Return to Book Page. In "A Practical Guide to Death and Dying," consciousness researcher John White provides a thorough, compassionate look at death and explores the biology, psychology, and metaphysics of one's own demise. In addition to recounting the personal stories of those who have developed a healthy attitude toward death, White also offers a program for personal action. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Shashank Singh rated it really liked it Jul 25, Ryusho rated it really liked it May 15, Jessica Schmidt rated it liked it Nov 14, Krysta marked it as to-read Nov 11, Cosimo Books added it Jan 12, Joe marked it as to-read Feb 03, Josef marked it as to-read Apr 15, Harry John Venema marked it as to-read Dec 03, Yasser Kareem marked it as to-read Apr 02, Bijan Kiani marked it as to-read Apr 21, Victoria Manning marked it as to-read Feb 24, Geo marked it as to-read Apr 29, Vin-Diesel marked it as to-read Dec 10, She is here to be my caregiver.
Personna not only ensures Bowers makes it to his various medical appointments and takes his daily regimen of medications but also provides companionship. They also share many of the same friends and can reminisce about their younger days in the city. Bowers has designated an executor for his estate and thought about how he would prefer to be cared for at the end of his life.
He expects to live out his days in San Francisco, though Bowers said if he could afford it he would spend the rest of his days in Paris or somewhere tropical, like Tahiti or the jungles of South America. When somebody dies in the Catholic tradition, people generally know what to do. When Iris Explosion — an entertainer and social worker who prefers to go by her stage name — was widowed unexpectedly at age 28, she and her friends had to create the memorial service for her husband, Jon, from scratch.
The memorial service her friends created a few days after his death, she says, contained a blend of traditions and practices individual to Jon. Friends from out of town dialed in on Skype to share their stores.
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Numerous friends gave Explosion rose quartz, a stone associated in some New Age and occult traditions with heart healing, as a gift. Explosion is just one person among the 24 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated. But what do secular funerals — or death rituals more broadly — look like? What are the challenges involved in putting them together? And as secular funerals become increasingly individualistic, tailored to the preferences and needs of the deceased, rather than a given religious or spiritual tradition, what does that mean for the sense of community engendered by ritual?
Scholar and psychologist Philip Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life , suggested in a telephone interview that secular funerals are just the latest iteration of the secularization of major life stages overall. Its genesis, he said, lies in the proliferation of secular weddings in America. In , just 22 percent of American weddings took place in houses of worship, a nearly point drop from , according to data from the wedding website the Knot. Different states have different laws about the extent to which Universal Life ordinations are legally valid for performing weddings.
Funerals, however, have no such restrictions. More and more, Zuckerman said, he sees people choosing their own music and their own speeches that they want to be read after they die. This attitude, he said, is particularly prevalent in the United States. Someone might, for example, be a committed Christian but also practice Buddhist meditation or yoga, or be an atheist but attend Jewish family holidays and read tarot cards.
In a pluralist landscape, in which people are used to gathering information and ideas from multiple sources not least through the internet , a more individualized approach to religion and life rituals is all but inevitable. Even for those of traditional faiths, death is a phenomenon that defies easy answers. But for the religiously unaffiliated, processing and dealing with death and its aftermath can be an especially loaded task.
Wolfe is the founder of the week-long Reimagine End of Life festival. The festival, which takes place in New York and San Francisco, partners with community centers and artists to curate a strong series of events — from talks to workshops to performances to museum displays — dealing with the subject of death. The New York festival, which took place around Halloween, featured a range of explorations: What connects each event is a sense of intentionally: Ideally, both say, it involves elements of ritual, community gathering, and a sense of meaning: At least two Reimagine events are, fundamentally, immersive theater performances.
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In another, participants role-play members of a fictional bereavement support group. Speaking about these events, Wolfe argued that the lines between art, ritual, religion, and performance are deeply blurred. What matters is the sense of significance shared by participants: The idea or combining artistic creation and end-of-life ritual is far from new to Janie Rakow, president of the International End of Life Doula Association. While she works with patients from a wide variety of religious backgrounds through the hospice, she tailors her work and approach to the individual in question.
One of the most important parts of the end-of-life process, she says, is the act of creation. Next, she asks patients to help plan their own death — where they would like to be? What music they would like to be listening to? Often, Rakow says, these rituals are tailored to individual passions. She gives the example of one man she worked with, who was dying from ALS, a degenerative neurological condition that prevented him from being able to move.
One of the most difficult parts of creating secular death rituals is compensating for the lack of built-in community, or built-in structure, that often accompanies more established religious traditions. You want your kid to go through confirmation class in the Episcopal Church? If you want to do a secular version of that? You have to figure it out, explain it to people, rent the space, find people, figure out how to write up your own program. The lack of intentional secular communities, Zuckerman said, only intensifies this problem. Just as Friendsgiving has become a phenomenon among urban millennials, friendship networks more broadly have become an increasingly vital part of social cohesion, replacing both extended family structures and traditional organized religious communities.
A Practical Guide to Death and Dying by John Warren White
That was certainly the case for Explosion. At the same time, she says, she had less of a blueprint for how to cope with the next stages of grief after about six months. Without a church or synagogue to bind us together, it maybe felt like it dissipated. People missed their friend and their co-worker. We have the opportunity to curate our identities and public personae event after death, creating experiences that feel unique to us. On the other hand, what risks getting lost in the process is precisely that feeling of collective identity that demands subsuming our individuality in a wider whole.
As more and more Americans leave organized religion, the next question is whether, and how, many of them will gather together, and how an increasingly individualistic conception of identity can be reconciled with the real, human need for group belonging. As secular funerals and death rituals become the new standard, we may see some of these rituals become more group-centric. For Explosion, for example, the process of grieving led her to an unexpected new ritual. While she never particularly got into the game, she said, she enjoyed playing it with him.
Sometimes, Explosion communicates with other players in the game online. He did this in the old game. The secular funeral liturgies we see in the future may transition from being individualistic to being based on other nonreligious elements that bring a community together. They may involve the music of My Little Pony or the playing of video games.
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And second — and just as importantly — to not do it alone. Ira Byock, 67, founder and chief medical director at the Providence St. Which is exactly where throats start to get cleared and the death-phobic among us try to edge toward the exits. Because no matter the fact that each and every person alive to read this must one day perish, none of us wants to perish. Particularly not in misery and solitude.
That number is catching the eyes of cost-cutting politicians.
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All this penny-pinching has caused Byock to turn a jaundiced eye to the spate of now-legal physician-assisted death states: Excuse me if it just seems a little too convenient to me. Working one of his first physician gigs after med school in a rural Montana emergency room for about 14 years, Byock created a clinical assessment tool that measured the quality of life for people who are suffering. His prescriptions for the medical-industrial complex now include listening to patients, formulating care plans for disease and symptom treatments, helping them sleep, helping them move their bowels, addressing family needs and perhaps most importantly training doctors to do this early.
So medical schools have to teach about caring for seriously ill or dying people up to and including the ethics of decision making, and should face financial penalties if they fail to do so. Byock talks about learning to listen, being sensitive to older patient needs — and then comes the needle-scratching-across-the record moment when he brings up psychedelics.
Byock is pushing the U. In , three-quarters of all U.
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Best we do so the best ways we can. Byock and an ad hoc group of like-minded experts propose the following public policy planks to improve end-of-life care: Each evening, Tina Castanares sits with her year-old mother and reviews the next day. Castanares tells her mother who will wake her up in the morning and help her get ready for the day.
A recent study says that nearly half of all Oregonians who have died since the form was created had one filled out and the percentage of people doing so has only grown. In that same time frame, the number of deaths in Oregon by natural causes increased nearly 13 percent while the number of forms filled out by nearly 66 percent. Researchers say that indicates the popularity of the form has grown independent of the size of the population who would need it.
Oregon has led the country in palliative care in several ways. Oregon also has the most robust registry that any doctor or emergency worker can access in seconds. Paramedics in Oregon are allowed to start CPR or other resuscitation techniques on a person in a medical crisis at their own discretion. But the chance of it working can be as low as 3 percent for people who are permanent residents of a nursing home. However, the number of people who want extensive medical care in emergency situations has increased, according to the study. About 13 percent of people who had a POLST form filled out when they died in to requested every life-saving measure, whereas only 8 percent did in to And sometimes those desires change over time.
Many people fill out more than one POLST over the course of their life, Tolle said, as their diagnosis changes or they experience new ailments. For people 95 and older, nearly 60 percent have a form — an increase of 83 percent over the last five years. But even people in their 60s and 70s have filled out the forms at a growing rate. Many people who are frail or have weak immune systems die suddenly from pneumonia or complications relating to disease. Tolle also said that people with memory or dementia conditions have started to fill out forms years before they expect to die.
But Tolle said that might be excluding people who want to state their needs early and often.
Grief, as you might have sadly discovered, is like a river that takes us where it wants us to go. Gay grief is marginalized. My girlfriend of I was not invited to the funeral hosted by her family. And compared to many of my gay sisters and brothers, I got off easy. There are thousands of members of our community who cannot even tell their employers that the love of their life has died for fear of losing their job, and much worse. The current administration has unleashed a culture of hate that is once again stacking the deck against us.
Beautiful families with same-sex parents are scrambling to lock down their rights in the event that rulings are overturned. Many are forced to conceal their true selves for fear of harassment. This dread and anxiety, especially among our trans family members, is making access to proper healthcare a terrifying experience. Homosexuality is illegal in 73 countries. While not criminal in the U. If you lose your precious love, you might be denied a proper grieving process. This grief is forceful, commanding and unpredictable. We must grieve the loss of our loved one and the person we became with our love by our side.
If a long-term illness is the ultimate cause of death, will the medical staff be considerate and respectful of your relationship? How will you manage the discussions with the funeral home and cemetery arrangements? Are you afraid to tell your boss and co-workers about your relationship? These are questions straight people never have to ask. Gay grief is often not taken as seriously as the bereavement process is for a hetero relationship.
They might not even try to console you.