The Armistice between the Allies and Germany calling for the cessation of hostilities and ending WWI took effect.
Twenty million died.
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.
Near death, aided by ghostly companions
When Sevigny awakened, he could barely stand. His back was broken in two places, his knees were busted, and he had internal bleeding. He gave up hope of surviving and curled up in the snow to die. But then he felt an odd sensation. He felt someone behind him and heard a voice: "No, you can't give up. You have to live."
"It was right over my right shoulder," Sevigny said. "It was like if I would sneak up to you and put my nose a quarter of an inch from your neck. It was that kind of physical sensation."
What happened next was so profound that Sevigny, a scientist who disdains organized religion, says he couldn't talk about it for years afterward without crying. Sevigny still doesn't know who that voice belonged to, but another man does. He calls it "The Third Man."
Some people call them guardian angels.
If you are getting creeped out by the sudden surge of states decriminalizing assisted suicide, I'm with you. That's why I salute Barbara Kay who, concerned over the bill pending in Quebec to decriminalize euthanasia, pens a memo to her children
I do not want to be bumped off. I can't state the case more unequivocally than that. I don't care if I am a "burden" to you (you were once to me, that's how life works); I don't care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don't care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents' sake before nature intended.
__
M y deathbed physician should be familiar with a 2002 John Hopkins University study indicating that although 45% of terminally ill cancer subjects voiced a wish to die (i.e., subjects meeting the standards of Bill C-384), the wish turned out to be transient in all but 8% of the cases. If all 45% had been euthanized, we wouldn't know that. So even if I say I want to die, take that as a cry for comfort, reassurance or pain relief, which it almost certainly will be.
--
Do not fall for any claptrap about what "your mother would have wanted." Read my lips: Your mother does not want to be made to feel it is her duty to die before nature decrees, so that others may be freed from care and responsibility, a subtle shift that inevitably follows upon an established "right."
Mind, your mother is no martyr. If it's hopeless, no heroic measures, please. Oh yes, and she wants to die as painlessly as possible. If this means raiding the entire arsenal of available analgesics and even sedatives whose side effect is to facilitate an easier death, so be it.
Intention is all. I want an unequivocal healer-patient dynamic with my doctor. His or her intention should be to kill my pain, not me. Finally, my doctor should be well versed in palliative care techniques, improving all the time.
Parents in England might want to do the same. Oh, and parents in Oregon, Washington, Montana New Hampshire,
you too.
While lawmakers call it assisted suicide for the terminally ill (aren't we all?), Wesley Smith calls it The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia.
N.B. The Hemlock Society has rebranded itself Compassion and Choices. This is the group who wrote the end-of-life planning tool, "Your Life, Your Choices" for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hand out to veterans. Jim Towey, the lawyer who, after volunteering with Mother Teresa, drafted Five Wishes about end-of-life decisions with over 13 million in circulation, called the VA guide "fatally flawed" with the underlying message Your Life Is Not Worth Living
Report warns doctors snub families of the terminally ill amid growing use of 'death pathway'
More than a quarter of families are not told when life support is withdrawn from terminally-ill loved ones, a report has found.
Experts warn that growing use of a controversial 'death pathway' is seeing some patients killed off prematurely.
They say the system can lead to 'backdoor euthanasia' by encouraging doctors to deny fluids and drugs to those deemed to be in their final throes.
___
'Governments have got rid of respite care and geriatric wards, so we're left with a crisis. The Government has said let's develop a service to help people die at home - what they should be doing is helping them live. Only when death is unavoidable should you start withdrawing treatment.
'The problem is that there isn't enough discussion between doctors and patients and their relatives. Nobody is talking to them.'
The 'National Care of the Dying' audit also found that less than half of all terminally-ill patients and their relatives are offered religious or spiritual support.
And a quarter of doctors in hospitals are not properly trained in dealing with the dying
You may have seen this story, but it's so remarkable I just have to post it.
She thought she was saying a final goodbye to her premature infant Rachel who weighed only 20 oz and who was not breathing.
She said: "I didn't want her to die being cold. So I lifted her out of her blanket and put her against my skin to warm her up. Her feet were so cold.
"It was the only cuddle I was going to have with her, so I wanted to remember the moment." Then something remarkable happened. The warmth of her mother's skin kickstarted Rachael's heart into beating properly, which allowed her to take little breaths of her own.
Miss Isbister said: "We couldn't believe it - and neither could the doctors. She let out a tiny cry.
"The doctors came in and said there was still no hope - but I wasn't letting go of her. We had her blessed by the hospital chaplain, and waited for her to slip away.
"But she still hung on. And then amazingly the pink colour began to return to her cheeks.
"She literally was turning from grey to pink before our eyes, and she began to warm up too."
Four months later, Rachael was allowed home weighing 8lb - the same as a newborn baby - and she has a healthy appetite.
Mother's goodbye saves her baby
The skin to skin contact is called Kangaroo mother care and it's helped other premature babies survive.
Here's a site devoted to Kangaroo mother care
People are legitimately worried about the end-of-life provisions in the health care bill. While I am all for end-of-life planning with the necessary documents and I'm also against unnecessary medical treatments that can make the end of life a hell on earth, I believe these are private decisions by the person and the family involved. When doctors are paid to initiate these conversations and have the ability to execute documents on the spot, I am very concerned that economic and political concerns will have too great an influence on a vulnerable population.
So is Charles Lane, a member of the editorial staff of the The Washington Post, who writes in Undue Influence
About a third of Americans have living wills or advance-care directives expressing their wishes for end-of-life treatment. When seniors who don't have them arrive in a hospital terminally ill and incapacitated, families and medical workers wrestle with uncertainty -- while life-prolonging machinery runs, often at Medicare's expense. This has consequences for families and for the federal budget.
Enter Section 1233 of the health-care bill drafted in the Democratic-led House, which would pay doctors to give Medicare patients end-of-life counseling every five years -- or sooner if the patient gets a terminal diagnosi
--
Patients may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority. Once they're in the meeting, the bill does permit "formulation" of a plug-pulling order right then and there. So when Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) denies that Section 1233 would "place senior citizens in situations where they feel pressured to sign end-of-life directives that they would not otherwise sign," I don't think he's being realistic.
--
But Section 1233 goes beyond facilitating doctor input to preferring it. Indeed, the measure would have an interested party -- the government -- recruit doctors to sell the elderly on living wills, hospice care and their associated providers, professions and organizations. You don't have to be a right-wing wacko to question that approach.
Mickey Kaus puts it more succinctly
Tip for Dems: If you don't want people to think that subsidized, voluntary end-of-of-life counseling sessions are the camel's nose of an attempt to cut costs by limiting end of life care, then don't put them in a bill the overarching, stated purpose of which is to cut health care costs! .
Meanwhile we learn more about Oregon health care from a newspaper in Britain than we do in our own press
The chilling truth about the city where they pay people to die
His body ravaged by cancer, lumberjack David Prueitt barely had the strength to raise the cup to his lips.
In it was a mix of apple sauce and dozens of crushed barbiturate pills, legally prescribed by the 42-year-old's doctor to end his life.
Within minutes, the drugs had started to take effect, the terminally-ill man slipping into unconsciousness as his wife sat by his side.
If all had gone to plan, David would have quickly and peacefully passed away, his breathing becoming more laboured until it eventually stopped altogether.
But it did not happen like that. Instead, after three days in a deep coma, David suddenly woke up. 'Honey?' he said to his wife. 'What the hell happened? Why am I not dead?'
For another 13 days, coherent but racked with pain, David survived before finally succumbing to the disease and dying naturally in his home near Portland, Oregon's most populous city.
In that time he would be transformed from just another death to be recorded under Oregon's policy of assisted suicide into a figurehead for opponents of the U.S. state's deeply controversial Death With Dignity Act.
'He took five times the amount of barbiturates that should kill somebody and he still didn't die,' his older brother Steve told the Daily Mail this week.
'If anything, he should have been brain-dead. But he told us that, while unconscious, he had found himself before God and been told: "Not this way, David." God chose David as his spokesman, absolutely.'
He adds: 'It definitely made it very clear to me that we are not supposed to determine our own deaths.'
graphic from American Digest
When Barbara’s lung cancer reappeared during the spring of 2008 her oncologist recommended aggressive treatment with Tarceva, a new chemotherapy. However, Oregon’s state run health plan denied the potentially life altering drug because they did not feel it was "cost-effective." Instead, the State plan offered to pay for either hospice care or physician-assisted suicide.
--
The answer is simple. Oregon state officials controlled the process of healthcare decision-making—not Barbara and her physician. Chemotherapy would cost the state $4,000 every month she remained alive; the drugs for physician-assisted suicide held a one-time expense of less than $100. Barbara’s treatment plan boiled down to accounting. To cover chemotherapy state policy demanded a five percent patient survival rate at five years. As a new drug, Tarceva did not meet this dispassionate criterion. To Oregon, Barbara was no longer a patient; she had become a "negative economic unit."
Physicians for Reform want you to know What This Means for You
After reading David Warren's latest column, I had to learn more about Tomas Masaryk the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, a statesman, philosopher and sociologist, who had a most remarkable and exemplary life.
Karl Popper, The Prague Lecture 1994
60 years ago, there lived in the Hradcany Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the great founder of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and its Liberator President. I deeply admire Masaryk. He was one of the most important pioneers of what I have called, one or two years after Masaryk's death, the Open Society. He was a pioneer of an open society, both in theory and in practice; indeed, the greatest of its pioneers between Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
--
Never was a new state – after all, the result of a revolution – so peaceful and so successful, and so much the creative achievement of one man. And all this was not due to the absence of great difficulties; it was the result of Masaryk, s philosophy, his wisdom and his personality in which personal courage, and truthfulness, and openness, played so conspicuous a role.
According to Wikipedia, his doctoral essay at the University of Vienna, was on the phenomenon of suicide which became a book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization and that is what David Warren references in The killing fields.
That suicide is the ultimate subjective act, and thus, in effect, the final act of narcissism, was among the striking observations of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.
--
It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization.
--
This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.
Masaryk grasped the difference between depression and hopelessness, which we like to slur over today. Depression only makes one accident-prone; the real self-killer is the absence of hope for the future. This is a distinction that has been vindicated in psychiatric studies of the dying; it points directly to a dimension of human life that is irreducibly moral and religious.
--
People kill themselves for all sorts of stated reasons, but what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life, and the only sound predictor is religious formation.
That's an astounding conclusion, "what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life" and the only sound predictor is religious formation. Without formation in and practice of a religion, one has no tools to battle despair, meaninglessness and hopelessness.
Warren himself concludes in a column whose main focus is euthanasia, the euphemism for murder.
The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.
Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.
Amortality: Time magazine calls it number 5 on 10 ideas changing the world right now.
Catherine Mayer coined the term which she described thusly
It's about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers' resisting the onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion — all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra.
--
The defining characteristic of amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming much the same things, from late teens right up until death.
--
They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age. They're a highly sexed bunch. Viagra and its cousins help give elderly amortals a pleasurable alternative to aqua aerobics while blotting out those pesky intimations of mortality.Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it.
I think it was Alice Longworth Roosevelt who said, "The secret of eternal youth is arrested development."
There's a whole lot of talk by Glenn Reynolds, Ray Kurzweil, and Aubrey De Grey at about speeding up research to increase life spans indefinitely. I look to Dr. Bob for more meaningful thoughts in A Life Not Long who recalls the death of a friend who died too young.
These questions, in some way, cut to the very heart of what it means to be human. Is our humanity enriched simply by living longer? Does longer life automatically imply more happiness–or are we simply adding years of pain, disability, unhappiness, burden? The breathlessness with which authors often speak of greater longevity, or the cure or solution to these intractable health problems, seems to imply a naive optimism, both from the standpoint of likely outcomes, and from the assumption that a vastly longer life will be a vastly better life. Ignored in such rosy projections are key elements of the human condition — those of moral fiber and spiritual health, those of character and spirit. For we who live longer in such an idyllic world may not live better: we may indeed live far worse. Should we somehow master these illnesses which cripple us in our old age, and thereby live beyond our years, will we then encounter new, even more frightening illnesses and disabilities? And what of the spirit? Will a man who lives longer thereby have a longer opportunity to do good, or rather to do evil? Will longevity increase our wisdom, or augment our depravity? Will we, like Dorian Gray, awake to find our ageless beauty but a shell for our monstrous souls?
--
In Matt’s short life he brought more good into the world, touched more people, changed more lives, than I could ever hope to do were I to live a century more. It boils down to purpose: mere years are no substitute for a life lived with passion, striving for some goal greater than self, with transcendent purpose multiplying and compounding each waking moment. This is a life well-lived, whether long or short, whether weakened or well.
Like all, I trust, I hope to live life long, and seek a journey lived in good health and sound mind. But even more — far more indeed — do I desire that those days yet remaining — be they long or short — be rich in purpose, wise in time spent, and graced by love.
The bewildering lapses of memory in otherwise good parents who think such a thing could never happen to them.
Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime? asks Gene Weingarten in Fatal Distraction
"Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
--
These are heartbreaking stories made even more so by how the parents were demonized.
One clinical psychologist said
Humans have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."
40% of coma patients in a 'vegetative state' may be misdiagnosed.
Ttrapped inside their own bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead.
Adrian Owen’s first experiment on Kate involved presenting her with photographs of her mother and father, followed by fuzzy, meaningless pictures, while her brain was being scanned. “We found,” he says, “that areas of Kate’s brain burst into activity when pics of her family were shown that accorded perfectly with the brain locations of healthy volunteers doing the same task.”
This did not necessarily mean that she was fully conscious. It has been established by David Menon’s research that an anaesthetised patient’s brain can respond to certain stimuli without being actually aware. But Owen’s first experiment revealed that Kate’s brain was not entirely devastated: there were islands of activation. In fact, Kate has no memory now of seeing the pictures. And as she returned to consciousness, she remembers people speaking without understanding what they were saying. The first words she understood as meaningful words, and not just noise, were spoken by her mother. Kate remained in hospital for a further six months, returning gradually to responsiveness in fits and starts. The scan had given her parents and the medical staff confidence that her brain might begin to heal itself slowly with systematic stimuli. They were right.
One in ninety million. That's your odds of dying in a plane crash. Even if you are in a plane crash, your chance of survival is 95.7%.
Yet many people believe "if this plane goes down, we're all dead and there's nothing we can do about it."
Why do people perceive the danger to be so great? Barnett studied the front page of The New York Times and found the answer. Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was sixty times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDs; fifteen hundred times greater than auto hazards; and six thousand times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.
Ben Sherwood explains in The Great Plane Crash Myth.
One dangerous consequence of the Myth of Hopelessness is that when people believe there’s nothing they can do to save themselves, they put themselves in even greater peril.
The crew of the US Airways Flight 1549 behaved quite differently
'Deliberate calm' guided crew
In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to see what happens inside the brain when people, like Sullenberger, are forced to make decisions under pressure. Though the typical assumption is that some people don't feel fear -- that they are somehow less scared than the rest of us -- that assumption turns out to be false. The fear circuits in the brain, such as the amygdala, generate their response automatically; it's almost certain that everyone on board Flight 1549 was terrified.
What, then, allows people like Sullenberger to make effective decisions in harrowing circumstances? How do they keep their fear from turning into panic? Scientists have found that the crucial variable is the ability to balance visceral emotions against a more rational and deliberate thought process, which is centered in the prefrontal cortex. This balancing act is known as metacognition -- a sort of thinking about thinking.
--
Pilots have a different name for this skill: They call it "deliberate calm," because staying calm under fraught circumstances requires both conscious effort and regular practice.
--
The important lesson of US Airways Flight 1549, however, is that no matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, we have the ability to look past our primal emotions and carefully think about how we need to think. Metacognition allows a person to remain calm when every bone in his body is telling him to panic. It
Why the 'right to die" is fashionable nonsense.
This is why in the Netherlands, the supposedly enlightened pioneer of euthanasia, more than a quarter of “physician-assisted” deaths occur without any request from the patient-victim and people carry cards that read: “Please don’t kill me.” Some persist in calling this “dignity in dying”, but the Dutch health ministry recently admitted that a third of “physician-assisted deaths” had “complications”, such as delays in the poison taking effect, vomiting and even patients waking up afterwards. Dignified, it is not.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence given to the House of Lords came from Dr Bert Keizer, who worked as a geriatrician in Amsterdam for a quarter of a century and carried out many “physician-assisted suicides”– the basis of his book Dancing with Mr D. Dr Keizer told our legislators: “It is useless to worry about the slippery slope. Once a society has decided that euthanasia is allowed in certain cases, one is on it. Thus in Holland we have given up the condition that a patient must be in a terminal situation. Next, mental suffering was allowed [as a reason]. Then one’s future dementia was suggested as a reason for a request for death . . . I believe, on the grounds of the more than 1,000 deathbeds I attended, that euthanasia is a blessing in certain exceptional situations, yet I would rather die in a country where euthanasia is forbidden but where doctors do know how to look after patients in a humane manner.”
What is driving middle-aged white women to kill themselves?
U.S. suicide rates appear to be on the rise, driven mostly by middle-aged white women, researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found a disturbing increase in suicides between 1999 and 2005 and said the pattern had changed in an unmistakable way -- although the reasons behind the change are not clear.
The overall suicide rate rose 0.7 percent during this time, but the rate for white men aged 40 to 64 rose 2.7 percent and for middle-aged women 3.9 percent, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found.
---
"The results underscore a change in the epidemiology of suicide, with middle-aged whites emerging as a new high-risk group," Baker said in a statement.
One of the funniest writers around, P.J. O'Rourke faces an embarrassing, but curable, cancer.
I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd.
--
I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts: "Damn quantum mechanics!" "Damn organic chemistry!" "Damn chaos and coincidence!"
--
But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit ... um ... extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?
Robert Novak on his Brain Tumor
The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.
--
I promptly suffered another seizure in the ambulance, the second of three seizures that day. I gained admittance to the high-quality Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which has an excellent oncology staff. A biopsy was performed, which showed a large, grade IV tumor. In answer to my question, the oncologist estimated that I had six months to a year to live.
Being read your death sentence is like being a character in one of the old Bette Davis movies.
I believe I was able to withstand this shock because of my Catholic faith, to which I converted in 1998.
--
My dear friend, the Democratic political operative Bob Shrum, asked Sen. Kennedy's wife, Vicki, to call me about Dr. Friedman. I barely know Mrs. Kennedy, but I have found her to be a warm and gracious person. I have had few good things to say about Teddy Kennedy since I first met him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, but he and his wife have treated me like a close friend. She was enthusiastic about Dr. Friedman and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke, which I did.
The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington. My long conversation with Vicki Kennedy filled me with hope.
--
There are mad bloggers who profess to take delight in my distress, but there's no need to pay them attention in the face of such an outpouring of good will for me. I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case.
Court orders girl, 10, to see dying father
In an extraordinary Family Court judgment, the girl - who has said she wishes that her father would die - was instructed to see her father who is dying from liver cancer and has up to 12 months to live.
The girl, who is almost 11 years old, lives with her mother and has not seen her father since late 2003.
The mother has an intense hatred of the father and doubts that he is ill, despite doctors' statements that the man has inoperable cancer.
An expert told the court that if the father dies without he and the child being able to say goodbye, the child will come to regret this later in life when she has emotional independence from her mother and "has had time to reflect on the appalling way in which she was drawn into the conflict between her parents".
Justice Le Poer Trench said he had agonised over the decision but felt the child should be given an opportunity to see her father.
A court officer will supervise the once-a-month visits and determine their duration.
It was also suggested to the father that he might write a letter to the child and make her a DVD to view in the future should she want to learn more about her father in the future.
How would you choose to go? Cancer, heart attack or just old age?
That's the question posed by geriatrician Dr. Joanne Lynn 'How Many of You Expect to Die?'
In the fine New Old Age blog by Jane Gross in the New York Times. Don't miss the comments.
What got me was the excellence of the graphic by Joanne Lynn.
John Cornwell writes about those trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, 40% of whom are misdiagnosed in The Undead.
here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. “Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.
--
Cornwell writes about a small group of colleagues, Owen, the Prof, Pickard Menon and Coleman who are collaborating on innovative techniques for brain-damaged patients, the Impaired Consciousness Group.
The biggest, most tragic clinical myth about brain injury today is that PVS can be reliably diagnosed by bedside observation alone. It has in fact been known for at least a decade, ever since a key survey of brain-injured patients, that misdiagnosis of the condition runs at more than 40%, a statistic originally calculated by Professor Keith Andrews, former head of the Putney hospital, and confirmed by recent surveys in Europe and North America.
It's essential that we do the necessary imaging and brain-scanning to get the true information about patients before pulling the plug. The demand for fresh organs for transplant is too great.
According to Steven Laureys, professor of neurology at Liège University, there is constant pressure in many parts of the developed world to withdraw sustenance from vegetative patients in order to allow them to die so that their body parts can be harvested. In a recent study, Laureys reports, “slightly less than half of surveyed US neurologists and nursing-home directors believed that patients in a vegetative state could be declared dead”. His remarks should be set against the background of widespread shortages of organs and body parts for transplantation.
If I had died in 1975, without faith, without family, without love, I would have gone with a bitter curse on my lips.
Now, my heart raises a blessing with every remaining breath.
Lawrence Harvey while awaiting a third kidney transplant, the first lasted for 20 years, the second for two.
On leave from the violence he had survived in the war in Iraq, a young Marine was so wary of crime on the streets of his own home town that he carried only $8 to avoid becoming a robbery target.
Despite his caution, Lance Cpl. Robert Crutchfield, 21, was shot point-blank in the neck during a robbery at a bus stop. Feeding and breathing tubes kept him alive 4 1/2 months, until he died of an infection on May 18.
---
"It is an awful story," said Alberta Holt, the young Marine's aunt and his legal guardian when he was a teenager determined to flee a troubled Cleveland school for safer surroundings in the suburbs.
Crutchfield was attacked on Jan. 5 while he and his girlfriend were waiting for a bus. He had heeded the warnings of commanders that a Marine on leave might be seen as a prime robbery target with a pocketful of money, so he only carried $8, his military ID card and a bank card.
"They took it, turned his pockets inside out, took what he had and told him since he was a Marine and didn't have any money he didn't deserve to live. They put the gun to his neck and shot him," Holt told The Associated Press.
Home from Iraq, Wary Marine Fatally Wounded.
An awful story and tragedy. Condolences to his family
After the extraordinary reception to the Beloved Professor Delivering His Last Lecture Jeffrey Zaslow teamed up with Randy Pausch to co-write the new book,
"The Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow)
Zaslow reports that Pausch is finding more difficult to say goodbye to his family than he did to his colleagues at work.
Zaslow asks "When death is near, how do we show our love?" in A Final Farwell
For many of us, his lecture has become a reminder that our own futures are similarly -- if not as drastically -- brief. His fate is ours, sped up.
--
People wrote about how his lecture had inspired them to spend more time with loved ones, to quit pitying themselves, or even to shake off suicidal urges. Terminally ill people said the lecture had persuaded them to embrace their own goodbyes, and as Randy said, "to keep having fun every day I have left, because there's no other way to play it."
--
Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him--
"Well, you also need emotional insurance," the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy's time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.
--
Randy also made a point of talking to people who lost parents when they were very young. They told him they found it consoling to learn about how much their mothers and fathers loved them. The more they knew, the more they could still feel that love. To that end, Randy built separate lists of his memories of each child. He also has written down his advice for them, things like: "If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, 'Tell the truth.' If I got three more words, I'd add, 'All the time.' "
The advice he's leaving for Chloe includes this: "When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do." Chloe, not yet 2 years old, may end up having no memory of her father. "But I want her to grow up knowing," Randy said, "that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her."
--
As he later explained it: "I am maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying. But at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living."
--
And so despite all his goodbyes, he has found solace in the idea that he'll remain a presence. "Kids, more than anything else, need to know their parents love them," he said. "Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen."
The Last Lecture website.
Cross-posted at Legacy Matters.
For many years, the renowned European oncologist Sylvie Menard was a supporter of euthanasia. Now that she's contracted bone cancer, she's changed her mind.
Menard told the magazine that she always believed that each person should decide his own fate, but ‘when I became ill, I changed my position radically.”
“When you get sick, death ceases to be something virtual and becomes something that is with you every day,” she said. “So you say to yourself: ‘I am going to do everything possible to live as long as possible.”
Menard, who is married and has one son, acknowledged, “Today anything that means a new chance at life is valuable to me.”
--
She said that those who promote euthanasia do so for two reasons: they don’t want to suffer and they don’t want to lose self-sufficiency, thus becoming a burden for others.
She agreed that people who are ill “do not want to experience pain” and that “they have a right to alleviate it”. She also emphasized that “pain therapy has advanced considerably in recent years.”
“Even if you do not have complete use of your faculties and you cannot get up because you are confined to bed, but you still have the affection of your family members, in my opinion, even in those conditions, it’s worth it to keep living,” she said.
One third of all federal spending on health care is spent caring for elderly people in the final two years of life.
One reason, I believe, we spend so much is a societal denial of the inevitability of death. When most people now die in hospitals, it's natural to think that death is a medical failure.
"When you're looking at end-of-life care, too often the care that is delivered is simply a shotgun approach: This person is really sick, so let's try this, this, this, and this," said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Massachusetts' health secretary. "People don't understand the limits of technology and providers don't, in a way that is understandable to people, discuss the risks and benefits of certain interventions.
"We are operating in an era where for the most part, the public thinks that consuming more healthcare is better for your health, and that's simply not true."
End-of-life care costlier in Boston
I do not think that government regulations can solve this problem unless there is a rationing of care for the elderly. An elderly person should be able to get whatever medical treatment he needs or she wants.
As death approaches, it's usually the family that insists on whatever it takes to help grandma. What grandma wants is the presence of loving family and friends.
Rocco Palmo loves his 93 year-old grandmother who is constantly surrounded by the presence and love of her daughters and other family members; but, when she was hospitalized last Christmas Eve with pneumonia, he saw what was happening in the other hospital rooms.
Walking to Gram's room, I couldn't help but look in the other doors along the way and notice so many patients all alone in their beds, almost writhing with a loneliness and heartbreak you could feel a full ten feet away and almost cut with a knife. In the eeriest of ways, the usually-frenetic hallways felt like a ghost-town, filling the place with a sense of despair, of sadness and pain that was, in a word, brutal, especially given all the lights and celebrations going on in the streets outside and streaming over the TVs.
Thinking about it later, I couldn't help but try to figure out what it was that they were looking for.... And, well, the answer was right there: it might've been 24 December, but in the purest sense of it, they were still waiting for Christmas -- not wrapped gifts, lavish rituals, beautiful music or decorations on trees, but simply the loving, comforting presence of God in a human touch.
Do family members realize that leaving grandpa in the hospital for "whatever it takes" subjects him to tubes and drops and continuous pokes and prods for yet another test, depriving him of what he wants most, the assurance that only a loving human presence can give him? Who wants to die in a hospital if it can be avoided in any way.
Death is a profound mystery. People who have developed a solid Christian faith and who believe in the risen Christ can face death with serenity. Those lacking faith still want loyal companions to accompany them to the gates of death. I wish families would consider hospice soon for their elderly relatives who are terminally ill.
As I learned when my mother was dying and all my brothers and sisters came home to be with her, our time together in her last month was wonderful, full of love and laughter, stories and visitors. Her death was beautiful , at home in her own bed, without tubes, with all the pain medication she needed, surrounded by the children and grandchildren who loved her.
Saved by air trapped in his plastic safety helmet, that plus Buddhist meditation techniques saved the life of Chinese construction worker who was buried alive.
Chinese Man Buried Alive Saved by Air Trapped in His Hat
“I had my back to the wall and didn’t know it was falling until it was on top of me. It was suddenly dark and I realised what had happened and found that there was a small air pocket in front of me,” Mr Wang said. That was when the Buddhist turned to meditation to control his intake of oxygen. “I knew it would not last, so I made myself relax and concentrated on slowing down my breathing by meditation.”
--
Doctors were astounded, saying that a person could normally not live longer than five minutes in a similar sealed space. One local doctor said: “It’s a miracle that he’s alive after being buried for two hours.”
After being told that her newborn son had died during a traumatic birth, the mother suffering from blood poisoning, fell into a coma. Yvonne Sullivan was only 28 when she was taken to intensive care where her husband kept vigil for two weeks.
Two weeks in a coma is just about how long you've got with the U.K.'s national health insurance.
The doctors told the husband they might have to switch off the life support machines.
That's when Dominic started berating his wife,
When the doctors told me to think about turning off the life support I got angry," he added. "I grabbed her hand and began shouting at her. I gave her a bloody good rollicking.
You start fighting, don't you dare give up on me now. I've had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me."
"I'd already had to explain to Ryan that his brother Clinton had died, and that his mummy might not survive.
"He said he'd be cross with the doctors if they let mummy go to heaven. I kept telling her to pull through. Then I left the room to get some air."
Two hours later she started breathing on her own, five days later she recovered consciousness.
"I can't remember exactly what he said but I never liked getting told off by Dom," she recalled.
"Something inside me just clicked and I began to fight again.
"I had been on 100 per cent life support and I was deteriorating, but within two hours of him ordering me to get better I'd regained 5 per cent of my breathing.
"When I first came round I'd thought he'd been gone a few minutes, then he told me I'd been out for two weeks. It's a miracle really. I owe him so much."
Coma woman woken by husband's 'rollicking' as doctors were about to switch off life-support machine.
If you are hiking in the woods and come back to your car only to find that your keys are locked inside, pick up a stone and break the window so you can drive away alive.
Sandra Order didn't. She locked her keys in her SUV and died next to it in the cold and the rain of hypothermia.
When two Penn State students dressed themselves as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party, one explained later
"We are notorious and infamous as the state college, and very popular, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value"
Aaron Hanscom thinks its another example of young people treating murder as a victimless crime.
Christina Hoff Sommers, who has taught ethics courses, has written about colleges’ responsibility to provide students with what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “moral common sense.” Sure, young people hear their professors’ opinions on capital punishment, abortion, stem cell research and, yes, suicide bombings, but “they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor.”
Until they do, we shouldn’t be surprised to see college students dressed up as suicide bombers or shooting victims. After all, one person’s monster is another’s hero who just wanted to go out with a bang.
Well, this is a surprise, the death penalty saves lives. If so, the question than becomes only a moral one.
Rethinking the Death Penalty in The New York Times
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
---
“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”
Amy Pickard spent 6 years in a coma until a sleeping pill woke her up.
"When she takes the pill, I see her face relax and the old sparkle return to her eyes. It truly is remarkable," said Mrs Pickard.
She is one of 360 people taking part in a worldwide trial of Zolpidem as a treatment for people in comas. Sixty per cent of patients taking part in the study have started showing signs of life.
More Awakenings
On October 19, only months after being nearly dehydrated to death when his feeding tube was removed, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix on his own two legs. Ramirez is lucky to be alive. Early last June, a mere one week after a serious auto accident left him unconscious, his wife Rebecca and doctors decided he would never recover and pulled his feeding tube. He went without food and water for five long days. But then his mother, Theresa, represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, successfully took Rebecca to court demanding a change of guardianship on the grounds that Rebecca and Jesse's allegedly rocky marriage disqualified her for the role.
The judge ordered that Jesse be temporarily rehydrated and nourished. Then Jesse regained consciousness. Now, instead of dying by dehydration, he will receive rehabilitation and get on with his life--all because his mother rejected the reigning cultural paradigm that a life with profound cognitive dysfunction is not worth living.
--
In this climate, Jesse Ramirez-type stories can become more numerous, yet still barely penetrate the public consciousness. Increasingly, we hear about sustenance being withdrawn within days of a serious brain injury. And now that these helpless people are deemed dehydratable, there is a growing clamor in the professional journals to transform them into natural resources to be exploited like a corn crop--as sources of vital organs and subjects for experimentation. To show how far this line of thinking has already gone, bioethicists writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics recently advocated transplanting pig organs into people diagnosed with PVS to determine the safety and efficacy of xenotransplantation (the transplantation of animal organs into human patients).
Be careful who you give your health care proxy to, especially if you are in a rocky marriage.
Channing Moss was impaled through the abdomen with a rocket-propelled grenade and left on the verge of death in Afghanistan.
His fellow soldiers, a helicopter crew and a medical team would risk their lives to save his.
An extraordinary story Do or Die via Technicalities
“It was an extremely unusual set of events. He should have died three times that day,” said Maj. John Oh, 759th Forward Surgical Team general surgeon.
Three months after the attack, Moss attended the birth of his second daughter, Ariana.
He expects to be discharged from the Army on medical disability by October.
--
“I don’t think there has been a day in the last year and a half that I haven’t thought about them, that I haven’t prayed for them. They saved my life,”
I predict this won't be the first. A doctor with the power of life and death, prescribe the latter
Surgeon charged with trying to hasten patient's death
A San Francisco transplant surgeon was criminally charged Monday with excessively prescribing drugs to a 25-year-old disabled man last year to hasten his death and harvest his organs more quickly.
The felony charges are believed to be the first against a physician for his role in a transplant.
Is there life after death? Eternity for Atheists?
Reports The New York Times, some very good scientists are saying yes, arguing that the signal continues even after the radio is broken.
Each of us, Leslie submits, is immortal because our life patterns are but an aspect of an “existentially unified” cosmos that will persist after our death.
---
The mind or “soul,” as they see it, consists of information, not matter. And one of the deepest principles of quantum theory, called “unitarity,” forbids the disappearance of information.
If you try to prevent a friend from driving home drunk and the friend ignores you, don't hang on to the car window, or like this poor fellow Louis Wiederner, you could end up being dragged along until you lose you grip and fall under the wheels to your death.
New York Man Trying to Stop Girlfriend from Driving Drunk Run Over, Killed
Jay Steiner, 60, a retired nurse, who lives near the scene, rushed to the man's aid.
"Oh, my God," Steiner recalled Vega telling him. "Don't tell me I just killed my fiance."
Says Maggie Chapman, now a widow, about her husband Nick, 51, who refused to see a doctor despite terrible stomach pains. He died of pancreatic cancer, which if discovered earlier may have been treatable.
Man who was killed keeping a stiff lip.
I say again, if you don't take care of your body where will you live?
Teen-agers feel invulnerable and often go too far to look good. I mean, who in the right mind, would use a tanning bed twice a day. That is apart from George Hamilton.
Zita started doing just that when she was 14, giving them up when she was 21. But already that was too late.
Last August she found a mole on her leg and was diagnosed with melanoma. Doctors who treated her said they believed the excessive use of sunbeds caused her cancer.
Nine months later she was dead, just three days before her daughter's first birthday.
Her partner Phil said that the sunbeds had destroyed the family's life.
Tanorexic young mother dies of skin cancer after seven years of sunbeds.
I would have posted more frequently during my mother's last days if only the server which hosts my blogs had not migrated and upgraded to a new server and address causing all sorts of problems getting the blogging software to work and appear. I did write several posts that never appeared because I hadn't realized that I had such a problem for several days.
I didn't have the wherewithal to take the time to get help and figure out how to fix it. After all, my mother was dying.
We hear so much of horrific and painful deaths that it's hard to imagine death can be beautiful. Yet, such was my experience of my mother's death. She was in her own house, in her own bed, surrounded by love. Every one of us believe that it was a great privilege to be with her and with each other, our bond as a family greatly strengthened.
My mother was very independent, used to doing things the way she wanted. She didn't want chemotherapy, she didn't want to be in a hospital. Too often, elderly people fall, break a hip and end up in a hospital where they are poked, prodded and fitted with all sorts of tubes and IVs and other devices to preserve life for a few more days. But if you have cancer and know that you will die if you do not treat it, hospice is an extraordinary resource because they are skilled in palliative care, meaning they know what drugs should be given to a dying person to relieve pain, yet keep the mind alert and focused on the life still to live.
Even as she grew more frail and weak, my mother's last days were happy ones, spent receiving visitors, sitting at the dinner table with all of us, taking very short walks outside with someone on each side making sure she didn't fall, watching the leaves, paying her bills, doing her crosswords, and playing with her newest grandchild, 5 month old Adia Moxie. Even as she began sleeping most of the day, too tired to go downstairs even in the elevator, we gathered more in her bedroom and from time to time, she would sit bolt upright and beam at all of us, radiant.
The last five days she was unresponsive, eating nothing, drinking nothing. The hospice nurse put her on a morphine drip and told us she thought she would die Friday. My sister Colleen, a nurse, gave her anti-anxiety medication periodically whenever she saw the slightest indication of a furrow on my mother's brow. She grew tinier in her big bed, her strong heart using every last bit of her substance so she could be with us and us all together in one room just a little bit longer.
Because all of seven children came home to be with her, someone was always with her, reading, saying prayers, playing music or lying down beside her. Downstairs, meals were made, dishes cleared and washed, laundry done, bike trips taken, gardens weeded, flowers planted and beer drunk.
Monday, the last day, my brother Robby brought up my mother's favorite wine, Santa Margarita Pinot Grigio and we all - me, Kevin, Billy, Colleen, Robby, Julie and Melinda toasted our mother and put a tiny drop of wine on her lips, the last thing she tasted.
A few hours later she died. A half hour after that, her mouth relaxed into a smile and we knew she was in heaven.
Over at Legacy Matters, I've posted the eulogy for my motherThis is a hard post to write because the words themselves have a certain finality that's not here yet. My 85-year-old mother last fall had abdominal pains that, after a visit to the emergency room and a CAT scan, turned out to be colon cancer. Surgery followed a couple of days later and we were encouraged to think that the tumor blocking her colon had been completely excised and her colon stitched back together.
Recovery was slow but seemed complete and while she had lost lots of weight despite my cooking, she was back bopping around in her sports car. About a month ago, she began having abdominal pains again. It was the cancer back. She doesn't want chemotherapy at her age which seems to me to be quite sensible, so the focus has been on reducing her pain.
My sister Colleen is a nurse and immediately took medical leave from her job to come out for the duration which she counts as a privilege and a blessing to be able to do since her two daughters, my nieces Jessica and Chrissy are away from home, in college. My brother Kevin, his wife Melinda and two daughters, Taylor and Lucy, live in the same town as my mother as do I just two blocks away. For Mother's Day, Colly's husband Robin came, brother Billy came from Switzerland and brother Robby and his wife Jennifer with their two baby girls, 21/2 and 4 months, Zoe and Adia from California.
We all had a lovely time, my mother included, playing with the babies and looking at old family and childhood photos, about 1200 of them that I had digitized so every one could have a copy and telling stories. Now numbering about 16, we had a delicious Mother's Day lunch at a local restaurant.
In many ways we are very blessed. Mom - we call her Ruth - is completely herself, if much more frail and more tired. She laughs, makes jokes, gives orders, goes through her mail, makes calls, gets her hair done, and is forever putting Vinny her beloved Jack Russell terrier out when he's in and bringing him in when he's out and making sure he gets all three of his dinners. She carried long term care insurance for in-home care because she hates being in the hospital even though she too is a nurse and never wanted to go into a nursing home. Now the benefits are apparent because she's home where she wants to be and Colly is even being paid, making up for some of her lost income. Colly got a new MacBook, put in wireless, got a new bike and is testing some of Ruth's best, baking recipes and I'm going to make a book out if it.
We have an elevator in the house which my parents put in about 15 years ago when my sister Debby, wheel-chair bound with multiple sclerosis, was living at home. So Mom still uses her bedroom and bath but can come down easily to the kitchen, the living room, office and yard during the day. Heat gives her the most tactile relief for her abdominal pains so she sits with a heating pad at her back, holding a hot water bottle against her stomach, a heat sandwich.
Two weeks later it's a different story. Hospice has started and they have been wonderful, delivering my mother's exponentially increasing pain medications, an assigned nurse, Peggy, who visits several times a week to check on her status and making sure we have everything we need. Since Ruth was only eating about 300-500 calories a day, she was becoming even thinner although her pain does seem to be under control.
"Two to four weeks" we were told in one of Colleen's daily emails to all concerned. In just a few days, Robby was back from the West Coast, Billy from Geneva, and Julie, my youngest sister, due in Tuesday.
Her affairs and finances are all in order so there's nothing to be done there. My mother is enjoying lots of visitors, family and friends alike, basking in all the love and banter, sometimes glowing. The weather is beautiful. My brothers have found projects to do around the house and yard. Patty, Colleen's dear friend from Florida is visiting for week and cleaning up gardens, planting the window boxes, and impatiens in every corner. We all eat dinner together that one of us makes or takeout and we have cases of beer in the garage so we'll never run out. These are wonderful times for the family. The loss will come soon enough.
This is the way to go, a vigorous old age and a fast decline, at home surrounded by family and people who love you.
This is a hard post to write because the words themselves have a certain finality that's not here yet. My 85-year-old mother last fall had abdominal pains that, after a visit to the emergency room and a CAT scan, turned out to be colon cancer. Surgery followed a couple of days later and we were encouraged to think that the tumor blocking her colon had been completely excised and her colon stitched back together.
Recovery was slow but seemed complete and while she had lost lots of weight despite my cooking, she was back bopping around in her sports car. About a month ago, she began having abdominal pains again. It was the cancer back. She doesn't want chemotherapy at her age which seems to me to be quite sensible, so the focus has been on reducing her pain.
My sister Colleen is a nurse and immediately took medical leave from her job to come out for the duration which she counts as a privilege and a blessing to be able to do since her two daughters, my nieces Jessica and Chrissy are away from home, in college. My brother Kevin, his wife Melinda and two daughters, Taylor and Lucy, live in the same town as my mother as do I just two blocks away. For Mother's Day, Colly's husband Robin came, brother Billy came from Switzerland and brother Robby and his wife Jennifer with their two baby girls, 21/2 and 4 months, Zoe and Adia from California.
We all had a lovely time, my mother included, playing with the babies and looking at old family and childhood photos, about 1200 of them that I had digitized so every one could have a copy and telling stories. Now numbering about 16, we had a delicious Mother's Day lunch at a local restaurant.
In many ways we are very blessed. Mom -we call her Ruth - is completely herself, if much frailer and more tired. She laughs, makes jokes, gives orders, goes through her mail, makes calls, gets her hair done, and is forever putting Vinny her beloved Jack Russell terrier out when he's in and bringing him in when he's out and making sure he gets all three of his dinners. She carried long term care insurance for in-home care because she hates being in the hospital even though she too is a nurse and never wanted to go into a nursing home. Now the benefits are apparent because she's home where she wants to be and Colly is even being paid, making up for some of her lost income. Colly got a new MacBook, put in wireless, got a new bike and is testing some of Ruth's best, baking recipes and I'm going to make a book out if it.
We have an elevator in the house which my parents put in about 15 years ago when my sister Debby, wheel-chair bound with multiple sclerosis, was living at home. So Mom still uses her bedroom and bath but can come down easily to the kitchen, the living room, office and yard during the day. Heat gives her the most tactile relief for her abdominal pains so she sits with a heating pad at her back, holding a hot water bottle against her stomach, a heat sandwich.
Two weeks later it's a different story. Hospice has started and they have been wonderful, delivering my mother's exponentially increasing pain medications, an assigned nurse, Peggy, who visits several times a week to check on her status and making sure we have everything we need. Since Ruth was only eating about 300-500 calories a day, she was becoming even thinner although her pain does seem to be under control.
"Two to four weeks" we were told in one of Colleen's daily emails to all concerned. In just a few days, Robby was back from the West Coast, Billy from Geneva, and Julie, my youngest sister, due in Tuesday.
Her affairs and finances are all in order so there's nothing to be done there. My mother is enjoying lots of visitors, family and friends alike, basking in all the love and banter, sometimes glowing. The weather is beautiful. My brothers have found projects to do around the house and yard. Patty, Colleen's dear friend from Florida is visiting for week and cleaning up gardens, planting the window boxes, and impatiens in every corner. We all eat dinner together that one of us makes or takeout and we have cases of beer in the garage so we'll never run out. These are wonderful times for the family. The loss will come soon enough.
This is the way to go, a vigorous old age and a fast decline, at home surrounded by family and people who love you.
Last year for a poetry jam I memorized The Mower by Philip Larkin. Today, Eamonn Fitzgerald writes that the horror and tragedy of the Virginia Tech killings drives home the urgency of its command.
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Bravery is a virtue; helplessness is not.
Long ago, way before 9/11, when airline hijackings were the craze, I thought then and still do that every citizen is a foot soldier in the fight against terror. Most days, I drive through Lexington Center and see the statue of the Minuteman, an ordinary man, ready in a minute to defend home and others.
Still none of us know what we would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun.
Kathy Shadie says
Remember: when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position. At least show a smidgen of bravery and say "I", rather than "we."
I don't know what I would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun.
I like to think that I would be brave, push past my fear, not run away, save lives. You see as a young girl, I grew up on the stories of martyrs, often young girls just like me. When I wasn't playing cowboys and Indians with my best friend Kathy, we played martyr, practicing how to fight back and die well if the Russian Communists ever took over the country. How many children play like that any more?
From Meditation on Death of the Young
The quarterback of the football team was just outside the hall when the shooting began. He said, in an article in the Washington Post, that he
"I couldn't tell whether people were hurt or not, "I was kind of on the move. The whole time, I wasn't really trying to figure what was happening or where the shots were coming from. I was just kind of on the move,
No one made a move to attack the killer or throw something at him. No one.
Did it all happen too fast?
What if they had been warned that a double murder had occurred and a killer was loose on the campus?
Jack Dunphy who's been present at over 1000 shooting scenes in his police career writes
This would have given them the chance to make an informed decision on how best to proceed with the day. After all, the difference between what happened on Flight 93 and on the other doomed flights of 9/11 was that the passengers on Flight 93 had been warned of what awaited them. Had students and faculty at Virginia Tech been told that a murderer may be stalking the campus, some of them might have been alert to the danger and steeled themselves to fend off the killer.
Nathanael Blake asks Where Were the Men?
College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut. Meanwhile, an old man hurled his body at the shooter to save others.
Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.
Dr. Sanity says Feminishness is a Word Whose Time Has Come for a society with too much yin and not enough yang and quotes John Derbyshire, "PC is fem and its consequences are femmer..."
Mark Steyn writes A Culture of Passivity is an existential threat to our society
They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet....it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.
Have we become too passive, too afraid, too nice? Is even the talk of self defense politically incorrect? Where is it decreed we always have to wait for the police or the firemen when lives are in danger?
Michelle Malkin says
You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.
The Anchoress discusses with her son the various ways a random shooter could be taken down in "Throw a desk, a heavy book, make him flinch."
While Varifrank has the best guidelines of all in More Sparta, Less Athens.
Back from being way all day and far from the Internet, I just learned about the horrific killings at Virginia Tech. How terrified the students must have been. How awful for the victims' families. I can't imagine the shock their parents must feel after thinking their children were safe at college. I can't imagine the shock and pain their friends and fellow students are going through.
I join everyone in sorrow at this tragedy and in prayers for those touched by the shootings.
32 killed! I don't understand the 2 hour lag between the first murder and the classroom murders.
How a heavily armed man could walk around campus without people noticing and calling security is beyond me.
Why after bomb scares last week and a double murder at about 7:15, did it take 2 hours for school officials to warn students to "be cautious".
Two people killed and the gunman at large seems to me to warrant more than a "be cautious." What was campus security doing?
We've seen Columbine. We've been horrified at the Bestlan massacre. Now we're seeing Virginia Tech.
How many more?
In an emergency being connected is more important than ever. Why wasn't there an emergency communications plan for all the students? The elements are all in place. All students have phones and computers. Why weren't all the students on a email, phone text message alert?
Any plan could have saved lives.
'Two to three months," the doctor said, almost reluctantly, when I finally posed the question. That's eight to twelve weeks. Sixty to 90 days. Or 2,160 hours, if you want to get right down to it.
--
Eventually - what a luxurious word.
A 39-year -old columnist, living with cancer, says Focusing on present matters most.
Little reported in the coverage of the Iraq war is the internal war by Arab and Muslim islamists on the Assyrian Christian community. They are Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, sometimes called Syriacs or Chaldeans.
This is what the Islamists or Muslim militants, righteous and violent murdering gangs of men, have done to the Iraqi Christians since the Iraq war began.
They have bombed 28 churches.
They have murdered hundreds of Christians.
They have beheaded a priest in Mosul.
They have crucified a 14-year-old Christian boy in Basra.
They have kidnapped a woman's baby in Baghad and, when she couldn't pay the ransom, they returned her child, beheaded, roasted and served on a mound of rice.
Read Ed West's We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion
just to be aware of what's happening.
From Palestine, to Iraq, to Iran and Pakistan, Christians who have lived in the middle East are leaving for fear of their lives in ever increasing numbers.
American Catholic bishops have called for asylum for Iraqi Christians
Last night I watched the Sopranos, the episode when Christopher, in hospital after being shot and considered clinically dead for about a minute, reports that he had a visited his father in hell where he was told he was going.
Many people were discomfited by the Pope's speech the other day in which he said God's love is great, but hell 'exists and is eternal.'
Have there been near-death experiences of hell? Time to check out near-death.com which I found less reliable than the Wikipedia entry on near-death experiences.
Not all near-death experiences are those of a brilliant white light and indescribable love; some experience what they could only call hell.
Two of the most famous are Dr. George Rodonaia and Howard Storm.
If you think that hell has gotten a bad name, you might want to read Fr. James Schall on The Brighter Side of Hell who concludes that Hell exists so that we might be free.
"The road to Hell," it is said, "is paved with good intentions." It is also paved with many insights into the very nature of our being that guide us to the truth of things and the importance of our existence.
I wrote this post last year for Third Age, and thought why not repost it this year because so few people know about the Great Hunger. The Irish who fled the famine emigrated around the world and were such successful immigrants, so completely integrating into the mainstream culture wherever they landed, they lost touch with their own history.
Some say the potato first arrived in Ireland when they washed up on shore following the shipwreck of the 130 ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588 in a violent storm. It didn’t take long for the potato to become popular as a healthy and reliable source of food and soon the mainstay of the Irish peasantry. Grown underground, it was plentiful even during times of war, surviving when other crops and livestock were destroyed. The population of Ireland soared with more than two thirds living on the land, dependent on a potato harvest that, unlike grain, could not be stored.
When the potato blight appeared in 1845 and spread in 1846, people were left with nothing to eat, with no way to make money to support themselves. By the end of the worst years of the potato famine, 1847-1849, more than one million Irishmen women and children died of starvation in "The Great Hunger." Another 1.5 million emigrated.
About a half million were evicted by their landlords, many sent away in overcrowded "coffin ships" to Canada with little food, almost no water and no doctors. Already weak and sick, often more than half died. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.
Remember now, Ireland was part of Great Britain and in this time of greatest need, the English government washed their hands of the "Irish problem" by dumping the entire cost and responsibility of famine relief upon the Irish property owners. They closed down the public works programs and soup kitchens which were a "temporary solution" for the first crop failure.
With the passage of the Poor Law, anyone seeking relief who owned more than a quarter acre in land had to forfeit their land.
Men could only get relief if they went as destitute paupers to workhouses already overfull with widows, children and the elderly. People were turned away in droves. They wandered the countryside, living in holes and under bridges, eating grass and dying in ditches.
In Donegal Union, ten thousand persons were found living "in a state of degradation and filth which it is difficult to believe the most barbarous nations ever exceeded," according to the Quaker, William Forster. His organization, the Society of Friends, had refused to work in cooperation with the new Poor Law.
Still, it was not enough as the British Government called for maximum pressure to collect taxes and tax collectors seized livestock, furniture, clothes and tools from homeless paupers. As a matter of policy they would not supply food to the starving people who were considered feckless and reckless for depending on the potato. In 1861 in The Last Conquest of Ireland, John Mitchel wrote: "The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine."
Little wonder that intense hatred grew against the British. Unrest by a group of Irish nationalists known as ‘Young Ireland’ caused the British government to send in troops to quell any sort of popular uprising. Habeas corpus was suspended and the Treason Felony Act was passed that made speaking against the Crown or the Parliament punishable by deportation to Australia for life.
Ireland was forced to pay for its own relief. Landlords tore down houses so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, evicting tenants in the winter with nowhere to go. Men and women who had never committed any crimes deliberately committed crimes so they could be deported. The horrors of the Great Hunger are unimaginable to us today and deeply shameful to those who survived it.
Michael Shaughnessy, a barrister in Ireland, described children he encountered while traveling on his circuit as "almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible." In another district, there was a report of a woman who had gone insane from hunger and eaten the flesh of her own dead children. In other places, people killed and ate dogs which themselves had been feeding off dead bodies.
So shameful is the memory of the famine that those who survived rarely spoke of it. Those of Irish descent now living in the U.S or Canada or Australia are only beginning to learn about the Great Hunger, through contemporary Irish bands like Black 47, recent books like the National Book Award winner, Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett and the PBS series on the Irish in America.
What’s most often told is the glory of a new life in a new land. The most famous of which is the story of "Nine Famous Irishmen’ reprinted on countless restaurant placemats.
In the Young Irish disorders, in Ireland in 1848 the following nine men were captured, tried, and convicted of treason against Her Majesty, the Queen, and were sentenced to death: John Mitchell, Morris Lyene, Pat Donahue, Thomas McGee, Charles Duffy, Thomas Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Terrence McManus, Michael Ireland.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked if there was anything that anyone wished to say. Meagher, speaking for all, said, "My lord, this is our first offense but not our last. If you will be easy with us this once, we promise, on our word as gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time - sure we won’t be fools to get caught."
Thereupon the indignant judge sentenced them all to be hanged by the neck until dead and drawn and quartered. Passionate protest from all the world forced Queen Victoria to commute the sentence to transportation for life to far wild Australia.
In 1874, word reached the astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported men were revealed and this is what was uncovered:
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, Governor of Montana
TERRENCE MCMANUS, Brigadier General, United States Army
PATRICK DONAHUE, Brigadier General, United States Army
RICHARD O’GORMAN, Governor General of Newfoundland
MORRIS LYENE, Attorney General of Australia, in which office
MICHAEL IRELAND succeeded him
THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE, Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of
Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada
JOHN MITCHELL, prominent New York politician. This man was the father of John
Purroy Mitchell, Mayor of New York, at the outbreak of World War I.
He was brought in to take over one of the worst state medical examiner's offices in the country, but the increase in autopsies has brought its own problems now that there is only one fully staffed office in the state.
Too few body bags, an overwhelmed plumbing system, long delays in picking up bodies at scenes of crimes and too little space with some bodies being stored in refrigerated trucks parked behind the building is causing a "review of the situation" in Boston.
Autopsies overwhelm medical examiner staff says the Boston Globe.
The Boston Herald has by far the more vivid report. Morgue backlog 'nightmare'.
One morgue technician walked off the job and flung his badge at his supervisor. Now on administrative leave while the office processes his complaint, he emails the Herald that:
• Bodies stacked three high on shelves and gurneys in the main cooler, many decomposing and dripping fluids onto others through leaky body bags.
• At least five infants have remained in the cooler for upwards of two years because the office has not been able to arrange burials.
• Poor ventilation leading to a constant stench of decomposition and the routine presence of flies in the autopsy areas.
• Several cases in which improper drainage and a heavy caseload have caused blood and bodily fluids to back up and pool onto the floor of the autopsy suite.
“These bodies all have names. They are just lying there decomposing with mold forming on them,” said Kelley, a father of four. “It shows a total disregard for human remains.
One shudders to think what would happen in a disaster.
Teen's survival in Gulf 'pretty amazing'.
A 13-year-old boy survived 28 hours in the chilly Gulf of Mexico because the three adults with him kept him propped above the water line on a part of the sunken pleasure boat that protruded above the water, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Tuesday.
Melquisedec Acevedo of Houston was found Monday clinging to a line from the partially submerged boat that sank Sunday about 10 miles south of Galveston Island. Two bodies were recovered and the search continues for a fourth man.
"For that little boy to survive is a strong indication that his family members did everything possible to ensure that he at least had a fighting chance at survival," Petty Officer Adam Eggers said.
What heartens me is the realization that these three men, even as they knew they were dying, did all they could to save the life of the youngest among them whose birthday it was. Extraordinary bravery and love.
Dolphin ‘dying of a broken heart’ after trainer is killed.
When the young dolphin was rescued from the Adriatic Sea, distressed and bruised, she was nurtured back to health by a dedicated trainer who took responsibility for her care.
Now the trainer is dead, the victim of a frenzied attack by her neighbour — and the dolphin, apparently, is dying of a broken heart.
--
The dolphin is refusing her daily diet of milk and squid and has lost 50kg (110lb) since Ms Monti’s murder. Her weight has fallen to just 160kg (350lb) and she has failed to respond to medication for a gastric infection.
--
The extraordinary story of love emerged yesterday as keepers at the Oltremare water park in Riccione appealed for international help to save the life of their dolphin.
It seems there's an awful lot of people who go missing on cruises. The cruise industry reported to a U.S. subcommittee that 24 passengers had disappeared between 2003 and March 2006. Since then there's been ten more.
These are not known suicides and something suspicious seems to be going on. Going on a cruise is the perfect way to commit a perfect crime said Congressman Christopher Shays who warned of a
"growing manifest of unexplained disappearances, unsolved crimes and brazen acts of lawlessness on the high seas". Like small cities, he said, cruise ships experienced crimes. "But city dwellers know the risks of urban life - and no one falls off a city never to be heard of again.
Death on the High Seas, a special report from the Guardian.
Out at sea, there are no police.
It is extremely difficult for any detective to piece together a murder case without a body, and chances of finding a passenger dumped into the ocean are slim indeed. And while all cruise ships employ security officers, they do not always seal off crime scenes, detain suspects and interview witnesses in the manner that might be expected of them.
--
"The cruise companies just want it to go away," says Randy Jaques, an American security officer. He claims personally to have dealt with more than 50 complaints, and says hundreds of women have signed "Jane Doe agreements" - meaning they have reached an out-of-court settlement with the cruise lines and signed a confidentiality clause.
Passengers can find themselves in a complex legal situation, potentially under numerous jurisdictions when sailing abroad. With many cruise ships registered under flags of convenience with relatively slack tax and labour regimes, the relevant laws might be those of Panama, the Bahamas or Bermuda. Prosecuting, say, a sacked crew member who has returned to his own country brings a whole new dimension of complexity. Charles Lipcon, a Miami lawyer who has built a 30-year career on suing cruise lines, says his firm does not normally take on cases without a clear jurisdiction. "What I've seen over the years is that it's a hot potato for everyone, and nothing much gets done," he says.
Feeling relief when someone dies is rarely admitted, but more common than you think.
Jennifer Elison does in My Turn - The Stage of Grief No One Admits To: Relief.
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A Hong Kong schoolboy who died in a traffic accident has brought festive hope to at least seven other patients through the rare mass donation of a large number of his vital organs.
--
The mother said
"Even though I'm devastated, I want to do something for society,"
--
"(My son) is very great. Even though he's left us ... we can still hear him breathe, and his heart beat. He's already become an angel."
Doctors hailed Miu's case as an example to others in Hong Kong where organ donorship is traditionally frowned upon given the Chinese belief in keeping bodies whole to allow the deceased to rest in heavenly peace.
"This is a very encouraging event... we're desperately in need of organs," said Dr. Choi Kin, president of the Hong Kong Medical Association.
Last year, only 4.2 of every million people in Hong Kong donated organs to science upon dying, a fraction of the rate in the U.S., according to the Apple Daily.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Patricia Bolsom is writing a diary of her final days.
It's a horrifying look at Britain's National Health Service where nothing is co-ordinated, no one is in charge and care is rationed.
Brian Hathaway, 20, was accused of having sex with a dead deer, but he found a public lawyer willing to defend him by arguing that because the deer was dead, it was not considered an animal and the charge should be dismissed.
Lawyer argues sex with dead deer not crime.
The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass,”
-----
the Webster’s dictionary defines “animal” as “any of a kingdom of living beings,” Anderson said.
If you include carcasses in that definition, he said, “you really go down a slippery slope with absurd results.”
Anderson argued: When does a turkey cease to be an animal? When it is dead?
When it is wrapped in plastic packaging in the freezer? When it is served, fully cooked?
A judge should decide what the Legislature intended “animal” to mean in the statute, he said. “And the only clear point to draw the line in that definition, I believe, is the point of death.”
I wonder if he had any idea that he made himself and his client a laughing stock across the nation. Sometimes, it's better to take your lumps and not make a public fool of yourself.
I have no doubt that a number of people at Microsoft thought it was a terrific idea to hold a preview at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, for their newest video game, Gears which is apparently so violent that even its maker calls it 'horrific'. I think both the preview and the game sounds appalling.
"Gears," which puts you in the role of a grizzled soldier fighting off alien invaders, has tantalized gamers with graphically realistic faces, explosions and blood.
The game carries an "M" rating, meaning it is for "mature" gamers aged 17 years and older.
---
Attendees at a "Gears" preview party held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery last week were eager to try the game.
"It's gorgeous, isn't it?" one gamer remarked as another pumped bullets into a dead body dangling from a chain.
"Gears" doesn't so much incorporate violence as revel in it.
A chainsaw mounted on your rifle quickly fillets enemies amid fountains of gore, and when an enemy goes down in a hail of hot lead, you can finish him off with a gruesome move the designers gleefully call the "curb stomp."
"It's pretty graphic because it's not just visually that you understand a head is being stepped on and squashed like a watermelon, you also hear it as well," said Dan Hsu, editor-in-chief of "Electronic Gaming Monthly."
I've been thinking a lot about good and evil since I heard of the horrific deaths of five innocent schoolgirls, shot to death execution style, in a simple one room Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
The killer, 32 year old Charles Carl Roberts IV, came into the schoolhouse, armed to the teeth, ordered the boys and adults out, barricaded the doors, tied the young girls feet, lined them up in front of the blackboard and shot them in the head, before shooting and killing himself.
Roberts, a milk tank driver, who wrote suicide notes to each of his three children, before arming himself with an automatic handgun and shotgun, and driving to the school which he apparently chose just because it was close by and had young girls.
The suicide notes suggested that he was acting out of revenge for an incident that happened 20 years earlier when he was 12. Nothing can explain such a horrific death. To say that he was obviously "sick" seems to minimize the tragedy. This premeditated crime was evil and there is no better word for it. Sometimes, I think the personification of evil as the devil as more subtlety than is generally given credit. And I don't mean "the devil made me do it." That there are dark forces around us and in us with which we do battle is something we all know. We continually choose between good and bad, every one of us.
Today, four girls will be buried, Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7; Marian Fisher, 13; Mary Liz Miller, 8; and her sister Lena Miller, 7. The funeral for the fifth girl, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is scheduled for tomorrow. Each girl laid to rest in a white dress, a cape, and a white prayer covering on her head.
That there are good forces as well we can see from the Amish themselves. Their actions humble all of us. In the aftermath, they reached out to the family of the gunman, comforting them and extending forgiveness. Said Gertrude Huntington, a Michigan researcher who wrote a book about Amish children, they are quietly accepting of God's will.
"They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death. The hurt is very great, but they don't balance the hurt with hate."
One pastor who stood next to the body of a 13-year-old girl heard her grandfather tell his young boys, "We must not think evil of this man." Such forgiveness said pastor Rev. Robert Schenck, "Was one of the most touching things I've seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."
Descendants of Swiss and German immigrants, the Amish are Anabaptists and no strangers to tragedy which they accept as the will of God, an approach to life they call yieldedness. They derive their strength from their faith and the mutual aid of their community.
The Amish surmount hardship through mutual aid. When a barn burns, they do not call the insurance company. They have a barn raising, said Kimberly D. Schmidt, associate professor of history at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va., who has studied Amish women.
“For the families who lost children, there will be a tremendous community outpouring of love and support,” Ms. Schmidt said. “They will not suffer alone in their grief at all. People will bring in meals for weeks. As devastating as this is, there’s so much strength they can draw from their community.”
The Amish are self-insured and pay for all their own medical bills. There are young girls, severely injured still in the hospital who will require long term care. They may not be able to shoulder all the costs themselves. They generally do not accept help from outside their community. Said one Amish bishop, " "We are not asking for funds. In fact, it's wrong for us to ask. But we will accept them with humility."
The local newspaper reports that funds have been set up to cover the expenses of the victims and their families, including the family of the gunman.
Donations may be sent to Nickel Mines School Victims Fund, HomeTowne Heritage Bank, 100 Historic Drive, P.O. Box 337, Strasburg, PA 17579, or at any division of National Penn Bank.
•••
Another fund is being set up through Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Disaster Services. According to MCC’s Web site, contributions may be sent to the MCC U.S., 21 S. 12th St., P.O. Box 500, Akron, PA 17501-0500.
Donations may also be made by phone by calling 859-1151 or (888) 563-4676 or online at www.mds.mennonite.net.
If you wish to send a card or letter of condolence, address them to Bart Township Fire Company, P.O. Box 72, 11 Furnace Road, Bart, PA 17503.
Herman Bontrager, the secretary/treasurer of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, said the Amish are “very appreciative” of the outpouring of help.
“They feel so humbled by it,” he said.
The Amish sometimes refer to themselves as "plain people". What we've seen in the past week is plain goodness.
It's hard to imagine but a husband and wife arrested in the British terror raids planned to take their six month old baby with them on their suicide mission to bomb planes in mid air. Their baby's bottle would have hidden the liquid bomb.
Just in case you wondered how far the anti-life ideology of the islamo terrorists would go.
With his parents in jail, I hope that the poor baby will be placed in a good foster home with a chance at a normal life
UPDATE: Dr. Sanity says we have moved into a time beyond wisdom and points to a discussion she calls heart-breaking and she's right at Blackfive, On the virtues of killing children.
Learning to Die is quite a remarkable essay by Brother David Steindl-Rast.
on awareness of death
In the rule of St. Benedict, the momento mori has always been important, because one of what St. Benedict calls “the tools of good works” – meaning the basic approaches to the daily life of the monastery – is to have death at all times before one’s eyes....it is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive.
on purpose and meaning
With purposes, we must be active and in control. We must, as we say, “take the reins,” “take things in hand,” “keep matters under control,” and utilize circumstances like tools that serve our aims....But matters are different when we deal with meaning. Here it is not a matter of using, but of savoring the world around us. In the idioms we use that relate to meaning, we depict ourselves as more passive than active: “It did something to me”; “it touched me deeply”; “it moved me.”
on life.
Life, if it isn’t a give and take, is not life at all. The taking corresponds to the active phase, to our “purpose” when we do something; while the giving of ourselves to whatever it is that we experience is the gesture by which meaning flows into our lives. It must be stressed that this is not an either/or; life is not a give or take, but a give and take; if we only take or only give, we are not alive. If we only take breath in we suffocate, and if we only breathe out we also suffocate. The heart pumps the blood in and pumps it out; and it is in the rhythm of give and take that we live.
The lifeguard on duty at Houghton's Pond in Milton didn't have his mouthpiece to protect himself so he refused to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a three-year-old boy.
Fortunately, there were bystanders who were CPR certified and they didn't have any qualms about germs. They saved the young boy's life.
How Faith Saved the Atheist or how to handle the pressure of 'death with dignity'.
On Father's Day, we packed my father's hospital room: his wife, daughters, grandchildren, each of us regaling him with our successes large and small.
"Life's not so bad, after all," the atheist said. I wanted to go back to ICU, find Dr. Death, drag her to my father's room and say: "This is the life you wanted to end." But if I'm really to be a person of faith, I'll have to tackle forgiveness.
China is now employing death vans used for lethal injection executions, mobile execution chambers, that travel from village to village. The designer says lethal injections are a sign that China promotes human rights.
Amnesty international says from 2000-8000 are put to death each year.
China makes ultimate punishment mobile
China's critics contend that the transition from firing squads to injections in death vans facilitates an illegal trade in prisoners' organs.
Injections leave the whole body intact and require participation of doctors. Organs can "be extracted in a speedier and more effective way than if the prisoner is shot," says Mark Allison, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. "We have gathered strong evidence suggesting the involvement of (Chinese) police, courts and hospitals in the organ trade."
Why did Karen McCarron, a respected physician and advocate for autistic children, smother her three-year-old daughter with a plastic bag?
The toll of autism has a lot of people in heated discussion.
Her husband has filed for divorce. Grandfather Michael McCarron said
Karen McCarron had a lot of resources and help with Katie, whom he described as a happy, endearing child who loved to swing and play in the grass and would line up her Teletubbie dolls so they could "kiss" each other.
"This was not a question of there's no place to turn, there's no support," Michael McCarron said. "This was not a murder about autism."
When faced with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, ordinary moments become holy.
So Harry Lehotsky writes in the Winnepeg Sun
Being told you only have a short time to live has a way of sharpening your senses and adjusting your priorities and perspectives on life.
Many of the most ordinary events and encounters in life are infused with fresh meaning and significance.
A sunny day. The smell of lilacs. A good day at work. Greetings, hugs, goodbyes. We take too many people and things for granted.
Time simultaneously speeds up and slows down. It's hard to explain. It's like you're aware of how quickly hours and days speed by. But you're more determined than ever to juice the most out of every minute.
More than 40 climbers ascending Mt Everest passed a British mountaineer who lay dying and didn't stop to help.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit said
"I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top," he told the newspaper.
Hillary told New Zealand Press Association he would have abandoned his own pioneering climb to save another's life.
"It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by," he said.
He said that his expedition, "would never for a moment have left one of the members or a group of members just lie there and die while they plugged on towards the summit."
Too focused, too goal-oriented, too selfish to be authentically human.
A nurse writes I have seen people die.
The most sobering thing about doing what I do for a living is this: it means that I have done something that, as far as I know, the rest of my immediate family has not. I've done it enough that it's become, at least in the outlines, fairly routine.
.... I've answered the call bell or the person who comes out into the hall with *that tone of voice* or *that look* that means that the person in the bed has quit breathing. I've caught up another nurse on the way to the room to verify the lack of a heartbeat. I've called more residents than I care to think about to verify our verification and chart time of death. I've walked them through the paperwork and told them where to sign.
And, more than that, I've been alone with a number of dead people. The dead are peaceful; they don't ask for cups of coffee when they're NPO or talk politics. I've bathed bodies, removed tubes and wires and IVs, wiped off things I couldn't identify and would rather not think about. I've talked to those people as I've done it, hoping that maybe my persistence in treating them as a living person would speed their souls on to wherever souls go.
I always leave the window open when I do this, no matter the weather. If I have a soul, and if it leaves my body after I die, I do not want to have to work to get outside and fly away. No elevators for me; give me an open window. Supersitious, yes, but part of the private ritual I have.
--
Those of us who midwife the dying are a weird group; we're not generally skeeved out or frightened by the thing that is most taboo in our culture. Most of us have dissected at least portions of bodies; all of us have talked to those still living about the process of dying. It's hard work, as hard as having a baby, and with much the same rhythm as birthing.
Far from his home and family in the Dominican Republic, M'ximo Cid Ortiz has been in Washington, an outpatient at the NIH and is now dying of a bone marrow disease with only weeks to live, in his words, "ready to set sail."
He couldn't go home so his family came to him and his eldest daughter, a 14 year old pianist, performed a special concert to a packed hall, including a piece she composed in honor of her father, "Mi Alma" (My Soul). All because one friend Grace Rivera-Owen said, "That's something I could do." It was Music to a Father's Ears.
At night's end, friends and strangers approached Cid Ortiz. Many didn't know what to say.
"I can't describe the amount of gratitude I have," he said again and again.
His wife wiped drops of blood that dripped from his nose, tucking the stained tissues into a plastic wine cup as Cid Ortiz made his way out of the hall.
Cid Ortiz donned his surgical mask, stepped outside and boarded a waiting car. He returned to the hospital with Castillo and the girls, who have decided to stay by his side until he's ready to set sail.
When it comes to a disaster like Katrina or 9/11, it's often better to question authorities especially when your gut tells you to.
The release of the tapes of 911 calls from September 11 is heart-breaking because
No more than 2 of the 130 callers were told to leave, the tapes reveal, even though unequivocal orders to evacuate the trade center had been given by fire chiefs and police commanders moments after the first plane struck. The city had no procedure for field commanders to share information with the 911 system, a flaw identified by the 9/11 Commission that city officials say has since been fixed.
I wrote in Good Sense and Preparation that
You have to depend on your own good sense and preparation to survive if something terrible happens, a terrorist attack, a fire, or in what seems increasingly likely next year or the next two or three, a pandemic of avian flu.
You have to depend on your own good sense and preparation to survive because the federal government, state and local governments are not prepared as they should be and never will be.
This used to be commonly accepted.
Civil engineers who studied the collapse of the World Trade Center towers said some 2500 people saved their lives because they disobeyed authorities who told them to stay put and instead engaged in "reasoned flight". They didn't flee in a panic but stopped to help the injured and assist the disabled. They knew more than the authorities because they had better access to what was happening than the authorities did.
It may seem strange, but there's a resurgent market in Zombies, the walking dead.
Books, films and video games about zombies are speaking to the deep and pervasive fear many have.
Most zombie zealots seem to agree that the zombie renaissance has something to do with the anxieties of life after Sept. 11.
"People have apocalypse on the brain right now," Mr. Brooks said. "It's from terrorism, the war, natural disasters like Katrina." Several zombie aficionados said there was a zombielike quality to the spread of the bird flu.
---
If you need to brush up on zombie lore, a little background. Zombies have their origin in Caribbean voodoo; they are thought to be reanimated corpses, under the control of the witch who reanimated them.
In modern literature and films, zombies are typically mindless, slow-moving creatures (due to the stiffness of necrotic tissue, Mr. Brooks writes) with but one aim: to eat flesh. And they're not particular about whose flesh they eat.
Seems to me, there's enough walking dead out there. What we need are more people waking up and becoming more responsible for the world around us.
Art Buchwald makes me laugh out loud. Take Low-Interest Loan
He read the same piece I wrote about in Sperm Online but he "decided it was a sign. Why not me?" so he calls the sperm bank, offers a deposit, and spends the rest of the column in a reverie about his possible children in his room at a hospice where he is spending his last days as the man who wouldn't die.
Since the start of the American Revolution in 1775, about a million Americans have died in wars. Since Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1913, more than 2.5 million Americans have died on the road.
The comparison is stunning says Marilyn vos Savant.
Bernard Chippie was fired because took time off to be with his wife who was dying from brain cancer.
Earlier, Chippie said he notified his employer on Feb. 13 that he would not be able to finish his weekly route because he had just learned his wife had between two days and a week to live. He went to Kathleen Chippie's bedside at a hospice that day.
"There was never a question of where I needed to be," Chippie said.
He said that three days later, his boss demanded that he show up at work the next day. He said he was fired when he said he couldn't.
Three days after that, Kathleen Chippie died at the age of 56.
In 13 years, he had never taken a full week of vacation from the Rug Doctor.
The company's behavior is disgraceful.
While the company did an about-face and offered him his job back, it was probably to avoid a law suit.
The Financial Planning Association and the National Endowment for Financial Education have teamed up to create an online life-stages financial planning tool.
Life Events & Financial Decisions is definitely a site to bookmark if only for as a checklist for the Business of Life™.
Roseanne Cash's new album Black Cadillac "mines the grief" Cash experienced after she lost three parents in two years - her mother, father and stepmother, Johnny and June Carter Cash. She says in a Beliefnet interview "Each song is about a different place on the map of loss."
Do you see this album as a love letter or a farewell to your parents?
No--it's not a tribute record, it's not a farewell, it's not a goodbye note. It's about what I discovered in the mourning process about my relationship to them, which I believe continues, about re-negotiating the terms of those relationships, because they're not over, although I'm the only one talking. And about the emptiness, the silence that comes when you're the only one talking. It's about an attempt to connect and find what survives death—the ancestral thread, and love.
----
I am the wall protecting my children from their own mortality, so therefore my mortality is acutely present. I have a sense that I'll get past this phase I'm in right now where I feel like it's so present, that death is imminent, because I'm not old yet, and I know that it's all there because so many people died in such rapid succession. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate that sense of mortality into a graceful way to live in the present. It's hard.
-----
I have written above my desk—"When you sing, you pray twice." Somebody told me that they knew this psychic who when he saw musical notes around a person, he knew they prayed a lot. I thought that was so great, like prayers go out as musical notes, and maybe vice versa.
From Pamela Bone, one year after being diagnosed with myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, and retiring.
The best advice to people suffering a terminal illness I've read was this: 'Yes, you are going to die, but until you do, you are alive.' So that's what I'm doing: being alive.
And goes on to talk about the butter, the Danes and Prince Fredrik.
We forget how ever present death was for all the generations before us, especially death of young children.
As he reads Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, Callimachus ruminates at Done with Mirrors
We tend to think of death as a country for the old. It was not so then. People of all ages were vulnerable, the cold calculus of contagion meant that often if a disease got into a household parents would lose some or all of their children in a matter of days.
Parental bereavement came not only by the sudden stroke of a gunshot or accident; with tragic frequency they had to watch, desperate and powerless as death took its agonizing time with their children, who writhed as parasites dissolved their bowels or languished delirious in parching fevers. Nowadays, parents who lose a child have to go in search of support. No one, it seems, really knows how to talk to them. Parental bereavement is alien to most of us. But 150 years ago, death of a child was a common denominator among American families.
He says
It's remarkable that a tragedy so pervading, and so intense, has not been more considered by historians in examining the temper of the times. This grim fact of life seems to me to explain so much about the shape of 19th century American minds, especially where they seem different from ours: The determination to make something of oneself, the importance of family.
As Haines's letters suggest, not just the intensity of American religion but the form of it, so full of resurrection and the need to keep in God's good graces at every moment, seems to have been guided by the realities of death in that era. The hope of meeting in another world and knowing one another in the flesh again was the only solace.
We are no doubt a blessed and fortunate people but death still comes to all of us. May the certain fact of our death inform our lives in this 21st century and draw us to a more expanded consciousness so we live more abundantly and with true compassion.
When it comes to end-of-life care, there are distinct gender and ethnic based differences in people's choices, according to a study, admittedly small. Gender, Ethnicity Sway Choices for End-of-Life Care.
"For Arabs, going to a nursing home is the worst thing that could happen to you. The strong expectation is that your family takes care of you," Duffy said. "But African-Americans were more comfortable going to a nursing home, as they did not want to 'burden' their families."
When it comes how you want to be treated if you had only six months to live...
"The men generally did not want extensive intervention done. Dying with dignity was very important, and they didn't want to be a 'vegetable,' " she said.
Duffy added that many men appeared to feel that being dependent at the end of life was a threat to their masculinity.
By contrast, "women were more hopeful that God might intervene and things might change."
Jerry Fensterman I see why others choose to die
I am approaching 50, recently remarried, and the father of a terrific 13-year-old young man. By every measure I enjoy a wonderful life. Or at least I did until April 2004, when I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Surgery was my only hope to prevent its spread and save my life. The discovery of a new lump in December 2004 after two surgeries signaled that metastasis was underway. My death sentence had been pronounced.
Life may be the most intense addiction on earth. From the moment I first heard the words ''you have cancer" and again when I was told that it was spreading out of control, I recognized my addiction to life almost at the cellular level. I have tried since then, as I did before, to live life to the fullest. I also committed myself to doing everything within my power to extend my life.
----
Mine has been a long, difficult, and certain march to death. Thus, I have had ample time to reflect on my life, get my affairs in order, say everything I want to the people I love, and seek rapprochement with friends I have hurt or lost touch with. The bad news is that my pain and suffering have been drawn out, the rewarding aspects of life have inexorably shrunk, and I have watched my condition place an increasingly great physical and emotional burden on the people closest to me. While they have cared for me with great love and selflessness, I cannot abide how my illness has caused them hardship, in some cases dominating their lives and delaying their healing.
Perhaps the biggest and most profound change I have undergone is that my addiction to life has been ''cured." I've kicked the habit! I now know how a feeling, loving, rational person could choose death over life, could choose to relieve his suffering as well as that of his loved ones a few months earlier than would happen naturally.
Terrorist attacks are mighty different when you know one of the victims.
My brain unconsciously processed the information: Statistics from half a world away... Thank God I don't know anyone over there... Are there any Diet Cokes in the refrigerator?
But in my daily AM-induced trance I was shocked into sharp focus when the newsman reported that the lone American death, at the time, was "34-year old Rima Akkad". In that instant I knew it was my friend, the beautiful and jovial younger sister of my high school classmate Malek, who I think saved me (at least from something) by getting me over the Mexican border in a wheelbarrow after a drunken night in Tijuana in 1985.
Al Qaeda Killed My Friend by Andrew Breighbart, guest blogging over at Roger L Simon's blog
Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life or somewhere in between, I can't believe that any American woman or man supports the forced abortions that are going on in China.
In the last few months, some 7000, maybe many tens of thousands, forced abortions have been performed in Shandong province, outside Shanghai. One blind activist, Chen Guangcheng, traveled to Beijing to complain to the central government, journalists and other activists of the "bizarre" brutality of the forced abortion campaign by local government officials in Shandong. According to the San Francisco Chronicle,
Chen was ambushed on the street by plainclothes security officers from Shandong who bundled him into a car and took him back to Linyi. There, Chen found himself under de facto house arrest, where he remains.
It's a horror story of kidnappings, ransoms and brutality against women by local officials that may have widespread consequences to the stability of China. Public protests against corrupt local officials numbered 74,000 last year, up 50% from two years ago. Some of the terrible stories is in the extended entry.
A former employee in the Linyi family planning department, who asked that he be identified only as Cao, said such astonishingly cruel measures were usually carried out by "overzealous" local officials.
___
Zhu Hongying, 40, and her husband, Xia Jiandong, 40, who are farmers in Zhai Tian Zhuang village near Linyi, and who already have one son, said they had first heard of the forced abortions in March, when Zhu was five months pregnant.
"We panicked and ran into (Linyi) to hide," Zhu said during an interview that was conducted by telephone because local police had sealed off her area in the wake of Chen's detention. "But to get to us, about a month after we left, they arrested three of my sisters-in-law. So we felt very guilty and went home."
What happened next went beyond her deepest fears, Zhu said: "The people from the family planning department were waiting for us. They demanded 700 RMB (about $90, two months' wages for Zhu) to release my sisters-in-law, and then they pushed me into a van and took me to a local family planning clinic."
There, a group of eight people surrounded her and harangued her to have an abortion.
What they were doing was illegal. By law, only financial and other penalties can be levied against parents who break China's one-child policy. But Zhu said there was no way for her to protest.
"I just kept sobbing and begging, but no one listened," she said. "Finally, I was so weak, I just said 'yes.' Then a doctor came in and gave me an injection in the stomach. After I took the shot, the whole day I didn't feel anything. The second day in the early morning blood and water all flowed out of me. Then the baby came out, but it was dead. It was a boy."
Zhu said gazing at her dead son was the most heartbreaking moment of her life.
After she aborted, her husband said, a nurse came into the room and dumped the baby's body into a black plastic bag, along with all the other discharge.
"She told me to go throw it into a truck, which had a large container kind of thing at the back," said Xia, his voice quavering. "When I opened the door and looked in, it was full of black bags and blood."
An Italian poet said, "We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever." It’s only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens."
- Anthony de Mello, 20th century Jesuit priest
via Zaadz and Brian Johnson, Philosopher & CEO who offers more from de Mello -
"The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine you’re lying in your coffin….Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it?"
"You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it."
"Life is for the gambler, it really is."
"So love the thought of death, love it."
If you haven't read his thinkarete.the manifesto, you will love it - What would you do if you weren't afraid?
I wish nothing more than people living long, healthy, happy and productive lives so I'm excited about the extraordinary medical and technological advances we are seeing.
Joel Garreau, the author of Radical Evolution, showed me how how we are riding on a curve of exponential change in genetics, robotics, information and nano (GRIN) technologies that is unprecedented in human nature.
Much as being made of Ray Kurzweil's, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology which I haven't read. But when it comes to radical life extension advocates, I get the creeps. Why does living to 140 or 350 years sound so unappealing? I couldn't put my finger on it until I read an interview of Bioethicist William Hurlburt on the dangers of radical life extension.
It's like stretching out a symphony, playing it at half speed so it goes on longer–it wouldn't have the same beauty or meaning. We get a taste of each relational category–being a child, a parent, and a grandparent. And our direct family lineage is connected by both genetics and personal experience, not so attenuated by time that relatives feel unrelated. If people lived to be 140, as some scientists suggest we will through technological intervention, a child could have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents whose names he or she could never remember. In our natural lifespan, there is a harmony of proportion between the cycles of birth, ascendancy, and decline–phases of generation, nurture, and dependency that give a sense of meaningful connection within the journey of our lives.
For the most part, I'm not afraid of dying because Life Will Always Continue. If you see yourself as inter-connected to all life, then dying is far more of a natural process, part of a Great Harmony.
My greatest concern is not how long we can live, but the rapidity of technological advances that is not being matched by similar advances in our wisdom or our ethics.
I'm one voice in a group of talented people each with a distinctive voice, experience and expertise: Connie Goldman, Jacqueline Marcell, Jed Diamond, Lisa Haneberg, Rinatte Paries, Ronni Bennett, Sharon Whiteley, Susan Anderson, Susan Mitchell, Tom Blake and Yvonne Divita.
I write about many of the same things I do on Business of Life and Legacy Matters but often in a more personal way.
Until I can get me on of those doohickies that signifies a new post on another blog, I'm just going to periodically round-up a group of posts and link them here in reverse chronological order.
Rules of Life
Responding to Suffering
Make Haste for a Neighborhood Barbecue
Lessons of Katrina
Afraid to Get Prepared?
Intensely Alive While Dying
Why Can't We Talk About the Important Things?
A Gift of Stories
Good enough is good enough
Learning from Life
Many years ago, I was in a plane with my then boss when we were told the landing gear appeared to be stuck. Somehow, I wasn't afraid though my boss was terrified.
We circled around Logan Airport for about two hours before we were told to assume the crash position with the pillows every airplane used to carry. A runway was sprayed with foam before we landed which we did easily.
So yesterday's drama on Jet Blue was a familiar one. I eagerly searched for reports by the passengers and found this.
Mrs. Jacobs said "We couldn't believe the irony that we might be watching our own demise on television. It just seemed a bit post-post-modern if you will."
Read the full report by McCannta, Post-Post Modern on Jet Blue
The Astute Blogger says Mortality Comparisons Reveal US Response to Katrina Excellent.
While no one knows what the final toll will be, it looks as though the death toll will be far less than the 10,000 expected.
By comparison the 2003 heatwave in Europe killed 35-40,000 according to wikipedia.
The levees have been breached. The mayor of New Orleans says that water is flowing into New Orleans, flooding it beyond recognition.
From Major Breech Flooding and Destroying New Orleans.
80% of the city is under water, in some sections the water is 20 feet deep. Both airports are underwater. The Twin Span bridge is totally destroyed. All of Slidell is under water. The I-10, the major highway into the city is under water.
Brendan Loy says, "Lake Pontchartrain is entering the city and becoming Lake New Orleans."
The breach is at the 17th Street canal and the water is flowing so fast, there are whitecaps on Canal St. The main hospital is being flooded and is considering air evacuation of patients.
This is terrible. This is catastrophe. My heart weeps at the devastation of lives and property. It will take years to recover.
UPDATE: The KatrinaHelp Wiki is up
Many thanks to Terry Teachout for creating the first manual aggregator of Katrina related blogs.
Technorati Tags: flood, Hurricane Katrina
In the secret world of surrogacy, where older women buy eggs from other women or arrange for other women to carry and bear their child,
Melanie McGuire was an "emotional midwife", available at any time to talk with her clients.
A client of Reproductive Medical Associates, Jennifer Calise, is quoted in the Style section of Sunday's New York Times
The entire process is a leap of faith. As a parent who is entrusting strangers with your DNA - your eggs, your sperm, your future children - it's really a scary prospect.
The emotional midwife has been arrested for murder. Prosecutors charge her with shooting her husband, dismembering him, putting the cut-up pieces into black garbage bags, then into suitcases, throwing them off a bridge, before carrying on her life and career for over a year before her arrest.
Murder Stirs Surrogacy Network
Was there ever such a story that combined tragedy with hope, sadness with love?
Is there any doubt that this is what Susan Torres would have wanted? Her dying body, riddled with cancer, was yet suffused with love sufficient to bring a healthy baby to life - Susan Anne Catherine Torres.
Brain dead mother taken off life support from the Washington Post .
After her husband and parents said their last goodbyes and after a priest offered a prayer -- words about weeping in a valley of tears -- Susan Torres, her improbable mission accomplished, was unhooked yesterday morning from the machines that sustained not only her body but that of her baby for the past three months.
The 26-year-old Arlington woman, who was felled by cancer and declared brain-dead in May, but who gave birth by Caesarean section Tuesday to the girl she had hoped for, died shortly thereafter. It was the end her family knew was inevitable, but it was no less difficult to fathom.
...
Jason Torres, who slept by his wife's side for three months, whose cell phone still carries her voice and who made the final decision to unhook the machines, stayed away from the cameras and crowds of reporters who had come to the hospital to find out, among other things, how his new daughter, Susan Anne Catherine Torres, was doing.
Strange happening on the night of Susan Torres' tragic collapse.
On the night of Susan’s collapse, May 7, said Sonny, he returned home with his wife Karen at about 3:00am, and went to bed, exhausted. At about 4:15am, without any warning, he awoke and sat bolt upright. Karen also awoke and asked him what the matter was.
“What it was,” he said, “it wasn’t a dream…This was so different from a dream…so…so powerful. It was words that came to me. It was a woman’s voice; my wife made me write it down. It wasn’t a request, it was a command.”......
“.......Sonny said that although it struck him at the time as a singular and unusual experience, he put it down to overwrought nerves, still barely coming to terms with the tragedy of his daughter-in-law’s sudden collapse only a few hours before. It wasn’t until the following day when he began to tell his son what happened that he was given a palpable reason to think of it as something more than imagination.
“I went to my son later that day,” continued Sonny, “and I began to tell him about it and he said ‘Stop! Let me tell you what I had.’ We compared notes, and it happened about the same time—4:15 in the morning. And his is almost word for word of mine.”
The words that both Sonny and Jason believe they heard, before the life-affirming story of Susan ever reached the ears of a journalist or a newsman, are the following:
“You and others will tell the world of a fight to save a precious life, not to change hardened hearts, but to give hope to those who believe, so that they know that there is more than what they see and hear. Let them come and see for themselves.”
Congratulations and condolences to the Torres family.
Is Communism to blame for baby deaths?
Brandenburg Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm thinks so to the consternation of his party, the Christian Democrats.
Police arrested a 39-year-old German woman in the eastern state of Brandenburg on Monday and charged her with killing nine newborn babies between 1988 and 1999 after finding their bodies buried in flower pots at her parents' home.
--
The deaths, described as Germany's worst post war series of child killings, have sparked shock and disbelief that the woman identified as Sabine H could conceal so many pregnancies.
--
He added the communists' compulsory collectivisation of farms 50 years ago in the largely rural state had led people to lose their sense of personal responsibility and to a decline of moral values in society.
It has the ring of truth to me. Nine pregnancies. Nine births. Nine babies buried in flowerpots and no one noticed?
I fight spam every day, sometimes deleting up to 300 trackback pings, so I've finally installed a new plug-in that closes off trackbacks after 30 days.
While I fumed death to spammers, I never thought of murder.
Someone in Russia did. Russia's biggest spammer was brutally murdered in his apartment, dying after repeated blows to the head.
What do the police do when there are millions of suspects?
From the things I never knew department, these shocking numbers.
A. 11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic during the days of the slave trade. 95% went to South and Central America, only 5% of the slaves went to the United States.
B. At least 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. At least 80% of those captured by Muslim slave traders were estimated to have died in treks across the desert. The death toll from 14 centuries of Muslim slave traded into Africa could have been over 112 million. Add that toll to the number sold in slave markets and the total number of victims of the Trans Saharan and East African slave trade could be higher than 140 million people!
This must be one of history's best kept secrets.
From The scourge of slavery, the rest of the story which was highly recommended by Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.
Katzman points out that in the U.S, we had the great fortune of the 18 and 19th century Abolitionists. Just a few dedicated people, inspired by their Christian faith, opposed slavery, crusaded against it and changed the world.
No such abolitionists arose in the Muslim world where slavery still exists in many places, albeit secretly. In my hometown, a suburb of Boston, the wife of a Saudi prince was arrested earlier this year for keeping slaves!
If you were to name diseases that seem terrifying to just about everyone, Lou Gehrig's disease would be at the top of the list.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is incurable. It destroys the brain's ability to control muscles through neurons, gradually causing physical decline until the patient is unable to breathe. Some 30,000 Americans live with ALS and about 5600 are newly diagnosed each year.
Yet, remarkably, ALS patients with advanced ALS who have trouble breathing and probably only six months to live are not greatly depressed even though death is very much on their minds.
Steven Albert, associate professor at Columbia University and co-author of a study published in the July 12 issue of Neurology says,
"The broader message is that even when people are dying, they can have satisfying lives and appreciate a lot of things."
Death was on the minds of many of the patients, however. Of the 53 who died during the study period, 23 reported thinking about ending their lives. Three asked caregivers for relief from pain even if it hastened their deaths.
"For those people who are able to exercise this control over dying and report very high levels of suffering, their mood improves when they realize they could work out an arrangement and control the time of death," Albert said.
Dr. Catherine Lomen-Hoerth, director of the University of California at San Francisco's ALS Center, said the findings reflect what she sees on the job. "Most patients are quite comfortable with death," said Lomen-Hoerth, who wrote a commentary accompanying the two new studies. "It comes with having a lot of time to prepare, and from clinics and hospice professionals addressing the issue with patients and families."
A lot of people are dissatisfied with the way their relatives in nursing homes are treated at the end of their lives. With one in four Americans dying in a nursing home, that's a lot of unhappy people.
Too often they don't get pain medication. Some 25% of those with cancer don't get daily pain medication and many are sent to hospitals where they receive aggressive treatment in the last weeks of life
Many Elderly Not Aware of Hospice Value
Providing information can enhance end-of-life experience, a new study finds. Just by giving elderly people straightforward information makes them more likely to enter hospices for their end of life care.
HospiceNet for patients and families facing life-threatening illness
Sharon Kaufman, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco, has written a deep, quite remarkable book on how American hospitals shape the life at the end of life.
"And a Time to Die : How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life" (Dr. Sharon Kaufman)
For over a thousand years, death was a public event, not the private family matter as we understand it. The art of dying well provided the model for the deathbed scene when it unfolded in public view, the passage into the unknown seen as a spiritual one.
By the 18th century, the art of medicine made death more visible and the dying person was transformed into the patient. Today we experience the "problem of dying" because new technologies allow a new state of being - "death in life". The Karen Quinlan case began a new way of speaking about death - "a matter of deciding when a person should die and when a person should be considered dead."
We've gone from death watch to billable treatments.
The notion of patient autonomy is actually applied only within a narrow sphere-decision-making about specific medical treatments offered by individual doctors. Patients and families are given choices only among the options made available by hospital rules, reimbursement mechanisms and standards of care. Death is rarely spoken until shortly before it occurs. Until then tests and treatments continue. There is a huge conflict between aggressive medical care and palliative care with every instinct of the hospital pushing people towards lifesaving treatment.
Old age as a disease rather than a developmental process that includes decline toward death has become a more compelling truth that drives hospital practice today. Since 1913, the last year one could die of "old age, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) requires a bureaucratic listing of a discrete disease for every death.
The idea of a good death as one that gave the dying an opportunity to say farewell and to prepare to cross the threshold to the afterlife has morphed into a death that is quick, unconscious or at least painless. More recently, the emphasis is on the individual patient's control of the style of death and " 'good' mostly indicates a death that is "aware, pain-free and in which psychological and worldly business are completed."
"The pervasive quest for an emotionally satisfying death exists uneasily with the fact that dying has become a technical endeavor, a negotiated decision and a murky matter biologically. Potential litigation hangs over and even guides health practitioner activity. These developments have an enormous impact on how life at the end of life is made and interpreted."
A difficult book and an important one.
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.
US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
-----......this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
----
The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor.
"The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully," - Samuel Johnson
While the adage "life is short" may seem true for everyone, no one understands this better than those facing a terminal illness.
Who can they talk to about the serious matters weighing on their minds? Doctors and nurses are too busy. Family and friends are often too uncomfortable with unsettling reflections.
At the same time, terminally ill individuals face very pressing, end-of-life issues. "Major transitions like these are inherently spiritual, and people start asking questions such as 'What is the meaning of my life?' 'What's my legacy here?' 'Where am I going to next?' " Miller said. "All of these issues come into play. And it's those three areas, in particular, that aren't being addressed."
Support groups seem to work. Makes sense. Who knows better what a terminally ill person is going through than someone else facing the same prospect?
Talking Together Brings Comfort to the Terminally Ill
This is such a stunning article by an atheist in Africa that I simply must point to it, The Green Genocide by Andrew Kenny or why religion works better than ideology in the overall scheme of things.
Previously, religion had served mankind's deep needs for explanation, order, spiritual comfort and transcendental meaning. Now a new and hideous thing was summoned up to serve the same needs. The thing was ideology, and in a few decades it caused more bloodshed than millennia of religion. It was darker and more irrational, and contained within it something unknown to all the Religions of the Book: a death wish. Religious leaders, however bad they may be, however prone to hubris and hatred, are generally constrained by fear of God above and by ancient tradition and wisdom.
Ideological leaders have no such constraints.
Ideology comes in three colours: Red, Brown and Green, representing Marxism, Fascism and environmental extremism. Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly: Hitler's holocaust, six million; Stalin's famine and terror eight million; and Mao's famine 30 million. But the Greens have topped them all. In a single crime, they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It began in the United States in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.
-------
I have heard not one word of pity or regret from any Green organization about the vast loss of human life caused by the ban on DDT. On the contrary, they seem to regard it as a glorious triumph. The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the United States in 1971, when it was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor countries. He said: "So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as anything."
-----
My father's death was the envy of all his friends.
He hit a perfect drive off the eighth tee one spring morning and fell over dead of a heart attack. He was 73 and had never spent a day in the hospital. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of so-called procedures he ever had to endure.
Of course, given the outcome, we all might have been better off if he had submitted to a few more of them after that day of nausea a few months before his death. Dad's doctor decided it had been a teeny-tiny heart attack.
I might give the same advice to myself.
Dennis Overbye writes Anti-Doctor and Anti-Death - What's a Guy to Do.
If you're one of those guys - and you know who you are, avoiding doctors - or married to one, this is a funny must-read piece.
From the Annals of Improbable Research, the Dead Grandmother / Exam Syndrome
The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.
And in Britain, extra credit given if a pet dies on day of exam, more if parent or grandparent, as reported by the BBC.
Nearly half of the relatives whose loved ones died of cancer wish that hospice care had started earlier. They wanted palliative care - treating the physical, spiritual, and psychological needs of a patient at the end of life sooner.
No doubt they saw the acute anxiety that afflicts some people as they realize the end is near, making their last days more difficult than they need be. Harvard University recognizes that such anxiety is often treated with sedatives that leaves the dying disconnected from reality at a time when most want to connect more deeply and lovingly with their family and friends. The Boston Globe reports Harvard seeks to test ecstasy drug on the dying.
Harvard researchers are preparing for the first time in three decades to conduct human experiments using a psychedelic drug, a study that would seek to harness the mind-altering effects of the drug ecstasy to help ease the crushing psychic burdens faced by dying cancer patients.
In the experiment, 12 terminal cancer patients would be given MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, to determine whether the drug helps alleviate their anxiety. If the results are positive, the Harvard scientists said, they will push forward with large-scale tests that could make end-of-life ecstasy treatments generally available to terminally-ill patients.
....''We're trying to avoid sedating people, to allow them to maintain a good quality of life so they can enjoy the time they have with family and friends," said Shuster, who will select patients from Lahey for the experiment.
Typically, dying patients are given drugs such as valium, which can cloud their minds, or antipsychotics that leave them edgy. In any of these states, said cancer specialists, it becomes difficult to resolve family issues, arrange financial matters, or approach death with a sense of peace and understanding.
....Ethics boards at McLean and the Lahey Clinic, which will provide the patients, have already approved the experiment, as has the US Food and Drug Administration. The Drug Enforcement Agency still must approve the experiment, and Harvard officials said they expected to hear from the agency within weeks.
The near death experience has been described by many as total bliss accompanied by a flood of light. This mystical joy is what saints and yogis have experienced using prayer and meditation to close down the mind and still the senses. Stephen Ruppenthal has lots more at "Spiritual Awakening and the Near-Death Experience,"
I've always been told that one of the last senses to go is hearing. When my husband lay dying for the longest 24 hours of my life, I talked and cried and swore and talked some more as I rubbed his growing colder feet. I could only hope that he heard how much I loved him
Today, brain imaging technology can show that some people in comas respond to their loved ones speaking recalling shared experiences much as healthy people do. From The New York Times, Signs of Awareness Seen in Brain-Injured Patients.
Thousands of brain-damaged people who are treated as if they are almost completely unaware may in fact hear and register what is going on around them but be unable to respond, a new brain-imaging study suggests.
....."This study gave me goose bumps, because it shows this possibility of this profound isolation, that these people are there, that they've been there all along, even though we've been treating them as if they're not," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Your chances of getting away with murder are 3 out of 4 according to a real homicide detective in Chicago who deals with 50 or so murders a year. Fascinating look at a profession we only know from cop shows on TV.
I do love my job. I believe in silly old-fashioned ideas like justice, integrity, and law & order. No one, no matter what they have done, deserves to be murdered. ... I ended up in this profession quite by accident and I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing. ... Being a homicide detective has had one personal drawback. I have an overwhelming sense of my own mortality. It is mildly depressing. .... On a side note; never trust a detective who dresses like one of those TV characters.
"Enough Dreaming. It's Time to Ride." Are you an aging boomer with an unsatisfied lust to take to the open road on your Harley? Well, slow down. The over 40 motorcycle deaths have tripled in the past decade to 1674 in 2003 at the same time deaths of riders under 30 have dropped slightly to 1161. Safety experts suspect older motorcycle riders with a lot of money to spend are buying more and more powerful machines than their aging bodies can handle.
"It's really kind of astonishing. The ages of these fatalities are so high. You would think it would be all of the young kids on those fast bikes, but it's not," said Carl Hallman, highway safety coordinator with the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Over at Grandrounds 18, a collection of the best medical posts in the past week, a wonderful one about why people love hospice. Did you know that 49% of the population has had experience with hospice and 98% of them had positive experiences according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization?
When people stop me on the street tell me how wonderful hospice is and how much we helped one of their family members or friends, I usually say, “We’re the experts at the one thing that nobody wants to be an expert at.” I believe that simple statement is why hospice is so well received.
If you have a decent sized family, odds are someone in your family is going to go through a terminal illness in your lifetime. If you have many friends, again, odds are one of them is going to be sick and eventually die. Morbid I know, but that does not mean it’s not true. Now, when that happens, will you know everything you need to know to help? Will you know who to call to get medical equipment? Will you be able to get the doctor to make the seemingly daily medication changes as the illness progresses? Will you be able to give them their bath and change their clothes? Will you know what to say when they get scared? Do you know about the resources in your community that can help in this tough situation? The answer to most or all of these questions is probably no, and that makes you normal. Why would you know these things? Why would you want to? How many times in your life will you need to know these things? Once or twice, three at the most. Few people are an expert at the dying process, and even fewer want to be. Hospice workers are experts at the one thing nobody wants to be an expert at.
Part of this is the team concept. Every hospice patient gets a nurse, an aide, a social worker, and a chaplain. All of them (unless they are new to the job) have done this before. There is very little you can ask for or say to a hospice worker that they have not heard before. I’m sure it will be the first time you have said it, but it’s not the first time they have heard it. It is the nature of hospice that what you are experiencing for the first and possibly for the last time the hospice team will experience twice that day or week. People need answers to their questions. They need someone who can help when it is needed. They need someone who understands. That is what hospice does.
We are the experts at the one thing nobody wants to be an expert at, and for that reason people love hospice and the people who do it for a living.
It's quite impossible to take in the immensity of the tragedy of the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. The numbers boggle the mind. It may be over 60,000 lives lost now. There are few things we can do. First, contributions of course to pay for emergency relief of water, clothes and shelter. Click on How to Help for a list of organizations accepting contributions to help the victims.
The stories are heart-wrenching and there so many. The people lost and the people left behind.
From The Guardian
"My house collapsed and I had my daughter's hand in mine as we ran back from the water," said her distraught father, Raja. "But the wave took her from my hands." From the same spot Shiva Prakashan, 26, saw his father swept away by the waves."He was sitting by the street and suddenly the water came," he said. "I looked back and he was gone."
From The Age in Australia
This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan businessman YP Wickramsinghe as he picked through the rubble of his dive shop in the devastated southwestern town of Galle. "I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
From the New York Times
Mulyana, a 24-year-old housewife, had just sat down to a wedding party on Sunday morning when the tsunami struck. She ran and held on to a coconut tree. But the water pulled her away anyway, far out to sea.
"I was alone in the middle of the ocean," she said from her hospital bed in this town on the northeastern coast of Aceh Province, the area of Indonesia hit hardest by the disaster. "I was afraid of being pulled all the way to India."
Mulyana, who cannot swim, grabbed to a coconut tree floating nearby and clung to it. With the weight of her clothes pulling her down, she ripped off everything but her bra and prayed to God to help her. Four hours later, a group of fishermen found her as they were pulling bodies from the water.
Norm Geras at Normblog has a terrific post Perspectives on the calamity. He quotes Simon Day at the University of California
As a scientist working on the causes and effects of tsunamis, I find editorialising along the lines of "a readiness to accept the hardness of our condition is the only proper attitude" quite excruciating. For me, the deepest horror of the event lies in the one to three hours between the recording of the earthquake on the worldwide seismic network and the arrival of the tsunami waves on distant coasts, while their victims lived out the last hours of their lives all unawares.
With less than an hour of warning and a simple lesson in advance on what to do, most would have been able to simply walk a mile inland to safety and the death toll would have been counted in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands. Providing these things is not advanced science.
The most thought-provoking is Waves by 'Cicero' at Winds of Change.
Living consists of enduring tsunamis -- unexpected waves rising out of the sea, changing everything. If asked only a minute before the first wave hit, “what threatens you the most,” the bin Laden bystander might have postulated that George Bush was his greatest threat, or American capitalism. Or perhaps he would have lamented diminishing fish supplies, or pointed at a deforested tropical coastland. Maybe he would have expressed fear for Tamil rebels, or government army men. Then, only one minute later, the sea’s horizon would tilt upwards, sweeping away the expected.
Change tends to come in waves -- deep, silent swells that knock every atom of presumption aside, overturning accepted prejudices, ideas, fears and dreams. 9/11 was one such wave. It was a great surge that overcame our meticulously constructed reality, seemingly impervious to the dark motives of bearded men living in 12th century Afghanistan. That wave rose out of the sea, on a beautiful, sunny day. And a new world was born in its wake.
In this last nod to 2004, we should remember waves. We can look back on human history and see that fundamental change rises from nowhere, and is revolutionary. Waves like the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, or the 1929 Crash; waves such as Pearl Harbor and Trinity, or a crumbling Berlin Wall, or the World Wide Web. In retrospect, there were impending signs, and surely their coming could have been foretold if anyone was attuned and heard. We should recognize that our greatest asset as living beings is our capacity to absorb waves. In so doing, we transform ourselves, and move ahead. The waves of this world make us a better people. We will endure only if we create opportunity from the abrupt realities that rise from the sea.
Change comes in waves. Being prepared, being resilient, being compassionate is what we all must do as we endure the Business of Life and the waves that change everything.
Dr. John Halpern, a Harvard psychiatrist, has won FDA approval, authorization from the Lahey Clinic and McClean hospital for a pilot study to see whether the recreational drug Ecstasy or MDMA "can help terminally ill patients lessen their fears, quell thoughts of suicide and make it easier for them to deal with loved ones," according to the Associated Press.
Halpern said anecdotal reports of people dying from cancer who take Ecstasy and were able to talk to their family and friends about death and other subjects they couldn't broach before. Unlike other pain medications, Ecstasy does not make people foggy but reduces their stress and increases their empathy.
"I'm hoping that we can find something that can be of use for people in their remaining days of life," Halpern said
The loss of a child has to be one of the most wrenching of human experiences. Doctors and nurses who work at neonatal intensive care units face daily the inexplicable loss of tiny babies and the devastating impact on their parents. Dr. Robert White of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, realized that caring for the families of premature infants included matters of the sprit.
White heads a group of Memorial doctors who encourage physicians to recognize the spiritual needs of patients both in the hospital and in their private offices. They are now championing what they see as a legitimate spiritual dimension to modern medicine as David Rumbach writes in "Doctors recognize faith's role in recovery" in Science and Theology.
The reaction to the soft sell approach of the Spirituality Committee's efforts has been quite positive. Says Dr Ferguson, an obstetrician and president of Memorial's staff of 580 physicians says, "I've been pleasantly surprised. It's not like we're pushing this on people and saying you have to do this."
Another reason for the lack of resistance might be that medicine’s traditionally strict wall of separation between body and mind has been eroding steadily. Ironically, the change has been driven by scientific evidence.
In a 2002 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Harold G. Koenig, of Duke University and editor-in-chief of Science & Theology News, said 724 studies have been conducted on religious coping this century, and about two-thirds have shown a positive association between religious activity and better mental health, greater social support and less substance abuse.
White said the mountain of studies not only justifies physicians in paying attention to spirituality, but also compels them to do it.
“Even if you’re a totally nonreligious physician, this means you have to pay attention to spirituality because it’s going to help your patients get better,” he said.
The reaction to the soft sell approach of the Spirituality Committee's efforts has been quite positive. Says Dr Ferguson, an obstetrician and president of Memorial's staff of 580 physicians says, "I've been pleasantly surprised. It's not like we're pushing this on people and saying you have to do this."
Another reason for the lack of resistance might be that medicine’s traditionally strict wall of separation between body and mind has been eroding steadily. Ironically, the change has been driven by scientific evidence.
In a 2002 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Harold G. Koenig, of Duke University and editor-in-chief of Science & Theology News, said 724 studies have been conducted on religious coping this century, and about two-thirds have shown a positive association between religious activity and better mental health, greater social support and less substance abuse.
White said the mountain of studies not only justifies physicians in paying attention to spirituality, but also compels them to do it.
“Even if you’re a totally nonreligious physician, this means you have to pay attention to spirituality because it’s going to help your patients get better,” he said.