Mayat and Death

[mahebubchatur]

A Question raised by a member of the Jamat
“A member of my family would like to cremated, when he dies. And would like to have all our Duas and Chantas to be performed. Is this allowed in our Religion. “

The following was my response. I ahve also asked ITREB UK

Cremation is not permitted in Islam. Burial is prescribed in Islam, except in 2 instances.
1 If the body has communicable diseases, e.g. an epidemic/Pandemic, (then cremation/burning is permitted) Or secondly
2 Death at sea ( burial at sea is then permitted)
In Farmans and in the Quran it is not said specifically that cremation is not permitted. We therefore have to rely on Al Hadiths and Farmans. In our tariqah burial with funeral rites Chantas & Dua are prescribed by Imams which includes the Duas, after the burial and to continue to visit the grave & pray for 40 days. (Chirag Roshan is now accepted by Hazar Imam)
(Bearing in mind our Leaders do not give us all the Farmans and do not say what Imam has said. And they have stopped explaining and do not respond officially. Informally they do)
Cremation is not permitted. You must explain to your brother in law and ask an Al Waez to speak to him in more detail. If he still wishes and insists to be cremated, then Mukhis must perform and administer all our other Ismaili funeral rites including Chantas, & the Duas. (These are also to be given to all, even if excommunicated, provided he or she has not accepted another faith. And Imam has said there is no compulsion in our faith.
Mukhis & AlWaez should also be happy to also perform and recite the final Dua (Fatihah), after a cremation. In any event the final Dua & Fatihah must be recited after a cremation (as with burial at sea and in a case of communicable diseases). You must ensure this prayer is recited.
We have been reassured by our Imams that our soul is eternal and lives on. Our soul finally leaves our body, after the burial & final prayers by the grave (Fatihah & kul Fatihah). Nur e Imam, will be there, as always, during our journey to become one with He who is above all else - (asal ma wasl)
We Ismailies, believe in a personal resurrection & one which will be collective. Nur e Imam will be there with us, as always. Sunnis believe there will only be one collective resurrection on the final day of judgement.
Organ donation in order to save another life, is permitted.
The following and attached may help you & your brother I law..
When we die and become dust and bones, shall we be resurrected? (23:82; 37:16; 56:47)” "When we have died and become dust and bones, are we indeed to be resurrected”
We cannot become dust and bones if we are cremated. If we are cremated, we can and will still be resurrected to go through the account for our deeds and Niyats.
Prophet Mohammed has said that not even a bone of the body of dead must be broken before or after death.
Allah has given us clear guidelines on how to bury our dead; what we do not do, what we have to do, and what is permitted to do. And the teachings of Islam includes treating the dead with respect in a way that will fit the dead person. We wash him, cleanse him, and put a white shroud around him, then we offer a funeral prayer (janazah) and pray forgiveness for him. Allah does not include cremation as a part of it. Thus we are not permitted to do so.
Allah says:"And indeed We have honoured the Children of Adam" [17:70] Cremation is deemed as an act of dishonor to the dead. We derive at this by what we call Qiyas alawla, elevated analogy. Meaning, if we are not permitted to trample on the dead body, or sit on the actual grave itself, then more so with burning the body to ashes!
Regarding cremation, the general view is that the aspect of burying and what is allowable is based what was the norm at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. The non-burial was associated with specific pagan acts. Allah says that even from a fingerprint we will be put together. See ayah 75:4, plus several others that show that no matter how much the bodies have decayed, they will be remade, also Q17:49, 17:98, 23:35, etc. This is obviously an expression of explanation. Whether we burn or don't burn our dead, Allah will resurrect us as He wishes.
Now there is a hadith that says the injury to the dead is like the injury to the living, and several other ahadith that describe conditions in the grave.
The Grave
The overwhelming amount – if not all – of the hadith data on death, the grave and the interim between death and resurrection is remarkably similar to the Hibbut ha-Kever and Intermediate State of Jewish and Christian lore. In this chapter, we will examine the subject that S.G.F. Brandon notes was "probably the strangest and the most notable development of Muslim faith and practice"(1967:147). The lack of harmony between the Qur'an and Hadith on the subject led him to opine that the latter "certainly presupposes a view of the condition of death which differs from that which Muhammad appears to have held…” (ibid.). Several names have been given to this genre of Muslim writings – among them ahwal al-Qabr (the conditions in the grave) and adhab al-Qabr (punishment of the grave).
The Qur'anic View of Death
Every soul, we are told in Q3:185, must taste of death. The death is seen by the Qur'an as a barrier that does not allow any possibility of return to the world of the living until the day when all the souls will be resurrected: "… behind them is a barrier (barzakh) until the day when they are resurrected."(Q23:100) The later muhadithun gradually added to the concept of the word barzakh until it came to be understood as simultaneously the time and place wherein every individual must wait between death and resurrection (Smith & Haddad, 1981:8). This development is evidenced by there being no references to barzakh in the canonical traditions (Eklund, 1941:22), even though, as noted earlier, they contain a vast amount of material on the intermediate state.
The probable authenticity of the hadith about barzakh can only be established if it can be proven that death (Mawt) – according to the Qur'an – is a condition wherein there is some form of consciousness and perception. Therefore, we will examine the usage of this word, which with its derivative forms, occurs 165 times throughout the Qur'an ('Abd al-Baqi, 1982: 678-80). The following verses are examples from which we can attempt to form our answer:
How can you reject Allah seeing that you were dead, and He gave you life, then He will cause you to die, and will bring you again to life, and to Him will you return. (2:28)
Thou bringeth the living out of the dead, and the dead out of the living… (3:27)
The human says: What! When I am dead, shall I be raised up alive? (19:66)
They say: When we die and become dust and bones, shall we be resurrected? (23:82; 37:16; 56:47)
Truly you cannot make the dead hear… (27:80, 30:52)
Nor are the living equal with the dead. Allah can make those whom He wishes listen. But you cannot make those who are in the graves hear. (35:22)
Even if We did send unto them angels, and the dead did speak unto them… they are not the ones to believe. (6:111)
Those who listen to be sure will accept; As to the dead, Allah will resurrect them; then will they be returned to Him. (6:36)
Do they not see that Allah who created the heavens and the earth and never tired from their creation is able to give life to the dead? Indeed, He has power over all things. (46:33)
These are things dead, lifeless. They have no perception of when they will be raised up. (16:21)
Can the person who was dead, to whom We gave life and a light whereby s/he can walk among human beings be like the person who is in the depths of darkness, from which s/he can never come out? (6:122)
Say: It is Allah who gives you life and gives you death, then He will gather you together for the Day of Judgment about which there is no doubt. (45:26)
Then on the Day of Judgment will you be resurrected. (23:16)
From the above verses, a singular unequivocal image manifests itself: death is the opposite of life; the dead, devoid of perception, cannot speak, nor can they hear. They have no understanding of what is happening around them since they are in the depths of darkness. Only with the resurrection on the Day of Judgment will they be returned to consciousness and life to receive their recompense.
This view of the Qur'an then is not unlike the predominant conception of death in some of the earlier books of the Tanakh, as is shown from:
The dead in Sheol are remembered no more, they are cut off from God's hand. (Ps. 88:5)
They lie in dark places, in the deep, their thoughts perish. The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence. The grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee, they that go down into the pit, cannot hope for thy truth. (Isa. 38:18)
As far as the punishment to come, the Qur'an is also quite specific that any postmortem chastisement will only occur after resurrection and reckoning. This is evidenced by the following verses:
And let me not be in disgrace on the day when they will be resurrected, the day when neither wealth nor progeny will prevail, but only the person who has come to Allah with a sound heart. To the righteous the Gardens will be brought, and to the evildoers, the fire will be made to appear. (26:87-91)
When the sun is folded up, and the stars fall, and the mountains vanish… when the scrolls are laid open, when the world on high is unveiled, when the blazing fire is kindled to its fullest, and when the garden is brought near, then each soul shall know what it has brought forward. (81:1-14)
The dead then have no awareness whatsoever, nor is any questioning directed towards them while they are in the graves, for everything is in abeyance until the final collective resurrection when dreadful cosmological imbalances will occur, and judgment and sentencing will take effect. Martyrs, however, enjoy a special status with their Lord, and because of their consciousness – albeit on a different dimension – are not regarded as dead. This is clearly shown from the following verses:
Do not say of those who are slain in the path of Allah that they are dead; nay, they are alive but you cannot perceive this. (2:154)
Think not of those who are slain in the path of Allah as dead; Nay, they live finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord. (3:169)
Two verses of the Qur'an describe the state of the persons at death, when the angels take the lives of the righteous and the evildoers. Of the former, the Qur'an describes the situation as one of tranquility, wherein the dying persons are told: "Peace be on you! Enter the garden because of the good that you did in the world"(16:32). Since the emphasis throughout the Qur'an is that the entry to Paradise does not occur until after the resurrection, the meaning of verse 16:32 is simply to express that the believer greets death, or is greeted by the angels in a manner truly indicative of the Lord's pleasure, and that the experience of death is not a fearful one.
For the rejecters of faith, however, the situation is quite the opposite:
If Thou couldst see when the angels take the souls of the unbelievers; they smite their faces and their backs saying: Taste the penalty of the blazing fire. (Q8:50)
Since the casting into the fire will not occur until after the final judgment, the meaning of the verse is to indicate that the unbeliever dies in a state of terror, knowing that s/he did not do good deeds to warrant entry into Heaven, and that now there is no opportunity to return and change things. The immediate feeling is tantamount to a hellish torment, and from the verse it would appear that at the actual experience of leaving the world of the living, there is some sort of punishment inflicted – pain that can only be felt by the living, for since the dead cannot hear, speak, or otherwise perceive, there would be no point in the angels administering any immediate postmortem castigation.
Several of the traditionalists, in an effort to find scriptural vouchsafement for their narrations, cited Qur'anic verses that apparently contradict what we have just proven. Smith and Haddad identify these verses as: 6:93, 71:25, 40:46, 8:52, 9:102, 14:32, 25:21, 32:21, 40:11, 47:29, and 52:47 (1981: 32, 208). We shall limit our examination to the first three, since only by the most forced and transparent eisegesis can the others be construed as substantiating the traditionalist argument.
Verse 6:93:
Who is more wicked that the one who invents a lie against Allah, or says that "I have received inspiration" when he has received none, or one who says: "I can reveal the like of what Allah has revealed." If you could see how the wicked do fare at the flood of confusion at death! The angels stretch forth their hands saying: "Get yourselves out of this (predicament). This day you shall receive your reward – a penalty of shame, for you used to tell lies against Allah, and scornfully to reject His signs."
In translating the above verse, Yusuf Ali (YA:319f.), basing his translation on the dogmatic refraction of the traditional exegeses, has opted for the translation of "Akhriju anfusakum" as "Yield up your souls" instead of my rendering of "Get yourselves out of this (predicament)." The angels, however, take the souls of the humans (Q8:50); the latter have no choice in the matter. Ordering the humans to give up their souls therefore, is meaningless if taken in concord with the theme and language of the Qur'an.
The penalty of shame indicated in the verse is quite different to the punishment of the fire they are supposed to undergo in Hell. The earlier part of the verse tells us that these people claimed divine properties by stating that they could produce the like of what Allah has revealed. For such people, the Qur'an clearly states that their punishment will be on a particular day:
And if you are in doubt about that which we have revealed to our servant, then produce a sura like it… And if you cannot do it, and ye surely cannot, then fear the Fire whose fuel is humans and stones, which is prepared for those who reject faith. (Q2:23-24)
Verse 6:93 then is not an indication of any form of punishment in the grave, but rather warns of a pain that is inflicted in the last stages of life immediately prior to the taking of the soul, i.e., in the state of dying. The malefactors claimed to be divine; now they have to die like all other mortals, and then be forgotten, suffering the ignominy of being relegated to becoming bones and dust. From their positions of pride and false claims, they now face the harsh reality so succinctly versified by 'Adi b. Hatim:
After all their prosperity, their royal estate and their dominion, they vanished into graves yonder: Then they became like dry leaves, which are swept away by the east wind and by the west. (Bevan, 1904:21)
Verse 71:25:
Because of their sins, they were drowned, and were made to enter the fire. And they found none to help them in place of Allah.
If the above verse is treated atomistically, it could give the impression that the entry into the fire was immediate upon their drowning. The Qur'an, however, states on several occasions that the consignment to the fire will only be after sentencing on the Day of Judgment – as in 52:13, 29:25 and 26:87-91. The most explicit reference is probably 26:87-91, which read thus:
And let me not be in disgrace on the Day when they will be resurrected –
The Day wherein neither wealth nor progeny will prevail
But only the one who comes to Allah with a sound heart
To the righteous the garden will be brought
And to those of evil, the fire will appear.
Understood in light of the foregoing then, verse 71:25 therefore indicates that since at the time of their death, the people of Noah were still rejecting God, they died as those who on the Day of Judgment would have to enter the fire.
Verse 40:46:
They will be exposed to the Fire morning and evening,
And on the day of the Hour, (it will be said): "Cast the people of Pharoah into the severe penalty."
This is perhaps the strongest argument for the proponents of Qur'anic sanction for punishment in the grave (Shawkani, 1993: 4:702). The verse gives the impression that there is a chronological order of events and that before the Day of Judgment, the people of Pharoah will be exposed to torment in the morning and evening. The exegetes, however, explained the verse in several ways, but in following the traditional method, did not employ a fully thematic approach to understanding the verse. Some ventured the explanation that, as is quite frequent in Arabic literature, the sequence of the actions of exposure and casting does not require the order implied in the literal reading of the verses. The meaning, if taken vis a vis other verses, would be:
And on the Day of the Hour, (it will be said): "Cast the people of Pharoah into the severe penalty; they will be exposed to the Fire morning and evening (ibid.)
That this position is correct is evident if we consider the subsequent verses, which read:
Behold, they will dispute with each other in the Fire. The weak ones (who followed) will say to those who had been arrogant: "We but followed you: Can you then take (on yourselves) from us some share of the fire?" Those who had been arrogant will say: "We are all in this (Fire)! Truly Allah has judged between his servants!" (Q40:47-47; Trans. YA)
The last sentence indicates that the Fire to which they are exposed is one that has come about after Allah's judgment – which as the Qur'an never fails to remind us, is after the Final Hour, the Day of Reckoning. To further underline the matter, the Qur'an states:
He will go before his people on the Day of Judgment and lead them into the fire. And base indeed is the place to which they are led! (11:98)
We find, therefore, that from a thematic approach, the Qur'an is insistent that the punishment and placement in the fire will occur only after the Judgment. It is impossible then, for Pharoahand his people to be exposed to it before the final resurrection and reckoning. It is quite significant that in the section on Qur'anic exegesis, Sahih Muslim does not contain any hadithto explain the verses which the traditionalists use to bolster their position. This seems to be telling evidence that the use of Qur'anic verses to support the theory was developed over a period of time, and that Imam Muslim either did not accrue any weight to the claims of proof from the Qur'an, or that contemporaneous traditions did not meet his criteria of acceptability.
The Judeo-Christian Views on Life in the Intermediate State
If some verses from the Bible point to death being a state of oblivion, as do Ps. 6:5, 88:5, 115:17, Isa. 38:18, Eccl. 9:5, others indicate a different vision. The dead were buried with their kin as is evident from several different instances, such as Genesis 25:8, 1 Kings 2:10, 2 Kings 11:43 etc. The normative practice was to inter the dead in the family tomb, and only Rachel (Genesis 35:19-20) was not buried in this manner. The family tomb, as Simcha Raphael notes, is the central symbol for understanding the early Biblical understanding of the hereafter (1994:45). The motivation of this emphasis on burial with the family members is not solely out of sentimental respect for the physical remains, but rather "an assumed connection between proper sepulture and the condition of happiness of the deceased in the afterlife" (Brichto, 1994:26). The works of Enoch 1(22:9), 4 Ezra (7:75), and Psalms (44:14,15) are concerned in part with souls which are in some form of purification for their way to heavenly Jerusalem.
Simcha Raphael's "Jewish Views of the Afterlife" (1994) is a thorough dealing with Jewish lore on the Hibbut ha-Kever, and he proves that it was a well-developed area dating back to the days of the redaction of the Talmud. Even though some of the Midrashic material may come from sources that post-date the founding of Islam, they are based on earlier reports supposedly coming from the pre-Islamic rabbis as outlined in Chapter 1.
Since the early Christian ideas have their foundation in Jewish antecedents, the idea of a conscious intermediate state appears quite early in the Patristic writings. Evidence has been cited from various texts, among them 2 Macc. 12:39-45, Matt. 12:31, 1 Cor. 3:11-15, Isa. 66:15-16, Mal. 3:2-3 etc. Tertullian (c. 200 C.E.), Lactantius (c. 306 C.E.), and Augustine (c. 398 C.E.) all spoke about the matter (Chambers, 1902:27ff), showing that the good are in a place of rest, whereas the evil are in a place of torment, all awaiting a final judgment.
The Hades of the Gospels corresponds exactly to the Barzakh of the Hadith, for as Chambers points out, the translation of Hades into Hell is a mistake (1902, 44). From Luke 16:19-27, we can see that Hades is divided into two parts: Abraham's Bosom for the righteous (Luke 16:22) and another part for the damned, such as the rich man who was there in anguish. Lazarus and the rich man were then to be seen as not in the ultimate Heaven or Hell, but in the after-death state prior to the final judgment.
The Hadith
The 33 narrations that we have selected for investigation are as follows: SM584, 590, 903, 904, 905, 920, 927, 928, 929, 931, 932, 933, 956, 963, 1887, 1913, 2372, 2663, 2723, 2866, 2867, 2868, 2869, 2870, 2871, 2872, 2873, 2874. The main points that can be extrapolated are:
-Moses fought with the angel of death.
-There is a postmortem life review and questioning in the grave.
-The dead are punished in their graves.
-The martyrs live in heaven in the bodies of green birds.
These points will be discussed as subheadings wherein the possible sources will be explored.
Moses Fights with the Angel of Death
As Schwarzbaum observed, this legend has been extremely problematic for the Muslim theologians and traditionalists over the centuries – because it diametrically opposes the very essence of obedience and submission to Allah's will, which is best exemplified by the Prophets (1982:32). The angels we have shown earlier (summa 13; Q16:32) greet the believers making the death experience one of tranquility. The antecedents of the story then could not have come from the Qur'an. Legends of Moses defying the angel of death are detailed only in Jewish folklore, as reported by Ginzberg (1938: 3:471), Rappoport (1966: 354ff.) and Bialik (1992:101-104). The gist of the story is that Samael, the angel of death, was ordered to take the soul of Moses who apparently did not as yet want to meet his Creator. When the horrible looking angel appeared before him then, he became very angry and struck him with his staff, blinding him. Subsequently, God Himself promised to take Moses' soul, and the latter then committed himself to this unique honor.
There is a functional consensus of opinion among the scholars that the Muslim version is an adaptation of the Jewish antecedents. Bialik and Ginzberg have identified the sources as being, among others, early Petirat Moshe, Deuteronomy Rabbah 7:10, 11:5, 10, TanhumaVa'et hannan 6, and Yalkut, Va'et hannan 821. Of these, Petirat Moshe and Deuteronomy Rabbah antedate the Islamic tradition literature, while the others, although later, are based on older sources that precede Islam.
The Postmortem Life Review and the Questioning in the Grave
Hadith SM2866 notes that when someone dies, the angels give that person a review of her/his life and the recompense s/he has merited. Muslim also reports that two angels perform this task. This idea of questioning developed in stages, as shown by John MacDonald (1965:27). Initially there was one angel, then this angel was identified as Ruman, then there were two angels who were unnamed, but by the time of Tirmidhi, they were given the names of Munkarand Nakir (ibid.). If according to the Qur'an, however, the dead cannot hear or speak, and are totally without consciousness, then any concept of their interrogation must come from sources other than that Book. In Taanit 11a, we find that "When a man departs to his eternal home, all his deeds are shown before him and he is told: Such and such a thing you have done, in such and such a place on that day." Macdonald also traces the idea to the 4th Century Apocalypse of Paul which states: "I looked and saw a man about to die, and before he departed the world, there stood by him holy angels and evil ones."
Hadith SM2870 and 2872 put the number of the questioning angels at two: these angels are identified in Jewish tradition as the angel of death and Dumah (Shabbat 152b, Hagigah 5a and Berakhot 18b). Muslim does not identify them, and since the idea of disguised or unidentified angels visiting the tomb is to be found in Pesikta Rabbati 2:3 (dated at 6th/7th century: EJ: 13:335) and Ketubbot 104a, John Macdonald suggests that the later names of Munkar and Nakir given to them in tradition may be taken to mean "unknown or disguised." (1965:8). Whatever Arabic appellations and finishing touches may have been given to the angels to totally Islamize the legend, it seems evident that the sources are from the Apocalyptic, Talmudic, and Midrashic imagery.
The Dead are Punished in Their Graves
In most of the hadith on the subject, the questions and/or information are put in the mouth of a Jewish person. We see therefore that 'A'isha supposedly claims that a Jewish woman alleges that the dead are punished in the graves. Muhammad denies it (in some traditions), while in others he says that only the Jews will be punished. That Muhammad could deny that there is punishment in the grave in one hadith, while in another claim that he could hear the dead being punished, clearly points to the development of a concept which initially did not find acceptance among those who are more attentive to the Qur'anic view.
In Berakoth 62a, it states that "just as the dead are punished, so too the funeral orators are punished and those who answer after them." The hadith took this tradition and made it seem that because of the weeping of the mourners, the dead are punished. Such a position, however, was clearly at odds with the Qur'anic statement that none shall bear the punishment of another, and so we see 'A'isha being made to explain the hadith in several different narrations, some concordant with Berakoth 62a (cf. SM931), and others with the obviously polemic stance that this ruling only applies to the Jews (SM933, 927). Yet although only the Jews are supposed to be punished, we find Muhammad supposedly praying and exhorting his followers to pray to God to protect them (the Muslims) against the torment of the grave.
The Martyrs Live in Heaven in the Bodies of Green Birds
As we explained earlier, the Qur'an does not regard the martyrs as dead, and states that they are with their Lord in a state that the living cannot perceive (summa, p.12). The Qur'anic view of those who are killed in the path of the Lord is remarkably similar to that of Revelation 6:9, 10:
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice saying: How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
If the Qur'an agrees, however, with the view of the Book of Revelations that the martyrs are with their Lord, it leaves the matter there. The hadith (SM1887), however, claims that the souls of the martyrs are in the bodies of green birds in Paradise. This narration is remarkably similar to Greek Apocalyptic Baruch, which states:
And I saw a mountainous pillar, and in the middle of it a pool of water. And there were in it multitudes of birds of all birds, but not like those here on earth. But I saw a crane as great as great oxen; all the birds were great beyond those in the world. And I asked the angel: "What is the plain, and what the pool, and what the multitudes of birds around it?" And the angel said: "Listen Baruch! The plain which contains in it the pool and other wonders is the place where the souls of the righteous come when they hold converse, being together in choirs." (3 Baruch 10, [APOT)
The hadith makes some changes in the scenario, coloring the birds green and putting chandeliers and trees instead of a plain as in Baruch. This, however, can be seen as the inevitable metamorphosis that is deliberately made to occur in adaptation to obscure the actual origin of the story.
Conclusion
As we have shown, the finer details of resurrection would have been something new to many of the early Muslims. The concept of some sort of temporary existence after death seems to have, however, been present among some of them (Guillaume 1986:9; Henninger, 1981:10). Such people, in encountering the Jewish and Christian material, would have found a fertile ground for maintaining their pre-Islamic belief. These ahadith indicate that the Arabs were well aware of the Rabbinic notion that punishment in Gehenna was only for a limited period of time (Shabbat 33b), and this is also noted by the Qur'an in 2:80. Adapting the antecedent traditions, therefore, served a two-fold purpose: they provided details to fill the Qur'anic lacunae, and they also furnished material for polemic against the People of the Book.

[mahebubchatur]

NAMAAZ E MAYAT

NIYYAT: Namaaz mee guzarum bar mayyete

Hazar (Hazera)
Wajeb qurbatin illallh

ALLAHO AKBER

I declare my intention to offer congregational prayer upon the body of the deceased to reach the presence of Allah
Allah is Great

Ash-hado unla illaha illallaho
I declare there is no deity but Allah

wa ash hado unna Muhammedanr-Rassoolallah salallaho alehi wa Aalehi ALLAHO AKBER
I declare that Muhammed is His (final) Messenger, Let us all declare that Allah is Great

Allahumma sale ala Muhammadin wa Aale Muhammed
(recite three times)
ALLAHO AKBER

O Allah shower Your Blessings on (through)Mohammad and his progeny
* (ala can also mean ‘on’ or ‘through’)
Allah is Great
Allahummaghfirlil momineen wal mominaate,
I ask for forgiveness for all the Momins and around the world,

Wal, Muslimeen wal muslimaate
(I ask for forgiveness) for all believers here and around the world

ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great

Allahummaghfir-li haza (hazil) mayett
I ask for forgiveness of behalf of the deceased

ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great

ALLAHO AKBER, ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great, Allah is Great

LA ILLAHA ILLALLAHO
There is no deity except Allah

WALLAHO AKBER,
Allah is Great

WALILLA-HIL HAMD
For Him is all Praise

Significance of raising our hands and touching the ears with the thumb and reciting Allaho Akbar in unison

[kmaherali]

MSMS mentioned in his Farman that when Mansur al-Hallaj was executed , even his blood pronounced "Anna al Haqq" ( I am the truth). They had to subsequently burn his body.

Below is the descrption of the passing away of the great saint Kabir:

The final act of Kabir’s life exemplifies beautifully his non-sectarian teachings: At his death the disciples were fighting if his body should be buried in Muslim fashion, or burned in Hindu fashion. Kabir rose from death, telling them: “Half of my remains shall be buried by the Moslem rites, and let the other half be cremated with a Hindu sacrament.” He then vanished. When the disciples opened the coffin which had contained his body, nothing was found but a dazzling array of gold-colored champak flowers. Half of these were obediently buried by the Moslems, who revere his shrine to this day. The other half was used for Hindu rites.

http://yoganandaharmony.com/yogananda-history-chapter-4

The following is the description of the death of shahids (martyrs) who died in Jerruk.

"The incident of Jerruk took a heavy toll of lives and materials of the Ismailis. The dead bodies were buried in a mass-grave in the heart of Jerruk, known as Ganji Shahidan, near the residence of the Imam. The Imam offered Fatiha and paid a glowing and well-deserved tributes to the martyrs and said, "These heroes are like the martyrs of Karbala and their memory shall ever remain green, even their flesh shall never decay."

According to "Athar-i Muhammadi" (p. 136), the Imam also recited the following touching couplets in Persian on that occasion:-

Gardad chu kharab tan chigam jan bashad,
Viran chi shaud hubab aman bashad.

"No affliction should prevail when a body perished, because the soul exists (as if) the bubbles are smashed, but the ocean exists."


Darushud ishq zianish sud ast,
Gar jan biruvad che baak janan bashad.

"Love became a medicine, whose deficit is a profit for me. Doesn't matter if a body is perished, but one who gives life is in existence."

According to the report of "Sind Observer" (Karachi, April 3, 1949), "Seventy dead bodies of Khojas buried 107 years ago at Imam Bara in Jherruck town, 94 miles by road north-east of Karachi, were found to be fresh on being exhumed recently in the course of digging the foundation for a new mosque for the locality, a Sind government official disclosed on Saturday. The bodies which lay in a common grave was again interred another site selected for the mosque. The Khojas were believed to have been murdered in a local feud 107 years ago according to local tradition in Jherruck."

Source: "Jerruk and the Ismailis during the British rule in India" by Mumtaz Tajdin
http://www.ismaili.net/inbyauth.html

There is a related thread on funeral traditions at;

http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... 41&start=0

[nuseri]

Ya Ali Madad:
eXCELLENT POSTING by Kmaherali

Only God can order that body should not decay.
Did Imam on Jerruck incident prayed to somebody for this.
NO NO NO.
HE ordered the angels n nature for the same.
only shallow believers consider him as plain vanilla Imam n not beyond
and stuck at Tariqati level.

This simple act/order that certifies who acknowledge this event that
Imam/ALI is none other than Allah/God.

[agakhani]

According to the report of "Sind Observer" (Karachi, April 3, 1949), "Seventy dead bodies of Khojas buried 107 years ago at Imam Bara in Jherruck town, 94 miles by road north-east of Karachi, were found to be fresh on being exhumed recently in the course of digging the foundation for a new mosque for the locality, a Sind government official disclosed on Saturday.

Karim,

Thanks for posing the news paper article which I wanted for a long time, however I heard and read the above events many times before but I didn't know the name of that news paper.

That is true that the bodies of Imams, pirs and those peoples who died in fighting for Haqq ( like Kabala, Jerak ) are not decays or putrefys!!
Not long ago the body of Imam Hasan Ali Shah was also used to shown to interested jamati members who wants to see his face in Hasanabad! and many older jamati members still telling that his face was not decayed at all

[kmaherali]

Not long ago the body of Imam Hasan Ali Shah was also used to shown to interested jamati members who wants to see his face in Hasanabad! and many older jamati members still telling that his face was not decayed at all [/b]

Abhai
Interesting. So the body has not been buried yet?

[agakhani]

I heard it in Abu Ali waez and also heard from some older Jamati members who used to live in Hasanabad, Mumbai they showed Imam face by their own eyes.

There is a tunnel ( underground way ) to reach to the tomb, now a days it is closed but it was open more than 50-60 years ago and peoples were using that tunnel to see the face of Imam.

You may ask this any older Jamati members from Mumbai, I think you are originalyl from Mumbai.

[kmaherali]

You may ask this any older Jamati members from Mumbai, I think you are originalyl from Mumbai.

I have never been to India. I was born and brought up in Tanzania and am now resident in Canada.

[tret]

Not long ago the body of Imam Hasan Ali Shah was also used to shown to interested jamati members who wants to see his face in Hasanabad! and many older jamati members still telling that his face was not decayed at all [/b]

Abhai
Interesting. So the body has not been buried yet?

Even if that was true, I wonder which kind of spiritual satisfaction a murid would obtain, by seeing the physical face of an Imam?

[kmaherali]

It’s Been 140 Years Since This Catholic Nun Died, But Her Body Is Said To Be Mysteriously Unchanged

The year is 1909, and it’s been 30 years since the death of Bernadette Soubirous – a simple but pious girl from a small town in France. Doctors are preparing to perform the first exhumation of her body. And in normal circumstances, the medics might expect to find some degree of natural decomposition. But Bernadette was no ordinary person.

Photo slide show at:

https://scribol.com/anthropology-and-hi ... gjrtkytggy

[kmaherali]

Facing the Fact of My Death

As a child, confronting my mortality was terrifying. Now it is an opportunity.

Excerpt:

So, sooner or later I will die. I’m assured that it will happen. I know that if you are reading this article 100 years from now, I will no longer exist. I will have paid the debt for the gift of being. Death is our collective fate. Yet so many of us fear to talk about it, fear to face it, terrified by the idea of nonbeing. But we must face our destiny, our rendezvous with death. Indeed, the concept of death is a deep and perennial theme in philosophical and theological-religious thought; it is one of the Big Questions. As the philosopher Todd May writes, “Of course, most religions don’t claim that we don’t die. But there is, for many religions, a particular sense in which we don’t really die.”

It is in this spirit of exploration that I will interview 12 deeply knowledgeable scholars, philosophers and teachers, one each month, about the meaning of death in their respective traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism and others. I will be asking questions like: What is death? Why do we fear death? Is death final? Do we have immortal souls? What role does death play in how we ought to live our lives?

The objective is not to find definitive answers to these eternal questions, but to engage, as my students and I try to do in our classes, in a lively discussion about a fact that most of us would rather avoid, and move ourselves a little closer to the truth.

Next: An interview with the Tibetan Buddhist Dadul Namgyal.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opin ... 0920200203

[Admin]

Any Farmans on Ghusal?

[kmaherali]

Don’t fear the reaper, or the dying

It occurred to me, as I sat holding my mother’s thin hand in the intensive care unit, that none of her stories had been about dying. My mother was celebrated in our family for her stories, many of which sprang from her years as a nurse in a large Catholic hospital. The things she’d seen! The objects lodged where no objects should be. Wrong limbs operated on. The hospital priest much loved by student nurses because he was handsome and could say mass in 10 minutes.

Her patients loved her because she had an unending supply of goodwill, which hid her own sorrows. The stories she brought home from the hospital were hilarious and vivid and grotesque, but they always ended on a high note. The lady and her monkey left the emergency room in harmony. The baby survived.

Dying was one thing she didn’t talk about: Not her own death, and not the ones she’d witnessed. Except once, when she’d told me about a dying patient whose face became suffused with radiance at the very end. When my mother was dying, I kept waiting for that moment, but it never came. She laboured for breath and pulled at her oxygen mask so that she could whisper to me that she was afraid. I know you are, I said.

But there was so much else that was radiant. She trusted me with her fear; it was a gift. The nurses who moved her fragile body with such tenderness, they were a gift. The cleaners who mopped her floor quietly and smiled at her. The junior doctor who took us into a room and shut the door so that we could cry in private when all the options had run out. These days we argue about medically assisted dying, but what can’t be known, until you’re actually there, is how much life there is in death. As the palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke writes in her book Dear Life, “All that is good in human nature – courage, compassion, our capacity to love – is here in its most distilled form.”

And humour, too, if like my family you bend toward the macabre. Christie Blatchford, the great journalist who died this week, was planning to write something funny about the end point; I wish she had, because black comedy is everywhere. Pneumonia had almost robbed my mother of her voice, so the hospital gave us a sheet printed with helpful pictures a patient could point at. There were squares indicating food and TV and even a grinning face that said “happy,” which I don’t think got used very much. “Music” sat right above “let me go.” What if you were asking for a song and your finger slipped?

We wrote the alphabet on a sheet of paper and my mother picked out letters. “She’s not really spelling out ‘wine,’ is she?” my sister asked. But she was, so we smuggled wine in a little plastic bottle that looked like a specimen jar – Mildred, who accidentally once brought home tonsils in just such a jar, would have appreciated it – and dipped in a sponge to swab her mouth with pinot grigio. I made my siblings promise to do the same for me when my time came.

What can we promise each other, at the end? That we’ll be there, through all the boring, painful, transcendent moments. You’ll fall asleep in uncomfortable chairs and drink terrible cafeteria coffee so that if your person wakes up suddenly, panicked and confused, you will be there to take their hand and remind them that they’re loved. You’ll play Luciano Pavarotti through your crappy phone and it will sound good enough. You’ll remember the times you travelled and argued and danced, and laugh about dropping the turkey when it came out of the oven. You’ll apologize for all the times you didn’t call. One of you will talk and one of you will listen, because hearing is said to be the last thing to go.

I understand why people don’t like hospitals, won’t visit hospices, worry about what to say to the dying. We push death to the margins of life so we don’t have to think about it knocking at our own window. The crazy thing is that, if you’re lucky enough to end up at home or in a facility that treats patients humanely, being with the dying actually reminds you of what you love about life. Time folds in on itself, leaving space to think deeply. You become grateful for lungs that still work, and the frozen moon when you leave the hospital in the middle of the night. You remember how much you actually enjoy your family, as they show up with snacks and socks and random useless things, and talk and laugh and reminisce so loudly that a nurse comes and says “shhh” and ostentatiously shuts the door.

Everybody knows what an honour it is to be present at a birth, but what a privilege it is as well to be there at the end, to ease someone’s passing. Of course it’s also terrible, the stabbing beginning of grief, but that pain can be offset with the knowledge that a valuable service has been performed. A service we’ll all need, one day.

We watched our mother’s failing body that had brought four humans into the world, had nursed countless others, had told thousands of stories, had worn red lipstick, had wrung all the juice out of life. We told her we loved her. And then we let her go.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY

[kmaherali]

How Does a Buddhist Monk Face Death?

If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, we can make peace with its end.

This is the first in a series of interviews with religious scholars from several faiths — and one atheist — on the meaning of death. This month’s conversation is with Geshe Dadul Namgyal, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who began his Buddhist studies in 1977 at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India, and went on to earn the prestigious Geshe Lharampa degree in 1992 at Drepung Loseling Monastic University, South India. He also holds a master’s degree in English Literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. He is currently with the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, Emory University. This interview was conducted by email. — George Yancy

George Yancy: I was about 20 years old when I first became intrigued by Eastern thought, especially Buddhism. It was the transformation of Siddhartha Gautama to the Buddha that fascinated me, especially the sense of calmness when faced with competing desires and fears. For so many, death is one of those fears. Can you say why, from a Buddhist perspective, we humans fear death?

Dadul Namgyal: We fear death because we love life, but a little too much, and often look at just the preferred side of it. That is, we cling to a fantasized life, seeing it with colors brighter than it has. Particularly, we insist on seeing life in its incomplete form without death, its inalienable flip side. It’s not that we think death will not come someday, but that it will not happen today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on. This biased, selective and incomplete image of life gradually builds in us a strong wish, hope, or even belief in a life with no death associated with it, at least in the foreseeable future. However, reality contradicts this belief. So it is natural for us, as long as we succumb to those inner fragilities, to have this fear of death, to not want to think of it or see it as something that will rip life apart.

We fear death also because we are attached to our comforts of wealth, family, friends, power, and other worldly pleasures. We see death as something that would separate us from the objects to which we cling. In addition, we fear death because of our uncertainty about what follows it. A sense of being not in control, but at the mercy of circumstance, contributes to the fear. It is important to note that fear of death is not the same as knowledge or awareness of death.

More....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opin ... 0920200226

[kmaherali]

I’m Going to Die. I May as Well Be Cheerful About It.

While death is inevitable, our attitude about it is not.

Generally, I don’t think about death during the day. My schedule is full, and I focus on what is right before my eyes. It’s usually only when I go to funerals that I reflect upon deaths past, present and future; most of the time I think about life. Still, about once a month I wake in the night and know with absolute clarity that I will soon be gone.

I have always felt my own finitude. My father had his first stroke at 45 and died at 54. My mother died of diabetes at 74. I am 72. I would like to attend my last grandchild’s high school graduation and meet at least one great-grandchild. However, with my family history, that is unlikely. Now, with the news filled with stories of the coronavirus, I am reminded of the many random diseases that can strike suddenly and lethally.

Like almost all my peers, I want to die young as late as possible. I don’t want to live beyond my energy level. I don’t want to suffer dementia or lie helpless in a hospital. I want to die while I still believe that others love me and that I am useful.

I have done what I can to prepare for my death. I have a will, a health care proxy and medical directives. I’ve had many conversations with my family and my doctor about end-of-life decisions. My mnemonic device for all of them is, “If in doubt, snuff me out.”

While death is inevitable, our attitudes about it are not. We can be sanguine or gloomy, solicitous of others or self-absorbed. We can approach our deaths with fear and resistance or with curiosity and a sense of mission.

Facing death offers us an opportunity to work with everything we have within us and everything we know about the world. If we have been resilient most of our lives, most likely we will cope well with our own dying. It is frightening, of course, but it is our last chance to be a role model, even a hero.

I’d like to face death with the courage of my grandmother. The last time I visited her, she was recently widowed and dying from leukemia. She lay in bed in her small home in eastern Colorado. I could see she was in pain and could barely move, but when I asked about her health, she replied: “Let’s talk about you. How is college going this year?”

When I complimented her on her courage, she said simply, “I am going to be in pain and die soon no matter how I behave, so I might as well be cheerful.”

By the time we are in our 70s, we are likely to have witnessed many people dying. I’ve seen my parents and my husband’s parents die “bad deaths” with months of suffering and too much medical intervention, and I’ve witnessed peaceful deaths in rooms filled with love. Most of us boomers know how to behave at a bedside and have a sense of how we want to act when it’s our turn to be the one in bed.

We also have had decades of observing the rituals of death — hospitals and hospice, funerals, burials and the communal meals afterward. From these experiences, we have learned what we do and don’t want when it’s our turn. We may continue some of these traditions, but we will also design our own. Some of my friends with terminal illnesses have hosted goodbye parties in parks or at our local blues bar. Wakes with dancing, music and storytelling are back in style. Many of us want pine box coffins, green burials or cremations with our ashes tossed in beautiful places.

What happens after death is a popular topic among people I know. Opinions range from, “We turn into dirt,” to “I will see the face of God.” My writer friends want heaven to have a good library. One friend believes we will return to the place we were before we were born.

Jean Nordhaus wrote, “The dead are all around us / feathering the air with their wings.” A therapist who lost her young, cello-playing husband told me she feels his presence and knows they are still deeply connected in spirit. She finds that many people are afraid to die because they have no language for the numinous; however, she is certain that neither life nor relationships end with death.

I feel death may not be as big a change as we suppose. Rather, it might be like crossing a river.

I like to think that my relatives and friends will be waiting for me on the other side. I like to imagine grassy banks and flower-filled pastures shining in the sun. I like to think a lot of things, but I don’t know for sure.

I am not a particularly mystical person, but I have had mystifying experiences. When my Aunt Grace died, I drove to the Ozarks for her funeral. Her little house was surrounded by pink surprise lilies — what my cousins called “naked ladies.” The next spring, even though I had not planted them and they had never come up before, surprise lilies popped up in my garden. The year after that they popped up again but in different places. I concluded that Aunt Grace was greeting me. If I wanted to send a message after death, I would do it with flowers, too.

I love the world but I cannot stay. Death is democratic and we will all participate in its enactment. I will miss the beauty all around me. I have taken so much pleasure in the natural world, in people and books, in music and art, in cups of coffee and lolling cats. If I knew that I had a month left to live, I wouldn’t spend my time much differently than I do now.

When I was a girl in the 1950s, snow fell often in the long winters of western Nebraska. I remember one winter when, after the streets were plowed, mountains of snow 10 feet tall stood in the middle of the streets. As a young mother, my favorite days were snow days when our family could stay home and play board games. I would make soup and popcorn. I relished taking my children outside to do the things that I had done in the snow as a girl. I loved falling asleep with my family safe on a blizzardy night when the streets were impassable and a blanket of peace covered our town.

Now, snow has become a profoundly spiritual experience. When it snows, I sit by my window and watch it fall. I go deep into its purity and softness.

Snow falls inside and outside of me. It settles my brain and calms my body.

I hope death feels like watching the snow grow thicker and thicker. Doctors call dying of a morphine overdose being “snowed.” I would not mind that at all. I would like to disappear in a whiteout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opin ... 3053090307

[kmaherali]

What Judaism Teaches Us About the Fear of Death

A conversation with the Princeton scholar Moulie Vidas on mortality and the embrace of life in Judaism.

This is the second in a series of interviews with religious scholars from several faiths — and one atheist — on the meaning of death. The idea for this series, and the content of this interview, originated shortly before the pandemic. Yet all of it has obviously taken on a deeper and more urgent relevance in the midst of this crisis. The essential ideas being discussed here are ones that people everywhere, religious or not, are grappling with.

This month’s conversation is with Moulie Vidas, an associate professor of religion and Judaic studies at Princeton University. His books include “Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud” and a collection of essays, coedited with Catherine Chin, “Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: I’m delighted to engage with some of the important beliefs within Judaism to get a deeper sense of this living and historical religious tradition. I’m aware of some of the similarities between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but in what ways would you say Judaism differs from the other two?

Moulie Vidas: Speaking very generally, I’d say there are two characteristics that set most forms of Judaism apart from Christianity and Islam. First, whereas Christianity and Islam imagine themselves as universal religions, Judaism is usually imagined as a religion for a specific people, for Jews. This of course does not mean that Judaism does not concern itself with humanity as a whole, but the orientation is different.

Second, in comparison to Christianity and Islam, Judaism places less of a stress on belief and more on practice. To be sure, one could formulate core Jewish “doctrines” (and many thinkers have), but it is not a coincidence that the most classical Jewish literature lacks such a formulation. Most Jewish movements are concerned not with what you believe about God, but with how the tradition informs your life: how you pray and celebrate the holidays; how you conduct your family or business affairs; what you eat and so on.

Yancy: An essential part of Judaism is that Jews have a covenant with God — an agreement or commitment between God and his people. Is there anything in this covenant regarding how Jewish people ought to approach death? And does that covenant speak to the promise of an afterlife?

Vidas: The covenant as we find it in the Hebrew Bible is about life, not about death. It promises, to those who keep it, a long and prosperous life (see, for example, Deuteronomy 6:2, in which one keeps the commandments so that “your days may be long”) rather than an afterlife. In fact, the Hebrew Bible mentions neither heaven nor hell: it speaks of “she’ol,” a dark underworld to which everyone goes after death, regardless of how they acted during their lifetime. There is also only one chapter in the entire Hebrew Bible that refers explicitly to a collective resurrection of the dead in the future (Daniel 12).

In contrast with the “this world” emphasis of these biblical manifestations of the covenant, we find already the earliest rabbinical texts looking increasingly toward another world. What the rabbis meant by this usually was not the immediate afterlife following a person’s death, but rather the afterlife following resurrection of the dead at the end of times. At the same time, we see from the Second Temple period onward the development of the idea that different souls have different destinies immediately after death. The righteous are rewarded in heaven and the wicked are punished in hell. The distinctions between these two kinds of afterlife, the immediate one and the eschatological one (end-of-times version), are often unclear, and the way these elements are imagined varies greatly among different Jewish texts and authors.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opin ... ogin-email

[kmaherali]

‘I Believed That I Would See Her Again’

A Christian theologian recounts how her mother’s death affirmed her faith and belief in the afterlife.

This month’s conversation in our series exploring religion and death is with Karen Teel, who has been a member of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego since 2007. Her research and teaching focus on the essential beliefs of Christianity and the theological engagement with the problems of racism and white supremacy. She is the author of “Racism and the Image of God.” — George Yancy

Excerpt:

Yancy: We are concentrating in these discussions on learning about and understanding religious conceptions of death. How is the reality of death conceptualized in your faith?

Teel: Death is conceptualized as a transition from this life into eternal life. Christianity teaches that God is eternal; this world came from God and will eventually return to God. In that sense, this life is temporary. Moreover, God created humans with immortal souls, so the death of a human being is not the end. The body dies while the soul continues to live.

When this world comes to an end, Christianity teaches, Jesus, who has already been raised from the dead, will return to oversee the general resurrection of the dead and the last judgment. The bodies of those who have died will be resurrected — rendered alive anew in a glorious, immortal state — and reunited with our souls. The bodies of those who have not yet died also will be transformed into this new state. And Jesus will separate us into two groups, those who will be eternally rewarded and those who will be punished. Christians traditionally believe that heaven is where God is and hell is where God is not, but I like the idea, suggested in the teaching of one of my graduate school professors, Father Michael Himes, that we may all have the same destiny — to spend eternity being loved by God. For those who want God’s love, this will be heaven; for those who don’t, it will be hell.

For Christians, everything that God created is good, and God will not allow anything that is good to pass away. We are never alone, in this life or in eternity. The death of a loved one brings profound sadness. But it is a temporary separation; we hope and believe that we will see each other again. Death is not a separation from God but a return to God. When a Christian dies, we say that they have gone to be with God. And when we die, we will join them.

Yancy: This all seems to work out well for faithful Christians, but what about atheists? Should they fear death?

Teel: No more than anyone else. In the 1960s, the Catholic Church’s teaching on non-Christian religions developed beyond the ancient notion that only Christians could be saved. Now the church teaches that, under certain conditions, people who do not identify as Christians may be saved. Personally, I believe that whenever a person does their best to live rightly, according to the principles they know to be true, God honors that effort. Nothing good will be lost.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

When Faced With Death, People Often Change Their Minds

By Daniela J. Lamas

Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

My patient had done everything possible to avoid being intubated. After a traumatic hospitalization when she was young, she had consistently told her loved ones that she would never again agree to a breathing tube. She had even filled out an advance directive years ago to formalize that decision.

But when she arrived in the emergency department one night this past spring with severe pneumonia, struggling to breathe, the doctors called her husband with a question. Should they intubate? If they didn’t, she would likely die.

He hesitated. Was this really the scenario that his wife, now in her late 60s, was imagining when she told him that she didn’t want a breathing tube? He could not ask her now, and faced with this impossible choice, he gave the team the OK. She was intubated and sedated and transferred to our intensive care unit later that night.

I believed this to be a failure of our health care system: A patient was in exactly the scenario she had long wished to avoid. When I stood at her bedside, I murmured an apology.

After several days, the medical team gathered her family to make a plan. We would continue to treat her pneumonia and try to take her off the breathing tube. Based on our understanding of her prior wishes, we would not put the tube back in once we had taken it out. We would also not consider a tracheotomy, a procedure in which doctors cut a hole in the windpipe to help with breathing for patients who need a longer-term connection to a ventilator. Instead, if she could not breathe on her own, we would focus on her comfort, knowing that she would die. This was what she would have chosen. Or so I thought.

When she was finally awake and off the breathing tube, the team told her what had happened. I assumed that she might feel betrayed by the decisions that had been made for her. But she surprised me. She said she would choose to be intubated again, and even undergo a tracheotomy, if it meant more time with her family.

She had changed her mind. And if the doctors and nurses treating her had made decisions based only on the preferences that she had articulated years ago, we never would have known.

I want advance care planning to work. I want to believe that advance directives — written statements of a person’s wishes about medical treatment — can be completed when someone is relatively healthy and offer doctors and family members a clear road map in the event of serious illness.

But experiences like this one, along with a growing body of academic research, are leading me to rethink that belief. Some palliative care experts have begun to ask a controversial question: What if the present model of advance care planning does not actually deliver better end-of-life care?

This would be a major change in thinking for doctors and policymakers. Since the Patient Self-Determination Act of 1990 went into effect, advance care planning — which encourages all adults, even those in good health, to choose a surrogate to make medical decisions and to draw up an advance directive — has been promoted as the way to make sure that people receive the care they want at the end of their life.

But this well-intentioned effort has not worked as promised. In a recent commentary published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. R. Sean Morrison, a palliative care specialist, and colleagues wrote that despite decades of research on advance care planning, there are scant data to show that it accomplishes its goals. A 2020 review of more than 60 high-quality recent studies on advance care planning found no impact on whether patients received the care they wanted, or how they rated the quality of their lives afterward.

When doctors talk to patients about advance directives, they implicitly promise that the directives will help patients get the care they want and unburden their loved ones, Dr. Morrison told me. “And the reality is that we’ve been pushing a myth,” he said.

I once thought that the only barriers to effective advance care planning were practical. Not all people are aware of how to write such a directive, and even if they are, the document is not always uploaded into patients’ medical records or is easily retrievable.

But the bigger obstacle, and what has increasingly troubled me working in the intensive care unit, is the difficulty of asking people to make decisions about future scenarios.

Humans have an amazing capacity to adapt to illness or disease. From the vantage point of youth or good health, it is easy for people to say that they would rather die than live with significant limitations, pain or dependence on others.

But people evolve in ways they cannot expect. This is why some survivors of catastrophic accidents, such as spinal cord injuries leading to complete paralysis, nevertheless come to rate their quality of life as good — even if they never would have imagined being able to do so before the accident. As a result, what people are willing to go through to extend their life might change depending on the context. Advance directives written at one point in time about hypothetical scenarios cannot capture what someone actually wants at every point in the future.

A key goal of advance care planning is to free family members from the burdens of making decisions, yet these conversations can paradoxically leave relatives with even more conflict. A loved one may have said years ago that she would want “everything” done. Was she imagining weeks on a ventilator and continuous dialysis without a reasonable hope for recovery?

This does not mean that planning is useless. But there is a better way.

We all should choose a health care proxy, someone who knows us well and whom we would trust to make hard decisions on our behalf, and document that choice in writing. And there is likely some unmeasurable benefit for adults in good health to talk with the people they love about sickness and death. This should not be done in order to make statements about medical treatments that are in any way binding, but to practice what it is like to say those words and experience the complicated feelings that arise when these topics are at hand.

Most important, we need to shift the focus from talking to healthy people about what would happen should they stop breathing during a routine procedure, and toward improving conversations with people who are already seriously ill. All patients for whom these decisions are no longer hypothetical should have a documented conversation with their doctor that focuses less on their thoughts about specific medical interventions and more on their understanding of their prognosis, what is important to them and what gives their lives meaning.

When I am standing at a bedside in the intensive care unit, I want to be able to lean on that conversation. Is my patient someone who would be willing to go through aggressive medical treatments for the possibility of prolonging his life? Or is this someone who would prioritize comfort given the current medical realities?

It’s this kind of information that helps medical teams make recommendations about interventions in real time, as we ultimately did for my patient.

After she was taken off the breathing tube, she did well for a few days. But when her breathing grew ragged, she was intubated once again and then had a tracheotomy. She spent a month in the hospital, and when I last saw her there, she was breathing on her own. The tracheostomy tube had just been removed, and a small piece of gauze was put in its place. She would make it home after all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opin ... 6_50_ranks

[swamidada]

NAMAAZ E MAYAT

NIYYAT: Namaaz mee guzarum bar mayyete

Hazar (Hazera)
Wajeb qurbatin illallh

ALLAHO AKBER

I declare my intention to offer congregational prayer upon the body of the deceased to reach the presence of Allah
Allah is Great

Ash-hado unla illaha illallaho
I declare there is no deity but Allah

wa ash hado unna Muhammedanr-Rassoolallah salallaho alehi wa Aalehi ALLAHO AKBER
I declare that Muhammed is His (final) Messenger, Let us all declare that Allah is Great

Allahumma sale ala Muhammadin wa Aale Muhammed
(recite three times)
ALLAHO AKBER

O Allah shower Your Blessings on (through)Mohammad and his progeny
* (ala can also mean ‘on’ or ‘through’)
Allah is Great
Allahummaghfirlil momineen wal mominaate,
I ask for forgiveness for all the Momins and around the world,

Wal, Muslimeen wal muslimaate
(I ask for forgiveness) for all believers here and around the world

ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great

Allahummaghfir-li haza (hazil) mayett
I ask for forgiveness of behalf of the deceased

ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great

ALLAHO AKBER, ALLAHO AKBER
Allah is Great, Allah is Great

LA ILLAHA ILLALLAHO
There is no deity except Allah

WALLAHO AKBER,
Allah is Great

WALILLA-HIL HAMD
For Him is all Praise

Significance of raising our hands and touching the ears with the thumb and reciting Allaho Akbar in unison

I wander why there are 2 different sets of Namaz e Janaza/Mayet? In western countries including Africa they recite 7 Takbeers, where as in eastern countries where Ismailis live they recite 5 Takbeers. There are no similarities in Duas in between Takbeers. We are one community with same Imam, same Quran, same Tariqa (as mentioned by ITREB), then why such huge difference. As I know in 1977 new Fatimi Namaz e Janaza was introduced by Imam of the time for all Ismailis in all continents where Ismailis live. Is there any logic in it?

[kmaherali]

Ash Wednesday Forces Us to Confront Death, but It Also Offers Hope



Several days a week, on the way from my home to the nearest coffee shop, I pass a cemetery. Among hundreds of others lie the graves of my father, grandmother and grandfather. It’s an almost daily reminder of their lives but also that I will join them someday, perhaps even in that same graveyard. It’s an unbidden memento mori in an ordinary day.

We as a culture tend to strenuously avoid the fact of human mortality. Of course, we all know that we will die. But those of us who live in places that feel safe and who are relatively healthy, with friends and family who are relatively healthy, can arrange our lives to avoid thinking about death. With the blessings of modern medicine, people are living longer and when death comes it often happens in medical spaces, far from where most of us live and spend our time.

Gone are the days when graveyards frequently circled churches, a bygone reminder of the intrinsic connection between our mortality and our practices of faith. Cemeteries are often no longer near cities at all. In a Times profile of Colma, a small California town where many of San Francisco’s dead have been buried or reinterred, John Branch wrote, “Colma exists mostly because the deceased, like so many present-day workers in San Francisco, could no longer afford to live in the city.” As prices rise for urban spaces, burial grounds are moved farther out of town, and urban dwellers are left with few palpable reminders of death. Death itself, like cemeteries, becomes a distant and forgotten reality.

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, which begins the Christian penitential season of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, churchgoers usually kneel and our foreheads are marked with ashes in the shape of a cross. An Ash Wednesday service was one of the first liturgical services I ever attended. And it hit me hard. We, the living, gathered to name the fact of death. The priest marked the foreheads of children, even newborn babies. It felt so true and countercultural, and also incredibly sad.

I have since presided over several Ash Wednesday services as a priest, and it still hits me hard. In the service, I tell the members of my congregation, one by one, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This black mark of death rests on every forehead — the young and old, rich and poor, strong and weak, sick and well. We carry on our body a recollection and proclamation that we, and everyone we love, will die.

The church has long said that facing death, without denial or distraction, is a necessary part of living truthfully. And this truth, like all truth, teaches us how to live. In the Rule of St. Benedict, Benedict urged his monks: “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die. Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you, wherever you may be.” Benedict understood that recalling death changes us.

Speaking the truth of mortality out loud on Ash Wednesday feels somehow transgressive. In the midst of the bustle of cities, the busyness of our lives, the triviality that subsumes much of our time and the unreality of social media, a priest stands with ashes in hand and calls people back to reality.

Amid the mountains of sociological data about life in a pandemic over the past two years, one weird statistic caught my eye. Christianity Today reported on an annual funeral industry study that showed that after a decade of steady decline, the percentage of people age 40 and over who say that religion is “very important” in the funeral of a loved one spiked by 10 percentage points in 2020 and rose another 2 percentage points in 2021.

Covid’s specter of mass death challenged any flimsy hope that we can control our lives and be rescued from mortality, loss and pain. For many of us, facing the immovable fact of death quite naturally raises questions about God. With nearly a million lives lost to Covid in the United States alone, more people find themselves longing for religious rituals that acknowledge mystery, meaning, horror and hope in death.

Oftentimes, by avoiding the truth of death, we end up stifling questions about the meaning of life, about God, about eternity and about who we are, what we are for, where we are headed and why anything matters at all.

I experience this all the time. Karl Marx famously called religion the opiate of the masses. He meant that faith can have a numbing affect, quelling hard questions and hampering the work of justice in the here and now. He has a point. Religion has at times been used as an excuse by some to not work for change and to embrace a pie-in-the-sky quietism. Still, in my own life, any numbing effects of religion don’t hold a candle to binge-watching Netflix with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bourbon on the rocks. Like morphine, the pleasures of consumerism and creature comforts dull my notice of life, death, longing and the pressing struggles of this world.

A fascinating 2014 study by The Times’s The Upshot looked at the most difficult places in America to live, based on factors such as life expectancy and income level, and then compared common internet search terms there with those from the easiest — and wealthiest — places to live. What they found was that those in the hardest places spend time thinking about health woes and religion. People in America’s easiest places think about jogging and cameras.

On a global scale, this divided reality is even clearer. A 2008 Pew study showed that “Generally, there is a clear relationship between wealth and religiosity: In rich nations fewer people view religion as important than in poor nations.” People who live in the world’s poorest nations almost unanimously said religion was important to them, while people in Western Europe and in other wealthy nations said it is less significant.

Even the book of Proverbs in the Bible acknowledges this tendency. The book’s writer asks for daily bread, acknowledging that if he became desperately poor, he’d be tempted to steal. But he also asks God to deliver him from riches, “Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’”

There are myriad reasons that wealth might dampen faith. But one is that those of us who are privileged and comparatively comfortable can insulate ourselves from death, suffering and our own mortality in ways others cannot. Whether one is a churchgoer or not, when our bodies are strong, our stomachs are full, and we have high-speed internet and craft beer, questions of eternity seem less pressing.

These Covid years, though, asked us to face the inescapable fragility of all of our lives. Each year, Ash Wednesday asks the same.


But Ash Wednesday doesn’t end with an invitation to distraction or consumer comfort. Nor does it end with the imposition of ashes. After the ashes, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the priest asks that “at the last we may come” to God’s eternal joy. Then we take Communion together, a tangible decree that ashes give way to beauty, that death gives way to resurrected life.

The Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen called the hope of Christianity — the hope of Ash Wednesday — a “transcendent realism.” Transcendent realism confronts the truth of the grave. And it is in this truth that the most important questions of our lives get a hearing. We need more than diversion, work and pleasure. We need deep, resonant, defiant hope.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

By Daniela J. Lamas

Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

My patient’s wife had just one question: Was her husband dying?

She knew that he was still on the ventilator even after all these weeks, his lungs too sick and his body too weak to breathe on his own. That he still needed a continuous dialysis machine to do the work of his kidneys. That he had yet to wake up in any meaningful way, though his brain scans showed nothing amiss. That it had been more than 50 days since he entered the hospital and we needed to talk about what would come next.

But when she stood there at the bedside, her husband looked much the same to her as he had a week ago, much the same as he might look next week if we continued to push forward. And she had to ask: Why did we need to have this conversation today? Was her husband dying?

You might think this is an easy question to answer. And yet here in the intensive care unit, it is not. Our medicines and machines extend the lives of patients who would otherwise have died. But what happens when it becomes clear that a patient is not actively dying, but not getting better either? How do doctors and family members navigate death when it is not imminent and unavoidable, but is instead a decision?

During my medical training, death happened in one of two ways. It was either a moment of crisis, doctors rushing into a room, all sound and fury and chest compressions for minutes that felt like hours. Or it was something quieter, entirely divorced from machines, family gathered for the last breaths when the lungs were failing, or the cancer had spread too far.

But there’s a third form that dying takes, when it becomes clear that the life that we can offer is not one that would be acceptable to the patient. It is a death that is made imminent only by the withdrawal of medicines and machines — a death that we plan for. It is a strange thing to plan a death, but I have come to understand that this is part of our work in the I.C.U.

A few months ago, I took care of a cancer patient in her 70s who had been intubated because of a flare-up of an underlying lung disease. In the moments before the anesthesiologists put her to sleep and placed the breathing tube down her throat, she had given her son instructions: Give her a chance to get better, but if that failed, she did not want a tracheostomy tube for a longer-term connection to the ventilator or months at a rehabilitation hospital. Her cancer was progressing, and that was not the way she wanted to spend the last year of her life.

I told her family that we would continue our intensive interventions for two weeks, a “time-limited trial of critical care,” as we often call it. If my patient was not breathing on her own at that point, then she never would never be — not without a trach and protracted rehab, a best-case scenario that she would find unacceptable. A week passed. She improved a bit and her family let themselves hope, only to be devastated days later when she worsened again.

Then, the day before the time-limited trial was to end, my patient’s son and daughter took me aside. They could not bring themselves to leave that night and return the next morning to hear the words that now seemed inevitable. If their mother was not going to improve, they wanted to take her off the machines that evening. The next day was her grandson’s birthday. She would not have wanted the little boy’s celebration to be forever intertwined with the sadness of her death. Perhaps they could wait until the day after the birthday, but that might only prolong their mother’s suffering.

There is something uncomfortable about these conversations, where it feels as though we are asking family members to plan the end of a life. It begins with a moment in the family meeting, when we have made the decision to “transition to comfort,” and family members ask me what comes next. What they are asking, really, is how their loved one will die.

As gently as I can, I tell them that when they are ready — as anyone really can be for any of this — we will stop the medications and the tubes that are prolonging life. I tell them that the bedside nurse will give other meds, often morphine or a similar drug, to make sure that their loved one is not in pain. Sometimes they ask if this medication will hasten death, and I explain that it can, but that our primary goal is always to relieve discomfort.

We even have a term for this balance, the “principle of double effect” — as doctors, we accept the risk of a negative consequence like hastening death, so long as our intended outcome is to help the patient by alleviating symptoms. The pain-relieving meds that we administer do not themselves cause death; instead they ensure that our patients are as comfortable as they can be while dying from their underlying disease.

Some family members ask us to stop everything all at once. Others ask for a longer process, to stop one medicine and then another. Someone recently asked the nurse to let every medication run out and not to replace the IV bags. Some ask us to remove the breathing tube, others do not. I am often surprised to what extent people have ideas about what feels right to them, about how the unimaginable should play out. Sometimes there is music. Jerry Garcia. Beethoven. For others, this is all one decision too many, and they sit in silence.

A resident doctor in training came to me recently after one such family meeting, worried that by telling a family that their loved one was dying, he had made it true. If we define dying solely by physiology, by a falling blood pressure or oxygen level, then perhaps that concern is valid. But if we broaden our definition, if we think of dying in the intensive care unit as something that begins when an acceptable outcome is no longer possible, then we are acknowledging the inevitable.

Which is what I told my patient’s wife that day outside his room. We had given her husband every chance to rebound, to show us that he could make it through, but the insults his body faced were too great. We could press on, but to what end? He would never make it home, never be able to do the things that made his life worth living.

She was right, the timing of this conversation was, in a way, arbitrary. Had I been dealing with a patient in extremis, I might not have stopped her outside the room that day. But once we recognized the reality of her husband’s medical condition, what choice was there?

That night, my patient’s wife made the decision to take him off the ventilator. The nurses titrated the pain medications that ran through his veins as she held vigil at his bedside. And after weeks of critical care limbo, the answer to her question was finally clear. Her husband was dying.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

By Katherine Rundell

Ms. Rundell is the author, most recently, of “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” from which this essay has been adapted.

The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

It was the spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne, long a struggling poet, had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral two years before. He was 51, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation — merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole of the city’s elite — came to his sermons. Some carried paper and ink to write down his finest passages and take them home to relish and dissect them. Donne often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him.

That morning he was not preaching in his own church but 15 minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of town. Word went out: Wherever he was, people came flocking to hear him speak. But too many flocked, and as the crowd pushed closer to hear his words, some men were shoved to the ground, trampled and badly injured. A contemporary wrote in a letter, “Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.” There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s not impossible that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bloodied men were carried off and out of sight.

A certain amount of ease around death would have been in character. John Donne was honest about death and its place in the task of living, just as he insisted on joy. Both his life and his work tell us the same thing: It is only by keeping death nearby that one can truly live.

Confronted with the thought of death, many of us perform the psychological equivalent of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin. But Donne saluted death; he wrote it poetry, he threw it parties. He had a memento mori that he left to a friend in his will, “the picture called The Skeleton which hangs in the hall.” For Donne, that we are born astride the grave was a truth to welcome.


Credit...Getty Images

Death — the looming fact of it, its finality and clarifying power — calls us to attention and wakes us up to life. Donne spoke it from the pulpit, in a passage from a sermon he gave in his late 40s:

Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.

Awake is his call. And Donne’s work laid out how: He insisted on the vivid, the alert, the original. His poetry is famously difficult, and the images can sometimes take all your sustained focus to untangle. That is deliberate. In repayment for your effort, you will look at the world with both more awe and more skepticism.

First, though, you must shake yourself out of cliché. In a time when other poets were still largely engaged in the “my lady is a perfect dove” game, he refused to play. Love was almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? But it might be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His women are never roses, birds or fawns, but they might be compared to a mythic sucking fish: They thrum with idiosyncratic life.

Bodies, doomed to decay, delighted him. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealized, sanitized desire and joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. His writing about sex is explicit, joyful and strange: a bodily salute to life:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below!
O my America! My new-found land!
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned!

He also loved the “trans-” prefix: It’s scattered everywhere across his writing — “transpose,” “translate,” “transport,” “transubstantiate.” In this Latin preposition — meaning “across, to the other side of, over, beyond” — he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable.

And Donne reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: He was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the king, dean of the finest cathedral in London. He worked his way from failure and penury to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age.

He lived intensely, even for a time in which intensity seemed to be the hallmark. He sailed the high seas, rode through Europe, wore a hat large enough to sail a cat in. He was a man who often added the super- prefix to words that others would not think needed them: “super-infinite,” “super-miraculous,” “super-eternal,” “super-exaltation,” even “super-dying.”

If the human soul was visible, he believed, it would be larger than the world itself. “It is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is,” he wrote in “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.

But humans, he also knew, are unique in their capacity to ruin themselves and one another: “Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn stings,” he wrote at age 37 in an elegy for a friend.

Donne was born into a Roman Catholic family in a time when the religion was illegal in England. One of his great-uncles was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed; another was locked inside the Tower of London, where Donne visited him as a small boy, venturing fearfully in among the men sentenced to death. His younger brother, caught harboring a priest, was locked in a plague-ridden jail, where he died alone and in agony.

Donne married a young woman, Anne More, clandestinely and hurried by love, which derailed his early career and got him thrown in an ice-cold prison. Even after his release he and Anne were often poor and at the mercy of richer friends and relations. He knew what it was to be jealous and thwarted and bitter. He lost, over the course of his life, six children. And he lost Anne when she was just 33.

In his life, Donne walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. And as he grew older, he grew drier and harsher, but he always insisted determinedly on awe. Donne believed our minds could, with work, be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: “be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail,” he wrote in a verse letter to his friend Henry Wotton, when they were both still young men in their 20s.

We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must, he demanded, acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.

Wake, his writing tells us, over and over. Weep for this world and gasp for it. Wake, and pay attention to our mortality, to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us. Pay attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet. Attention — real, sustained, unflinching attention — is what this life, with its disasters and delights, demands of you.

And if a skeleton in the hall helps, well then: Bring on the skeletons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

By Daniela J. Lamas

Dr. Lamas, a contributing Opinion writer, is a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The headlines might make you think that Anne Heche died twice. First on a Friday, when the actress was declared brain-dead. And then again on a Sunday, when her body was disconnected from machines so that her organs could be donated.

It would be easy to assume that these headlines are unique to this event, the fault of imprecise language or constraints around the timing of obituaries. But they actually reveal a much deeper and pervasive lack of understanding about what happens in that liminal space between the declaration of brain death and when a heart stops beating.

During this period, which could last for days, doctors and nurses must care for the bodies of patients we know to be gone. It is an uncomfortable process in many ways, but there is a clear and necessary process that ultimately allows the lifesaving act of organ donation. Just recently, in fact, the United States recorded one million organ transplants since 1954. And because brain death and organ donation are sensitive topics, so rife with misconception, it is essential to get the language right and to be open about the steps that health care providers take.

It all begins with a catastrophe. An accident. An overdose. We gather at bedsides with our lines and tubes and procedures. Minutes pass. Hours. Sometimes days. And then there is the moment when we realize that even as heart and lungs and liver and kidneys have started to improve, the patients will likely never wake up or breathe on their own again.

Often, by this time, the neurologists have already been involved. There might be a CT scan that shows early signs of damage — swelling, the brain tight within its bony cage, normal structures obliterated. Sometimes we have cooled the patients’ bodies to give the brain the best chance to recover and must wait until it has been warmed again before we can make any determination about what is left. It is at this point that we talk about the testing required to declare brain death.

The first time a patient of mine was declared brain-dead was in my intern year. She was a mother, as I remember it, and had come in after her heart had stopped during a drug overdose. By the time her heart started again, her brain had been without oxygen for too long. I watched as the lead neurologist went through the steps of the brain death exam that by now have grown familiar. He shined a light in her eyes. Her pupils did not react. He injected cold water into her ear with a syringe, moved her head quickly back and forth, pinched the beds of her nails, each test trying to elicit reflexes that were tragically absent. In the final test, we stopped the ventilator and watched for long seconds that turned to minutes as her body made no attempt to breathe.

It is during this process that we shift from thinking solely about our patients to thinking about the possibility that they might become organ donors. This means that we call the regional organ bank, the nonprofit that is responsible for recovering organs from deceased donors. A federal mandate requires us to alert the organ bank in such cases, whether a patient is a registered organ donor or not. As the organ bank begins to review the case from afar, we talk to the patients’ family members.

By now, they likely know what has happened, but we need to say the words. That there are two ways to die — the heart stops, or the brain stops working — and that the testing that we have performed means that their loved one is legally dead. And then, as they try to get their minds around the fact that this person they love still has a heartbeat on the monitor but has died, they ask about what comes next.

Studies have shown that families are more likely to consent to organ donation if that request comes from someone who is specifically trained to ask and that this request should be decoupled from the declaration of death. This makes sense. I am their loved one’s doctor — not someone who should be thinking about the organs that could save someone else’s life. So we doctors are instructed not to bring up organ donation and not to say that an organ donor representative will reach out to them but instead to say simply that a member of another team will talk with them about next steps.

I think that generally is enough; in their grief, families do not wonder why I didn’t bring up donation or feel misled, but it is always a moment when I feel pulled between my two mandates: one to this person and the family and the other to whatever it is that comes next. Though television shows would have you believe that the same doctors and nurses are also caring for the patients who will receive these organs, that is not the case. We never know where they will go.

Discomfort grows more acute in the coming hours or days, when patients have been declared brain-dead but their hearts are still beating as a result of our medicines and machines and they are being worked up as potential organ donors. This is the time between that Friday and Sunday, the space between death and donation. Now a member of the organ bank is helping to direct the patients’ care from behind the scenes. Asking us to check labs. To do procedures.

The first time I had to do a bronchoscopy on a brain-dead patient, sliding a camera into the airways to visualize the lungs, I kept reminding myself that I was doing this to help save the life of someone who could not breathe. A colleague told me that when he does a cardiac catheterization on such a patient, to see if the heart is viable for donation, he knows the patient is gone, and yet he still gives numbing medicine before he nicks the skin. I have seen our nurses talk to patients still, even though they have died, even though they are no longer present to hear the words.

I will confess — back in my intern year, with the mother who had overdosed, there was a part of me that resented the organ bank representatives. And I think that’s a natural response, in a way, to this moment. We are asked to perform the rituals of critical care on deceased patients so that their organs can go to someone else.

Years later, I no longer feel this way. Maybe it’s because I have cared for enough transplant recipients, and for those who died waiting for organs, that I know how remarkable it is to be able to donate. Maybe it is because I have seen so many tragic deaths that have no positive ends, nothing for anyone to hold on to afterward. Maybe because I have realized that in these moments, I am still caring for my patients and their families — I am doing what I can to make sure that their wishes are carried out and that some aspect of them persists, even in death. So we do the procedures. We check the labs. The family visits. The life is over, but there is this coda.

My patient’s son held his mother’s hand as her body was wheeled out of the intensive care unit. I remember that. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt; he must have been a teenager. Her death certificate will mention only that first date, when we declared her brain-dead, because that is the day she died. There is no second death, as much as it might feel that way, despite what the headlines suggest. That second date, the punctuation mark at the end of the story, is the moment when loss turns to hope, when a stranger gets a second chance at life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Four years after her death, the body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster has not decomposed, her fellow nuns said. Believers come from all over to see for themselves.



An orchard grows on the grounds in front of the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower, Mo.Credit...Katie Currid for The New York Times

In life, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster was known to her fellow nuns for her devotional poetry, her sense of humor and her fierce piety. “I’m Sister Wil-hel-mina,” she was known to say. “I’ve a hell of a will and I mean it!” A biography published by her order after her death at age 95 in 2019 described her as the little nun “who persevered in faith.”

In death, Sister Wilhelmina has become something much larger to some: a potential saint, a pilgrimage attraction, a miracle.

The transformation started this spring at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, run by the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, a small but growing conservative order whose headquarters are nestled in the rolling hills north of Kansas City. Four years after burying Sister Wilhelmina, the order’s founder, in a simple wood coffin in a corner of the property, the sisters decided to move her body into a customary place of honor inside their church.

When they opened the coffin, expecting to find bones that could be easily cleaned and placed in a new box, they instead found what looked and even felt remarkably like Sister Wilhelmina herself. Her face was recognizable, even after years in a damp coffin, and the sisters said that her beloved habit was “immaculate.”

For the Benedictines of Mary, this immediately signaled that Sister Wilhelmina may be an “incorruptible,” a term the Catholic Church uses to describe people whose bodies — or parts of their bodies — did not decompose after death. Believers in the phenomenon say there have been more than 100 examples worldwide, mostly in Europe.

Michael O’Neill, who hosts a national radio show called “The Miracle Hunter” on the Catholic station EWTN, said that the case of Sister Wilhelmina, who was Black, was especially distinctive. “There’s never been an African American incorruptible; in fact there’s never been an American of any sort who’s an incorruptible,” he said. “So this is big news.”

Word began to spread in Catholic circles locally, and then more widely.

The sisters turned an alfalfa field into an impromptu parking lot, and put up hand-lettered signs directing guests to Sister Wilhelmina’s now-empty gravesite, and to her body in the church. Huge crowds — the sisters say at least 25,000 people — streamed into the abbey over Memorial Day weekend to view the body, touch it and pray.

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Women in long dresses and men in dark suits cluster on a green lawn outside a stone building.

People gathered outside the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus after Mass last month.Credit...

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A nun kneels in front of a glass box with the body of Sister Wilhelmina.

After evening prayers have concluded, the sisters take a moment of private prayer, and many of them pray in front of the body of Sister Wilhelmina.Credit...

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Four rows of nuns stand in pews with open books.

The sisters of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles gathered for morning prayers. The conservative order is growing.Credit...

“I used to think something like this could only happen in Europe, or St. Louis,” said Edith Riches, 13, who volunteered that weekend handing out cold water and fruit to visitors waiting in line along the abbey’s long gravel driveway. Volunteers also distributed veils and knee-length skirts to women in the line, to help them meet the abbey’s firm dress code.

The mayor of Gower, Ken Pike, worked with authorities in two counties and the state highway patrol to plan for the influx of visitors, temporarily turning the two-lane road that leads to the abbey into a one-way route. The town also added a large link to the abbey on the top of its website in May, right under its slogan, “A nice place to call home.”

Sister Wilhelmena became the biggest news in town since the high-school football team won the state championship last year for the second time in a row.

But quiet downtown Gower, a town of about 1,500 people where $1.50 buys you a cold can of beer at happy hour, experienced little of the hubbub. The abbey is about six miles from there, so relatively few tourists ended up making their way into town.

After Memorial Day, the nuns enclosed Sister Wilhelmina’s body in a glass box, which they installed in the church on their property in view of the pews where visitors sit during Mass. The volume of visitors dropped, but then remained steady.

When I visited the abbey on a Thursday in August, about 75 people attended midday Mass at the church, a sizable turnout for a weekday service. I met pilgrims from Minnesota, Texas and California, some passing through on summer road trips. One woman snapped pictures of the body, saying she would check back on Sister Wilhelmina’s condition in a few years.

In life, Sister Wilhelmina was the descendant of enslaved Catholics, and grew up in a Catholic family in St. Louis. She belonged to a traditionally Black order of nuns for 50 years, the Oblate Sisters of Providence. But by the end of that time, she was disillusioned by what she perceived as a loosening of standards in worship and clothing styles. She founded the new traditionalist order in the 1990s.

Some of Sister Wilhelmina’s nieces and nephews have objected to the way the abbey had handled her body. They issued a statement over the summer stating that they were not informed about her exhumation until weeks after the fact, and were only begrudgingly allowed to have time alone with her body.

Image
Three nuns rake a green field.

Sisters Isabel, Lillien and Natalie rake hay for the cows at the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles convent in Gower, Mo. The nuns tend to chores and jobs between their daily prayers, such as milking the cows, gardening, cleaning and mowing the lawn.Credit...Katie Currid for The New York Times

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Two people stand nearby a dirt grave with a cross.

Theresa and Joyce Gabriel of Nebraska visiting the empty grave of Sister Wilhelmina.Credit...

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A nun in a blue habit and white head covering kneels over a bucket milking a cow.

Sister Lillien milking a cow at the abbey.Credit...

Others question why Sister Wilhelmina is being promoted so eagerly by a largely white movement within the Catholic Church. Almost all of the 64 women who make up the Benedictines of Mary are white.

Shannen Dee Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and author of a book about Black Catholic nuns, said she hopes that Sister Wilhelmina is not “being used to counter the reality of what Black Catholicism is in the United States.” She said Sister Wilhelmina’s beliefs did not make her representative of most Black Catholics, who tend to be more liberal on social issues. Dr. Williams noted that more than 70 percent of Black Catholics say abortion should be legal, for example, a higher level of support than Catholics in general.

For the sisters at the abbey, Sister Wilhelmina simply was who she was: by all accounts a sincere conservative on theological and social issues. “Her life ran in parallels, with being Black on one hand, and then being traditional on the other hand,” said Sister Scholastica Radel. “She wanted unity.”

In an era in which the population of nuns and priests in the United States is aging and declining, however, the Benedictines of Mary is among the handful of orders that is growing.

Georgia and Jim Nelson were on their third trip from Lincoln, Neb., to see Sister Wilhelmina’s body. Mr. Nelson was having exploratory surgery for throat cancer in just a few days. Mrs. Nelson had felt called during her private prayer time to make one more visit before the surgery.

Sister Wilhelmina is “right in heaven next to the Father,” Mrs. Nelson said, her voice catching. (Mr. Nelson’s cancer turned out to be minor, which Mrs. Nelson saw as an answer to their prayers.)

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A priest holds a golden incense holder with smoke streaming from it.

Incense burning during daily Mass.Credit...

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Men, women and a toddler stand in pews.

People attending midday Mass in August. The conservative order requires modest dress and head coverings for women.

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A teenage girl in a red polo shirt stands in a grocery aisle.

Madeline Whitt, a high school senior at East Buchanan High School, is not Catholic, but she said she has been to see Sister Wilhelmina three times.Credit...

Bishop James V. Johnston Jr., in whose diocese the abbey is located, cautioned in a statement in May that while it is understandable that visitors would want to see the body, they should not touch the sister’s body or treat it as a relic.

Inside the abbey walls, few openly question what they see before their eyes. To experts in forensic science, there are other potential explanations.

“It’s impossible to make many conclusions at all,” said Marcella Sorg, a forensic anthropologist and research professor at the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. One of several explanations is the phenomenon of dry mummification, which can take place naturally if the body’s soft tissues stay dry enough. Factors include the person’s body fat, their diet in the days before death and the dryness of the wood used for the coffin.

For others, science is hardly the point.

Madeline Whitt, a clerk at the Hy-Klas grocery store in Gower, shrugged when asked if Sister Wilhelmina’s preservation was a miracle. “Even if it’s not,” she said, “if it brings more people to come and question things, then it is.”

Ms. Whitt, 17, has visited the abbey three times to see Sister Wilhelmina.

She attends a nondenominational Protestant church and said she had not ever seen a nun before her visits to the abbey. It was a “culture shock,” she said. But in a quiet, small town, it was also something to do.

Ruth Graham is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She previously reported on religion for Slate. More about Ruth Graham

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/us/m ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Childhood, youth, and maturity,
and now old age.

Every guest agrees to stay
three days, no more.

Master, you told me to
remind you. Time to go.

-----------------------------------

The angel of death arrives,
and I spring joyfully up.

No one knows what comes over me
when I and that messenger speak!

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1 ... atic-poems

[kmaherali]

Fifty years on, Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death” remains an essential, surprisingly upbeat guide to our final act on Earth.



Ernest Becker was already dying when “The Denial of Death” was published 50 years ago this past fall. “This is a test of everything I’ve written about death,” he told a visitor to his Vancouver hospital room. Throughout his career as a cultural anthropologist, Becker had charted the undiscovered country that awaits us all. Now only 49 but losing a battle to colon cancer, he was being dispatched there himself. By the time his book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize the following spring, Becker was gone.

These grim details may seem like the makings of a downer, to put it mildly, and another downer is the last thing anyone needs right now. But there is no gloom in “Denial,” no self-pity, not even the maudlin wisdom today’s illness memoirs have primed us to expect. A rare mind is at work, and you get to hang out in the workshop. Writing against the hardest stop of all, Becker managed to produce “a kind of cosmic pep talk,” as the literary critic Anatole Broyard put it in The New York Times.

For a book published in the early 1970s, “Denial” includes remarkably little discussion of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But holding back on context allowed Becker a measure of freedom. He transmits on what Ralph Ellison called “the lower frequencies.” To tune into those frequencies today is to discover that age has not robbed Becker’s ideas of their power. “I’m surprised at how new it seems to me,” Broyard wrote in 1982. Readers continue to revel in the same surprise.

Only by confronting our own mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified. “To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem,” Becker wrote.

The book is famous for a cameo in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” where, in a scene filmed in the bygone Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue, Allen’s Alvy Singer buys a copy for his girlfriend Annie (Diane Keaton). As he does so, Alvy discourses on how “life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.” I get the desire to impress Annie, but Alvy clearly didn’t read the book, for Becker has no patience with such self-defeating pessimism.

Allen got closer to the heart of the matter when he joked that instead of achieving immortality through his work, he’d rather simply avoid dying. Alas, that’s not an option. So we create elaborate distraction in the form of what Becker called “causa-sui” — or self-caused — “projects” (also known as “immortality projects”) that convince us we have the means to leave a lasting mark on the world: Yes, I know I’m just an oxygenated carbon sack clinging to a rock hurtling through the unfeeling infinity of dark matter, but did you hear that my kid got into Princeton?

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This image shows a worn paperback copy of “The Denial of Death,” by Ernest Becker, viewed from an angle so that we can see the book’s spine, with the title in block letters, as well as the cover, with the same block letters, on a background of black and red. On a diagonal yellow banner stretching from the bottom left to bottom right, we can read the words “Pulitzer Prize Winner, General Nonfiction.”

Credit...Kubik Fine Books Ltd

We may leave behind large families, or a corporation that lasts for generations, but in the end we are subject to the same “creatureliness” (a favorite Becker word) as the common gnat. The gnat may even be better off, unaware that it is about to meet the business end of a fly swatter. For us, the swatter is always there, hovering in the periphery. Will it come down because of bad sushi on a cruise ship? Will we make it to old age? Are those new studies about diet soda and cancer true?

Splat!

An anthropologist who refused to stay within the bounds of his discipline, Becker understood society as “a vehicle for earthly heroism,” allowing each of us to engage in an immortality project that endows our lives with significance. In the postindustrial West, he believed, that vehicle was breaking down. Along with thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Neil Postman, he saw the emergent American culture as tending to strip away individual agency, turning would-be heroes into passive receptacles for consumer goods. “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing,” Becker wrote a half-century before marathon Netflix sessions became a common salve for braving an increasingly bewildering world.

Becker is interested in the moment right after your “Suits” binge has run its course and you are alone in your apartment, just you and your thoughts, a vague unease sharpening into an ever finer point. Instead of pacifying your dread, he wants to cultivate it, to use it as fuel for better living.

He was born in 1924 in Springfield, Mass., two decades after the city’s most famous native: Theodor Geisel, or Dr. Seuss. It is hard to imagine two books more superficially different than “Denial” and “The Lorax,” but both writers were interested in dismantling the artifice and casual cruelty of the adult world. The chase after wealth and power that had come to rule postwar America was enforcing a “blind drivenness that burns people up,” Becker wrote. We’d rather be followers instead of explorers, hoarders instead of heroes. He wanted us to live at a Cat-in-the-Hat tempo: “Childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men,” he declared.

As an infantryman still in his teens, he fought in World War II, seeing the horrors of the Holocaust up close. The works he later wrote retain a hint of postwar French existentialism, which struggled to make sense of a world that had obliterated the Enlightenment’s optimism about the human condition.

Becker studied at Syracuse and taught at Berkeley, but he never stayed in one place for long, finally landing at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He consistently refused to settle for easy conclusions, or to confine himself to a single discipline. In one of his first books, “The Birth and Death of Meaning” (1962), Becker introduced his concept of heroism as a contradictory notion, at once pointless and central to human society. “The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious,” he wrote. But what else is there?

Becker saw the civil rights movement as a bid for people of color to engage in heroic projects long available to white Americans. “The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism of which they have been cheated historically,” he observes in “Denial”’s brief nod to current events. Just because most human heroics are artificial makes them no less seductive.

According to this framework, to exclude a group of people — through discriminatory hiring, redlining, college admission quotas — is to tell them that they can never be heroes, that their lives can never have meaning. The horrific Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel might have been seen by Becker as an exercise in depraved heroics undertaken by desperate Palestinians for whom mundane immortality projects have not been possible for decades.

For all its relevance, “The Denial of Death” has not aged perfectly. There are too many references to Otto Rank, a once influential disciple of Freud who has lapsed into obscurity, as well as turns of phrase that would be considered sexist or homophobic today.

Becker began his career as therapy was shedding its severe Freudian past. Dr. Joyce Brothers started dispensing psychological advice on television in 1958; three years later, The Atlantic devoted most of an issue to “psychiatry in American life.” But the discipline could also fall for suspect practices like primal scream therapy, which its founder (an Angeleno, naturally) touted as “the most important discovery of the 20th century.”

“Therapeutic megalomania” bothered Becker almost as much as hollow heroism. He wanted psychiatry to strip away illusions, not erect new ones. Thinking about death could build “new forms of courage and endurance,” he believed, if the mind were properly trained. Once we got real about the looming fly swatter, and the utter futility of pretending we could do anything about it, we could learn to approach our brief time on this overheated planet with “a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience.”

Tech billionaires are currently looking for ways to use artificial intelligence to help humans achieve immortality, and while living past 100 does sound nice, it is our mortality that gives our lives meaning. “The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don’t take life seriously enough,” Becker wrote, arguing that “by deadening human sensitivity,” science “would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory.”

That criticism was directed at peers in his field, but it just as readily applies to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have helped popularize dopamine fasting — a literal deadening of human sensitivity that involves depriving both mind and body of all stimulation by sitting in a room that essentially functions as a coffin.

Meanwhile, the real world is waiting, as desperate for heroes as ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/book ... ecker.html

[swamidada]

‘Cost of dying’ at record high in UK

A growing number of Britons are choosing cheaper funerals amid declining living standards

Funeral costs have risen to a record high in the UK, prompting nearly one in four people to opt for a direct cremation or burial with no send-off, according to a report by insurance firm SunLife. Almost one in five people had to sell their belongings to pay for their funeral last year, the report found.

Between the cost of burial or cremation, the price of a memorial service, and expenses like legal fees, the “cost of dying” hit an average of £9,658 ($12,296) in the UK last year, the report stated. This represents an increase of £458 since 2022, and is the highest such figure ever recorded by SunLife.

In 2023, the average funeral itself cost £4,141 – 4.7% more than in 2022 and up from only £1,835 in 2004. With prices rising, the report noted that more and more Britons are opting for cheaper funerals, based on interviews with more than 1,500 families and 100 funeral directors.

Some 20% of families had their loved ones directly cremated last year, up from only 3% in 2019. A direct cremation involves the deceased being taken straight to the crematorium without any religious or other remembrance service. 4% opted for direct burials, in which the deceased is buried without a service. 2023 was the first year that SunLife recorded this kind of funeral in its report.

A direct burial costs an average of £1,657, compared to the £5,077 price tag attached to a traditional burial, the report noted.

No matter what kind of funeral someone chooses, a growing number of people are finding it hard to pay for their own departure, with 45% having to rely on their families to make up some of the costs. Since last year, the number of people selling their belongings to cover their funeral expenses has risen from 15% to 18%, the report found.

Britain is currently experiencing the worst fall in living standards since records began, with the Office of Management and Budget warning last year that the decline will continue through this March. The TUC trade union warned last week that real wages will not return to their 2008 levels until at least 2028

https://www.rt.com/news/590690-cost-dying-funeral-uk/

[kmaherali]

What Ants and Orcas Can Teach Us About Death

A philosopher journeys into the world of comparative thanatology, which explores how animals of all kinds respond to death and dying.


A portrait of Susana Monsó who sits with her hands resting on a desk with a keyboard, coasters, books and notebooks and a vase of flowers on it.

Susana Monsó, a philosopher of animal minds at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. “I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human,” she said. “Death was a natural topic to pick up.”Credit...Gianfranco Tripodo for The New York Times
Emily Anthes
By Emily Anthes

In the summer of 2018, off the coast of British Columbia, an orca named Tahlequah gave birth. When the calf died after just half an hour, Tahlequah refused to let go. For more than two weeks, she carried her calf’s body around, often balancing it on her nose as she swam.

The story went viral, which came as no surprise to Susana Monsó, a philosopher of animal minds at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. Despite the vast chasm that seems to separate humans and killer whales, this orca mother was behaving in a way that was profoundly relatable.

“This idea of a mother clinging on to the corpse of her baby for 17 days seems like something we can understand, something we can relate to, for those of us who have experienced loss,” Dr. Monsó said.

Of course, projecting our own human experiences onto other species can be a tricky business, and scientists often warn about the mistakes we can make when we engage in this sort of anthropomorphism. But we can also be misled by our tendency to assume that many cognitive and emotional traits are unique to humans, Dr. Monsó said. And in her new book, “Playing Possum,” she argues that a variety of animal species have at least a rudimentary concept of death.

Dr. Monsó spoke with The New York Times about her work. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you get interested in this aspect of animal minds?

I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality. Death was a natural topic to pick up. There had been a growing number of reports of animals reacting in different ways to corpses. This seemed to be the birth of a new discipline, which is called comparative thanatology: the study of animals’ relationship with death.

You note that an animal does not need to have a “concept” of death in order to respond to it. Can you give an example?

Corpses can be very important objects, either because they entail an opportunity for an animal who is a scavenger or because they entail a threat for animals who might be infected by pathogens carried by a corpse. So, some animals are equipped with adaptations that allow them to detect corpses.

Ants will do things like take dead ants out of the colony and into the refuse pile. This behavior seems to be dependent on the detection of certain chemical cues, such as oleic acid, which arises from the decomposing process.

If we take oleic acid and we put it on a live ant, the other ants will treat it like a dead ant and take it out to the refuse pile. So they’re not really understanding death. What they’re doing is just reacting, more or less automatically, to a certain stimulus.

But you argue that many animals do understand death.

The concept of death has often been understood in very cognitively demanding ways — as somehow requiring an understanding of infinity or absence. I’m thinking of what I call a “minimal concept of death,” which is the idea that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings typically do and that this is a permanent, irreversible state.

One of the most interesting cases was when a chimpanzee was born with albinism. It’s an extremely rare condition in this species, and the other members of the group reacted in a way that suggested that they found the baby to be extremely scary. They started alarm calling, making these calls that they use to signal predators. Their fur was standing on end. And after a few moments of panic, the alpha male grabbed the baby and killed him.

Once the baby was dead, the attitude of the chimpanzees radically changed. They suddenly all became so curious about this corpse. They were sniffing it, touching it, pulling on its hair. They didn’t show indications of fear. They understood that the baby could no longer hurt them, that its nonfunctionality was irreversible.

Is it going too far to say that animals grieve?

Deceased-infant carrying, what we saw in the case of Tahlequah, is very common in mammalian mothers who lose their babies. I don’t think it’s outlandish at all to suppose that this is an example of grief. Grief is an emotional process of coming to terms with the demise of another individual. And this seems to be what these mothers are doing.

What can we learn by thinking about how animals respond to death?

Thinking about death in animals, how they cope with it, how they live with this reality, can help us to understand that death is not something unfair that happens to us. It’s a deal that any animal that is alive must step into. We are these bodies that work until a certain point but then eventually break down irreparably — the same as happens to any other animal in the world.


What Do Animals Know About Death?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/book ... monso.html
“Playing Possum,” a new book by the philosopher Susana Monsó, explores the mysteries of grief and mourning in the animal world.
Oct. 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/scie ... monso.html

[kmaherali]

The Positive Death Movement Comes to Life

Death cafes, death doulas, “Ask a Mortician,” DeathLab — once the province of goth subculture, death is having a moment in the sun.


Melissa Dodd, during a course called the “Art of Death Midwifery,” takes her turn in the shroud.

By John LelandPhotographs by Devin Yalkin
June 22, 2018
It was the party of a lifetime, and Shatzi Weisberger wouldn’t have missed it for the world. After all, it was her funeral. Or, as she pronounced it, her FUN-eral.

“Come on in,” she said. “There’s lots of food. And a coffin that people are decorating.”

And so it was that a hundred or so people gathered in the common room of an Upper West Side apartment building recently to eat, sing, mingle and hear Ms. Weisberger’s thoughts about death and dying.

“I hope we have fun,” she said.

A former nurse, Ms. Weisberger wore white slacks, white sneakers and a bright floral print blouse. A biodegradable cardboard coffin in one corner bore handwritten messages in colored marker: “Go Shatzi! (but not literally)”; “death is only the beginning”; “Shatzi, many happy returns … as trees, as bumble bees, as many happy memories.”

Ms. Weisberger worked the crowded room. “I have been studying and learning about death and dying, and I want to tell people what I’ve learned,” she said. “Some people are coming because they love me, and some people are coming because they’re curious about what the hell it’s about.”

At 88, Ms. Weisberger has found a second calling in what has been labeled the positive death movement — a scattering of mostly women who want to break the taboos around discussions of death.

Some connect through blogs or YouTube channels; some gather at monthly death cafes; some find more institutional grounding at the DeathLab at Columbia University’s architecture school or the Art of Dying Institute at the Open Center, a six-month program touching on everything from green burials (bonus: they’re cheap) to certified training for end-of-life doulas.

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Friends at Shatzi Weisburger's FUN-eral decorate her coffin.

Nearly a million people have downloaded the starter kit for the Conversation Project, a guide to discussing plans for the end of life. Others use the popular WeCroak app, which sends five daily reminders that we are all going to die.

All share a common idea: that Western culture has become too squeamish about talking about death, and that the silence impoverishes the lives leading up to it.

Ellen Goodman, a retired newspaper columnist who started the Conversation Project after caring for her mother at the end of life, likened the foment to the earlier movement for natural childbirth. “Birth was perceived as a medical event, and then in came the women’s movement and ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’” she said. “It wasn’t doctors who changed the way we give birth in America. It was women who said that giving birth was a human event. I think that we’re trying to do that now. Dying is a human experience. We’re trying to put the person back into the center of the experience.”

Ms. Weisberger is by no means a morbid person. She sings in the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus and shops at the new Trader Joe’s in her neighborhood. But a few years ago, after sitting with a friend who was dying of cancer, she realized that she was unsatisfied with the American way of death.

“She became terrified, so scared that she couldn’t even talk about it,” Ms. Weisberger said of her friend. “I kept urging her to talk about what was going on, but she wouldn’t. And then she died. So that was a problem. We had not dealt with the issue — myself, herself and the others.

“So I started studying about it,” she said. Down the digital rabbit hole she went.

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Ms. Weisberger gets mic'd up before she addresses the crowd at her FUN-eral.

If there is a germinal moment for the positive death movement, it is 2003, when a social worker at a New York hospice center became disillusioned by the care that the medical staff were able to give to dying patients and their families. The social worker, Henry Fersko-Weiss, saw what doulas did for women during and after childbirth. Why couldn’t dying people get the same level of attention and emotional support?

Using birth doulas as his model, he created a training program for end-of-life doulas, or midwives, to attend to patients’ nonmedical needs — anything from helping them review their lives to sitting quietly in witness.

“There are tremendous similarities between birthing and dying,” he said. “There’s a great deal unknown, there’s a great deal of pain and a need for support for the people around the person who is going through the experience.”

For doulas in either setting, he said, “arranging the atmosphere, creating a special space around the event, is exactly the same.”

As Mr. Fersko-Weiss was getting his program underway, Joanna Ebenstein, a graphic designer in Brooklyn, was thinking about death from a completely different angle.

“We just don’t know what to do with death anymore,” she said. “It’s this big, scary thing. We don’t have a set of rituals around it that contains it or gives it meaning. Ours is the first culture to pathologize an interest in death.”

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Amy Cunningham, a funeral director at Fitting Tribute, with a biodegradable seagrass coffin.

In 2007, Ms. Ebenstein started a blog called Morbid Anatomy, highlighting ways different cultures represented death. Only in the United States, she said, were images of death absent from art and daily life. The blog opened conversations about death outside of the realm of hospice or advance health care directives.

From the first posts, she said, she started hearing from an audience she had not known was out there: people who felt isolated by their interest in death. Before then, the only people she knew who shared her interest in death had been in the goth subculture.

“We’re not supposed to be curious about death now,” she said. “But how can you not be? It’s a great human mystery. It’s the thing that defines our life, but we’re supposed to pretend it’s not interesting to us? It’s in horror movies and pop culture, but there was no high culture discourse around it.”

She withheld her name from the blog because she was afraid her design clients, especially Scholastic, would think she was creepy. This was the era when Sarah Palin warned that the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act was trying to impose “death panels.”

Ms. Ebenstein, 46, sees her work as resurrecting a lost strand of American culture.

“This idea that we have now, that death is exotic and cannot be seen, is brand new,” she said. “Your grandparents tended to die in the house. They’d be laid out in the parlor when they died, which the Ladies’ Home Journal advocated changing to the ‘living room’ when the funeral parlor came around. The living room became the living room because it’s no longer the parlor for laying out the dead. And that’s around 1900. All of these changes are happening, and now we think of death as something that happens offstage, that we don’t see and children certainly shouldn’t see. But that was not possible until so recently.”

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The Morbid Anatomy Library popup at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Image


In 2014, Ms. Ebenstein and Tracy Hurley Martin spun the blog into a small museum of the same name in Brooklyn, which closed in 2016 but has been succeeded by a pop-up residency at Green-Wood Cemetery. By then, something had changed. “Now this stuff was cool,” she said.

Part of what changed was a funeral director in Los Angeles named Caitlin Doughty, who dressed like a lost member of the Addams Family and posted a series of plucky YouTube videos called “Ask a Mortician” that spoke frankly about corpses and decomposition and routinely topped 400,000 views. A typical opening line, from a video titled “All My Fave Graves,” went, “Something I’m always trying to get you to do is hang out with dead bodies.”

In April of 2013, Ms. Doughty tweeted, “Why are there a zillion websites and references for being sex positive but nothing for being death positive?”

With that, an inchoate curiosity had a brand name, a cachet and an internet presence. All it needed was an occasion to gather.

On a Monday evening at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, Emily Leshner, a graduate student in visual media anthropology, had a question about the end of life. Specifically, she wanted to discuss the issue of digital immortality: is it right for people’s social media profiles to live on when they die? “Our digital presence exists beyond our biological life,” she said. “It made me think what kind of person I’d want to be my legacy.”

It was the monthly gathering of the Lower East Side Death Cafe, one of a handful of death cafes that have formed in the last few years around the city. Jafar Al-Mondhiry, a resident in internal medicine, picked up Ms. Leshner’s question. He hoped to start a death-related podcast for other residents — a virtual death cafe. “Is social media a triumph over the body?” he asked.

Around two tables piled with carrots and other snacks, the conversations were lively and unstructured. Melanie Nilsson described taking her father’s cremated remains to all of his favorite restaurants for a year. Millet Israeli, a former corporate lawyer who changed careers to become a grief counselor, asked what sort of reactions the others got when they told friends they were attending a death cafe.

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A volunteer at the “Art of Death Midwifery” course taught at Sacred Crossings that aims to demystify death.Credit...

“They said, ‘Is that some sort of goth thing?’” Ms. Leshner said. “That it’s dark and trendy and cool.”

Death cafes, as a formal institution, began in East London in 2011, in the basement of a man named Jon Underwood, who quit his job as a business development director to create small gatherings where strangers could drink tea, eat cake and talk informally about death and dying. To encourage others to replicate his meetings, Mr. Underwood, who died at age 44 last year, published guidelines for discussions and a website for other death cafes to promote their meetings. The discussions have no leaders, are free or inexpensive, and are open to talk of all things death but are not support groups. The organization’s website claims to have initiated 6,503 death cafes in 56 countries.

Ms. Israeli, who facilitated the conversation at one table, met the women who started the Lower East Side group while they were all training as volunteer caregivers at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which takes a Buddhist approach to the end of life.

The death cafe, she said, “is almost like my form of activism to create an atmosphere publicly that permits talking about death. If we can talk about death and dying, maybe that will spread to easier conversations about grief and terminal illness.”

Ms. Israeli recalled a guided meditation at the Zen Center imagining her own death: the mouth becoming dry, the body shutting down, the attention becoming more internal. Even with all her work as a grief counselor, Ms. Israeli said, she was nervous going into it. “It seemed scary,” she said. “But the experience was the opposite. As heavy as that sounds, it made it feel lighter. It felt safer than it did going in.”

This is the odd math of the positive death activities. Embracing mortality, practitioners say, helps them live with less fear, more life.

On a Saturday morning at the Art of Dying Institute at the Open Center, Amy Cunningham led a discussion of different ways to hold a funeral, including at home. Ms. Cunningham, 63, worked as a journalist until she decided to go to mortuary school at age 54. “I thought it was going to be like becoming a real estate agent,” she said.

Ms. Cunningham discussed alternatives to embalming — which involves toxic chemicals — and coffins made of wool or other materials that decompose easily. The group included 24 women and two men.

“We’re part of a movement, and it’s really a return to a female presence at the time of death,” Ms. Cunningham said.

Several of those attending worked in hospice or in the funeral trade. Others had enrolled after the deaths of people close to them.

Hillary Spector, who attended, teaches art in primary school and directs and acts in theater. Ms. Spector recently trained to volunteer as a death doula and joined a synagogue to meet people who might use her services.

“It’s a bit macabre,” she said, “but I’ve always been superfascinated by dying — the physiological processes, but also this idea of what happens to our consciousness. I don’t believe in heaven or an afterlife.

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Hillary Spector, an art teacher, recently trained to volunteer as a death doula.

“I also feel that decomposition is deeply spiritual. One of the things that draws people to this work is that we don’t have a basis in religion. That’s why a lot of people are becoming part of this death positive movement.”

Others offer different explanations for why all this is happening now. The AIDS crisis transformed grief and caregiving into expressions of community. The mass shootings on the news call for examination: What if today was your last day? The rising interest in Buddhism introduced alternative concepts of dying. And the aging population brought more urgency to questions of how people want to consider the last years.

Also, death has a bright future: the number of Americans dying annually is expected to rise by more than one-third in the next 20 years. In a social media landscape where fringe topics find large constituencies, death is a taboo that connects to everyone.

“We got so far removed from death even being an option that we finally got sick of it being closeted,” said Suzanne O’Brien, a former nurse who now trains end-of-life doulas and hosts a podcast called “Ask a Death Doula.”

“The first step is recognizing that death is a natural part of life’s journey,” Ms. O’Brien said. “We can have it go well or have it go poorly. They say death and taxes are the only things guaranteed in life. But people don’t pay their taxes. So I’m saying death is the only one that’s for sure.”

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Unlike most, Shatzi Weisberger knows exactly how many people came to her funeral.

At the FUN-eral, Ms. Weisberger showed off a burial shroud she plans to use when her time comes. She bought it online, from Amazon, she thinks. Three friends have agreed to wash her body according to Jewish tradition, and Ms. Cunningham — who supplied the cardboard coffin — will provide dry ice to preserve her body before burial, she said.

On the wall was a quote from Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who died in 2011: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” Ms. Weisberger found it on WeCroak.

“I was about to give up on WeCroak until I saw this,” she said.

Ms. Weisberger assured her friends that she was in no hurry to occupy the coffin in the corner. Her health was good and her studies in death and dying gave her motivation to keep going, maybe to age 100, she said.

After all, she had too much work to do to stop now.

“I really want to experience my dying,” she told the crowd. “I don’t want to die in a car crash or be unconscious. I want to be home, I want to be in my bed, I want to share the experience with anybody who’s interested.”

It has been the journey of a lifetime, she said, and the last chapter was still to come.

“There’s so much more to share, but I don’t want to go on — no, I really do want to go on,” she said.

Everybody laughed. For one afternoon, death did not get the last word.

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Ms. Weisberger happily receives well-wishers, though is in no hurry to leave this world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/nyre ... -life.html