Are you prepared to die? Why or why not?

[_Bazooka]

I really don't want to be that old person, who gets dressed and sits and looks out the window all day, because that is the best I can manage.

Hey....no need to bring Quasi into this!

I believe that constitutes elder abuse!

*psst* Quasi, wheelchair race to the bar before nursey brings us our meds? Last one pays.

One, two, three GO!

Can you just imagine us lot ending up all in the same nursing home....holy crap the Cohen Brothers would have a field day with that kind of material.

[_Tchild]

"What d'ya know? God is really the dip**** Mormons described him as."

With an attitude like that sock puppet, you are going to find yourself a neutered "an helpmeet" acting like a celestial bitch for those worthy of a far greater and everlasting glory.

[_kairos]

"You can’t be more loving than God; it’s not possible! If you understand God as the fountain fullness of outflowing love, relationship itself—there is no possibility of any hatred in God. Finally, God—who is Love—wins. And we're all saved by mercy. Knowing this ahead of time gives us courage, so we don’t need to live out of fear, but from love. To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world."

From my friend Franciscian Richard Rohr

just sayin

k

[_Quasimodo]

*psst* Quasi, wheelchair race to the bar before nursey brings us our meds? Last one pays.

One, two, three GO!

Can you just imagine us lot ending up all in the same nursing home....holy crap the Cohen Brothers would have a field day with that kind of material.

Better than "Fargo". I'm ready to sign contracts. This could ease my retirement.

[_EmilyAnn]

I've told my wife that if she spends more than the absolute minimum on disposing of my body, I'll come back and haunt her ass. I can't stand wastefulness. Find a cardboard box and bury me in the backyard.

Google: caring for your own dead...which was originally the title of a book by Lisa Carlson (for which I will always be grateful)...as well as, now, an actual movement in North America.

During the time when I had three relatives dying in the same general time period, I was standing in line at a health food store, flipping through one of their magazines for sale (which I bought, after I saw the article)...and this was my first encounter with the "caring for your own dead" movement. Lisa Carlson, who was probably one of the first to do this in contemporary times, had---by necessity---learned to do this when her husband unexpectedly died and she did not have the money to do the normal things. It turned out very well for her and for everyone in her family.

At that point, two of the three relatives I spoke of above had already died (both had been cremated; both sets of ashes were delivered to me for scattering)...but in each case, the standard "going through a funeral home" had been done.

When I read this article, my father had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer...so I just followed what Lisa Carlson said in her book, step-by-step, and it worked out incredibly well. Including everything, the entire after-death process from the moment I pronounced his time of death (he was under hospice care, as we all knew it was going to be "in the next few hours") was just me following each of the steps she laid out (modified as necessary by instructions, both legal and practical, I received along the way.

A couple of weeks prior to my father's death, I had gone to the county office which is responsible for issuing Death Certificates, explained that my father was terminal and was going to die fairly soon and I was doing "everything" myself---and the county employee I was talking to said: "I've always wondered why more people didn't do this." She gave me the blank Death Certificate forms to fill out, gave me the instructions I needed (NO erasures AT ALL---if I made a typing mistake, I had to bring back the forms I had mistyped and get a new set of forms from them), told me what to do if my father died during their regular office hours, and also what to do if he died when they were closed (including weekends and holidays). Basically, the first thing after I, in effect, pronounced my father dead (noting the to-be-forever-official time of death), then getting a "Coroner's Case Number" assigned to my then-deceased father---after which, I would be "legal," even though I had a dead human body in my possession.

When he did die (it was around eight at night...on a Friday night), I made sure he was dead...I then phoned hospice to send over a hospice nurse...then I phoned the county Coroner's office to get that case number assigned (from a really nice guy on the other end of the line), and I turned up the air conditioning to maximum cool as I had been instructed. (My father's body had to stay in place until Monday morning, after I had his Death Certificate filed and after the crematory opened, so keeping his body as cool as possible for those couple of days was essential.)

I phoned his doctor's emergency number and made an appointment (for Sunday, at the golf course; between the doctor's rounds of golf) so the doctor could sign the Death Certificate form. The hospice nurse arrived, she checked my father's body to make certain he was dead (listened to his heart, etc.), then asked me what she could do to help. I told her I was doing "everything" [after death], but I would REALLY appreciate it if she would watch my father's poodle while I went across the street to the supermarket to get "party ice" to ice down his body (especially his abdomen) until we could transport his body to the crematory on Monday. (We already had the long piece of cardboard which folded into a cardboard "coffin" which was a requirement of the crematory.)

I went to the supermarket and brought back some big bags of party ice, and the hospice nurse helped me ice down his body (still "clothed" in what he was wearing when he died: a diaper and socks), then she left, I checked the air conditioning to make sure it was at maximum cool, turned out the lights, locked the doors, and took my father's poodle with me to my own home (about an hour away). It was the first night I had slept in my own bed in about six weeks, I think.

Saturday (the next morning) I typed out the Death Certificate forms...got them signed by the doctor on Sunday...and Monday morning, just after I had the Death Certificate legally certified at the county coroner's office, we were at my father's apartment (in a rented van) to take my father's body to the crematory. We put the cardboard "coffin" together (a mortuary had given it to me free, though I was most willing to pay for it---it was just a big piece of flat cardboard before we folded it on the pressed-in lines), got his body into it, carried it out to the van, and we drove his body to the crematory where I had already made arrangements for his body to be cremated. When we arrived at the crematory, they checked his Death Certificate, made their notations, gave me a receipt for the body, and then took his body (in the cardboard "coffin") away on a gurney. We turned in the van...and a couple of days later picked up my father's ashes.

Total costs (including legal fees at the county Coroner's office, cremation, and van rental for a few hours) was under three hundred dollars. (The biggest cost was the cremation fee...followed by van rental...followed by the required legal fees for the Death Certificate. This was a few years ago; it might cost a couple of hundred dollars more now.)

You can do this is most states, but not all of them. (I think there are about eight states where "caring for your own dead" is not possible.)

Lisa Carlson: Caring for Your Own Dead.

Google: caring for your own dead

For me (and everyone I know of who has done this), it was an extraordinarily healing experience---and it used to be the way nearly all deaths were handled up to about World War I times. This is not a new thing, which is obvious when you think about it...this used to be how all families dealt with the deaths which occurred in their families.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

EmilyAnn,

That was a phenomenal post. I'll have to talk to my spouse about this, and put it into my will with instructions on how to take care of business. What a healthy way for a loved one to process a death.

V/R
Doc

[_ludwigm]

As a 69 yo, I have my coffin --- virtually.
By day, I am sitting on it, at night I am laying in it.

Part 1
I am prepared financially. Our children are all adults, they have got everything we had - not much of.
We produced all resource to educate them; all of them has university or (and) college certificates. From that point on they were the freedom to improve or corrupt their life.
They will distribute my (our) remainders.

Part 2
I am prepared mentally. It would be fine to live up to 100 --- if and only if it would be worth to live.
Living in machines, using tubes, drugs is not in my imagination. I did everything I could to go away when I want to go away - the law is against it, my family may help me to die with decorum. I don't see the future.

Part 3
Technicalities.
My mother wanted to be scattered, I did it for her. Some members of my family accepted it, some of them didn't.
I ordered it a little more poetic...
I want to be scattered in an area where - probably - the nature remains unchanged for the next few decades.
More than half of our grandchildren hike, rode, run regularly. They know such areas.

Part 4 (especially to EmilyAnn...)
The fruit of mine own nature, nought beside ___ Can I give Thee;

The "Essential English for Foreign Students" by Charles Ewart Eckersley was my Bible in learning English (~60 years ago).

LUCILLE’S STORY:
THE SAND-GLASS

Lucille: It’s usually Hob who has the interesting relatives, Aunt Aggie, Uncle Tom, Albert, Theophilus — to mention just a few of them, but, though it is not about an actual relative, I could tell you a story about my old nurse Anna.
May I do so ?
Mr. Priestley: We should be delighted to listen to you, Lucille.
Please tell us the story.
Lucille: Well, Anna was a dear old servant in our house in Paris.
She had been a servant in our family before I was born and had been nurse to my sisters Marie and Yvonne and to me.
She helped with the work in the house, she did the sewing, she could cook an omelette, or any other dish, better than anyone else I know.
We all loved her, she was so kind, so helpful and so constantly busy.
From early morning till late at night she never rested and nothing was too much trouble for her.
If ever we were in difficulties, from a torn frock to a broken heart, it was to Anna that we went for help and comfort.
Then, one day, she came to say that she was leaving us.
“Leaving us, Anna!” I said, hardly able to believe my ears.
“Yes, Miss Lucille”, she said, and then, blushing and looking rather confused, she said, “I’m going to be married”.
You could, as Hob said, have knocked me down with a feather.
Because we had known her all our lives, we girls naturally thought of Anna as old, but I don’t suppose she was more than forty when she left us; for had she did leave us, and married Henri Behr.
It was the greatest mistake she ever made in her life, and, though than Anna never said a word about it, I am sure she regretted it almost from the day she was married.
Anna had saved quite a bit of money during the years she had been with us, and with it she bought a house in Tours.
It was quite a big old house, and she made her living by letting rooms in it.
And when I say she made the living, I mean that, for Henri did absolutely nothing at all.
My father and mother and my sisters and I at some time or other all visited Anna, but none of us liked Henri.
He was ten or twelve years older then Anna, a big, unpleasant, selfish, bad-tempered man.
I never once saw him smile or say a kind word to anyone.
But all this was nothing compared with his laziness.
That was almost beyond belief.
I don’t think he had ever done a stroke of work in his life.
He certainly never did after he married Anna.
He got up about ten o’clock in the morning (by which time Anna had been up for four or five hours) and sat in his armchair by the big stove, and there he would sit until it was time to go to bed.
Anna had to leave her work and hurry to bring him his breakfast of rolls and butter and coffee.
Then he sat and read his paper and smoked his pipe or slept while Anna ran about upstairs cleaning all the rooms (and with Anna everything was always as clean and bright as a new pin), making the beds, doing the washing, or running downstairs half a dozen times to answer the door-bell.
And in the midst of it all she had to prepare the vegetables and cook the huge meal that he always expected promptly at one o’clock.
A dozen times a day you would hear him shout, “Anna”, and she had to leave her work and hurry to see what he wanted.
It would usually be to pick up the pipe that he had dropped, or find another cushion for his head, get him a glass of wine or put some more wood on the fire.
If she didn’t come running the moment he called, he would burst into a fit of rage, his face would go red with anger and you could hear his shouting all over the house.
Well, for the next year or two we lost touch with Anna.
Tours is a hundred and fifty miles or so from Paris, and in any case we hated to see her so unhappy, so we never went to see her.
Then, one day, I went to Tours to visit some friends and I thought I would call and see Anna.
I went to the house where she lived near the Church of Notre-Dame-la-Riche.
I rang the bell — it was one of those old-fashioned ones that you pulled — and I could hear it ringing through the house.
I waited, but there was no sound of footsteps in the house.
I waited, perhaps for two minutes, but still all was silent.
But the house was occupied; there was smoke coming from the chimney (it was in December), and I recognised Anna’s clean, bright curtains in the windows.
I rang again, louder than before, and then, after another minute or so, I heard footsteps slowly coming down the stairs.
The door opened and I saw Anna.
The moment she saw me her face lighted up with a smile.
I threw my arms round her and said, “Oh, Anna, how nice to see you again!” There was no doubt about her joy at seeing me.
She took me upstairs to her cosy room, neat and clean and tidy as Anna’s rooms always were.
The room was exactly as I had always known it — except that Henri wasn’t there.
Oh, yes, and except for one other thing.
On the table near Anna’s chair (the chair where Henri always used to sit) was a big sand-glass, I think you call it an egg-timer.
Frieda: I know what you mean.
The sand takes four minutes to run through from the top to the bottom of the glass; and that’s the time you need to boil an egg.
Olaf: I saw a big one like that in an old church in Scotland.
But they called them “hour-glasses”.
The sand took an hour to run through, and when the preacher began his sermon he used to turn the glass upside down and then he preached until all the sand had run through.
The old Scots liked good value for their money!
Hob: Never mind the Scots.
Let Lucille get on with her story.
I want to hear what happened to Henri.
I think Anna had murdered him; I hope she had.
Lucille: Well, I noticed that Anna looked every now and then at the sand-glass and whenever she saw that the sand (a peculiar, dark-coloured sand) had run through, she turned the glass and let the sand run through again.
Just then the front doorbell rang again, but instead of jumping up at once to answer it as Anna always used to do, she just turned the sand-glass over and sat still.
When the sand had all run through, she got up quietly and went downstairs to answer the door.
So that was why I had to wait so long! It all seemed very funny, but I didn’t say anything.
She came back and we continued our chat, and then she said, “But you must be hungry, Miss Lucille; I’ll make lunch.
Would you like an omelette?” I certainly was hungry and, knowing Anna’s omelette of old, I said there was nothing I should like better.
But again she didn’t get up.
She just turned over the sand-glass and when she saw the sand had run through, she got up and cooked the lunch.
It was not until we had finished lunch that I said, “Where’s Henri?” Anna said, “He’s dead; he died about a year ago”.
I couldn’t say, “I’m sorry to hear it”, I just sat silent.
Anna continued, “He got into one of his rages and suddenly dropped down dead”.
There was a pause.
She picked up the sand-glass.
“I had him cremated”, she said.
“These”, and she pointed to the sand, “are his ashes. He never worked while he was alive, but I see to it that he does now he’s dead”.

And she turned the sand-glass over again.

[_sock puppet]

"What d'ya know? God is really the dip**** Mormons described him as."

With an attitude like that sock puppet, you are going to find yourself a neutered "an helpmeet" acting like a celestial bitch for those worthy of a far greater and everlasting glory.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody

[_Some Schmo]

EmilyAnn,

That was a phenomenal post. I'll have to talk to my spouse about this, and put it into my will with instructions on how to take care of business. What a healthy way for a loved one to process a death.

V/R
Doc

I agree, that was a great post. I doubt people really think much about the details of processing a death (I certainly hadn't). The fact that doing it yourself is likely the most economical way to handle a death in the family is secondary to the healing benefits you describe. It never occurred to me that having a funeral home handle everything likely postpones the healing process to some degree.

I really appreciate you sharing that with us.

[_Nightlion]

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody

Ah, Dylan. The one I would like to hang out with and trade his own lyrics in his voice back and forth if he was game. What a blast.

PINCESS ON A STEEPLE
AND ALL THE PRETTY PEOPLE
THEY'RE ALL PRAYING
THINKING THEY ALL GOT IT MADE

EXCHANGING ALL PRECIOUS GIFTS
YOU BETTER TAKE YOUR DIAMOND RING
YOU BETTER PAWN IT BABE

YOU USED TO BE SO AMUSED
AT NAPOLEON IN RAGS
AND THE LANGUAGE THAT HE USED

GO TO HIM NOW HE CALLS YOU
YOU CAN'T REFUSE
WHEN YOU AIN'T GOT NOTHING
YOU GOT NOTHING TO LOSE

YOU'RE INVISIBLE NOW
YOU GOT SECRETS TO CONCEAL

HOW DOES IT FEEL
HOW DOES IT FEEL
TO BE ON YOUR OWN
LIKE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

LIKE A ROLLIN' STONE