Posts Tagged ‘Death & Dying’

Don’t mention the D word

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Phil Brown; 5/5/10; No Internet Text; Australian Literary Review

Curtains; By Tom Jokinen; UQP,279pp,
The Deadly Dinner Party; By Jonathan A. Edlow’ New South,245pp,
The D-Word; By Sue Brayne; Continuum, 72pp,

In this trinity of books about disease, death and dying, the authors muse on the fact that, as a culture, we are reluctant to acknowledge our mortality.
- Why is this so?  Surely the answer is in the category of the bleeding obvious. Why confront the grim reaper before you need to? But it’s this attitude that makes talking about death one of our most enduring taboos. As far as Canadian writer Tom Jokinen is concerned the only way to deal with such a no-go zone is to go there, which he did by chucking in his job as a journalist and radio producer to become an apprentice undertaker at a funeral parlour in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnipeg is a good choice, Jokinen writes, as it has “more funeral homes than Starbucks outlets”.

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Veil of secrecy screens funeral home outrages

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Kate Benson and Mellisa Singer, 2/5/10

Funeral directors are furious at moves to deregulate their industry, saying a catalogue of horrifying abuses, such as a decaying corpse that was put on display at a funeral this year, will escalate if rogue operators are allowed to flourish. Hundreds of operators wrote to the NSW Health Department last week after reports that a teenager’s body, which his parents paid to have embalmed, was presented rotting and maggot-infested at his funeral. In other cases being investigated, a bloodied body was hosed down in a public car wash bay at Coffs Harbour, and human remains were discarded in the council’s regular garbage collection at Blacktown.

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The ethical minefield of bringing back the dead

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Clare Skinner; 16/2/10

Dr Clare Skinner is an emergency registrar and a founding member of the Hospital Reform Group.

A friend and I, the other day, happened upon a heavily tattooed man. ”Would you ever get a tattoo?” I asked my friend. ”Eww, no!” he responded. ”I just can’t imagine anything that I would still want marked on my body when I am 80 years old. ”On second thoughts, the only tattoo I would contemplate getting is one that says ‘Do Not Resuscitate’, right in the middle of my chest.” Having seen cardiac arrests in action – chest compressions, defibrillation, intubation – most friends and colleagues in acute health care would choose not to be resuscitated, unless the chances of coming out alive, cognitively and physically intact, far outweighed the discomfort and risk. Yet we increasingly subject our patients to futile care, painful and expensive tests, which will not change outcomes and treatments that prolong, but do not improve, life.

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Passing on, but not quite

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Jacob Simet; 24/5/09;

Melly ToPaivu, a prominent Tolai man, stages his own cultural death ritual while he is still alive;

Death means different things to different people in different places. For the agnostics, death is simply the end of a person’s life and no part of him or her exists thereafter, except perhaps the memories of them held by the living. For those who believe in theologies which include spiritual dimensions, death is the end of one phase of a person’s life but marks the transition into an afterlife, mostly in spiritual form, such as the soul. There are others still who believe that death is merely the means through which a person changes into anther form, such as an animal which continues to exist in the same place. Whatever the cosmological structure, almost everywhere; death is a phenomenon which captures everyone imagination, as it has done for millennia.

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A sorrow compounded by the absence of ceremony

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Jenni Russell; 7/2/09;

My father died just before Christmas. He was nearly 80; he had been ill. Intellectually and rationally there should have been nothing startling about his death. It is part of the pattern of things. Yet I have been as stunned by his death, and the utter absence of him, as if I never knew that human beings had a lifespan. I did understand that people die. I didn’t understand how the loss would feel. Perhaps it’s something one can never grasp until it has happened, because the imagination refuses to go there. But it’s also that death has been so removed from our daily experience that it has become almost embarrassingly private. We have gone from the strict and public mourning rituals of the Victorian era, with widows in heavy black clothes for a year and a day, and men in black armbands to signify loss, to having no mechanisms to signal our sadness at all.

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Canberra to tackle organ donation rules

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Julia Medew; 2210/08 (2 Items)

The Federal Government is considering national guidelines on organ donation after cardiac death, because of inconsistent policies among states and territories. Senator Jan McLucas, who oversees the Government’s organ donation policy, yesterday said all governments would discuss the introduction of consistent guidelines this year before the new Australian Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Authority begins operation in January. In Australia, organ donation is possible after cardiac death – when the circulation of blood has ceased – if it is known death is imminent and there is no chance of survival. But two sets of guidelines, written by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the NSW Department of Health, clash on what is permitted in such circumstances.

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Occasion of Happiness

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Ruth Ostrow; 23/8/08

Earlier this month I was invited to what might be considered a strange event. A leading international businessman hosted what was described on the invitation as an event to celebrate “An occasion of Happiness” in Sydney for a gathering of his Australian friends; many of whom were corporate identities. The celebration felt like a wedding or engagement party. Guests were seated at tables in a lovely hotel; it was beautifully catered. But while there was speculation as to the “real reason” for the event, including the host’s birthday which was coming soon, he maintained that he merely wanted to “celebrate life, love and those close to me”.

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Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Making sense of the journey Home
Lyndal Irons, 20/8/08
Dying has so much to teach us about life. There are also ways to help make a dying person’s journey more meaningful, as Lyndal Irons discovers. Nobody dies in Western society, says the Rev. Raymond Green, Senior Chaplain with the Ambulance Service of New South Wales. “We don’t like the words ‘dead’ or ‘death’. If you read some of the Helen Steiner Rice cards, people ‘move into the other room’ or they ‘pass away’ or they are ‘lost’. But nobody dies.” While side-stepping the word may bring some comfort to people who find the issue of mortality dark and upsetting, there are others who believe that, by refusing to speak about death frankly, we are missing out on some powerful teachings. After around 40 years in medicine, 20 of those as a palliative care physician, most would understand if Michael Barbato retired. The problem is that there’s too much to learn from the people he works with.

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Navigating life after death

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Sharon Gray; 22/7/08

Some years ago four people very close to me died, almost in a row. Writing about it here attracted the attention of a then new grief and bereavement organisation, where I still volunteer. Death is my old friend. Last week we hosted the eighth International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society. Heart-wrenching stories from six bereaved individuals preceded the keynote speakers – psychologists and a social worker with many, many diagrams. These are the two arms of a developing science, well-grounded within the context of the most common sample group: white, middleclass, middle-aged widows in developed countries. (Not much colour among the 680 mostly female delegates from 17 countries attending 174 presentations.)

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