Funeral Traditions and Ceremonies
I am not ashamed to say "I don't know" however it does not matter at all as far as the body is without importance, the soul is important and it can not be buried unless you are part of some funny religions.
So from my curiosity, I have 2 questions:
What if people move to a different planet, does Islam become void because they can not be buried as you suggest?
What if a Muslim blows up in a plane, does he go to hell because he was not buried left or right or perpendicular?
So from my curiosity, I have 2 questions:
What if people move to a different planet, does Islam become void because they can not be buried as you suggest?
What if a Muslim blows up in a plane, does he go to hell because he was not buried left or right or perpendicular?
Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=71987722
Excerpts:
Durham, N.C. — ON a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor.
......
The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.
CANCER has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.
But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=71987722
Excerpts:
Durham, N.C. — ON a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor.
......
The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.
CANCER has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.
But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.
Below is an article about what happens to your relatives if you do not leave a will...
Famous people who died without a will
From singing sensations to influential leaders, from legendary painters to esteemed business tycoons, here's a look at some of the famous personalities who passed away without leaving a will behind.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/ ... ailsignout
Famous people who died without a will
From singing sensations to influential leaders, from legendary painters to esteemed business tycoons, here's a look at some of the famous personalities who passed away without leaving a will behind.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/ ... ailsignout
The Art of Condolence
Recently a teenage boy in my community committed suicide. I immediately sat down to write the parents a sympathy note. I pulled out a monogrammed card, placed it on the desk in front of me, and proceeded to stare at it blankly for the next two hours.
Though I have been a professional writer for almost 30 years, I could think of absolutely nothing to say.
Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. “A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical — never mind,” advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. “Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value.”
But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. “Sorry about Mom. Sad face, sad face, crying face, heart, heart, unicorn.”
One mark of this change is in the card industry. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40.
For those who are inexperienced or out of practice in comforting someone in grief, what are some tips for mastering (or at least not humiliating yourself in) the lost art of condolence?
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/style ... d=71987722
Recently a teenage boy in my community committed suicide. I immediately sat down to write the parents a sympathy note. I pulled out a monogrammed card, placed it on the desk in front of me, and proceeded to stare at it blankly for the next two hours.
Though I have been a professional writer for almost 30 years, I could think of absolutely nothing to say.
Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. “A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical — never mind,” advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. “Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value.”
But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. “Sorry about Mom. Sad face, sad face, crying face, heart, heart, unicorn.”
One mark of this change is in the card industry. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40.
For those who are inexperienced or out of practice in comforting someone in grief, what are some tips for mastering (or at least not humiliating yourself in) the lost art of condolence?
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/style ... d=71987722
Vatican: No more scattering of cremation ashes
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Tuesday published guidelines for Catholics who want to be cremated, saying their remains cannot be approved place.
The new instructions were released just in time for Halloween and "All Souls Day" on Nov. 2, when the faithful are supposed to pray for and remember the dead.
scattered, divvied up or kept at home but rather stored in a sacred, church-
For most of its 2,000-year history, the Catholic Church only permitted burial, arguing that it best expressed the Christian hope in resurrection. But in 1963, the Vatican explicitly allowed cremation as long as it didn't suggest a denial of faith about resurrection.
The new document from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith repeats that burial remains preferred, with officials calling cremation a "brutal destruction" of the body. But it lays out guidelines for conserving ashes for the increasing numbers of Catholics who choose cremation for economic, ecological or other reasons.
It said it was doing so to counter what it called "new ideas contrary to the church's faith" that had emerged since 1963, including New Age-y ideas that death is a "fusion" with Mother Nature and the universe, or the "definitive liberation" from the prison of the body.
To set the faithful straight, the Vatican said ashes and bone fragments cannot be kept at home, since that would deprive the Christian community as a whole of remembering the dead. Rather, church authorities should designate a sacred place, such as a cemetery or church area, to hold them.
Only in extraordinary cases can a bishop allow ashes to be kept at home, it said. Vatican officials declined to say what circumstances would qualify, but presumably countries where Catholics are a persecuted minority and where Catholic churches and cemeteries have been ransacked would qualify.
The document said remains cannot be divided among family members or put in lockets or other mementos. Nor can the ashes be scattered in the air, land or sea since doing so would give the appearance of "pantheism, naturalism or nihilism," the guidelines said.
It repeated church teaching that Catholics who choose to be cremated for reasons contrary to the Christian faith must be denied a Christian funeral.
The new instruction carries an Aug. 15 date and says Pope Francis approved it March 18.
The author of the text, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, was asked at a Vatican briefing if Francis had any reservations about the text, particularly the refusal to let family members keep remains of their loved ones at home.
"The dead body isn't the private property of relatives, but rather a son of God who is part of the people of God," Mueller said. "We have to get over this individualistic thinking."
While the new instruction insists that remains be kept together, Vatican officials said they are not about to go gather up the various body parts of saints that are scattered in churches around the world. The practice of divvying up saints' bodies for veneration — a hand here, a thigh bone there — was a fad centuries ago but is no longer in favor.
"Going to all the countries that have a hand of someone would start a war among the faithful," reasoned Monsignor Angel Rodriguez Luno, a Vatican theological adviser.
https://apnews.com/43f1b1c274a14d16ab0d ... _medium=AP
********
Vatican Clarifies the Rules for Cremation: Bury, Don’t Scatter
VATICAN CITY — Ashes to ashes is fine, the Vatican says, as long as you don’t spread them around.
On Tuesday, the Vatican responded to what it called an “unstoppable increase” in cremation and issued guidelines barring the scattering of ashes “in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way.”
The Vatican decreed that the ashes of loved ones have no place in the home, and certainly not in jewelry. It urged that cremated remains be preserved in cemeteries or other approved sacred places.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/world ... d=45305309
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Tuesday published guidelines for Catholics who want to be cremated, saying their remains cannot be approved place.
The new instructions were released just in time for Halloween and "All Souls Day" on Nov. 2, when the faithful are supposed to pray for and remember the dead.
scattered, divvied up or kept at home but rather stored in a sacred, church-
For most of its 2,000-year history, the Catholic Church only permitted burial, arguing that it best expressed the Christian hope in resurrection. But in 1963, the Vatican explicitly allowed cremation as long as it didn't suggest a denial of faith about resurrection.
The new document from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith repeats that burial remains preferred, with officials calling cremation a "brutal destruction" of the body. But it lays out guidelines for conserving ashes for the increasing numbers of Catholics who choose cremation for economic, ecological or other reasons.
It said it was doing so to counter what it called "new ideas contrary to the church's faith" that had emerged since 1963, including New Age-y ideas that death is a "fusion" with Mother Nature and the universe, or the "definitive liberation" from the prison of the body.
To set the faithful straight, the Vatican said ashes and bone fragments cannot be kept at home, since that would deprive the Christian community as a whole of remembering the dead. Rather, church authorities should designate a sacred place, such as a cemetery or church area, to hold them.
Only in extraordinary cases can a bishop allow ashes to be kept at home, it said. Vatican officials declined to say what circumstances would qualify, but presumably countries where Catholics are a persecuted minority and where Catholic churches and cemeteries have been ransacked would qualify.
The document said remains cannot be divided among family members or put in lockets or other mementos. Nor can the ashes be scattered in the air, land or sea since doing so would give the appearance of "pantheism, naturalism or nihilism," the guidelines said.
It repeated church teaching that Catholics who choose to be cremated for reasons contrary to the Christian faith must be denied a Christian funeral.
The new instruction carries an Aug. 15 date and says Pope Francis approved it March 18.
The author of the text, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, was asked at a Vatican briefing if Francis had any reservations about the text, particularly the refusal to let family members keep remains of their loved ones at home.
"The dead body isn't the private property of relatives, but rather a son of God who is part of the people of God," Mueller said. "We have to get over this individualistic thinking."
While the new instruction insists that remains be kept together, Vatican officials said they are not about to go gather up the various body parts of saints that are scattered in churches around the world. The practice of divvying up saints' bodies for veneration — a hand here, a thigh bone there — was a fad centuries ago but is no longer in favor.
"Going to all the countries that have a hand of someone would start a war among the faithful," reasoned Monsignor Angel Rodriguez Luno, a Vatican theological adviser.
https://apnews.com/43f1b1c274a14d16ab0d ... _medium=AP
********
Vatican Clarifies the Rules for Cremation: Bury, Don’t Scatter
VATICAN CITY — Ashes to ashes is fine, the Vatican says, as long as you don’t spread them around.
On Tuesday, the Vatican responded to what it called an “unstoppable increase” in cremation and issued guidelines barring the scattering of ashes “in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way.”
The Vatican decreed that the ashes of loved ones have no place in the home, and certainly not in jewelry. It urged that cremated remains be preserved in cemeteries or other approved sacred places.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/world ... d=45305309
My Deathbed Playlist (and Yours)
Now that I’m approaching my mid-40s, I’ve finally gotten around to some basic end-of-life planning. Health care proxy? Check. Power of attorney? Signed. My playlist for dying? It’s done.
Some people find it meaningful to specify the music they would like to be played at their funeral. But before then — just before then, in fact — many of us will face a time when we are still able to experience music, but can no longer choose it for ourselves. Hence my advance directive for music, or what I like to call my singing will.
In many traditions, music is divine. Thomas Carlyle called it the “speech of angels.” But even if music only seems transcendent, it’s hard to imagine an experience for which it’s better suited than the end of life — a time when music’s unique expressive qualities might be particularly precious to us and when, it’s commonly said, our hearing may be the last of our senses to depart.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opini ... 87722&_r=0
Now that I’m approaching my mid-40s, I’ve finally gotten around to some basic end-of-life planning. Health care proxy? Check. Power of attorney? Signed. My playlist for dying? It’s done.
Some people find it meaningful to specify the music they would like to be played at their funeral. But before then — just before then, in fact — many of us will face a time when we are still able to experience music, but can no longer choose it for ourselves. Hence my advance directive for music, or what I like to call my singing will.
In many traditions, music is divine. Thomas Carlyle called it the “speech of angels.” But even if music only seems transcendent, it’s hard to imagine an experience for which it’s better suited than the end of life — a time when music’s unique expressive qualities might be particularly precious to us and when, it’s commonly said, our hearing may be the last of our senses to depart.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opini ... 87722&_r=0
"Although you are material in nature , try to elevate your souls.zznoor wrote:Shia and Sunni Muslim dig grave perpendicular to Kibla and place body on right side facing Kibla. Is it true for Ismaili Muslims?
Once you have elevated your souls, then there is no shame whether the physical body is burnt or fed to the dogs.
Eventually, what is material will turn into dust, but the soul in your body is pure and eternal."
Mowlana Sultan Mohamed Shah
Interesting question especially in view of how the question is formulated and which presuppose that people who do not bury the body perpendicular to the Kibla are not part of these groups.zznoor wrote:Shia and Sunni Muslim dig grave perpendicular to Kibla and place body on right side facing Kibla. Is it true for Ismaili Muslims?
Here is another interesting question:
When in few centuries we travel and establish ourselves in planets of various galaxies thousands of light years of planet earth, will we be digging graves parallel or perpendicular to the Kibla?
For some people Islam is a religion of yesterday doomed to remain a religion of yesterday where people can only see as far as their camel goes.
For other, they choose to be the children of their own time and these are the true Muslims who make of Islam a religion of the present and a religion of the future.
12 Funeral Etiquette Tips Everyone Should Know
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smar ... ut#image=1
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smar ... ut#image=1
First, Sex Ed. Then Death Ed.
Extract:
Many of the patients I have cared for at the end of their lives had no idea they were dying, despite raging illness and repeated hospital admissions. The reasons for this are complex and varied — among them poor physician training in breaking bad news and a collective hope that our technologies will somehow ultimately triumph against death. By the time patients are approaching the end, they are often too weak or disabled to express their preferences, if those preferences were ever considered at all. Patients aren’t getting what they say they want. For example, 80 percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, but only 20 percent achieve that wish.
Many of us would choose to die in a planned, comfortable way, surrounded by those we love. But you can’t plan for a good death if you don’t know you’re dying. We need to learn how to make a place for death in our lives and we also need to learn how to plan for it. In most cases, the suffering could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, by some education on death and our medical system. The fact is that when patients are prepared, they die better. When they have done the work of considering their own goals and values, and have documented those preferences, they make different choices. What people want when it comes to end-of-life care is almost never as much as what we give them.
I am a passionate advocate for educating teenagers to be responsible about their sexuality. And I believe it is past time for us to educate them also about death, an equally important stage of life, and one for which the consequences of poor preparedness are as bad, arguably worse. Ideally this education would come early, well before it’s likely to be needed.
I propose that we teach death ed in all of our high schools. I see this curriculum as a civic responsibility. I understand that might sound radical, but bear with me. Why should death be considered more taboo than sex? Both are a natural part of life. We may think death is too scary for kids to talk about, but I believe the consequences of a bad death are far scarier. A death ed program would aim to normalize this passage of life and encourage students to prepare for it, whenever it might come — for them, or for their families.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opin ... d=45305309
*******
Cursed tombs and discoveries
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/news/cu ... ut#image=1
Extract:
Many of the patients I have cared for at the end of their lives had no idea they were dying, despite raging illness and repeated hospital admissions. The reasons for this are complex and varied — among them poor physician training in breaking bad news and a collective hope that our technologies will somehow ultimately triumph against death. By the time patients are approaching the end, they are often too weak or disabled to express their preferences, if those preferences were ever considered at all. Patients aren’t getting what they say they want. For example, 80 percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, but only 20 percent achieve that wish.
Many of us would choose to die in a planned, comfortable way, surrounded by those we love. But you can’t plan for a good death if you don’t know you’re dying. We need to learn how to make a place for death in our lives and we also need to learn how to plan for it. In most cases, the suffering could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, by some education on death and our medical system. The fact is that when patients are prepared, they die better. When they have done the work of considering their own goals and values, and have documented those preferences, they make different choices. What people want when it comes to end-of-life care is almost never as much as what we give them.
I am a passionate advocate for educating teenagers to be responsible about their sexuality. And I believe it is past time for us to educate them also about death, an equally important stage of life, and one for which the consequences of poor preparedness are as bad, arguably worse. Ideally this education would come early, well before it’s likely to be needed.
I propose that we teach death ed in all of our high schools. I see this curriculum as a civic responsibility. I understand that might sound radical, but bear with me. Why should death be considered more taboo than sex? Both are a natural part of life. We may think death is too scary for kids to talk about, but I believe the consequences of a bad death are far scarier. A death ed program would aim to normalize this passage of life and encourage students to prepare for it, whenever it might come — for them, or for their families.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opin ... d=45305309
*******
Cursed tombs and discoveries
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/travel/news/cu ... ut#image=1
What Our Cells Teach Us About a ‘Natural’ Death
Every Thursday morning on the heart transplant service, our medical team would get a front-row seat to witness an epic battle raging under a microscope. Tiny pieces of heart tissue taken from patients with newly transplanted hearts would be broadcast onto a gigantic screen, showing static images of pink heart cells being attacked by varying amounts of blue immune cells. The more blue cells there were, the more voraciously they were chomping away the pink cells, the more evidence that the patient’s inherently xenophobic immune system was rejecting the foreign, transplanted heart.
There was so much beauty to be found in the infinitesimal push and pull between life and death those slides depicted that I would fantasize about having them framed and put up in my house. Yet the more I studied those cells, the more I realized that they might have the answers to one of the most difficult subjects of our time.
Throughout our history, particularly recently, the human race has looked far and wide to answer a complex question — what is a good death? With so many life-sustaining technologies now able to keep us alive almost indefinitely, many believe that a “natural” death is a good one. With technology now invading almost every aspect of our lives, the desire for a natural death experience mirrors trends noted in how we wish to experience birth, travel and food these days.
When we picture a natural death, we conjure a man or woman lying in bed at home surrounded by loved ones. Taking one’s last breath in one’s own bed, a sight ubiquitous in literature, was the modus operandi for death in ancient times. In the book “Western Attitudes Toward Death,” Philippe Ariès wrote that the deathbed scene was “organized by the dying person himself, who presided over it and knew its protocol” and that it was a public ceremony at which “it was essential that parents, friends and neighbors be present.” While such resplendent representations of death continue to be pervasive in both modern literature and pop culture, they are mostly fiction at best.
This vision of a natural death, however, is limited since it represents how we used to die before the development of modern resuscitative technologies and is merely a reflection of the social and scientific context of the time that death took place in. The desire for “natural” in almost every aspect of modern life represents a revolt against technology — when people say they want a natural death, they are alluding to the end’s being as technology-free as possible. Physicians too use this vocabulary, and frequently when they want to intimate to a family that more medical treatment may be futile, they encourage families to “let nature take its course.”
Yet, defining death by how medically involved it is might be shortsighted. The reason there are no life-sustaining devices in our romantic musings of death is that there just weren’t any available. Furthermore, our narratives of medical technology are derived largely from the outcomes they achieve. When death is unexpectedly averted through the use of drugs, devices or procedures, technology is considered miraculous; when death occurs regardless, its application is considered undignified. Therefore, defining a natural death is important because it forms the basis of what most people will thus consider a good death.
Perhaps we need to observe something even more elemental to understand what death is like when it is stripped bare of social context. Perhaps the answer to what can be considered a truly natural death can be found in the very cells that form the building blocks of all living things, humans included.
Though we have known for more than a century how cells are created, it is only recently that we have discovered how they die. Cells die via three main mechanisms. The ugliest and least elegant form of cell death is necrosis, in which because of either a lack of food or some other toxic injury, cells burst open, releasing their contents into the serums. Necrosis, which occurs in a transplanted heart undergoing rejection, causes a very powerful activation of the body’s immune system. Necrosis, then, is the cellular version of a “bad death.”
The second form of cell death is autophagy, in which the cell turns on itself, changing its defective or redundant components into nutrients, which can be used by other cells. This form of cell death occurs when food supply is limited but not entirely cut off, such as in heart failure.
The most sophisticated form of cell death, however, is unlike the other two types. Apoptosis, a Greek word used to describe falling leaves, is a programmed form of cell death. When a cell becomes old or disrepair sets in, it is nudged, usually by signaling molecules, to undergo a form of controlled self-demolition. Unlike in necrosis, the cell doesn’t burst, doesn’t tax the immune system, but quietly dissolves. Apoptosis is the reason our bone marrow doesn’t weigh two tons or our intestines don’t grow indefinitely.
As important as apoptosis is to death, it is essential for life. While as humans, we often consciously or unconsciously hope to achieve immortality, immortality has a very real existence in the cellular world — it’s called cancer. In fact, most cancers occur because of defects in apoptosis, and most novel cancer therapies are designed to allow cell death to occur as it normally would.
In many ways, therefore, life and death at a cellular level are much more socially conscious than how we interface with these phenomena at a human level. For cells, what is good for the organism is best for the cell. Even though cells are designed entirely to survive, an appropriate death is central to the survival of the organism, which itself has to die in a similar fashion for the sake of the society and ecosystem it inhabits.
We humans spend much of our lives denying death. Death, however, is not the enemy. If there is an enemy, it is the fear that death arouses. The fear of death often induces us to make choices that defy the biological constraints of our existence. Such choices often lead us to a fate that more closely resembles necrosis, involving the futile activation of innumerable resources eventually resulting in a cataclysmic outcome, rather than apoptosis. Furthermore, even as we hope to defy our mortality, our cells show the devastation that can occur for the organism if even one cell among billions achieves immortality.
When I asked Robert Horvitz, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was part of the group that discovered apoptosis, what lessons we could learn from cell death, his answer demonstrated exactly why we have failed to understand death in the context of our lives: “Only once before has someone approached me to discuss the existential questions that might relate what is known about cell death to human existence.”
The question for us, then, is: What is the human equivalent of apoptosis in the context of our society? One way to approach that question is to look at what the human equivalent of necrosis is. To me, if a human being is in the hospital with intensive, life-sustaining therapies such as artificial respiration, nutrition or dialysis sustaining them with little hope of recovering reasonable brain function, such a state could be considered necrosis. Almost any other alternative, whether one dies in the hospital having rescinded resuscitation or intubation (DNR/DNI), at home with hospice services or with the aid of a physician’s prescription, has much more in common with apoptosis.
We have striven endlessly to answer some of our most crucial questions, yet somehow we haven’t tried to find them in the basic machinery of our biology. Apoptosis represents a pure vision of death as it occurs in nature, and that vision is something we might aspire to in our own deaths: A cell never dies in isolation, but in clear view of its peers; it rarely dies of its own volition; a greater force that is in touch with the larger organism understands when a cell is more likely to harm itself and those around it by carrying on. Apoptosis represents the ultimate paradox — for the organism to survive, the cells must die, and they must die well. “There are many disorders in which there is too little apoptotic death,” Dr. Horvitz said, “and in those cases it is activating apoptosis that could increase longevity.”
And finally, a cell also understands better than we humans do the consequences of outlasting one’s welcome. For though humanity aspires to achieve immortality, our cells teach us that a life without death is the most unnatural fate of all.
Haider Javed Warraich is a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at Duke University Medical Center and the author of “Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opin ... d=45305309[/b]
Every Thursday morning on the heart transplant service, our medical team would get a front-row seat to witness an epic battle raging under a microscope. Tiny pieces of heart tissue taken from patients with newly transplanted hearts would be broadcast onto a gigantic screen, showing static images of pink heart cells being attacked by varying amounts of blue immune cells. The more blue cells there were, the more voraciously they were chomping away the pink cells, the more evidence that the patient’s inherently xenophobic immune system was rejecting the foreign, transplanted heart.
There was so much beauty to be found in the infinitesimal push and pull between life and death those slides depicted that I would fantasize about having them framed and put up in my house. Yet the more I studied those cells, the more I realized that they might have the answers to one of the most difficult subjects of our time.
Throughout our history, particularly recently, the human race has looked far and wide to answer a complex question — what is a good death? With so many life-sustaining technologies now able to keep us alive almost indefinitely, many believe that a “natural” death is a good one. With technology now invading almost every aspect of our lives, the desire for a natural death experience mirrors trends noted in how we wish to experience birth, travel and food these days.
When we picture a natural death, we conjure a man or woman lying in bed at home surrounded by loved ones. Taking one’s last breath in one’s own bed, a sight ubiquitous in literature, was the modus operandi for death in ancient times. In the book “Western Attitudes Toward Death,” Philippe Ariès wrote that the deathbed scene was “organized by the dying person himself, who presided over it and knew its protocol” and that it was a public ceremony at which “it was essential that parents, friends and neighbors be present.” While such resplendent representations of death continue to be pervasive in both modern literature and pop culture, they are mostly fiction at best.
This vision of a natural death, however, is limited since it represents how we used to die before the development of modern resuscitative technologies and is merely a reflection of the social and scientific context of the time that death took place in. The desire for “natural” in almost every aspect of modern life represents a revolt against technology — when people say they want a natural death, they are alluding to the end’s being as technology-free as possible. Physicians too use this vocabulary, and frequently when they want to intimate to a family that more medical treatment may be futile, they encourage families to “let nature take its course.”
Yet, defining death by how medically involved it is might be shortsighted. The reason there are no life-sustaining devices in our romantic musings of death is that there just weren’t any available. Furthermore, our narratives of medical technology are derived largely from the outcomes they achieve. When death is unexpectedly averted through the use of drugs, devices or procedures, technology is considered miraculous; when death occurs regardless, its application is considered undignified. Therefore, defining a natural death is important because it forms the basis of what most people will thus consider a good death.
Perhaps we need to observe something even more elemental to understand what death is like when it is stripped bare of social context. Perhaps the answer to what can be considered a truly natural death can be found in the very cells that form the building blocks of all living things, humans included.
Though we have known for more than a century how cells are created, it is only recently that we have discovered how they die. Cells die via three main mechanisms. The ugliest and least elegant form of cell death is necrosis, in which because of either a lack of food or some other toxic injury, cells burst open, releasing their contents into the serums. Necrosis, which occurs in a transplanted heart undergoing rejection, causes a very powerful activation of the body’s immune system. Necrosis, then, is the cellular version of a “bad death.”
The second form of cell death is autophagy, in which the cell turns on itself, changing its defective or redundant components into nutrients, which can be used by other cells. This form of cell death occurs when food supply is limited but not entirely cut off, such as in heart failure.
The most sophisticated form of cell death, however, is unlike the other two types. Apoptosis, a Greek word used to describe falling leaves, is a programmed form of cell death. When a cell becomes old or disrepair sets in, it is nudged, usually by signaling molecules, to undergo a form of controlled self-demolition. Unlike in necrosis, the cell doesn’t burst, doesn’t tax the immune system, but quietly dissolves. Apoptosis is the reason our bone marrow doesn’t weigh two tons or our intestines don’t grow indefinitely.
As important as apoptosis is to death, it is essential for life. While as humans, we often consciously or unconsciously hope to achieve immortality, immortality has a very real existence in the cellular world — it’s called cancer. In fact, most cancers occur because of defects in apoptosis, and most novel cancer therapies are designed to allow cell death to occur as it normally would.
In many ways, therefore, life and death at a cellular level are much more socially conscious than how we interface with these phenomena at a human level. For cells, what is good for the organism is best for the cell. Even though cells are designed entirely to survive, an appropriate death is central to the survival of the organism, which itself has to die in a similar fashion for the sake of the society and ecosystem it inhabits.
We humans spend much of our lives denying death. Death, however, is not the enemy. If there is an enemy, it is the fear that death arouses. The fear of death often induces us to make choices that defy the biological constraints of our existence. Such choices often lead us to a fate that more closely resembles necrosis, involving the futile activation of innumerable resources eventually resulting in a cataclysmic outcome, rather than apoptosis. Furthermore, even as we hope to defy our mortality, our cells show the devastation that can occur for the organism if even one cell among billions achieves immortality.
When I asked Robert Horvitz, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was part of the group that discovered apoptosis, what lessons we could learn from cell death, his answer demonstrated exactly why we have failed to understand death in the context of our lives: “Only once before has someone approached me to discuss the existential questions that might relate what is known about cell death to human existence.”
The question for us, then, is: What is the human equivalent of apoptosis in the context of our society? One way to approach that question is to look at what the human equivalent of necrosis is. To me, if a human being is in the hospital with intensive, life-sustaining therapies such as artificial respiration, nutrition or dialysis sustaining them with little hope of recovering reasonable brain function, such a state could be considered necrosis. Almost any other alternative, whether one dies in the hospital having rescinded resuscitation or intubation (DNR/DNI), at home with hospice services or with the aid of a physician’s prescription, has much more in common with apoptosis.
We have striven endlessly to answer some of our most crucial questions, yet somehow we haven’t tried to find them in the basic machinery of our biology. Apoptosis represents a pure vision of death as it occurs in nature, and that vision is something we might aspire to in our own deaths: A cell never dies in isolation, but in clear view of its peers; it rarely dies of its own volition; a greater force that is in touch with the larger organism understands when a cell is more likely to harm itself and those around it by carrying on. Apoptosis represents the ultimate paradox — for the organism to survive, the cells must die, and they must die well. “There are many disorders in which there is too little apoptotic death,” Dr. Horvitz said, “and in those cases it is activating apoptosis that could increase longevity.”
And finally, a cell also understands better than we humans do the consequences of outlasting one’s welcome. For though humanity aspires to achieve immortality, our cells teach us that a life without death is the most unnatural fate of all.
Haider Javed Warraich is a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at Duke University Medical Center and the author of “Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opin ... d=45305309[/b]
End-of-life care
How to have a better death
Death is inevitable. A bad death is not
IN 1662 a London haberdasher with an eye for numbers published the first quantitative account of death. John Graunt tallied causes such as “the King’s Evil”, a tubercular disease believed to be cured by the monarch’s touch. Others seem uncanny, even poetic. In 1632, 15 Londoners “made away themselves”, 11 died of “grief” and a pair fell to “lethargy”.
Graunt’s book is a glimpse of the suddenness and terror of death before modern medicine. It came early, too: until the 20th century the average human lived about as long as a chimpanzee. Today science and economic growth mean that no land mammal lives longer. Yet an unintended consequence has been to turn dying into a medical experience.
How, when and where death happens has changed over the past century. As late as 1990 half of deaths worldwide were caused by chronic diseases; in 2015 the share was two-thirds. Most deaths in rich countries follow years of uneven deterioration. Roughly two-thirds happen in a hospital or nursing home. They often come after a crescendo of desperate treatment. Nearly a third of Americans who die after 65 will have spent time in an intensive-care unit in their final three months of life. Almost a fifth undergo surgery in their last month.
Such zealous intervention can be agonising for all concerned (see article). Cancer patients who die in hospital typically experience more pain, stress and depression than similar patients who die in a hospice or at home. Their families are more likely to argue with doctors and each other, to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and to feel prolonged grief.
What matters
Most important, these medicalised deaths do not seem to be what people want. Polls, including one carried out in four large countries by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American think-tank, and The Economist, find that most people in good health hope that, when the time comes, they will die at home. And few, when asked about their hopes for their final days, say that their priority is to live as long as possible. Rather, they want to die free from pain, at peace, and surrounded by loved ones for whom they are not a burden.
Some deaths are unavoidably miserable. Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death’s imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did. What people say they will want while they are well may change as the end nears (one reason why doctors are sceptical about the instructions set out in “living wills”). Dying at home is less appealing if all the medical kit is at the hospital. A treatment that is unbearable in the imagination can seem like the lesser of two evils when the alternative is death. Some patients will want to fight until all hope is lost.
But too often patients receive drastic treatment in spite of their dying wishes—by default, when doctors do “everything possible”, as they have been trained to, without talking through people’s preferences or ensuring that the prognosis is clearly understood. Just a third of American patients with terminal cancer are asked about their goals at the end of life, for example whether they wish to attend a special event, such as a grandchild’s wedding, even if that means leaving hospital and risking an earlier death. In many other countries, the share is even lower. Most oncologists, who see a lot of dying patients, say that they have never been taught how to talk to them.
This newspaper has called for the legalisation of doctor-assisted dying, so that mentally fit, terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives if that is their wish. But the right to die is just one part of better care at the end of life. The evidence suggests that most people want this option, but that few would, in the end, choose to exercise it. To give people the death they say they want, medicine should take some simple steps.
More palliative care is needed. This neglected branch of medicine deals with the relief of pain and other symptoms, such as breathlessness, as well as counselling for the terminally ill. Until recently it was often dismissed as barely medicine at all: mere tea and sympathy when all hope has gone. Even in Britain, where the hospice movement began, access to palliative care is patchy. Recent studies have shown how wrongheaded that is. Providing it earlier in the course of advanced cancer alongside the usual treatments turns out not only to reduce suffering, but to prolong life, too.
Most doctors enter medicine to help people delay death, not to talk about its inevitability. But talk they must. A good start would be the wider use of the “Serious Illness Conversation Guide” drawn up by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author. It is a short questionnaire designed to find out what terminally ill patients know about their condition and to understand what their goals are as the end nears. Early research suggests it encourages more, earlier conversations and reduces suffering.
These changes should be part of a broad shift in the way health-care systems deal with serious illness. Much care for the chronically ill needs to move out of hospitals altogether. That would mean some health-care funding being diverted to social support. The financial incentives for doctors and hospitals need to change, too. They are typically paid by insurers and governments to do things to patients, not to try to prevent disease or to make patients comfortable. Medicare, America’s public health scheme for the over-65s, has recently started paying doctors for in-depth conversations with terminally ill patients; other national health-care systems, and insurers, should follow. Cost is not an obstacle, since informed, engaged patients will be less likely to want pointless procedures. Fewer doctors may be sued, as poor communication is a common theme in malpractice claims.
One last thing before I go
Most people feel dread when they contemplate their mortality. As death has been hidden away in hospitals and nursing homes, it has become less familiar and harder to talk about. Politicians are scared to bring up end-of-life care in case they are accused of setting up “death panels”. But honest and open conversations with the dying should be as much a part of modern medicine as prescribing drugs or fixing broken bones. A better death means a better life, right until the end.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... na/26763/n
How to have a better death
Death is inevitable. A bad death is not
IN 1662 a London haberdasher with an eye for numbers published the first quantitative account of death. John Graunt tallied causes such as “the King’s Evil”, a tubercular disease believed to be cured by the monarch’s touch. Others seem uncanny, even poetic. In 1632, 15 Londoners “made away themselves”, 11 died of “grief” and a pair fell to “lethargy”.
Graunt’s book is a glimpse of the suddenness and terror of death before modern medicine. It came early, too: until the 20th century the average human lived about as long as a chimpanzee. Today science and economic growth mean that no land mammal lives longer. Yet an unintended consequence has been to turn dying into a medical experience.
How, when and where death happens has changed over the past century. As late as 1990 half of deaths worldwide were caused by chronic diseases; in 2015 the share was two-thirds. Most deaths in rich countries follow years of uneven deterioration. Roughly two-thirds happen in a hospital or nursing home. They often come after a crescendo of desperate treatment. Nearly a third of Americans who die after 65 will have spent time in an intensive-care unit in their final three months of life. Almost a fifth undergo surgery in their last month.
Such zealous intervention can be agonising for all concerned (see article). Cancer patients who die in hospital typically experience more pain, stress and depression than similar patients who die in a hospice or at home. Their families are more likely to argue with doctors and each other, to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and to feel prolonged grief.
What matters
Most important, these medicalised deaths do not seem to be what people want. Polls, including one carried out in four large countries by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American think-tank, and The Economist, find that most people in good health hope that, when the time comes, they will die at home. And few, when asked about their hopes for their final days, say that their priority is to live as long as possible. Rather, they want to die free from pain, at peace, and surrounded by loved ones for whom they are not a burden.
Some deaths are unavoidably miserable. Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death’s imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did. What people say they will want while they are well may change as the end nears (one reason why doctors are sceptical about the instructions set out in “living wills”). Dying at home is less appealing if all the medical kit is at the hospital. A treatment that is unbearable in the imagination can seem like the lesser of two evils when the alternative is death. Some patients will want to fight until all hope is lost.
But too often patients receive drastic treatment in spite of their dying wishes—by default, when doctors do “everything possible”, as they have been trained to, without talking through people’s preferences or ensuring that the prognosis is clearly understood. Just a third of American patients with terminal cancer are asked about their goals at the end of life, for example whether they wish to attend a special event, such as a grandchild’s wedding, even if that means leaving hospital and risking an earlier death. In many other countries, the share is even lower. Most oncologists, who see a lot of dying patients, say that they have never been taught how to talk to them.
This newspaper has called for the legalisation of doctor-assisted dying, so that mentally fit, terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives if that is their wish. But the right to die is just one part of better care at the end of life. The evidence suggests that most people want this option, but that few would, in the end, choose to exercise it. To give people the death they say they want, medicine should take some simple steps.
More palliative care is needed. This neglected branch of medicine deals with the relief of pain and other symptoms, such as breathlessness, as well as counselling for the terminally ill. Until recently it was often dismissed as barely medicine at all: mere tea and sympathy when all hope has gone. Even in Britain, where the hospice movement began, access to palliative care is patchy. Recent studies have shown how wrongheaded that is. Providing it earlier in the course of advanced cancer alongside the usual treatments turns out not only to reduce suffering, but to prolong life, too.
Most doctors enter medicine to help people delay death, not to talk about its inevitability. But talk they must. A good start would be the wider use of the “Serious Illness Conversation Guide” drawn up by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author. It is a short questionnaire designed to find out what terminally ill patients know about their condition and to understand what their goals are as the end nears. Early research suggests it encourages more, earlier conversations and reduces suffering.
These changes should be part of a broad shift in the way health-care systems deal with serious illness. Much care for the chronically ill needs to move out of hospitals altogether. That would mean some health-care funding being diverted to social support. The financial incentives for doctors and hospitals need to change, too. They are typically paid by insurers and governments to do things to patients, not to try to prevent disease or to make patients comfortable. Medicare, America’s public health scheme for the over-65s, has recently started paying doctors for in-depth conversations with terminally ill patients; other national health-care systems, and insurers, should follow. Cost is not an obstacle, since informed, engaged patients will be less likely to want pointless procedures. Fewer doctors may be sued, as poor communication is a common theme in malpractice claims.
One last thing before I go
Most people feel dread when they contemplate their mortality. As death has been hidden away in hospitals and nursing homes, it has become less familiar and harder to talk about. Politicians are scared to bring up end-of-life care in case they are accused of setting up “death panels”. But honest and open conversations with the dying should be as much a part of modern medicine as prescribing drugs or fixing broken bones. A better death means a better life, right until the end.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... na/26763/n
The Symptoms of Dying
You and I, one day we’ll die from the same thing. We’ll call it different names: cancer, diabetes, heart failure, stroke.
One organ will fail, then another. Or maybe all at once. We’ll become more similar to each other than to people who continue living with your original diagnosis or mine.
Dying has its own biology and symptoms. It’s a diagnosis in itself. While the weeks and days leading up to death can vary from person to person, the hours before death are similar across the vast majority of human afflictions.
Some symptoms, like the death rattle, air hunger and terminal agitation, appear agonizing, but aren’t usually uncomfortable for the dying person. They are well-treated with medications. With hospice availability increasing worldwide, it is rare to die in pain.
While few of us will experience all the symptoms of dying, most of us will have at least one, if not more. This is what to expect.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/well ... d=45305309
You and I, one day we’ll die from the same thing. We’ll call it different names: cancer, diabetes, heart failure, stroke.
One organ will fail, then another. Or maybe all at once. We’ll become more similar to each other than to people who continue living with your original diagnosis or mine.
Dying has its own biology and symptoms. It’s a diagnosis in itself. While the weeks and days leading up to death can vary from person to person, the hours before death are similar across the vast majority of human afflictions.
Some symptoms, like the death rattle, air hunger and terminal agitation, appear agonizing, but aren’t usually uncomfortable for the dying person. They are well-treated with medications. With hospice availability increasing worldwide, it is rare to die in pain.
While few of us will experience all the symptoms of dying, most of us will have at least one, if not more. This is what to expect.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/well ... d=45305309
Crematory Is Booked? Japan Offers Corpse Hotels
OSAKA, Japan — The minimalist rooms at the Hotel Relation here in Japan’s third-largest city are furnished with plain twin beds. Flat-screen televisions adorn the walls. Plastic-wrapped cups and toothbrushes are provided in the bathrooms. And just across the hall are the rooms where the corpses rest.
Checkout time, for the living and the dead, is usually no later than 3 p.m.
The Hotel Relation is what Japanese call an “itai hoteru,” or corpse hotel. About half the rooms are fitted with small altars and narrow platforms designed to hold coffins. Some also have climate-controlled coffins with transparent lids so mourners can peer inside.
Part mortuary, part inn, these hotels serve a growing market of Japanese seeking an alternative to a big, traditional funeral in a country where the population is aging rapidly, community bonds are fraying and crematories are struggling to keep up with the sheer number of people dying.
By custom, Japanese families take the bodies of their loved ones home from the hospital and sit for an overnight wake followed by a service the next morning in the company of neighbors, colleagues and friends. Then, in the afternoon, the body is sent to a crematory.
But as neighborhood ties have weakened, funerals that once involved entire communities are increasingly the province of small, nuclear families. At the same time, Japanese society is getting old so fast and deaths per year are climbing so quickly that families sometimes have to wait several days before a body can be cremated.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/worl ... d=45305309
OSAKA, Japan — The minimalist rooms at the Hotel Relation here in Japan’s third-largest city are furnished with plain twin beds. Flat-screen televisions adorn the walls. Plastic-wrapped cups and toothbrushes are provided in the bathrooms. And just across the hall are the rooms where the corpses rest.
Checkout time, for the living and the dead, is usually no later than 3 p.m.
The Hotel Relation is what Japanese call an “itai hoteru,” or corpse hotel. About half the rooms are fitted with small altars and narrow platforms designed to hold coffins. Some also have climate-controlled coffins with transparent lids so mourners can peer inside.
Part mortuary, part inn, these hotels serve a growing market of Japanese seeking an alternative to a big, traditional funeral in a country where the population is aging rapidly, community bonds are fraying and crematories are struggling to keep up with the sheer number of people dying.
By custom, Japanese families take the bodies of their loved ones home from the hospital and sit for an overnight wake followed by a service the next morning in the company of neighbors, colleagues and friends. Then, in the afternoon, the body is sent to a crematory.
But as neighborhood ties have weakened, funerals that once involved entire communities are increasingly the province of small, nuclear families. At the same time, Japanese society is getting old so fast and deaths per year are climbing so quickly that families sometimes have to wait several days before a body can be cremated.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/worl ... d=45305309
21 Bone-Chilling, True Stories of People Who’ve Received Signs from the Dead
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smar ... ut#image=1
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smar ... ut#image=1
Your Body Knows When Death Is Near, And It All Begins In The Nose: Study Reveals
The human body is a very complex system, that is quite hard to understand. Scientists are still working on figuring out how and why things work like they do. We still do not quite understand where feelings and emotions come from and why do are exactly like we are. Another thing that is still a mystery is the moment before dying.
Many doctors have reported that patients make similar comments before passing away. It seems, that the patients know that they are dying even before doctors do. Their indicators might even improve and the doctor might think that there is still a change, but the patients already feel that the end is near.
People, who have a sixth sense, often say goodbye to their loved ones before they pass away. It is a strange thing that they kind of feel when it is time to go. These people start to make up with their past enemies and fix relationships that need fixing so they can pass away without unfinished business.
This is not very common, but it is actually common to feel one’s death right before it happens. This is a bit scary, but at the same time, it is good, because then you have a chance to say goodbye to your loved ones.
Some people might argue that there is no such thing as knowing your death time and the cases, where people start to say goodbye before dying, are purely a coincidence. A study was conducted at the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, which researched the possibility that people detect their death through scent.
Arnaud Wisman, who was the head of this study, analyzed the body during the dying process. It turns out that when a person dies, their body breaks down and many scents are released during this process. One scent is putrescine, which is the result of the decomposing process. Humans do not consciously know the smell or notice it, but subconsciously the mind recognizes the smell and knows that the end is near.
Arnaud Wisman conducted different experiments using the smell of putrescine, ammonia, and water. The participants were exposed to different smells and then their reaction was examined. Participants associated putrescine with negative emotions although none of them was familiar with the smell. But no participant associated the smell of putrescine with death or fear. That’s because our conscious mind does not see the connection, but the subconscious mind does.
The study, which conducted at the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, is part of a much larger question that many scientists are dealing with. There have been studies that show a connection between emotions and scent. For example, some kind smells can make us feel scared or stressed.
So when someone you truly care for is in a hospital or just ill and wants to see you, then definitely find time to go and visit them. Maybe they know that the end is near and they just want to say one last goodbye to you. If you miss this opportunity, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life.
http://www.riseearth.com/2017/07/your-b ... r-and.html
The human body is a very complex system, that is quite hard to understand. Scientists are still working on figuring out how and why things work like they do. We still do not quite understand where feelings and emotions come from and why do are exactly like we are. Another thing that is still a mystery is the moment before dying.
Many doctors have reported that patients make similar comments before passing away. It seems, that the patients know that they are dying even before doctors do. Their indicators might even improve and the doctor might think that there is still a change, but the patients already feel that the end is near.
People, who have a sixth sense, often say goodbye to their loved ones before they pass away. It is a strange thing that they kind of feel when it is time to go. These people start to make up with their past enemies and fix relationships that need fixing so they can pass away without unfinished business.
This is not very common, but it is actually common to feel one’s death right before it happens. This is a bit scary, but at the same time, it is good, because then you have a chance to say goodbye to your loved ones.
Some people might argue that there is no such thing as knowing your death time and the cases, where people start to say goodbye before dying, are purely a coincidence. A study was conducted at the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, which researched the possibility that people detect their death through scent.
Arnaud Wisman, who was the head of this study, analyzed the body during the dying process. It turns out that when a person dies, their body breaks down and many scents are released during this process. One scent is putrescine, which is the result of the decomposing process. Humans do not consciously know the smell or notice it, but subconsciously the mind recognizes the smell and knows that the end is near.
Arnaud Wisman conducted different experiments using the smell of putrescine, ammonia, and water. The participants were exposed to different smells and then their reaction was examined. Participants associated putrescine with negative emotions although none of them was familiar with the smell. But no participant associated the smell of putrescine with death or fear. That’s because our conscious mind does not see the connection, but the subconscious mind does.
The study, which conducted at the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, is part of a much larger question that many scientists are dealing with. There have been studies that show a connection between emotions and scent. For example, some kind smells can make us feel scared or stressed.
So when someone you truly care for is in a hospital or just ill and wants to see you, then definitely find time to go and visit them. Maybe they know that the end is near and they just want to say one last goodbye to you. If you miss this opportunity, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life.
http://www.riseearth.com/2017/07/your-b ... r-and.html
The poem below by Jelaledin Rumi highlights the relationship between a murid and the Mursheed extending beyond the physical existence...
The Blast of
That Trumpet
Remember me.
I will be with you in the grave
on the night you leave behind
your shop and your family.
When you hear my soft voice
echoing in your tomb,
you will realize
that you were never hidden from my eyes.
I am the pure awareness within your heart,
with you during joy and celebration,
suffering and despair.
On that strange and fateful night
you will hear a familiar voice—
you’ll be rescued from the fangs of snakes
and the searing sting of scorpions.
The euphoria of love will sweep over your grave;
it will bring wine and friends, candles and food.
When the light of realization dawns,
shouting and upheaval
will rise up from the graves!
The dust of ages will be stirred
by the cries of ecstasy,
by the banging of drums,
by the clamor of revolt!
Dead bodies will tear off their shrouds
and stuff their ears in fright—
What use are the senses and the ears
before the blast of that Trumpet?
Look and you will see my form
whether you are looking at yourself
or toward that noise and confusion.
Don’t be blurry-eyed,
See me clearly—
See my beauty without the old eyes of delusion.
Beware! Beware!
Don’t mistake me for this human form.
The soul is not obscured by forms.
Even if it were wrapped in a hundred folds of felt
the rays of the soul’s light
would still shine through.
Beat the drum,
Follow the minstrels of the city.
It’s a day of renewal
when every young man
walks boldly on the path of love.
Had everyone sought God
Instead of crumbs and copper coins
They would not be sitting on the edge of the moat
in darkness and regret.
What kind of gossip-house
have you opened in our city?
Close your lips
and shine on the world
like loving sunlight.
Shine like the Sun of Tabriz rising in the East.
Shine like the star of victory.
Shine like the whole universe is yours!
From:
In the Arms of the Beloved
Free download
https://www.goodreads.com/ebooks/downlo ... ?doc=19503
The Blast of
That Trumpet
Remember me.
I will be with you in the grave
on the night you leave behind
your shop and your family.
When you hear my soft voice
echoing in your tomb,
you will realize
that you were never hidden from my eyes.
I am the pure awareness within your heart,
with you during joy and celebration,
suffering and despair.
On that strange and fateful night
you will hear a familiar voice—
you’ll be rescued from the fangs of snakes
and the searing sting of scorpions.
The euphoria of love will sweep over your grave;
it will bring wine and friends, candles and food.
When the light of realization dawns,
shouting and upheaval
will rise up from the graves!
The dust of ages will be stirred
by the cries of ecstasy,
by the banging of drums,
by the clamor of revolt!
Dead bodies will tear off their shrouds
and stuff their ears in fright—
What use are the senses and the ears
before the blast of that Trumpet?
Look and you will see my form
whether you are looking at yourself
or toward that noise and confusion.
Don’t be blurry-eyed,
See me clearly—
See my beauty without the old eyes of delusion.
Beware! Beware!
Don’t mistake me for this human form.
The soul is not obscured by forms.
Even if it were wrapped in a hundred folds of felt
the rays of the soul’s light
would still shine through.
Beat the drum,
Follow the minstrels of the city.
It’s a day of renewal
when every young man
walks boldly on the path of love.
Had everyone sought God
Instead of crumbs and copper coins
They would not be sitting on the edge of the moat
in darkness and regret.
What kind of gossip-house
have you opened in our city?
Close your lips
and shine on the world
like loving sunlight.
Shine like the Sun of Tabriz rising in the East.
Shine like the star of victory.
Shine like the whole universe is yours!
From:
In the Arms of the Beloved
Free download
https://www.goodreads.com/ebooks/downlo ... ?doc=19503
The awful truth of donating a dead body to “science”
Donating a loved one’s body to science is for many people a comforting and altruistic act that makes meaning of a personal loss. For the many families unable to afford the cost of a funeral or cremation, it’s also a practical one, as the businesses that accept and arrange such donations typically offer to pay for cremation.
Yet loose regulation in the for-profit body-donation industry means that the final destination for many of these remains are far different than the legitimate research many donors imagine, as a Reuters investigation this week and a Quartz investigation earlier this year found.
A Reuters journalist was able to purchase the spine of a disabled young man whose impoverished parents believed that they were only donating small tissue samples from their deceased son. Quartz visited the suburban Oregon office of a dentist-turned-amateur-cryonicist who kept a refrigerator full of human heads for self-taught experiments. He’d purchased them for a few thousand dollars each from a body-donation agency whose website claims to supply “qualified research and education institutions for the purpose of advancing the design of medical implants, therapies, and surgical technologies.”
More...
https://qz.com/1111853/the-unregulated- ... o-science/
Donating a loved one’s body to science is for many people a comforting and altruistic act that makes meaning of a personal loss. For the many families unable to afford the cost of a funeral or cremation, it’s also a practical one, as the businesses that accept and arrange such donations typically offer to pay for cremation.
Yet loose regulation in the for-profit body-donation industry means that the final destination for many of these remains are far different than the legitimate research many donors imagine, as a Reuters investigation this week and a Quartz investigation earlier this year found.
A Reuters journalist was able to purchase the spine of a disabled young man whose impoverished parents believed that they were only donating small tissue samples from their deceased son. Quartz visited the suburban Oregon office of a dentist-turned-amateur-cryonicist who kept a refrigerator full of human heads for self-taught experiments. He’d purchased them for a few thousand dollars each from a body-donation agency whose website claims to supply “qualified research and education institutions for the purpose of advancing the design of medical implants, therapies, and surgical technologies.”
More...
https://qz.com/1111853/the-unregulated- ... o-science/
13 of the most famous last words in history
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/sma ... ut#image=1
We love famous last words.
There's a reason why there are so many books listing memorable deathbed sayings throughout history out there. Perhaps we'd just rather believe well-known figures tend to die saying something clever and profound. It makes death itself a little less scary.
But, for that reason, final words can be quite tricky. As with any quotes on the internet - and historical quotes, in general - it's hard to sort out what's true and what's phony or exaggerated.
Here are several poignant, strange, or otherwise memorable last words from throughout history:
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/sma ... ut#image=1
We love famous last words.
There's a reason why there are so many books listing memorable deathbed sayings throughout history out there. Perhaps we'd just rather believe well-known figures tend to die saying something clever and profound. It makes death itself a little less scary.
But, for that reason, final words can be quite tricky. As with any quotes on the internet - and historical quotes, in general - it's hard to sort out what's true and what's phony or exaggerated.
Here are several poignant, strange, or otherwise memorable last words from throughout history:
The most interesting facts about death
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/th ... ut#image=1
As sad as it may be, one day everything must come to an end. Nobody knows for sure what happens after we die, but in the meantime, we have compiled some interesting facts surrounding the subject.Click on the gallery to learn more!
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/th ... ut#image=1
As sad as it may be, one day everything must come to an end. Nobody knows for sure what happens after we die, but in the meantime, we have compiled some interesting facts surrounding the subject.Click on the gallery to learn more!
Woman declared brain dead won't be videotaped
VIDEO at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/wo ... ailsignout
The family of a Toronto-area woman who was declared brain dead more than a month ago has lost its bid to record her movements as part of an ongoing legal challenge meant to keep her on life-support.
Relatives of Taquisha McKitty, 27, had asked a court for permission to film her for 72 hours, arguing it would better allow doctors to determine whether her movements were spinal reflexes or something more.
In a decision released Tuesday, Ontario Superior Court Justice Lucille Shaw said there was no scientific or medical evidence to support the argument that such a test would be helpful.
She nonetheless granted the family more time to retain an expert who could assess McKitty and report back to the court. An earlier expert hired by the family was disqualified from testifying after Shaw found he could not be impartial because he told the court he does not believe in the concept of brain death.
Court has heard McKitty was admitted to hospital in mid-September after overdosing on drugs and was declared brain dead days later after her condition worsened and she stopped breathing on her own.
Her family obtained an injunction to keep her on a respirator and conduct more medical tests while it contests that decision.
VIDEO at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/wo ... ailsignout
The family of a Toronto-area woman who was declared brain dead more than a month ago has lost its bid to record her movements as part of an ongoing legal challenge meant to keep her on life-support.
Relatives of Taquisha McKitty, 27, had asked a court for permission to film her for 72 hours, arguing it would better allow doctors to determine whether her movements were spinal reflexes or something more.
In a decision released Tuesday, Ontario Superior Court Justice Lucille Shaw said there was no scientific or medical evidence to support the argument that such a test would be helpful.
She nonetheless granted the family more time to retain an expert who could assess McKitty and report back to the court. An earlier expert hired by the family was disqualified from testifying after Shaw found he could not be impartial because he told the court he does not believe in the concept of brain death.
Court has heard McKitty was admitted to hospital in mid-September after overdosing on drugs and was declared brain dead days later after her condition worsened and she stopped breathing on her own.
Her family obtained an injunction to keep her on a respirator and conduct more medical tests while it contests that decision.
‘Coco’ and Mexico’s Infatuation With the Afterlife
“Our relationship with death is intimate,” Octavio Paz, Mexico’s most celebrated 20th-century poet, wrote about his country in the classic book “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” “More intimate, perhaps, than any other people.”
Death is everywhere in Mexico. In the bodies of the victims of powerful drug cartels, in the way the Mexican police disappear groups of protesting students, in the methods used by corrupt politicians to discard journalists.
Death is with the Mexican who jumps over a border wall chasing a dream for a better life, with the families caring for the elderly with no health insurance and with the struggling farmworkers who labor under dangerous conditions.
For Mexicans, death is earthly. We build altars in our homes with framed photos of the departed next to candles, fruit, bread and candy. This intimacy with death brings with it a certain acceptance. Death is even celebrated.
In sharp contrast, Americans approach death with fear. They avoid speaking about it. They try to hide it. Or they turn it into a theater of horror, which is projected through cultural events like Halloween, where the dead are made into monsters.
Pixar’s new animated movie “Coco” is a sumptuous portrait of Mexico’s infatuation with the afterlife. Hollywood has gotten Mexican life wrong so many times — think “Under the Volcano” and “Traffic” — that Mexicans have stopped caring. But “Coco” feels fresh and authentic, perhaps the most sophisticated representation of Mexican popular culture ever produced for the big screen. It makes no excuses about Mexicans’ intimacy with death. On the contrary, it turns death into an amusement-park ride.
Most of the plot takes place during the Día de los Muertos, a holiday when Mexicans spend 24 hours in the cemetery, making “ofrendas” (gifts) to deceased family members. I have participated in this celebration several times, in Mexico as well as in border towns on the American side. The most striking element is the omnipresence of ghosts.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/opin ... dline&te=1
“Our relationship with death is intimate,” Octavio Paz, Mexico’s most celebrated 20th-century poet, wrote about his country in the classic book “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” “More intimate, perhaps, than any other people.”
Death is everywhere in Mexico. In the bodies of the victims of powerful drug cartels, in the way the Mexican police disappear groups of protesting students, in the methods used by corrupt politicians to discard journalists.
Death is with the Mexican who jumps over a border wall chasing a dream for a better life, with the families caring for the elderly with no health insurance and with the struggling farmworkers who labor under dangerous conditions.
For Mexicans, death is earthly. We build altars in our homes with framed photos of the departed next to candles, fruit, bread and candy. This intimacy with death brings with it a certain acceptance. Death is even celebrated.
In sharp contrast, Americans approach death with fear. They avoid speaking about it. They try to hide it. Or they turn it into a theater of horror, which is projected through cultural events like Halloween, where the dead are made into monsters.
Pixar’s new animated movie “Coco” is a sumptuous portrait of Mexico’s infatuation with the afterlife. Hollywood has gotten Mexican life wrong so many times — think “Under the Volcano” and “Traffic” — that Mexicans have stopped caring. But “Coco” feels fresh and authentic, perhaps the most sophisticated representation of Mexican popular culture ever produced for the big screen. It makes no excuses about Mexicans’ intimacy with death. On the contrary, it turns death into an amusement-park ride.
Most of the plot takes place during the Día de los Muertos, a holiday when Mexicans spend 24 hours in the cemetery, making “ofrendas” (gifts) to deceased family members. I have participated in this celebration several times, in Mexico as well as in border towns on the American side. The most striking element is the omnipresence of ghosts.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/opin ... dline&te=1
What We Get Wrong About Dying
Excerpt:
All of my clinical experience since those early days as a student has only strengthened my sense that death is a process, and not just a moment in time.
Most religious and spiritual traditions seem to recognize this as well, and often do a better job of accommodating this reality than our own medical system does. Within the Jewish tradition, for example, there is a specific term, goseis, used to indicate a person who is what the medical profession calls “actively dying,” who doctors believe has no more than hours or days left to live. According to kabalistic traditions, the soul of the departed person remains present in the home during the week that the family sits shiva (which is one of the reasons the mirrors in the home are traditionally covered, so that the soul won’t experience painful reminders that it no longer has a corporeal presence). There are non-Western traditions that incorporate this concept even more overtly into their beliefs surrounding death and dying. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, when death appears to be approaching, holy men are brought to the bedside to chant prayers. Once the point is reached that we in the West would call “time of death,” the holy men continue praying for three more days, which is considered to be a time of active transition for the spirit from one state to the next.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/what-we ... bout-dying
Excerpt:
All of my clinical experience since those early days as a student has only strengthened my sense that death is a process, and not just a moment in time.
Most religious and spiritual traditions seem to recognize this as well, and often do a better job of accommodating this reality than our own medical system does. Within the Jewish tradition, for example, there is a specific term, goseis, used to indicate a person who is what the medical profession calls “actively dying,” who doctors believe has no more than hours or days left to live. According to kabalistic traditions, the soul of the departed person remains present in the home during the week that the family sits shiva (which is one of the reasons the mirrors in the home are traditionally covered, so that the soul won’t experience painful reminders that it no longer has a corporeal presence). There are non-Western traditions that incorporate this concept even more overtly into their beliefs surrounding death and dying. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, when death appears to be approaching, holy men are brought to the bedside to chant prayers. Once the point is reached that we in the West would call “time of death,” the holy men continue praying for three more days, which is considered to be a time of active transition for the spirit from one state to the next.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/what-we ... bout-dying
The Men Who Want to Live Forever
Would you like to live forever? Some billionaires, already invincible in every other way, have decided that they also deserve not to die. Today several biotech companies, fueled by Silicon Valley fortunes, are devoted to “life extension” — or as some put it, to solving “the problem of death.”
It’s a cause championed by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the TED Talk darling Aubrey de Gray, Google’s billion-dollar Calico longevity lab and investment by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The National Academy of Medicine, an independent group, recently dedicated funding to “end aging forever.”
As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend, the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men.
Not all of them, of course. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn received the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, protein caps on chromosomes that may be a key to understanding aging. Cynthia Kenyon, the vice president for aging research at Calico, studied life extension long before it was cool; her former protégée, Laura Deming, now runs a venture capital fund for the cause. But these women are focused on curbing age-related pathology, a concept about as controversial as cancer research. They do not appear thirsty for the Fountain of Youth.
Professor Blackburn’s new book on telomeres couldn’t be clearer. “Does our research show that by maintaining your telomeres you will live into your hundreds?” it says. “No. Everyone’s cells become old and eventually we die.” Ms. Kenyon once described her research’s goal as “to just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights.” Even Ms. Deming, a 23-year-old prodigy who worked in Ms. Kenyon’s lab at age 12, points out that “aging is innately important to us.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opin ... dline&te=1
*******
Would you like to live forever? Some billionaires, already invincible in every other way, have decided that they also deserve not to die. Today several biotech companies, fueled by Silicon Valley fortunes, are devoted to “life extension” — or as some put it, to solving “the problem of death.”
It’s a cause championed by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the TED Talk darling Aubrey de Gray, Google’s billion-dollar Calico longevity lab and investment by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The National Academy of Medicine, an independent group, recently dedicated funding to “end aging forever.”
As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend, the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men.
Not all of them, of course. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn received the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, protein caps on chromosomes that may be a key to understanding aging. Cynthia Kenyon, the vice president for aging research at Calico, studied life extension long before it was cool; her former protégée, Laura Deming, now runs a venture capital fund for the cause. But these women are focused on curbing age-related pathology, a concept about as controversial as cancer research. They do not appear thirsty for the Fountain of Youth.
Professor Blackburn’s new book on telomeres couldn’t be clearer. “Does our research show that by maintaining your telomeres you will live into your hundreds?” it says. “No. Everyone’s cells become old and eventually we die.” Ms. Kenyon once described her research’s goal as “to just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights.” Even Ms. Deming, a 23-year-old prodigy who worked in Ms. Kenyon’s lab at age 12, points out that “aging is innately important to us.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opin ... dline&te=1
*******
Death is Going Home to God
Death is nothing else but going home to God,
the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity.
- Mother Teresa
While we are mourning the loss of our friend,
others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.
- John Taylor
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- St. Francis of Assisi
Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
- Lao Tzu
"I go to prepare a place for you."
- John 14:2
There is no death, only a change of worlds.
- Chief Seattle
Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Death is nothing else but going home to God,
the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity.
- Mother Teresa
While we are mourning the loss of our friend,
others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.
- John Taylor
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- St. Francis of Assisi
Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
- Lao Tzu
"I go to prepare a place for you."
- John 14:2
There is no death, only a change of worlds.
- Chief Seattle
Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
- Rabindranath Tagore
-
FreeLancer
- Posts: 180
- Joined: Tue Feb 13, 2018 12:20 pm
Funerals of the future
Undertaking has long thrived on a steady stream of loyal, uninformed customers. Changing norms, new businesses and technology are injecting new life into the industry"
Excerpt:
But in some of the world a profound shift is under way in what people want from funerals. As Thomas Lynch wrote in “The Undertaking” (1997), a wise book on practising his “dismal trade” in a small American town: “Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.” Social, religious and technological change threaten to turn that model on its head.
In North America the modern undertaker’s job is increasingly one of event-planning, says Sherri Tovell, an undertaker in Windsor, Canada. Among the requirements at her recent funerals have been a tiki hut, margaritas, karaoke and pizza delivery. Some people want to hire an officiant to lead a “life celebration”, others to shoot ashes into the skies with fireworks. Old-fashioned undertakers are hard put to find their place in such antics. Another trend—known as “direct cremation”—has no role for them at all.
More....
https://www.economist.com/news/internat ... m=20180412
Undertaking has long thrived on a steady stream of loyal, uninformed customers. Changing norms, new businesses and technology are injecting new life into the industry"
Excerpt:
But in some of the world a profound shift is under way in what people want from funerals. As Thomas Lynch wrote in “The Undertaking” (1997), a wise book on practising his “dismal trade” in a small American town: “Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.” Social, religious and technological change threaten to turn that model on its head.
In North America the modern undertaker’s job is increasingly one of event-planning, says Sherri Tovell, an undertaker in Windsor, Canada. Among the requirements at her recent funerals have been a tiki hut, margaritas, karaoke and pizza delivery. Some people want to hire an officiant to lead a “life celebration”, others to shoot ashes into the skies with fireworks. Old-fashioned undertakers are hard put to find their place in such antics. Another trend—known as “direct cremation”—has no role for them at all.
More....
https://www.economist.com/news/internat ... m=20180412