Die-alogue Cafe

Rosemarie Milsom writing in the Newcastle Herald, May 17 2014, tells the story of Erica Cameron-Taylor who attempts to bring comfort to her dying patients to ensure their last days count.  Read the story at: http://www.theherald.com.au/story/2285409/dr-erica-cameron-taylor-palliative-care-specialist/?cs=12

Before I Die: A Festival for the Living about Dying
12-18 May 2014
Various locations around the University and City of York, UK

Professor Celia Kitzinger, Festival Curator – “It gives me great pleasure to invite you to the ‘Before I Die’ Festival – a festival for the living about dying. We will include music, art, poetry, theatre, public lectures, debates, expert panels, and “death café” conversations over tea and cake.
My own interest in curating this festival grew out of my research exploring people’s experiences of having a loved one in a long-term coma and their thoughts on what makes for a ‘good death’. I have become convinced that we urgently need to talk about end-of-life issues as individuals and as a society.
The festival is sponsored by the University of York and organized as part of the ‘Dying Matters’ coalition Dying Awareness Week. It is part of a growing social movement to reflect on how we manage death and dying.”

Events include:
• An Instinct for Kindness – a solo-show telling the true story of Chris Larner’s
journey to Dignitas, the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, with his chronically ill ex-wife.
• For Their Own Good (Untied Artists) – a play which combines beautiful puppetry, new writing and documentary material to tell a moving and darkly comic tale which explores whether the way we kill animals teaches us anything about our own demise.
• Music and Poetry to Die For –Soloist Alison Wray and Chanticleer Singers, with poetry from James Nash.
• Memorials in the Minster – Tours of the Minster focusing on artefacts associated with memorial.
• Expert Panel on Advance Decisions for end-of-life planning. Convened by Celia Kitzinger – includes experts in law, medicine, ethics and more to answer your questions.
• Advance Decision Writing ‘Clinic’: One-on-one sessions on writing your own Advance Decision – information & support from people involved with the charity Compassion in Dying.
• The Sociology of Death and Dying – an afternoon of workshops and seminars with
members of the Sociology Department at the University of York.
• Dying to Live: Preparing yourself and your loved ones for death – a talk by the Revd Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor of York Minster) & Rev’d Dr David Efird (Philosophy Dept, UofY) about the spirituality of dying.
• Death Café – an opportunity to discuss thoughts, attitudes and questions about death and dying in a welcoming and open environment.
• Expert Panel – Should we legalise assisted dying?
And lots more. For full details please use the following link: http://www.beforeidiefestival.co.uk

Add this to The Ideal Death Show and it’s clear to see that our British friends are well ahead of us Aussies when it comes to getting their heads around the subject of death and dying.  We have a good deal of catching up to do.

This film has been out for over 12 months, but the contents remain timely.  Broadcast on January 31, 2013, it notes how: Death is about leaving here, for the here-after.  And it’s not free. Death isn’t just a certainty, it’s an industry.  Death: It’s a living, (CNBC.COM) documents how profitable dying can be for business and how expensive it is for families.

What is called a traditional funeral, is in fact a commercially created tradition of a very different vintage – the idea being that the more we spend, the more we are showing our love for the dead.  Americans die at the rate of 2.5 million per year and spend $17 billion a year on the rituals and customs surrounding death.

We talk about having Advance Health Care Directives, maybe it’s time we prepared Advance Death Care Directives that include Advance Funeral Directives – before I go, you should know!  Doing nothing leaves a vacuum where the under prepared looking for a service, get outsmarted by the well prepared who have turned death into a lucrative living.

Alain de Botton has been in Australia recently to promote his latest book, The News: A Users Manual.   He is well know for some other titles such as Religion for Atheists and The Consolations of Philosophy.  In The Consolations … he notes that Socrates claims that: “What is declared obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so.”  “The philosopher [Socrates] does not only help us to conceive that others may be wrong, he offers us a simple method by which we can ourselves determine what is right.”  Known as The Socratic method of thinking, it allows us to arrive at a conclusion that is superior to intuition.

1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.
3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.
4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
5. If one subsequently  finds exceptions to the improved statement/s, the process should be repeated.  The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove.  It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
6. The product of thought is, whatever Aristophanes insinuated, superior to the product of intuition.   (pages 23-25)

Note:   Plato^[8][9] singled out Aristophanes’ play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes

And so we try to practice The Socratic method of thinking, as it relates to the content within the Die-alogue Cafe.

Always open to suggestions about interesting people writing on end-of-life issues we think Richard Wagner has much to offer the subject, as the author of the book An Amateurs Guide to Death and Dying: Enhancing the end of life and the associated website: http://theamateursguide.com/

Choosing a name for an event about dying and death would not usually include words like ‘ideal’ and ‘show’.  But when looking at the content of this event they sit together very well.  Besides, why are we so precious about death, when without it, there would not be life as we know it. One begets the other.  A show of this kind attempts to say that life needs to be viewed as a whole including the ending, which if we get it right spawns new beginnings.  All food for thought which is what we’d expect to get at an ideal death show.  A report on the 2013 show .. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9018151/the-ideal-death-show/  And, finding meaning in mortality, the 2014 event .. http://www.idealdeathshow.co.uk/

Not too many people contemplate the idea of building a coffin or casket for themselves or one of their family, but that is what Matthew Hendicott did back in 2004.

It is a heart warming story that has probably been repeated many times before and since. But most people think that building a coffin or casket is beyond their expertise and/or the funeral industry would not accept it.  Neither is true.

Matthew built his coffin as part of his Higher School Certificate industrial technology project.  It had a special significance in that it was build for his then 74 year-old Nanna, Suzanne Field.  The story goes that she used it as a coffee table until the time came to use it for what it was built for. It was a fancy piece of woodwork that deserved being preserved for many years.

Considering it was constructed from solid timber – unlike most of the modern coffins made from chipboard, veneered to look like real wood – it is a shame the family didn’t demand of the funeral industry that it become a family piece of furniture that could be re-used. This is the case in other countries like the USA and the UK.  And renting a coffin is acceptable elsewhere and should be the case in Australia.

From the initial drawings to the finished product it took eight months.  It was a labour of love and it received wide media attention with reports in the Newcastle Herald (Grandsons’s gift an afterlife highlight, Gabriel Fowler, 08.09.2004, page 3), That’s Life magazine and a news story on NBN-television.

If you have a story about a family built coffin, please post it here.

A generation ago the baby boomers brought back home births. Recently there has been a resurgence in home-based end-of-life care.  As a natural extension of home hospice care, families are choosing to care for the body of their deceased loved one themselves, at home. http://funeralalternatives.wordpress.com/

HOW WILL YOU DIE?

LIFE Before Death is a multi-award winning documentary series that asks the fundamental question underpinning our mortality.

This beautifully filmed journey takes us to 11 countries as we follow the remarkable health care professionals battling the sweeping epidemic of pain that threatens to condemn one in every ten of us to an agonizing and shameful death. Through the eyes of patients and their families we discover the inherent humanity that empowers the best of us to care for those beyond cure.  Get the story here:  http://www.lifebeforedeath.com/movie/about.shtml

This book was released last year (Nov. 2013).  It is a manual for recording what needs to done by loved ones after we are gone.  Author Shanna Provost has posted some great links on her facebook page.  For more: https://www.facebook.com/RestEasyJournal