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.