Death Trips | Ann Neumann

Some people prefer dying along.

To ward off the specter of elder isolation, we are redoubling our faith in individualism, strangely enough—or more precisely, our conviction that what you choose will be your fate. Bad personal choices get you a lonely death. Good personal choices, on the other hand, get you something like “The Death of Socrates,” that painting by Jacques-Louis David in which attendants throng around the deathbed, contorting their bodies in energetic devotion. (The hemlock may have been bitter, but at least he felt the love.) 

Feats of self-improvement are what will put you on the path to a worthy end—and these days, those feats include spending money on the very thing that our new service economy is keenest to offer you: customized experiences. A doula-assisted death is a bespoke affair. Through made-to-order rituals, your death can be propelled into the realm of the unique, just like everyone else’s.

Death Trips | Ann Neumann

My sister made her end-of-life wishes clear. Then dementia took hold

Honoring the wishes of a woman -- what she wanted when she was well might not be what she wanted when her memory faded and her personality changed.

I had learned that the light of my sister’s spirit was stronger than her illness. It would survive.  

In inpatient hospice, we gave my sister liquid with a dropper, squirting it into the back of her mouth. Sometimes, she could take a bit of applesauce on a spoon. We’d wait to hear a gulping swallowing sound. And then, after giving her time to rest, we’d try again. She was fading.  

Family surrounded her day and night. We never sat down and talked about my sister’s wishes. But they informed what was happening along with another set of wishes, which we all understood but had never been articulated: “Treat me with respect. Be there by my side. Love me. Remember me.”  

 In the end, the feeding tube was a side issue. My sister was dying, one way or another, and nothing could change that trajectory. Her husband and children decided against artificial nutrition or hydration. It was what she’d said she wanted.  

They don’t regret it. Neither do I. And yet. We didn’t turn away from the feeding tube because of the wishes my sister had laid out earlier. We were honoring both the person she had been and the person she had become by making sure she didn’t suffer unnecessarily. Every step of the way, we let her know her life had value.  

And when the hard times came, we didn’t duck. We were fully present. My sister passed peacefully last November, surrounded by people she loved. She was 58. When I think of her now, I think of a romantic girl, an exhilarated college student, a striving 20-something, a passionate wife and mother, and a person with dementia whose lust for life and inner light shone all the way to the very end. That light has become a beacon, deepening my sense of what it means to be human and what’s possible at the end of life. I carry it with me to this day.

My sister made her end-of-life wishes clear. Then dementia took hold

The Victorian Cult of Mourning

No one knew how to grieve like the Victorians. The elaborate and often downright weird rituals of the era – inspired by Queen Victoria who publicly mourned her husband’s death for forty years – provide a fascinating look at a culture for whom death was ever present. In the United States, losses from the Civil War eclipsed 600,000 deaths, or two percent of the entire population. Death was everywhere. Mourning was an art form. Widows dressed in black from head to toe for an entire year. Household mirrors were covered and clocks were stopped when a death occurred. Women created and wore intricate jewelry made from the hair of the deceased. And rural cemeteries were established across America. 

Green-Wood is one such example, which by the 1860’s drew over 500,000 visitors a year who came to see the cemetery’s collection of ornate monuments and mausoleums. Join us for an afternoon symposium devoted to exploring the arts and culture of Victorian mourning with illustrated talks and show-and-tell presentations of period artifacts. 

Speakers will include Dr. Stanley Burns, M.D., founder of the Burns Archive of photographic history and professor of medicine and psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, Green-Wood Historian Jeff Richman, Evan Michelson, co-owner of Obscura Antiques & Oddities and host of the Science Channel’s Oddities, funeral director Amy Cunningham, Jessica Glasscock, Research Associate for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Death Becomes Her” Exhibition, and more! 

This symposium is organized in partnership with Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the former Museum of Morbid Anatomy and Laetitia Barbier, former librarian of the Museum. 

 $20 for members of Green-Wood and BHS / $25 for nonmembers

'via Blog this'

A Daughter Chronicles Her Parents' Final Months With Cancer : Shots - Health News : NPR

"I picked up my camera and documented my parents' dual cancer treatments for the next 24 months and our lives as they unfolded. From the seven-hour chemotherapy infusions to running errands with Mom according to her to-do lists, I was there with my camera slung across my shoulder."

A Daughter Chronicles Her Parents' Final Months With Cancer : Shots - Health News : NPR

"The Bright Hour": This year's 'When Breath Becomes Air.' - The Washington Post

The Washington Post calls The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs, a woman who died of breast cancer at age 39, "a stunning work, a heart-rending meditation on life — not just how to appreciate it while you’re living it, but how to embrace its end, too."

"Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book. There’s good reason for such a plea. Her book, “The Bright Hour,” is a memoir about the last two years of her life. She completed it in January; she died the next month, at age 39, of metastatic breast cancer....In an email interview from a hospice in Greensboro, N.C., Riggs, who had two young sons, remained remarkably upbeat: “I think a real gift that this experience gave me was forcing me to appreciate my life/death, not just my life. I had to embrace the experience of having cancer, because that experience was part and parcel to my experience of my husband, my kids, my dearest friends. So I would say I really hope the book I wrote will make you feel much more joy than anything else.”

"The Bright Hour": This year's 'When Breath Becomes Air.' - The Washington Post: 

Rituals to Express and Process Grielf

Embracing Personal Rituals

A while back we asked WYG reader to share their personal rituals on our Facebook. We got so many amazing responses, things that speak to the unique and individual nature of the rituals that mean something to us. I’ve got lots of little ones, like the fact that I never turn down a piece of coconut cake. Whether it’s at a restaurant or a coffee shop, if it’s on the menu I order it. Because coconut cake always reminds me of my dad and family and childhood (even though I didn’t really like coconut cake then) so it is my own little private ritual, that can happen almost anywhere.

Rituals people mentioned included drinking coffee from a late spouse's mug, celebrating the birthday of a daughter who died at 16 every year by eating her favorite dessert, and wearing the bracelets of a mother who is no longer here to family events she would have loved.

My Father, Dying by Joyce Sutphen

My Father, Dying
by Joyce Sutphen

It was hard work, dying, harder
than anything he’d ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-
breaking chore he’d forced himself

to endure—it was nothing
compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job
be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was
hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we’d heard
my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this
was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,
in a field we could not reach.