“Families that live and purchased their homes there never once thought there would be a funeral home and the reminder of death on a daily basis.”
Mayor Dennis Michael speaks for the townspeople of Rancho Cucamonga, California, in opposition to plans to open a funeral home.
Plans for the Joy of Death Festival 2013 are cooking.
Of course, we want it to be even braver, bigger, brighter and more brilliant than last year’s, where we staged talks by leading lights of Funeralworld, held the funeral industry’s first-ever Oscars, the Good Funeral Awards, hosted a Sky TV documentary film crew dedicated to the event (it’s out in the spring, btw), attracted publicity worldwide, supplied two speakers for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday programme with the Rev Richard Cole — and enjoyed a weekend by the sea in Bournemouth, Britain’s closest rival to Copacabana.
If you have any brilliant ideas to throw into the ring, now is the time to do it. Please, please do. This event is massively collaborative.
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Contact Brian: serenity@joyofdeath.co.uk
See you there!!
“The end of life can be big drama, that’s for sure. In nearly a decade of doing this work, I’ve witnessed momentous final decisions; conversations carried on with mysterious, unseen figures; visions of the afterlife; and eleventh-hour forgiveness. We release each other–one back to the seen, known world and one into the unseen, unknown–and are ourselves released.”
Dying got so protracted and difficult it became necessary to invent the living will — a list of opt-ins and opt-outs during the last days/weeks/months. If you haven’t made one, you know you should.
What a living will does not record, because it doesn’t need to, is something we also all need to decide for ourselves, preferably as far in advance as possible. It is: what will we do if the prognosis is terminal, but we are offered chemotherapy?
It’ll mean balancing side-effects against time bought. It’ll mean a very down-to-earth discussion with the doctor. And it’ll be vitally important that we don’t kid ourselves, the side-effects may not be worth it.
Most people, according to this article, do kid themselves. In a survey, over 1,100 patients with a recent diagnosis of stage IV lung or colon cancer who had opted to receive chemotherapy were asked what their expectations of their treatment were. 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of colon cancer patients reckoned that a cure was “very likely,” “somewhat likely” or “a little likely”.
In other words, they misunderstood why they were receiving chemotherapy. And they’re all dead.
Doctors know that people can be unrealistically optimistic in the face of an insuperable tumour. There’s this idiotic notion that cancer is a test of character, it can be defeated by willpower (and only losers surrender, presumably). Yes, we can easily delude ourselves.
The survey also reveals that patients who awarded their doctors best scores for communication were the ones with the most wildly optimistic expectations of their chemotherapy.