Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Elizabeth Gilbert on the Death of Her True Love, Her "Alpha Wolf" Girlfriend
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, tells the story of the death of the love of her life, Rayya Elias, who "didn't want gentle." She didn't want tender. She didn't want sunshine and lovely candles. She didn't want hospice and got kicked out. She wanted to live on Oreos and cigarettes. The story of the three women who loved Elias trying to keep up with her, "the Charlie's Angels way of being taken care of," and her insistence on dying as she had lived is beautiful. Here they are together.
No One is "Good" at Funerals
In 8 things this funeral director wishes you knew, Louise Winter writes:
She reassures us that we don't have to be "good" at funerals. We don't have to do what funeral directors tell us is how it's done. We don't even need to use one. What we do need is to talk beforehand about what our loved ones want, and to do what honors them and is kind to those who are mourning.
Last year I founded Poetic Endings – a modern funeral service – because I realised that most of the funerals happening today are not serving their purpose. What should a funeral do? Why do we even have them?
She reassures us that we don't have to be "good" at funerals. We don't have to do what funeral directors tell us is how it's done. We don't even need to use one. What we do need is to talk beforehand about what our loved ones want, and to do what honors them and is kind to those who are mourning.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
He Forgot They Were Married -- So He Proposed to His Wife Again
A man with dementia forgot that he was married. So he fell in love with his wife all over again, proposed to her, and insisted that they get married.
“There’s been a lot of sadness and a lot of frustration,” Linda Joyce said. “And despite all the fogginess, today has been pure joy.”
Now is the Time to Talk About End of Life Care that is Quality of Life Care
[T]he American health care system never taught the public that preventing a natural death often results in a wholly unnatural life.
As an intensive-care unit nurse, I am haunted by memories of patients who were stabilized in intensive care so that their catastrophic injuries or diseases did not kill them, but who were left unable to communicate or do anything but receive medical care....The incapacitated ill are profoundly disenfranchised, and the manipulation of their bodies is extraordinarily invasive and consequential.
It's a moral crisis hiding in plain sight, yet the people involved claim to be mere cogs in the machine. When I asked an ICU attending physician why families aren't given data and clear explanations of probable outcomes rather than best-case scenarios and “only time will tell” conversations, he said, “palliative care people can do that. In the ICU, we don't really have time.” Another physician mentioned the “inertia of the system.”
It falls to the general public — the patients — to take the initiative in reforming the excesses of modern medical care.
You can determine your fate by completing an advance directive. This is a legal document in which you can explain what measures should be undertaken if you are unable to communicate; name a health care proxy who can communicate your wishes to medical providers; and lay out how you envision the end of your life.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Earther: Green Burials
Brian Kahn writes in Earther:
In fact, the only sign there’s a cemetery here is the wrought iron and stone sculpture at its entrance and a few signs demarcating the conservation land that surrounds it.
But what Davis and a cadre of conservationists and afterlife advocates are building isn’t just about reconnecting with the Earth. They’re using the cemetery as part of a greater conservation plan for the Adirondacks. If they’re successful, that template that could spread to other landscapes stressed by human activity, helping them adapt them to the very modern problem of climate change....All told, the funeral industry with its estimated 19,177 funeral homes and thousands of cemeteries and crematoriums is worth an estimated $20.7 billion.
This big industry comes with a big environmental impact. In the U.S., 5.3 million gallons of toxic embalming fluid are buried every year. Each cremation releases as much carbon dioxide as a 500-mile road trip. Whether it’s metal caskets stuffed inside concrete vaults six feet below the surface or alkaline ashes that, if not stored in an urn on your mantle, are a real harm to the environment, the modern death industry has changed our relationship with, well, life.
“It’s bizarre we’ve ended up in a place where we spend thousands of dollars pumping our loved ones full of chemicals and painting their faces and putting them in a titanium casket is normal and wrapping them in a shroud and burying them isn’t,” Michelle Acciavatti, Spirit Sanctuary’s “death doula,” told Earther.
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