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.

Ghana's dancing pallbearers - BBC Africa

The Unexpected Comfort of Livestreaming Funerals

There were friends who couldn’t travel and family members who lived too far away to make it in time for the service, which, by Jewish tradition, had to happen as soon as possible. But their chapel had a solution: It livestreamed the funeral, and uploaded a recording of the service to its website shortly after, with a hyperlink prominently displayed in the obituary...The videos are not solely for the benefit of remote viewers. Levy and her family found that it proved most useful to those that attended. “One of the things that we were told was: You're not going to remember anything,” she says. “[Everyone is] saying all these wonderful things, they're telling these stories and you can't process it,” the grief and shock is just too much.

In the months since her mother’s January 7 funeral, Levy says she and other family members have watched and rewatched the recording online. “One of the only things that every day reminds you of how great she was in such an awful time is people's memories and you sharing those memories with each other.”

Now Even Funerals are Livestreamed -- and Families are Grateful

"Families want to put the 'fun' in funerals" -- Washington Post

Death is a given, but not the time-honored rituals. An increasingly secular, nomadic and casual America is shredding the rules about how to commemorate death, and it’s not just among the wealthy and famous. Somber, embalmed-body funerals, with their $9,000 industry average price tag, are, for many families, a relic. Instead, end-of-life ceremonies are being personalized: golf-course cocktail send-offs, backyard potluck memorials, more Sinatra and Clapton, less “Ave Maria,” more Hawaiian shirts, fewer dark suits. Families want to put the “fun” in funerals.

The movement will only accelerate as the nation approaches a historic spike in deaths. Baby boomers, despite strenuous efforts to stall the aging process, are not getting any younger. In 2030, people over 65 will outnumber children, and by 2037, 3.6 million people are projected to die in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, 1 million more than in 2015, which is projected to outpace the growth of the overall population.

Just as nuptials have been transformed — who held destination weddings in the ’90s? — and gender-reveal celebrations have become theatrical productions, the death industry has experienced seismic changes over the past couple of decades. Practices began to shift during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when many funeral homes were unable to meet the needs of so many young men dying, and friends often hosted events that resembled parties.

Now, many families are replacing funerals (where the body is present) with memorial services (where the body is not). Religious burial requirements are less a consideration in a country where only 36 percent of Americans say they regularly attend religious services, nearly a third never or rarely attend, and almost a quarter identify as agnostic or atheist, according to the Pew Research Center.

The funeral as we know it is becoming a relic

Funeral Industry Seeks Ways to Stay Relevant - WSJ

As more Americans choose cremation—often dispensing with the need for caskets, burial plots and dreary rituals—the funeral industry is reinventing itself. The goal: stay relevant and avoid a plunge in profit. 

“This industry was really built around selling a casket,” Thomas Ryan, chief executive of Service Corp. International, the largest U.S. operator of funeral homes, said in an interview. “Now it’s really about remembering the person.” 

That can mean elaborate pageantry. “We don’t call it a funeral service,” said Brad Rex, chief executive of Foundation Partners Group, which owns 50 funeral homes and nine cemeteries in 14 states. “We call it a gathering.”

Funeral Industry Seeks Ways to Stay Relevant - WSJ

How secular Americans are reshaping funeral rituals - Religion News Service

 "“A surge in the number of Americans that no longer identify with any religion has contributed to the decline of the historically traditional funeral in America — and the rise in cremation as the disposition of choice,” says the National Funeral Directors Association in its latest annual report.

For the past few years, the association has conducted surveys asking Americans 40 and older to rank the importance of including a religious component in the funeral for a loved one. The percentage of people responding that it is “not at all important” has more than doubled in the last three years, from 10 percent to 21 percent."



How secular Americans are reshaping funeral rituals - Religion News Service

Non-Funeral Ways to Mourn

"Over the past year, I’ve experienced several losses that, at the request of the deceased, did not include funerals. Grief rituals are central to my mourning process, but there’s no negotiating with the dead. In the absence of the most standard of ceremonies, how do you give expression to your grief while respecting someone’s final wish for “no funeral, please?” Through personal experience, and conversations with friends and readers who’ve faced the same scenario, here are seven ways to do just that."



Recommendations include donation to a favorite cause of the one who has died, learning one of their skills or trying their hobbies, and making a pilgrimage to a place that meant a lot to him or her.



When Your Loved One’s Last Wish Was ‘No Funeral’ - Modern Loss

Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century

 "Increased longevity paired with ageing baby boomers means that our older population is growing at record speed — a phenomenon in developed countries from the UK to Japan. According to Professor David Clark, a researcher in end-of-life care at the University of Glasgow: “We’re seeing what we regard as a massive global issue. There’s a huge wave of dying, death and bereavement.” At the moment about one million people die each week around the world; within 40 years, that number is expected to double.



 Compounding the impact of this wave of death is the fact that, for many, the rituals, artefacts and meaning once found in religion no longer provide emotional solace. In the most recent UK census from 2011, the proportion of the population who reported they have no religion reached a quarter — growing to 25.1 per cent from 14.8 per cent a decade ago. A rising trend of agnosticism, atheism and non-affiliation with religion has also been surveyed in countries including France and the US.



 Dissatisfaction with legacy service providers and striking shifts in demographics have converged to make alternative ways of dealing with death — that universal experience — in demand. Today’s broadly secular society, especially one in which more of us will soon be dying than ever before, has to find contemporary strategies for death.



A new generation of designers are responding to this call, with novel and challenging ways of thinking. When well-designed technology can help improve our every living moment, why should it desert us in death?"



Reinventing Death for the Twenty-First Century — Medium

'via Blog this'

Funeral Homes Using Dogs to Comfort Mourners

The Associated Press has a story about the use of dogs to comfort mourners.

Funeral directors say dogs, especially trained therapy animals, can lighten the often awkward, tense atmosphere at a wake or funeral service, and sometimes seem to know exactly who needs their help.
Whenever a dog joins a group of mourners, "the atmosphere changes," said Mark Krause, owner and president of Krause Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Milwaukee. "In a funeral home, people are typically on edge, uncomfortable. But everyone lights up, everyone has to greet the dog."

How to Write Your Own Eulogy

How to Write Your Own Eulogy

This beautiful essay by Rabbi Evan Moffic is inspired by his own experiences in delivering eulogies and comforting mourners. "Nothing can totally prepare you for the task of comforting mourners and making sense of death. And nothing better teaches us what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life." He quotes "a saying of the Jewish sages: 'The Righteous, even when they die, are called living.' In other words, the righteous live on in the inspiration and loved ones they leave behind."

funeralOne Blog » Blog Archive How To Handle #FuneralSelfies (And Modern Funeral Marvels)

funeralOne Blog » Blog Archive How To Handle #FuneralSelfies (And Modern Funeral Marvels)

Social media has taken over… well, everything. Forget the days of email, or heaven forbid, snail mail. Now when you want to share something, you tweet it out to the world, put it on Facebook, post a picture on Instagram, or upload it to your Snapchat feed.
After all, as the 2015 online mantra goes, “pics or it didn’t happen.” (The idea that, if you didn’t take a photo of something, it didn’t actually occur.) So people share photos of themselves on family vacation, buying a new car, out to dinner with friends… and at grandma’s funeral? That’s right. Funeral selfies are here, among many other modern, yet baffling funeral traditions, and it looks like they’re here to stay.
Luckily, there are many ways in which these social funeral trends can actually benefit the funeral profession, while also enhancing your families’ funeral experience at the same time. Here are a few positive ways you can spin these new modern funeral trends.

Song of Farewell - Catholic Funeral Song

A Will for the Woods: Interview with Amy Browne on Her Documentary about Eco-Burial

Clark Wang was a psychiatrist, a musician, and a man in a deep and loving relationship and he was dying of lymphoma. He made the time he had left profoundly meaningful in the way he chose to say goodbye by using his death and plans for an eco-burial to save a wooded area scheduled to be cut down for a cemetery. Wang was committed to having his last act give back to the earth as purely and harmoniously as possible.

Part of that thoughtful, generous resolve included his participation in the moving and inspiring documentary, "A Will for the Woods," already the audience award winner at four different film festivals. The film is about a life of purpose and a death with meaning.

There is a contrast between the health professionals on screen who use a lot of euphemisms like "outcome" and the directness and honesty of Wang, his friends, and Dyanne Matzkevich, the sympathetic cemetery manager who becomes a close friend as well.

While a doctor speaks vaguely of clinical trials as a way to convey that all possible treatments have failed, a friend builds a coffin to Wang's specifications, from reclaimed wood, and, as the film opens, we see Wang not just try it on for size but literally dance on it.

Producer/co-director Amy Browne said in an interview that

People are eager to have these conversations. That's why I think people are connecting with the film. It's because they connect so much with the idea and hopefully also the way that it's presented. Things need to change and it feels like the funeral industry is on the verge of an evolution and people are going to be demanding this option as the baby boomers are having funerals for their parents and very soon for themselves. They've always been the revolutionary generation and I think this option speaks more to their mindset, moving away from the sort of industrialized processes that have been going on for the last few decades.

Co-director/editor Tony Hale added, "It allows us to talk about death in a way that we haven't talked about in a long time because there is no vocabulary for it any more. This is about reclaiming rituals that may have been lost in the last hundred or two hundred years."

Browne says the film has been well received within the funeral industry.

We played at the ICCFA convention, which is the International Cemetery Cremation and Funeral Association. That was a big deal. A lot of people were really touched by the story and peripherally we influenced some directors in funeral homes to provide this option....Conventional folks would just have their mindset in one traditional way where the only way to have a funeral that's respectful is to have this elaborate casket and flowers and a manicured lawn cemetery setting. But those are also the types of people who turned their back on cremation twenty years ago and kind of lost out on that as the cremation rate continued to rise. As the funeral director says in the film, the main issue as to why some haven't embraced it within the industry is that they don't want to appear like they've been doing it wrong or that there is something the matter with these traditions.

It is especially touching to see the filmmakers become a part of the story through their intimate involvement as Wang and his partner, Jane Ezzard were managing his final illness and preparing for his death and burial. They even appear briefly in the film. After Wang's death, Ezzard begins to sob and we can hear one of the filmmakers comforting her. Browne said that rather than try to be journalistically objective, it was

more of a participatory documentary. During the funeral scene sometimes while we are filming, we would be the only people there at the end of the evening. We were staying at Jane's house and we put the camera on a tripod sometimes to film ourselves in the process of taking care of Clark's body because we were the ones doing it and we wanted to record everything. It felt very natural to step out from behind the camera and be involved. I can't imagine doing it any other way. We wanted to lift the veil on the relationship between filmmaker and subject.

This is the Place for Your Stories of Grief, Loss, and End of Life

Welcome.  You have come to the right place, and I am glad you are here.

This is a safe place to share stories of love and loss, devastating grief, exhausting care-giving, memorials, advanced directives.  We want to hear about about what you wish we had known or done differently, what you wish those around you had known or done differently, and what went right.

Every life is different and every death is different, but one thing we know, it is not like the movies.  The people we love do not just sigh sweetly and close their eyes.  Dying can be ugly and painful.  Helping those who are dying can be a moving experience that brings families closer, but it can also be a time of stress so severe that there is no recovery, so that just when we need to strengthen our connections with those who are still here, we find we do not know how.

This is a place for you to share your stories in whatever way will make you feel better.  No judgment, only a caring community to let you know we want to listen and we want to know.

There are those around you who will tell you that it is better if you stop talking about death.  They are wrong.  We will never tell you to move on or find closure.  We know the only thing that can help is to tell your story.  It keeps us close to the ones who have died and it creates and strengthens our bonds with each other.

We would be honored if you would share your stories with us here.