“It is costly to our society in general, quite beyond the church, not to observe the death of a person in a way that witnesses to the dignity of the person and the meaning of life and death.”
Thomas G Long
Archive: 20 June 2012
Can you help?
Space burial is about sending a portion of cremation ashes into space, then releasing them so that they can orbit the Earth.
Up in Glasgow, Tom Walkinshaw is developing his own space burial programme. It’s ambitious stuff. He’s won an award from Glasgow Caledonian University and he has the support of the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust.
Tom is carrying out a survey to find out more about what people want, and he has appealed to the readers of the GFG to tell him what they think.
We very much hope you’ll help him out. You can do that by going over to the survey — it’s very short — here.
Find Tom’s website here.
Thank you!
Different cultures, different customs
Very interesting photo-essay here about the ghats at Varanasi. Good text, too.
Sometimes poorer people cannot afford enough wood to completely burn a body. In this case charred body parts are simply flung into the river with the ashes. Certain people, such as small children, pregnant women and holy men, are not cremated at all, but instead simply have their bodies weighted down with stones and are dropped into the Ganges. Not too pleasant for the many bathers around the ghats.
As a solution to the problem of human remains clogging up the Ganges, snapping turtles were bred and released into the river specifically to eat the corpses and bones. A good idea, maybe, but since bodies and body parts are still seen floating around the river today, perhaps not as effective as originally hoped.
Doctors need to grieve, too
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times here about the emotional difficulties doctors experience when working with people who are going to die. People often characterise doctors as cold and uncaring when, in fact, they may simply not be coping:
We found that oncologists struggled to manage their feelings of grief with the detachment they felt was necessary to do their job. More than half of our participants reported feelings of failure, self-doubt, sadness and powerlessness as part of their grief experience, and a third talked about feelings of guilt, loss of sleep and crying.
Our study indicated that grief in the medical context is considered shameful and unprofessional. Even though participants wrestled with feelings of grief, they hid them from others because showing emotion was considered a sign of weakness. In fact, many remarked that our interview was the first time they had been asked these questions or spoken about these emotions at all.
Even more distressing, half our participants reported that their discomfort with their grief over patient loss could affect their treatment decisions with subsequent patients — leading them, for instance, to provide more aggressive chemotherapy, to put a patient in a clinical trial, or to recommend further surgery when palliative care might be a better option.
Unease with losing patients also affected the doctors’ ability to communicate about end-of-life issues with patients and their families. Half of our participants said they distanced themselves and withdrew from patients as the patients got closer to dying. This meant fewer visits in the hospital, fewer bedside visits and less overall effort directed toward the dying patient.
Oncologists are not trained to deal with their own grief, and they need to be. In addition to providing such training, we need to normalize death and grief as a natural part of life, especially in medical settings.
To improve the quality of end-of-life care for patients and their families, we also need to improve the quality of life of their physicians, by making space for them to grieve like everyone else.