Link: Celebrate Life
Celebrate Life allows users to create an online tribute including photos and stories that can be accessed via a QR Code embedded in a tombstone. The company also allows customers to order headstone cleaning and flowers online.
Author: Raine
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Books: All the Living and the Dead
When I think of people who work with the dead, I think of people who work in funeral homes, including funeral directors and embalmers, police detectives and that’s about it. However, in her entertaining book All the Living and the Dead, Haley Campbell identified several more professions that work with the dead, including crime scene cleaner and death mask sculptor. She did, however, skip the death scene investigator.
Campbell explains that she became fascinated with death when her cartoonist father was working on a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. Campbell started doing drawings of her own and was fascinated by not on the the fact that someone could be alive one moment and dead the next, but also by what physically happened to a body when it died.
All the Living and the Dead, follows Campbell as she seeks to better understand death and those that work with it. Her first interview with a death worker is when she visits Poppy’s funeral home in London and gets to assist in preparing a body for a viewing. She also learns about bodies donated to scene when she visits with Terry, who runs the Anatomical Services lab at the Mayo Clinic in MN. He is responsible for taking care of the bodies and making sure they are respected. Part of his role is dissecting bodies prior to classes so that if medical students are studying hips, that is what they see. However, although parts of his job are gruesome and bloody, Terry always makes sure to maintain his patients humanity such as the time after doctors were practicing face transplants, he made sure that the faces were swapped back so that every person left his morgue for cremation or burial with the correct face.
Another death related career that Campbell explored was disaster victim identification. She interviewed Mark Oliver from Kenyon whose job it was to assemble teams to fly to disaster sites at a moment’s notice to help with identifying the dead. The company also helped with the softer side of disaster recovery, including fielding questions from the media and making arrangements for family members to fly to disaster sites. Kenyon has considered things that few people think about when preparing for disasters, such as not serving barbecued meat at a fire site. Their warehouses are packed with gear designed to retrieve and identify human remains to help grieving families.
It was not the overwhelming gruesomeness of disaster recovery or even crime scene cleaning that most impacted Campbell, it was when she was observing an Anatomical Pathology Technician do an autopsy on a baby and when the baby was being washed it slipped beneath the water and even though it was already dead, Campbell felt as if she was watching the child drown. That moment more than anything seemed to make the fragility of life and the finality of death real for Campbell, and it led her to seek out a death worker who hadn’t been on her original list: a bereavement midwife.
Bereavement midwife’s help mothers whose children are stillborn or who die shortly after birth. If it is known that a child will not survive, they are taken to a special wing at Heartland Hospital in Birmingham so they will not be exposed to the happiness and joy that normally accompanies a child’s birth. The special Eden Ward at Heartland caters to parents who will not go home with a child. The specially trained midwifes are there to help parents with their loss by providing tiny caskets and by doing what they can to memorializing these tiny lives.
As a thanatologist, I seek out a lot of books on death, but this book was an impulse read that I’m really glad I read. Most of it is upbeat and provides a sense of how carrying people who work with the dead–and their living loved ones–really are.
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Books: What the Dead Know
True crime aficionados know that medical examiners, like the late great Dr. Donald Mallard (Ducky) on NCIS, talk to the dead and the dead talk back. It is not unusual when watching an episode of NCIS to hear Ducky, or his successor, holding a one-sided conversation with the corpse on the table. These conversations include laments about the deceased’s death as well as questions about what killed them. These conversations serve as a way to advance the plot and also show that the MEs have not forgotten the humanity of the corpse.
Although the conversation with corpses is minimal in What the Dead Know, Butcher does help the living understand what can be learned from corpses and crime scenes. Butcher spent 23 years as a New York City Death Investigator. She was not responsible for autopsying the dead, but was responsible for visiting death scenes around the city to photograph and gather evidence. Her clients included the elderly who died alone in one bedroom apartments, murder victims in alleys, and the desperate who die by suicide.
She opens with the story of a man who died by hanging, but who intended to electrocute whoever cut him down. He had unscrewed all the light bulbs and set it up to look as if the power was out in his apartment. However, he plugged in a power cord and used that to hang himself. If Butcher had not had a torn tendon and been unable to cut him down, she would have been electrocuted. She caught it through reviewing photos and was able to alert the morgue techs who did cut him down. Other stories include stories of men who died in flophouses and women who died in multimillion dollar townhouses.
Butcher was on sick leave on 09/11/2001 and like many of us she turned on her TV after someone called to tell her that something was going on in New York. She watched the tower’s fall from the perspective of a death scene investigator. As she watched, she thought about all the people who might have died, wondered how they would find their bodies, and how they would be identified. She was able to enter the city on 09/12 and she tells the tale of an insider who helped identify the bodies, helped coordinate resources, and was there in the aching aftermath when all that helpers could do was identify bodies and console the living.
Although the title of the book is What the Dead Know, this book is not only about what the dead can teach us about life in general, it is also about what happens to a person when they live in a world of death and destruction, when they spend 8 hours or more every day looking at dead people. Butcher is an alcoholic and she suffered a breakdown that led her to lose her first career and led her to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. She loved her job and did it well for 23 years, but when she was forced out, all the pain and ugliness she had absorbed for 23 years demanded to be let out. Butcher sought help at an in-patient facility and worked to regain her mental health. When she came out, she was more in touch with her feelings and ready for her next career as an author and an actor.
What the Dead Know provides a fascinating look at the world of death investigations and what goes on behind the scenes, but it is also a very human book about the dangers of keeping all our pain bottled up.
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Podcasts: All There is With Anderson Cooper
Link: All There is with Anderson Cooper
In the last episode of this podcast, Anderson played voicemails from people who shared their grief with him and one of these voicemails was from a mother who said she shared her grief because it was a way to help other people and that it was like headlights in a white out storm. That sums up this podcast overall because as Anderson puts himself out there he serves as a light in the darkness for others.
This amazing podcast isn’t full of shoulds and shouldn’ts, but simply provides stories and lessons from people famous and not so famous who have lost people they loved. Some of the more famous are Ashley Judd, who lost her mom to suicide, and Joe Biden, who lost his first wife and daughter when his sons were younger and who lost his son to brain cancer. This podcast doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff like death by suicide and the death of people who were difficult.
I also like that most of the podcasts are less than 40 minutes, which are long enough to make you care about the story, but not so long as to be hard to listen to.
A note about podcast reviews: In reviewing podcasts, I cannot say that I have listened to all episodes, but I have listened to at least three episodes in order to write a good review.
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Movies: Elizabethtown
Elizabethtown is a romantic comedy centered around a death and a funeral. The movie opens on the worst day of Drew’s life. He is a shoe designer and his latest shoe design is a colossal failure that is going to cost his company almost $1 billion. He goes home, rigs up a suicide machine, and is ready to take his own life when his sister calls crying. Their father, who was visiting his hometown in Kentucky, has died of a heart attack. Drew’s suicide plans are put on hold as it is decided that he’ll go to Kentucky to have their father, Mitch, cremated and return with his ashes.
Drew picks up his father’s favorite blue suit from his mother’s home and heads to the airport. He is the only passenger on the plane and a very talkative flight attendant, Claire, sits next to him for most of the ride. She chats about anything and everything and gives him directions from the Louisville Airport to Elizabethtown. She stresses the need not to miss exit 60B. She follows him off the plane and gives him a coupon, which he later finds she’s written her numbers on.
Elizabethtown is a small town in Kentucky where it seems everyone knew his father. Drew goes to his aunt’s house, where he meets father’s family. Some of them he has met when he was a child, but others he has never encountered before. His father’s family has very definite ideas about Mitch’s funeral, as they intend for him to be buried in the plot his family has owned for over 200 years. Cremation is definitely not deemed acceptable for Mitch, a war hero and from what we can tell an all around good guy. While Drew is meeting the family in Kentucky, his mother is trying to outrun her grief by fixing the car, learning to cook, and tap dance.
One lonely night at the Brown Hotel, Drew calls Claire, and they talk all night, then agree to meet to watch the sunrise. They realize there is a definite connection, and Claire skips her trip to Hawaii to be there for Drew. Drew ends up having his father cremated and his mother and sister fly in from Oregon to attend the memorial service, and Mitch’s family buries his blue suit and medals in the family plot. Drew takes the road trip with his father that they had kept putting off and as he is following Claire’s meticulous instructions, he finds her waiting for him at the Second Biggest Flea Market in the country. And then there is happily ever after.
On the surface, this is just a fun rom com that happens to be centered around a funeral, but it is so much more than this from a human perspective. We start off with Drew wanting to die because of his colossal failure at work, but then a phone call from his mother and the need to be there for his family puts life into perspective, and he pulls himself together to be there for his family. This is something that many of us can relate to as death has a tendency to put things into perspective and helps us to realize that as long as we and our loved ones are still breathing there is hope that things will turn out okay.
Deaths and funerals have a tendency to bring together people from different aspects of people’s lives. The work people. The church people. The friends. The family. Elizabethtown did a nice job of illustrating how different people see different aspects of someone’s personality. Mitch’s Kentucky family knew him when he was a child and schoolboy. They shared stories of his growing up and interacting with his family. His Army buddies knew him as a hero. And his wife and children knew him as a beloved husband and father. His wife Hollie told about how they had met and how she knew his kin in Elizabeth town thought she had stolen him away.
Hollie’s grief was on full display at Mitch’s memorials, but unlike other depictions of grief where the widow would have been shown crying and inconsolable, Hollie was funny and honest. She talked about taking dance and cooking lessons as a way to avoid her grief. She talked about wanting to be brave and strong by fixing the car herself. And she spoke about the unmentionable when she mentioned a male friend who hugged her and suggested he could help with her grief while he got a boner. She had the audience in tears and in stitches and while they may have thought she stole their Mitch, in the end they embraced her as a grieving family member.
Funerals and memorial services run the gamut from the solemn and staid to rowdy Irish wakes to fisticuffs. And Mitch’s funeral was no exception. In addition to Hollie’s raucous tribute, Mitch’s nephew Jesse gets his band back together for a ripping rendition of Freebird complete with a paper bird on a wire that is meant to fly the length of the ballroom. Unfortunately, the bird gets lit on fire, and it’s flight through the ballroom brings flames and mayhem. Although most memorial services don’t end with a paper bird going down in flames, a lot do end in mayhem as people’s emotions are raw. After the mayhem of the memorial service, we cut to the cemetery, where we see how the cremation versus burial debate ends. Mitch has been cremated, but his family buries his suit in the family’s plot.
This movie was a wonderful, although at times overblown, depiction of what loss and grief is like in the real world. It is a mix of emotions that can range from tears to laughter over fun memories. There is no one way to grieve and we need to be generous in our grief. And in the end it is about love: love for the one who has left and love for one another.
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Movies: The Bucket List
Carter Chambers, a blue collar mechanic who gave up his dreams of being a history professor, and Edward Cole, a four-times divorced billionaire, are an unlikely pair, except for one commonality: terminal cancer. They meet because Edward Cole, who owns the hospital they are both seeking treatment in, has decreed that there will be two patients to every room: no exceptions. Edward runs his empire from his hospital bed and Carter has loving visits from his family. While the medical staff often fawns over Edward, Carter’s medical needs are sometimes neglected until Edward orders the doctors to take care better care of him.
Carter loves his family, but sitting alone in the hospital room, he begins to have regrets about the things he did not do with his life. While he is a gifted amateur historian, he gave up his dreams to start a family. In the hospital, he begins a list of things to do before kicking the bucket including driving a Shelby Mustang and witnessing something truly majestic. When he learns that he has less than a year to live, he crumples the list and throws it away. Edward finds the list and convinces Carter to go on a round the world tour to complete a joint bucket list.
Despite his wife Vivian’s objections, Carter and Edward hip in Edward’s private jet and start their trek around the world. They go skydiving, race vintage cards around California speedway, eat dinner at a famous French restaurant, visit the Taj Mahal and trek to Mount Everest, although the weather is too bad to see the peaks. Along the way, we get to know these two diverse characters and their hopes, joys, and regrets. We learn that Edward is grieving his relationship with his estranged daughter and that Carter feels he is falling out of love with his wife.
After Edward hires a prostitute to seduce Carter, Carter realizes he really does love his wife and asks to go home. On the way home, Carter attempts to reunite Edward with his estranged daughter, but Edward considers that a betrayal. Carter is reunited with his loving family, and Edward goes home to cry alone over the mess he has made of his life. It is only after Carter collapses and later dies in surgery that Edward realizes that Carter was probably his best friend in the world and he eulogizes him by saying the last three months of Carter’s life were the best of his. The movie ends years later when Edward’s assistant treks to the top of a mountain to leave Edward’s ashes besides Carter’s.
The specter of death hangs over all of us and we should all make the most of the time we have on this earth. However, The Bucket List brings the fragility of life into sharp focus as two men facing their own mortality realize they still have things left to accomplish. Although some may find it strange that Carter chose to spend his last few months with a virtual stranger instead of his own family, I found it completely understandable for several reasons. The first is that he and Edward had a shared fate, as both of them had a fatal diagnosis. This meant that neither was going to baby the other, instead they were just two guys out to see the world and allowed them to both focus on living instead of dying. If Carter had stayed home, his family’s instinct would have been to baby him and take care of him instead of focusing on life.
The second is that Carter needed distance from his wife and family to truly come to appreciate them. If he had chosen to stay home, he may have become resentful because his wife was–once again–keeping him from living life on his terms. By having his grand adventure, he came to appreciate the love and comfort his wife brought him. This allowed his last few days at home to be filled with joy instead of resentment.
From a thanatological perspective, anticipatory grief was an overriding theme in this movie. Carter and Edward were both anticipating their own deaths and, for Carter, the grief his family would feel without him. Carter’s family was also facing life without their patriarch and anticipating the changes that his death would bring.
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Movie: Taking Chance
When a member of the US military dies in battle, their remains are transferred home for burial through a process called a dignified transfer. The body is placed in a metal casket surrounded by ice packs in the theater of battle and the military member’s peers cover the casket with a US flag, salute the casket, and place it on a military transport plane. The body is flown to Dover Air Force Base Mortuary, where it is cleaned and dressed in a dress uniform or civilian clothes, if preferred by the family. Exquisite care is taken each step of the way as the body is treated with the upmost respect and honor.
A member of the military is assigned to act as an escort for the body and accompanies the body from Dover to the service member’s home. At each step of the way, as the body is transferred, the escort salutes the body. The escort is also responsible for carrying the personal effects of the deceased service member.
Taking Chance tells the story of Lt. Col Mike Strobl who escorts PFC Chance Phelps home to Wyoming. Strobl is a military pencil pusher who served in Desert Storm, but returned stateside to become an analyst who makes manpower recommendations. Although he chose to work stateside so he could see his family every night, he is dissatisfied and feels as if he is letting other people fight the war on terror that erupted after 9/11. Although it is unusual for a senior officer to serve as a final escort for a junior officer, his boss grants his request to accompany PFC Chance Phelps home.
The movie shows the meticulous care that is taken with service members’ bodies as they are prepared for burial or cremation. Even if there will be a closed casket, the body is meticulously dressed and their ribbons are arranged with care. This movie is one of the few that makes me cry each time service members and ordinary citizens paid their respects. Baggage handlers who moved the body off and on the planes stood at attention as Strobl saluted the coffin. The captain who flew Chance on the final leg of his journey announced to his passengers that a service member was on his final journey and made sure to note Chance’s name. And as the hearse carrying Chance’s body traveled the final 90 miles from Billings, MT to his hometown, vehicles turned on their lights and created an honor guard to escort him home. Although Strobl had not known Chance in life, his platoon mates and friends from his hometown made sure that Strobl knew how special Chance was.
This movie shows the grief of a country honoring the military dead, of Chance’s friends, and final of his family who is mourning a son and brother.
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Movie: My Sister’s Keeper
Anna Fitzgerald’s parents had her in order to save her older sister, Kate, who was dying of cancer. Kate’s cancer impacted the entire family as their world revolved around keeping her alive. Howev er, when Anna was 11 and Kate 14 or 15, Kate relapsed and needed a kidney transplant. Their mother assumed that Anna would willingly give her kidney, but Anna took her parents to court and asked for medical emancipation. As the story unfolded, we learned that Kate had asked Anna to fight to not give her kidney as she was ready to die. Ultimately, Kate died before the court decided the case, although we learned in the final scenes that Anna had won her medical emancipation.
This is a story of grief, sadness, loss and longing, but ultimately it is a story of live. It is the love Anna has for her sister in helping save her and in going against her parents wishes to help Anna die. It is the love that their mother has for both of them. And at the end of the day, it is the love that carries them. The love that they all have for each other helps them let go of Kate.PostBlock
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Documentaries: How to Die in Oregon
How to Die in Oregon opens in Roger Sagner’s living room. He is surrounded by family and friends as he prepares to down the lethal drink that will end his life. Thanks to Oregon’s death with dignity law, Roger and other terminally ill patients can choose when to die. Ironically, enough being able to choose when to die, allows terminally ill patients to truly live in their last few months. Multiple people speak to how knowing they will have the choice to end their lives on their terms has given them piece of mind.
One of these patients is Cody Curtis who has been diagnosed with recurrence of liver cancer. She has been given six months to live and has chosen a proposed death date. However, when that date comes, she is feeling good so she chooses to wait. With palliative care and pain management, she ends up living almost seven months more. These months are filled with joyous and love filled moments with her family and friends. When she finally makes the decision to end her life, she is surrounded by her family.
I was surprised by how joyous this movie about death with dignity was. Even though the stories of terminally ill patients were sad, the undercurrent was of choice and people who were calmed by the knowledge that they had the right to choose when to die.
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Movies: Wit
WIT is a movie that tells the story of Vivian, a brilliant professor who is diagnosed with cancer. Throughout the movie we see how her life has been lonely as her constant companion is only literature. Her only visitor is her old mentor, who finds out by accident she is in the hospital and sits and reads her a children’s story. In her final moments, despite her DNR, her doctor undertakes aggressive resuscitation efforts and we see the sadness of her almost lifeless body undergoing poking and prodding.
This is a movie that affected me profoundly. I was assigned to watch it in one of my thanantology classes and was immediately captivated by Vivian’s stoic portrayal of a cancer patient, but also how her cancer caused her to be introspective and think about the times she was less than kind to her students. It is also, perhaps unintentionally, a cautionary tail about pursuing career above all else and having no time in one’s life for friends or hobbies. It is also a tail about the dangers of modern medicine and how in a pursuit of a cure we sometimes forget what true healing is.