The Good Funeral Guide

“I was just thinking about my funeral and stuff a couple days ago and thinking who would be at the funeral. People who I want to be in the funeral? I wanna have world leaders that were, like, affected, that said, you know, ‘Kanye gave me my shot here.’”

Kanye West

As you may have guessed, we are pretty short of stuff to say here at the GFG. The old year is waning and you’re distracted by getting ready for Christmas. We are all winding down. 

All except him, of course.

We’ll do our best to bring you news and views as they happen, but don’t expect the usual torrent. 

In a very good article which addresses society’s need to address the consequences of technological advances in medicine, Dr Alex Lickerman says this:

The notion that dying is a right seems nonsensical to argue:  death is given to all of us equally without the need of anyone’s sanction.  The right to die well, on the other hand—well, that’s another matter entirely.  A good death is, in many cases, something our fellow human beings have great power to grant or deny, and is therefore, sadly, a right for which we must indeed fight. 

The notion that we’d even need to fight for the right to die well has only come to make sense relatively recently, within the last forty years or so.  Prior to that, our ability to prolong dying—meaning, keep extremely ill people going in hopes that they might overcome whatever health problem threatens even when the likelihood is vanishingly small—was actually fairly limited.  But with the advent of modern intensive care units and all the amazing technology that’s emerged in the last four decades, we can now stretch the quantity of out our last days often to weeks or even months.  Unfortunately, a similar stretching of quality hasn’t yet occurred; if anything, we see the opposite (to be fair, the same technology also stretches some lives to years and even decades, meaning it’s enabled some people to recover from insults that in the past would have undoubtedly killed them).

… … …

Though I’m pledged to prolong life where I can, I’m also pledged to alleviate pointless suffering.  Thus, I very much believe in the right of people to freely choose the method and time of their own demise when they find themselves in circumstances where such a choice has become the only option to relieve their pointless suffering.  We remain profoundly uncomfortable as a society with this position, but our own technological advances will eventually force us to embrace it.  As more and more people die in needless pain and more and more people sit watching, eventually, I believe, we will accumulate enough collective experience to make peace with the notion that what we currently do with our pets is far more humane than what we mostly do with each other.

Read the entire article here. 

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Dear Abby: “Saddened in New Jersey” (Oct. 2) complained that her sister’s 4-year-old daughter put stickers on the hands and face of her deceased grandmother during her wake.

Find out what Abby said next here. 

Even here in the hushed and sepulchral atmosphere of the GFG-Batesville Tower the spirit of Christmas has seeped like moisture past a casket gasket. We customarily talk of nothing but death here, but at times of festivity we allow our minds to wander among peri-mortal matters. Here’s a bit of fun. The singers are all nurse-anaesthetists from Minnesota. 

Hat tip to Archa Robinson for this, via Not Totally Rad.

Smot is performed at Cambodian funerals to prompt people to think about the meaning of their lives.

Smot is not only for funerals, but also other occasions, such as Pchum Ben, the birthday of the king or queen and other religious ceremonies.

The teachings of the chants remind us of the inexorable forces of change from birth to death.

“I fear this tradition may not last long. These art forms will be lost if we do not care about them.”

[Source]

I first heard Adele’s song at the funeral of a young boy who died by suicide earlier this year. Songs are like that. They can become woven around memories of events that made a strong emotional impact on us. The depth of grief I witnessed among his friends was heartbreaking. One of them who spoke during the funeral could barely hold himself together. The life he had known was shattered; the future he might have had with his friend had been stolen from him. Grief had wounded him in a way he had possibly never known until that moment.

Read the whole article in the Irish Times here. 

“But our machines have now been running 70 or 80 years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1814