Debra Greene, Ph.D., recently sent me this letter about her mother’s death. Her mom had done her funeral planning arrangements, and still, the news is such a shock. Debra, an Energy Health Specialist practicing Mind-Body Medicine, has some good insights on processing grief.
Debra said I could share her story on the blog. She is a big fan of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die.
Let’s Talk About Death and the Interlife
There is so much stigma, fear, and misunderstanding about death in our culture. My intention in sharing this story is to inspire deeper conversations and honor our endless energy essence. I consulted with several people before sending this email. Most said, “Go for it!” Several said, “Proceed with caution.”
When the call came it was a lovely Maui afternoon. I was sitting at my desk working on an article. The voice said, “I’m sorry to inform you but your mother has passed away.” It was the retirement community in Dallas where my mom had been living for the past four years. She passed peacefully while napping in her favorite chair. My mom was 88 years old so this was not completely unexpected, but it was still a shock to my system. Then came the question, “What do you want us to do with the body?”
I was still struggling to absorb the news and couldn’t quite register the question. “What do you normally do with a body?” I heard myself ask. “You contact the funeral home and inform them. They send someone out to collect the body. Which funeral home was your mother working with?” I had no idea. The person on the other end became quite insistent that this be dealt with right away. Then I heard myself say, “What do you suppose is going to happen? She’s already dead!”
On a practical note, if you or your parents are aging it’s a good idea to put affairs in order. Although many people don’t like talking about death, it’s a necessary part of life and planning ahead can really help those left behind.
Luckily my mom was very organized and thorough. She had preplanned and prepaid her funeral arrangements. I just needed to find the documents she had sent me all those years ago. Once I located them, everything became easier. I could stop task-mode and focus on my feelings.
After the initial shock wore off (lasted for several hours) the grief came rolling in like waves. This consisted of uncontrollable sobbing on various occasions over the course of a few days. And then the process felt compete. There doesn’t seem to be unprocessed grief lurking around, but I am open to that if there is.
It helped that my mom had appeared in a dream about a week before she passed and the dream made it clear she was about to leave the physical plane. I didn’t remember this when the phone call came, but on some level I had been forewarned.
Also, I knew my mom had been dis-incarnating over the past several years. Unless someone dies in an accident, this is usually how it goes. It is a process that is marked by discernible stages. So I had been preparing for it.
I had also been preparing my mom for it by assuring her that we don’t die, and that there is nothing to be afraid of. Since Mom had a Catholic upbringing I also assured her there is no such thing as hell. I knew this was a fear she harbored, so I firmly stated, “It has been scientifically proven that there is no hell.” Given everything I’d studied about death, the dying process, and near-death experiences, I could say this with sincere conviction.
Since she made the transition in early February, Mom has “visited” me twice and we have “talked.” I must follow this by saying I do not typically communicate with the dead. Some people do, but I am not one of them.
This was an unusual experience. Although I did not see her, I knew it was her because I could not control her information input in my mind. (This is not to be confused with “old tapes” running. I knew it was her because years of meditation and self-work brought me to a place where I could clear my mind at will, controlling my thoughts. But I could not control these.) I also recognized the energetic signature of her presence. (Having studied my inner landscape thoroughly, I could recognize the contents of my own subtle energy system and discern the energetic presence of another.)
During her “visit,” she told me she was doing well. I asked how she spends her time. She said most of her time is spent “floating.” I suspect that has changed by now but this is the stage she was at in February, about two weeks after passing.
I told her it’s okay to visit me as long as it doesn’t interfere with her next step. We can hold people back and keep them earth-bound if we become too attached to them and try to keep them around. So far I have not heard more from her. Overall, I still feel very connected. I think of her from time to time and the thoughts are pleasant. I send her healing light, the Golden Light of Grace, and trust she is enjoying the great adventure.
Yours in the One Life,
Debra
(If you are having issues with the grief process, an Inner Clarity phone session with Debra can really help. Check it out!)
For those who need a reminder about funeral etiquette, using electronic devices during a memorial service is dead wrong. This guest blog post shows why.
10 Reasons Tweeting During a Funeral is Wrong
The recent death of beloved pop icon Whitney Houston set the Twitter-verse on fire, with a surprising number of celebrity mourners tweeting live from her funeral. This controversial move was met with mixed reactions from fans and the media, with the majority believing it wrong to compose tweets from a funeral pew. Here are ten of the reasons why you might not want to mimic this celebrity behavior at the next memorial you attend.
- Distracts From the Service – A person in the process of live tweeting from a funeral is, almost invariably, one that is distracted from the service. Though the tweeter’s attention is diverted, it’s also likely to pose a distraction for those around the person.
- Inconsiderate of Other Mourners’ Grief – Profoundly grieving for a loved one is one of the most painful things that most people ever encounter. Realizing that someone in the crowd is so detached from the service that they’re sending text updates to their Twitter feed is almost guaranteed to add to their pain and anger.
- Disrespectful to the Deceased – Though they’re not aware of it, the act of live tweeting a funeral is, at its very basis, disrespectful to the person the service is intended to honor. Even tweets in memory of the deceased should be reserved to the periods before and after the service.
- Creates a Distraction for Other Attendees – The clicking of keys and glow of a backlit display are very conspicuous in the largely silent atmosphere of a funeral chapel. Those in the seats surrounding someone tweeting from the funeral will be distracted from the service, which can create friction.
- Replies Could Draw Attention – Sending a tweet from a funeral will invariably lead to some sort of reply; if the tweeter accidentally neglects to put their phone into silent mode, the resultant alert noise could also draw attention and will likely be considered disrespectful.
- Funeral Services Should Be as Private as Possible – Even funerals for public figures are largely private affairs; those in attendance should be respectful of this boundary, even in our digital age. Just because a person can tweet from a funeral doesn’t mean that they should.
- Content of Tweets Could Create Friction – A slight misquote or a comment that could even barely be misinterpreted could potentially upset a distraught mourner; the time surrounding the death of a loved one is usually filled with high-running emotions that might lead to friction.
- Distraught Family Members Are Likely to Be Offended – Even if the content of a funeral tweeters posts is respectful, the act of making those posts during a memorial service is almost sure to be viewed as disrespectful to their loved one.
- The Deceased Should Receive Undivided Attention – A funeral should be dedicated solely to the memory of the deceased and a celebration of their life. Nothing should distract from the person being honored in any way; using a social networking site like Twitter, even to share memories of the deceased, detracts from the attention that rightfully belongs to them.
- It’s Simply Impolite – Emily Post would roll over in her grave to find people using Twitter during a funeral. Though the etiquette for such things is still largely unestablished, it’s a matter of common sense: using a cellphone or other mobile device during a funeral is just plain rude.
There is a time and place for everything, any use of your cell phone during a funeral service is unnecessary. It is always the WRONG time and place to be tweeting. Respect the other mourners and the person that has passed by leaving your cell phone off until after the funeral.
P.S. – When I officiate at a memorial service, one of the first things I tell people in the audience is to turn off their electronic devices and be fully present. Find out more about Certified Celebrants.
Filed under: Guest Blog Posts | Tags: burial, cremation, funeral planning
There’s a great funeral planning opinion piece in The New York Times today that ponders burial versus cremation. It’s written by James Atlas, author of My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale. It’s titled “Choosing Our Final Resting Places.” Enjoy!
“WHAT to do about grave sites?” my wife says at the breakfast table.
She’s learned from her brother that we own two plots in the cemetery of the Vermont town where we have a summer house. They were purchased by her mother some years ago, and are worth $400 apiece. Do we want to keep them for future use, or sell them back?
I hadn’t really thought about it. Over the years, there has been occasional banter around the dinner table about “ashes” vs. “dust” — cremation or burial. But it wasn’t urgent. We’re not actually that old, and expect to be above ground for a while yet. Like cleaning out the closets or “putting our papers in order,” it was a chore that could be postponed indefinitely. Also, neither option seemed great.
But unless we elect to be stuffed like Jeremy Bentham, embalmed like Kim Jong-il or have our ashes made into decorative beads — a new trend in South Korea — there aren’t a lot of choices. Cremation has its hazards: I’m always hearing about parents’ ashes left in a closet. Or you can get the wrong box from the funeral home and end up reciting “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” over the urn of some unknown person who it turns out thought Dylan Thomas was a drunken blowhard. Then there are the hazards of disposal: In Meghan O’Rourke’s “Long Goodbye,” the family gathers on a Connecticut beach on a blustery December day to scatter her mother’s ashes; the wind comes up and blows them all over her brother. “I’m fine,” he reassures everyone: “I just have Mom in my eyes.”
Burial, though, is somehow too … real. In the final scene of “Humboldt’s Gift,” Saul Bellow’s novel about the fictional genius poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, his friend Charlie Citrine attends Humboldt’s funeral. Citrine observes the process with dispassion: “The coffins went down and then the yellow machine moved forward and the little crane, making a throaty whir, picked up a concrete slab and laid it atop the concrete case.” But then the question to which we all know the answer bursts from his unconscious: “How did one get out? One didn’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed!” Learning to tolerate this eternity of eternity is the biggest challenge of our lives.
I, too, worry about being put in the ground. What if it’s cold? My winter-averse mother has also voiced this fear. Or what if there’s a flood? In Roger Rosenblatt’s heartbreaking memoir, “Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats,” he writes that after a flash flood in Japan, “the cemeteries built on the hillsides become waterlogged. Coffins rise and float out of the earth and ride into the villages, fishtailing on the liquid streets and banging on the doors of the houses.”
On the other hand, burying your loved ones means that you can go see them whenever you want. You can, in some uncanny way, be with them. Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, the unnamed protagonist of Philip Roth’s “Everyman” has an impulse to visit his parents’ graves in a cemetery near Newark airport. Searching for their plot, he encounters a gravedigger and prompts him into a detailed disquisition on the nature of his work. And he learns something even more important: why we bury the dead at all. “They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone.”
Going through family documents, I came across an old contract from the Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago. My grandparents bought a lot there for what was then — 1947 — the stupefying sum of $1,600. My grandfather was a shrewd businessman, but however you look at it, this was a bad deal. His convertible Packard with a jump seat probably cost less. In the end, both were buried at Westlawn. (My grandmother, who lived out her last years in California, referred to death as “going to Chicago.”) But they were the last. I have in hand a transfer deed for the remainder of the plot issued to my parents, “Dr. Donald H. Atlas and Nora Atlas of La Jolla, California,” notarized on March 31, 1980 — a few years after they moved out there. Added as a signatory to this deed is “James R. Atlas.” My older brother, for some unknown reason, isn’t listed. (Don’t think you’re getting out of this, Steve.) For the sum of “Ten & no/100 dollars,” I learn, we have “quit claim” to “North twelve (12) feet of Lot ten (10) in Block twelve (12) in Section ‘C’.” I guess I won’t be going to Chicago.
So I’m still considering my options. In Varanasi, India, I once stood on a terrace above the mist-shrouded Ganges at dawn and watched the corpses burning on pyres below, black smoke from the bodies rising up to dissipate in the haze. There are a lot of ways to go.
Beads, however, are out.
As the family gathers together this Thanksgiving weekend, it’s an ideal time to start a conversation on end-of-life wishes, don’t you think?
Actually, you probably haven’t thought about it. You just want to get through the turkey feast, the football games, the Black Friday shopping, and hanging out with your family without getting too deep. Having an in-depth conversation about how you or your loved ones want to be treated in a medical emergency when they can’t communicate what they would want done just isn’t on your radar.
Trust me, you want to have these conversations before you find yourself in a hospital floundering through a health care crisis with people you love. Today’s guest blog post from the fine folks at Engage With Grace provides some good insights.
Occupy With Grace
Once again, this Thanksgiving we are grateful to all the people who keep this mission alive day after day: to ensure that each and every one of us understands, communicates, and has honored their end of life wishes.
Seems almost more fitting than usual this year, the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring, people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now, love it or hate it – it’s the Occupy Wall Street movement that’s got people talking.
Smart people have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn’t an issue we need to raise our fists about – it’s an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.
It’s a mission that’s driven by all the personal stories we’ve heard of people who’ve seen their loved ones suffer unnecessarily at the end of their lives.
It’s driven by that ripping-off-the-band-aid feeling of relief you get when you’ve finally broached the subject of end of life wishes with your family, free from the burden of just not knowing what they’d want for themselves, and knowing you could advocate for these wishes if your loved one weren’t able to speak up for themselves.
And it’s driven by knowing that this is a conversation that needs to happen early, and often. One of the greatest gifts you can give the ones you love is making sure you’re all on the same page. In the words of the amazing Atul Gawande, you only die once! Die the way you want. Make sure your loved ones get that same gift. And there is a way to engage in this topic with grace!
Here are the five questions, read them, consider them, answer them (you can securely save your answers at the Engage with Grace site), share your answers with your loved ones. It doesn’t matter what your answers are, it just matters that you know them for yourself, and for your loved ones. And they for you.
We all know the power of a group that decides to assemble. In fact, we recently spent an amazing couple days with the members of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, or C-TAC, working together to channel so much of the extraordinary work that organizations are already doing to improve the quality of care for our country’s sickest and most vulnerable.
Noted journalist Eleanor Clift gave an amazing talk, finding a way to weave humor and joy into her telling of the story she shared in this Health Affairs article. She elegantly sums up (as only she can) the reason that we have this blog rally every year:
For too many physicians, that conversation is hard to have, and families, too, are reluctant to initiate a discussion about what Mom or Dad might want until they’re in a crisis, which isn’t the best time to make these kinds of decisions. Ideally, that conversation should begin at the kitchen table with family members, rather than in a doctor’s office.
It’s a conversation you need to have wherever and whenever you can, and the more people you can rope into it, the better! Make this conversation a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, there will be a right moment, you just might not realize how right it was until you begin the conversation.
This is a time to be inspired, informed – to tackle our challenges in real, substantive, and scalable ways. Participating in this blog rally is just one small, yet huge, way that we can each keep that fire burning in our bellies, long after the turkey dinner is gone.
Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season. Let’s Engage with Grace together.
To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org.This post was developed by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.
Filed under: Guest Blog Posts | Tags: funeral planning, pre-need, pre-planning
It’s good to see the word getting out to consumers that pre-need shopping around is better than waiting for someone to die before doing funeral planning. Angie’s List, the popular consumer service ranking site, recently put out some great tips for consumers. I’m pleased to share their information as today’s guest post.
Planning a funeral is an emotionally difficult process, but pre-planning helps you avoid making rushed decisions and allows you to shop around without time constraints.
However, unfamiliarity with the funeral industry can leave consumers vulnerable to fraudulent schemes that range from overpaying for goods and services to the embezzlement of prepaid funds.
Angie Hicks, founder of Angie’s List, said many consumers will go to the same funeral home that their family has used, simply because they have experience and they know what to expect. “But funerals are expensive so it is good to shop around to make sure you are getting the best price possible,” she said.
The national average cost of a funeral is $6,600, but some cost thousands more than that. On average, consumers spend $2,295 for the casket alone. Other costs include vaults, embalming, cremation, funeral staff and facilities, transportation for deceased and family. You can even purchase programs and note cards, tribute videos and online memorials from some funeral homes.
A nationwide Angie’s List poll found:
51 percent of Angie’s List members in a recent poll have never planned a funeral.
Of those who have, 19 percent say the experience was a poor one.
53 percent consider family tradition and reputation the most important factors in choosing a funeral provider.
In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission established the Funeral Rule, which is designed to protect consumers by requiring funeral providers to give adequate information about their services:
1. Give an itemized price list over the phone or in person.
2. Let you choose only the goods and services you want (with some exceptions).
3. Disclose on the price list if state or local law requires you to buy any item.
4. Handle without charge a casket or urn you bought elsewhere.
5. Obtain your permission for embalming services and disclose in writing that they’re not required by law (except in special cases).
Angie’s List is the nation’s premier provider of local consumer reviews including funeral homes.
Angie’s List tips for pre-planning a funeral:
Talk to your family about your wishes and write down a plan: Do you want a traditional burial or cremation? Do you want a simple or elaborate funeral? Share your ideas with family and put all your wishes in writing.
Know your rights – shop around: According the FTC’s “Funeral Rule” you have the right to stop in any funeral home and request a General Price List (GPL). Visit several funeral homes and use the lists to compare prices. If a funeral home says you have to buy a certain kind of casket, urn, etc. ask why and find out the law or regulation that requires it.
Pre-paying for a funeral: Be very cautious if you decide to pre-pay for services with a funeral home – ask what happens to your money if you want to transfer the funds to a different funeral home or if the funeral home you’ve selected goes out of business. Only nine states have funds that step in to protect consumers when funds are stolen or if the funeral service goes out of business. (FL, IN, Iowa, MO, NC, OR Texas, VT and WV)
If you choose to pre-pay now, a better option is to put that money in a checking or savings account and add a POD – payable on death designation. Your bank or credit union will have you fill out a form and have it paid to the person who will be taking care of the arrangements. Talk to a certified financial planner about the best plan for you.
Licensing is mandatory for funeral directors nationwide: You can confirm a funeral director’s license by checking with the licensing board in your state. Requirements vary from state to state, but most call for individuals to be at least 21 years old, have two years of education that include mortuary science, serve a one-year apprenticeship and pass an exam.
Schedule a meeting with the funeral director: Take this time to ask the director your questions (including services/costs) to help gauge if they would be a good company for you to use.Unhappy with a funeral home? If you have a problem, it’s best to try to resolve it first with the funeral director. If you are still having issues, file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
November is Hospice and Palliative Care Month. The conversation about choosing hospice care is as hard to start as the funeral planning conversation.
I’m pleased to present this guest blog post by Thomas Patrick Donovan. He is the community liaison for Rocky Mountain Hospice in Bozeman, Montana and a faculty fellow in the MSU freshman honors program.
Does choosing hospice mean giving up?
There is a story going around that when a person chooses hospice care at the end of life, this choice represents giving up.
In a society that values eternal youthfulness, it is hardly surprising that there is anxiousness about how to approach end-of-life concerns. For many, anything short of waging a heroic, all-out battle against death represents giving up and signifies a failure on the part of the patient and his or her family and caregivers.
While this is quite understandable, given our society’s focus on masking the process of aging and hiding completely the process of dying, it is also quite misguided and unhelpful.
To look at the choice of hospice care as a failure along the journey of life is like looking at winter as a failure on the part of nature. Yet as every Montanan knows deep in their bones, rather than winter being a failure it is a vital part of the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of life. As such it brings with it its own unique qualities, challenges and beauty.
Here in Montana winters can be long or longer, harsh or relatively easy. Montana winters are unpredictable, with mysterious rhythms, and one never knows when the helping hand of a friend or neighbor will be required to navigate what winter brings.
Conceptually we all know that death will come knocking on our doors at some point in our lives. Yet how often do we engage in discussions about preparing for the end-of-life season within our own families, much less consider the reality of death as part of an important community-wide conversation?
It is like ignoring all the signs and pretending winter will not come this year — where would that leave most Montanans? Would anyone, in the midst of a hard winter, look at asking for a neighbor’s help as a failure, or consider accepting a friend’s assistance to be an act of giving up?
On the contrary, we would likely welcome their willingness to pitch in and lighten our load a bit. Why then, when we reach the season of winter in the cycle of our own lives, would we reject or fear the helping hand of hospice?
Imagine, for a moment, the possibility that qualified hospice care can turn the end of life into a time of decreased worry and anxiety. Hospice, with an interdisciplinary team of doctors, case-manager nurses, social workers, chaplains, home aides and volunteers, creates the possibility that patients can stay wherever they consider home and, therefore, age in place with comfort and dignity.
Working closely with a patient’s primary care physician, family members and other caregivers, the hospice team adds another layer of care that can take tremendous pressure off the shoulders of overwrought loved ones and overstretched caregivers.
Specializing in palliative care, alleviating pain and providing symptom management, the hospice team is dedicated to compassionately crafting an individualized plan of care to meet each patient’s specific needs. With the relief provided by hospice care, the potential for creating quality time for patient and loved ones to share the beauty and mystery of life’s wintertime can be realized.
To hold fast to the belief that choosing hospice means admitting that one has failed is, in truth, a failure of our ability to imagine the end of life being anything other than a hard, possibly painful, winter that we have to suffer through.
Perhaps it is time to re-imagine the end of life: rather than giving up, hospice is the successful embrace of community, a way of being there for each other. Hospice offers the caring arms of hospitality to patient, family, and friends and, as a result, creates a way to meet the winter of life that has comfort and dignity at its foundation.
Filed under: Guest Blog Posts, Religious Traditions | Tags: cremation, Hindu, religion
Ellen Leitzer had the opportunity to witness a Hindu funeral in Nepal and wrote the following incredibly detailed description. I am honored that she agreed to share her insights in today’s guest post.
Dear Friends,
Rita died early yesterday morning from pneumonia and sepsis at Tribhuvan University’s Teaching Hospital, one of Kathmandu’s public hospitals. Her medical care and the hospital’s sanitary conditions were extraordinarily sub-standard and contributed to her death.
I spent a good part of the last 45 days advocating for her within Kathmandu’s public health care system based on ongoing information provided to me by physician friends in New Mexico. I am so grateful for the help and support of Drs. David Wachter and Aroop Mangalik.
According to Hindu custom, Rita was taken by ambulance from the hospital to be cremated at Pashupatinath, an important Hindu temple site along the banks of the sacred (and very polluted) Bagmati River. The Bagmati flows downstream into India’s Ganges River.
Sheri, my Canadian friend who introduced me to Rita, and I reached the hospital at 7:30 AM and sat by Rita’s shroud-covered body in a hospital courtyard with Rita’s husband and other male relatives until the ambulance arrived. We then boarded a dilapidated, rented bus and headed to the funeral site.
Rita has four daughters and one son. Her daughters and female relatives were not allowed to attend her funeral. Little did I think that almost two months ago when I visited Pashupatinath as a tourist that I would return to witness the cremation of a friend.
Rita received a first-class funeral ceremony. Her body was covered by an orange-and-red shroud, over which a red powder was sprinkled. Butter candles and incense burned nearby and then we all paid our respects by placing marigolds on top of her corpse. She was then hoisted onto the funeral pyre.
A Brahmin priest blew a conch shell three times as her grieving 19-year old son Saroj circled her body holding a burning wick that would be used to light the ghee that had been poured on top of the shroud. Saroj was to have placed the wick into her mouth, a starting point for the cremation, but he was not up to the task. At that point the Brahmin priest took over.
Once the fire started, bundles of hay were placed around and on top of Rita’s body and the flames consumed her. (Throughout the ceremony cell phones with their varied tones continued to ring and be answered despite the solemnity of the occasion.)
Sheri and I left Pashupatinath while Rita’s body was still burning and made our way to her home 20 kilometers south of Kathmandu by micro-bus and bus. Rita’s home is on the outskirts of a small village that is surrounded by rice paddies. As Sheri and I approached the home we saw scores of women dressed in red sitting cross-legged on the porch and roof. Rita’s daughters were distraught and friends and family attempted to console them.
At one point a 24-year old cousin came to pay her respects but did not enter the house. This delightful young woman, whom I had met a few days earlier at Teaching Hospital, informed me that she was menstruating and therefore was unclean so could not enter the home nor touch anyone.
When she left I gave her a big hug and said that I was not a Hindu and felt fine about touching her. (In rural areas, menstruating women are forced to sleep in cow-sheds with the livestock. It is not uncommon for adolescent girls to be molested by local men on such occasions.)
I learned a lot about Rita today. She was married at the age of 15, raised five truly wonderful children, and became an active community leader as a member of the Nepali Congress Party. She also ran a small NGO that focused on helping women.
Rita’s home was built as the result of her hard work. She earned money working for other farmers and built the family home 11 years ago with the proceeds from her labor. Her most recent project, that is not yet completed, was adding an indoor bathroom to the home. Rita’s husband, who was orphaned at the age of 3, works at Kathmandu’s Maternity Hospital.
Late in the afternoon Saroj and the family’s male relatives approached the home, single file through the rice paddies. They had stopped at a holy pond nearby where Saroj was bathed and then dressed in white garments and a turban – his head had been shaved. He was wearing sandals made of straw and carried a copper urn that contained holy water.
Saroj sat alone on the porch while the men prepared a room for him. He is unable to touch anyone for 13 days, must sleep on a bed of hay, and prepare his own food – rice (without salt), fruit and water. During this time Saroj must spend his days in prayer to ensure the safe passage of his mother’s soul into the Otherworld.
Saroj is very concerned about the uncertain future that his two unmarried sisters face. When a death occurs the family is considered unlucky and no one wants to marry into such a family.
I was also reminded of how under-valued women are in Nepal. One woman, Dhana, who came to pay her respects, is also active in the Nepali Congress Party. Dhana is educated and a woman of means. Her two sons were educated in the U.S. and work abroad.
She begged the Party to give money to Rita so that she could receive medical care in a private hospital or even India where the care is better and more advanced. Rita had done so much for the Party, I was told, yet the Party did nothing for her. Dhana said that had Rita been a man, the Party would have contributed a considerable amount to the cost of her medical care, including paying for care in India.
Namaste,
Ellen
Filed under: Guest Blog Posts | Tags: cryonics, estate planning, Frozen Dead Guy Days
This is today’s guest post that I wrote for the American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys blog.
Former American Idol judge and The X Factor creator Simon Cowell. Famed baseball slugger Ted Williams. Bredo Morstoel. Robert Ettinger. What do these four men have in common? And who are Morstoel and Ettinger?
They all have been, or intend to be, put into a cryogenic deep freeze after death. Their hope: when medical science comes up with a cure for whatever ailed them, they can be revived, cured, and restored to life.
Given that this might happen hundreds of years in the future, if at all, the question is – how will their estates pay for this? You think modern medicine is expensive now, wait until 2311!
Cryogenics is a wild and woolly world. It’s a challenge for the estate planning attorneys of today and could be an issue for decades to come.
Robert C.W. Ettinger conceived cryonics and popularized the idea in a 1963 book, “The Prospect of Immortality.” Ettinger died on July 23, 2011, at the age of 92. Mr. Ettinger’s body was promptly placed in a cryonic capsule and frozen at minus 371 degrees Fahrenheit, after several days of graduated cooling.
Ettinger was a physics instructor and science fiction writer. His idea of freezing the dead for future reanimation repelled most scientists. Still, he persuaded at least 105 people to pay $28,000 each to have their bodies preserved in liquid nitrogen at his Cryonics Institute in suburban Detroit. His mother, Rhea, who died in 1977 at 78, was his first patient. No word in Ettinger’s obituary on how his family will continue to pay for the service in the future.
Before Simon Cowell indicated he’d like to be frozen, baseball legend Ted Williams, whose freezing at an unrelated Arizona facility in 2002 set off a well-publicized family feud, was probably the most notable cryonics adherent.
But even before these two famous cryonics fans, there was Trygve Bauge, grandson of Bredo Morstoel from Norway. We have Grandpa Bredo and Trygve to thank for the annual Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Nederland, Colorado.
After Grandpa’s death due to a heart condition in 1989, Trygve had him packed in dry ice and shipped to a U.S. cryonics facility. In 1993, Trygve, hoping to start his own cryonics service, moved Grandpa to his concrete bunker home in Nederland, a tiny town 17 miles west of Boulder.
The story then takes a number of interesting turns. Trygve was deported back to Norway in 1995 due to visa issues. Long story short – Grandpa Bredo has been kept in a Tuff Shed-sheltered, dry ice-fueled deep freeze in Nederland ever since. The family sends money monthly to keep the dry ice stocked.
But how long will the family keep sending money? Grandpa Bredo has been on ice for 21 years. As far as anyone can tell, there is no family trust in place to keep “The Ice Man” coming with the monthly 1,600 pounds of dry ice that keeps Grandpa at a steady (and cryogenically inadequate) minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. (Kids, don’t try this at home!)
At this point, the money from the annual festival benefits the town, not the family. This year, the Nederland Chamber of Commerce put the festival, now going into its eleventh year, up for sale to a professional festival organization.
I’m sure the family and the Chamber of Commerce would appreciate any free advice as to how to keep the cold hard cash coming.
