’s easier to walk up than down. Even though gravity helps you. I have these conversations so people like you can process it and not feel sorry....I don’t want to let Mother Nature dictate me. I’m challenging Mother Nature. How presumptuous of me. Who am I not to allow her to do her thing? But when I see friends, what they’ve gone through in their dying days … I’m just preventing that. The burden on individuals and on society. Consuming medical attention that the young people are entitled to. I’ve thought this through for two years. I’m very comfortable with what I’m doing.

An Assisted Death Machine is Being Tested in Switzerland

From the Washington Post:

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. Real-life participants will start trying the coffinlike “Sarco” during trials set to begin in early 2022, the capsule’s creator, Philip Nitschke, told The Washington Post this week. A legal analysis commissioned by his nonprofit, Exit International, recently concluded that use of the pod will not violate Switzerland’s assisted suicide laws, he said. 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.

My Grandfather’s Death Party Was a Final Gift to His Family: Sara Harrison

From the NY Times;

Death is, famously, one of the few certainties in this life. It’s also a reality that doctors, patients and families tend to avoid. The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death notes that today death “is not so much denied but invisible.” At the end of life, people are often alone, shut away in nursing homes or intensive-care units, insulating most of us from the sounds, smells and look of mortality. 

Not so for my grandfather. Though he didn’t rush headlong into the hereafter, he didn’t want to wait for his faculties to fail one by one. He wanted to die with a modicum of independence, with hospice care. On an unseasonably warm Los Angeles day in May 2011, a cast of characters — his children, grandchildren and friends — assembled at his home, ready to play their part in the last act of his life....We listened to classical records and told stories and took turns cooking dinner. But just as Coleridge’s vision faded, interrupted by a person from Porlock, our reverie was splintered by closed-door meetings with hospice nurses and conversations with doctors, who could attest my grandfather had a sound mind and a failing body and was eligible for end-of-life care. 

However perverse it may sound, that death party — as my sister and I came to call those five days — remains one of the most profound experiences of my life. For a brief moment, at my grandfather’s party, I got to slow down the inevitable, to be with the people I grew up with, in the place we held sacred and dear. Amid that joyful reverie, I had time to sober up and confront the simple reality that my grandfather wanted to die and that everything would change.

Human Composting Now Legal in California

 This weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that makes human composting legal in the state beginning in 2027. The bill, AB-351, makes California the fifth state to allow human composting since it was first legalized in Washington in 2019 (Oregon, Colorado, and Vermont are the other places where you can make yourself into mulch)....Burying a dead body takes about three gallons of embalming liquid per corpse—stuff like formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—and about 5.3 million gallons total gets buried with bodies each year. Meanwhile, cremation creates more than 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of carbon dioxide from the burning process of just one body, and the burning itself uses up the energy equivalent of two tanks of gasoline. In the U.S., cremation creates roughly 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

It’s a no-brainer, then, to think of greener alternatives. The most common process for human composting—and the one laid out in the new California law—is called natural organic reduction, which involves leaving the body in a container with some wood chips and other organic matter for about a month to let bacteria do its work. The resulting mulch (yep, it’s human body mulch) is then allowed to cure for a few more weeks before being turned over to the family. Each body can produce about a cubic yard of soil, or around one pickup truckbeds’ worth. According to Garcia’s release, this process will save about a metric ton of CO2 per body. 

Human Composting Now Legal in California

"Living Well with Dementia" - A Preview by eHealth Digital Media in coll...

Modern Loss Handbook

Modern Loss is all about eradicating the stigma and awkwardness around grief while also focusing on our capacity for resilience and finding meaning. In this interactive guide, In the Modern Loss Handbook, cofounder Rebecca Soffer offers candid, practical, and witty advice for confronting a future without your person, honoring their memory, dealing with trigger days, managing your professional life, and navigating new and existing relationships. You’ll find no worn-out platitudes or empty assurances here. With prompts, creative projects, innovative rituals, therapeutic-based exercises, and more, this is the place to explore the messy, long arc of loss on your own timeline—and without judgment.
 

Author Rebecca Soffer on helping survivors thrive despite lasting grief

More to dying than meets the eye: Martha Atkins at TEDxSanAntonio 2013

Have You Heard About Greg? Official Trailer

Dust to Dust: Americans Increasingly Choosing Cremation

Cremation is now America’s leading form of final “disposition,” as the funeral industry calls it — a preference that shows no sign of abating.
In 2020, 56 percent of Americans who died were cremated, more than double the figure of 27 percent two decades earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to chose cremation over casket burial, according to both CANA and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).
This seismic shift represents potentially severe revenue losses for the funeral industry. It’s leading innovators to create a growing number of green alternatives and other choices that depart from traditional casket funerals. And rapidly shifting views about disposing with bodies have also led to changes in how we memorialize loved ones  — and reflect an increasingly secular, transient and, some argue, death-phobic nation.

Washington Post

This Body is Not Me

 Thich Nhat Hahn:

This body is not me.

This body is not me.

I am not limited by this body.

I am life without boundaries.

I have never been born,

and I have never died.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,

manifestations from my wondrous true mind.

Since before time, I have been free.

Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,

sacred thresholds on our journey.

Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.

So laugh with me,

hold my hand,

let us say good-bye,

say good-bye, to meet again soon.

We meet today.

We will meet again tomorrow.

We will meet at the source every moment.

We meet each other in all forms of life.

Advanced Directives Should Focus on Quality of Life, Not Technology

A letter to the editors of the New York Times: 

 Re “A Better Way to Face Death,” by Dr. Daniela J. Lamas (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 6): Too often, advance directives are construed as immutable guides to how one dies. 

We have found advance directives to be more helpful if we focus on how one wants to live. If we ask about ventilators or dialysis or artificial nutrition, we are typically asking people to express opinions about topics that they do not know well, usually based on preconceived and often inaccurate notions about these medical technologies. 

It is little wonder, then, when actually faced with the technology, patients will change their mind. What was once unacceptable may now be tolerable because life still holds a desired quality. The opposite may occur; treatment that was once strongly desired in the abstract may not deliver the quality of life that was hoped for. A

dvance directives should accomplish two goals: identification of a surrogate — one who can “stand in the shoes” of the patient, and the identification of preferences — what is important in how you live. A focus on evolving ideas rather than document completion will be more likely to bring the patient’s voice to decision-making at crucial times. 

 Margaret M. Mahon Ann Berger Bethesda, Md. 

Dr. Berger is chief of the Pain and Palliative Care team at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and Ms. Mahon is a nurse practitioner with the team. 

 The other letters in response are also worth reading. Excerpts: 

 The anxiety, indignities and angst of advanced age demand acceptance — and a sense of humor. Like most of my peers, I am not afraid of dying but of being kept alive. 

 [My father's] health care proxy came by every day and turned up the morphine, and my dad always turned it down. He said he didn’t have that much pain if he lay still, and he found that he got more relief from holding hands than from morphine.

“If you have an abundance of love to give, you should give it" -- Strangers Make Bucket List Dreams Come True

The Washington Post has a wonderful story about the daughter of a man who is terminally ill, and the strangers who found his story on Facebook and helped to make his last days full of adventure and new friends. He had VIP visits to an MMA fight, a Naval helicopter, and a private violin concert.

Billy Collins: The Afterlife

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, or riffling through a magazine in bed, the dead of the day are setting out on their journey. They’re moving off in all imaginable directions, each according to his own private belief, and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal: that everyone is right, as it turns out. you go to the place you always thought you would go, The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors into a zone of light, white as a January sun. Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other. Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever, while the less inventive find themselves stuck in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls. Some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door. There are those who are squeezing into the bodies of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on the skin of a monkey like a tight suit, ready to begin another life in a more simple key, while others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere. There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves. He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow. (And some just smile, forever on)

The Advance Directive Said DNR, But....

A crowd of various medical staffers quickly gathered in the small room where an elderly man, Mr. R, had unexpectedly lost his pulse while undergoing a CAT scan. For several minutes, the patient endured multiple rounds of rib-breaking thrusts to his chest to restart his heart. Then, suddenly, a nurse who had been reading through his medical chart screamed, “This man has an advanced directive from six years ago that says he does not want resuscitative measures!” Nearly all the heads in the room turned, many staffers confused as to whether to continue the resuscitation. The advanced directive is a legal document that records a patient’s preferences for medical care in case communicating them is impossible. In most cases, a "do not resuscitate" order alone might stop a medical team from pursuing further intervention. But this man, unlike many patients in the intensive care unit who were clearly close to dying, had walked into the hospital for an elective diagnostic work-up. As of that morning, he was not close to dying, and even within moments of starting CPR, we felt reasonably certain that we could resuscitate him....He walked out of the hospital two days later, knowing that he had almost died. What he did not know was that aside from his heart stopping, he'd come one step closer to death because of a lack of clarity in his code status, which easily could have resulted in us stopping our efforts to revive him.

Bishop Tutu: "An Unpretentious Monk's Homegoing"

From the very wise Amy Cunningham, about the burial of Desmond Tutu:

The church setting was glorious, and the other bishops wore their robes, but surely the great man who helped upend apartheid would exit in a mahogany, walnut or cherry casket with brass rails of some sort. And wait a minute—what’s going on there with the slender foot-end of the Archbishop’s pine coffin resting naked, skirt-less on the church truck? It’s not landing normally. No rails on the sides, just rope. Tiny fist of flowers for a significant public figure like that? Yes. It’s not that the funeral directors I know staring at photos like the one above—longing only for a dignified look—are hoping to up-sell the theologian’s handlers. It’s just that some folks in funeral work instinctively struggle to pair humility with high stature. In truth, I also would have preferred a truck skirt or bier, or modern catafalque in church, but the rolling truck, in the end, had a nimbleness to it, and spoke to transparency. What you see is what you get: an unpretentious monk’s homegoing.