A climber and his faithful dog have perished in Arizona after they appear to have been attacked by killer bees as he scaled a cliff.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office says that 55-year-old Steven Johnson, a counselor with some 30 years experience hiking and climbing was found dead, hanging 70-feet from the ground in his climbing gear in the Santa Rita Mountains on Monday night.
The cause of death has not been determined yet, but officials said that Johnson was covered in bee stings when he was found while his dead dog was discovered at the top of the cliff.
Johnson was last seen Friday when he went hiking, and friends became worried when he didn't go to work on Monday.
Sheriff's Lt. Raoul Rodriguez says Johnson may have disturbed bees by hammering a spike into the cliff.
Rodriguez of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office said the 55-year-old man was found hanging from his climbing gear on a cliff near Mount Hopkins
'He had anchored himself to the wall as he was going down so he was actually anchored and he must have been attacked and was not able to climb back up or go back down,' said Rodriguez.
He said Johnson's dog had also been attacked by bees and was found dead nearby.
Johnson is described as a father, climber and friend, who was well-liked throughout the climbing community in Southern Arizona.
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Once stung, the bee releases a pheromone that attracts other bees to attack - which is why most African bee attacks are in swarms.
The taboo has simply shifted, however. As the door to the bedroom has been thrown open, access to the deathbed has been barred. No one seems to linger long there, conversationally or otherwise: too often, a death is treated like an embarrassing fact, a regrettable failure of life that is best hushed up.
As Dr Granger carried on talking, with admirable courage and lucidity, I began to feel that whatever tweets she felt able to send from her deathbed would be well worth reading, and might do the rest of us a great deal of good. She already has a blog, on which she discusses matters such as planning her own funeral, the vagaries of end-of-life care, and the irritations of the faintly bullying, upbeat language that people use when describing cancer patients. There, she writes with passion, humour and honesty, but without self-pity or mawkishness: none the less, when I got to the point at which she made comforting plans for her final hours – “I want Mum to read to me like she used to when we were kids” – it was impossible not to cry.
We are built to cling to life, unless that instinct is withered in us through long suffering, extreme altruism or despair, and so when we read about the deaths of other people, we are moved partly because we start imagining our own: the pain of leaving the people we love, and their confusion at our departure. Or we think of the helplessness of watching someone we love slipping beyond our reach. The notion of death is so mysterious and enormous that, in many cases, it seems easier just to lock it away, although it has a way of escaping and sneaking up on our peripheral vision.
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Still, the option of pretending to ignore death (for a period of our lives, at least) has not been available to the bulk of humanity throughout history. In the 15th century, when the Ars moriendi, or “Art of Dying”, was written, the book desperately sought to popularise the concept of a “good death”, partly because – in the aftermath of the Black Death – an early demise was so frequent and lurid that some kind of etiquette guide was required. Both real-life accounts and novels were later preoccupied with the deathbed scene, which was, in many ways, the dramatic high point of a person’s life. It was their moment in which to forgive, regret, recant or curse, the final deal, the instant at which they revealed their essential self, and onlookers were unashamedly interested in it.
I can never think of the deaths of those I knew and loved, even those who were very old, without some small recurrent aftershock, some fresh sense of the overwhelming strangeness of their disappearance. The ritual of mourning and the ceremony of the funeral or memorial provides shapes for grief to stumble into, yet even those are designed primarily to comfort the living. What our society presently lacks – save for a few enlightened homes and hospices – is much structured means of comforting the dying, who are too often abandoned in hospital wards surprised by fear and pain.
Gurkiren Kaur Loyal's family said she was being treated for a simple case of dehydration when staff at a clinic gave her a mystery injection which took her life.
Her relatives said they guarded the eight-year-old's body, meaning her organs could not be taken in time to be used in transplant operations.
But she was then subjected to a "medieval" post-mortem, during which all her major organs were removed in a bid to hide the truth of how she had been killed, the grieving family claim.
It was only once her body was flown home to Britain that they discovered her organs were missing and only her eyes remained, the family said.
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The Indian police and medical authorities made little attempt to investigate the death, they say.
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Her mother Amrit Kaur Loyal said: "My baby was innocent and now I am devastated without her. Gurkiren was fine, she was chatting to us and planned to buy some gifts for her cousins. While we were talking an assistant came up carrying a pre-filled syringe and reached for the tube in her hand.
"I asked what was the injection for, but he gave me a blank look and injected the liquid into her.
"Within a split-second Gurkiren's head flipped back, her eyes rolled in her head, and the colour completely drained from her. I knew they had killed her on the spot. I knew my innocent child had been murdered."
Coun Kooner, a friend the family, said it was "highly probable" that she had been killed in a bid to harvest her organs.
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There is reportedly a "lucrative underground market" for human organs in India.
In 2007, Ravindranath Seppan, of the Chennai Doctors' Association for Social Equality, admitted: "India's rich are turning to India's poor to live longer."
He said the commercial trade of human organs remained big business, despite having been banned in 1994.
A San Francisco man who almost took his life eight years ago by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge has been reunited with the hero who saved his life.
Kevin Berthia was perched on the iconic bridge ready to take a fatal leap on March 11, 2005, when he heard the voice of California Highway Patrol officer Kevin Briggs calling out to him from above.
Over 60 life-changing minutes, Briggs managed to convince Berthia, as he has done with hundreds of suicidal men and women, to climb back over the rail and give life another shot. Since that significant day Berthia hasn't looked back and is now happily married with two children.
And this week he was able to thank the man who made all that possible. The pair reunited as part of an emotional ceremony honoring Briggs and other members of the CHP known as the Guardians of the Golden Gate Bridge, whose job it is to gently talk people like Berthia down from the structure.
'It was phenomenal,' Berthia, 30, told Yahoo News about the reunion at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention public service ceremony.
'I didn't know what I was going to feel, or how I was going to react,' he said. 'But when I first saw him, he walked up me and I just shook his hand. It felt like I had known this man my whole life. The nerves weren't there. It was just two old friends being reunited.'
As he presented Briggs with the award, Bertha explained how grateful he was for Briggs' help and urged others to seek help, insisting they could too get better and life a fulfilled life.
'I didn't want him to try and stop me but now I'm glad he did,' he told the crowd. 'All I can say is that I am truly grateful. You gave me an opportunity to live.'
A resounding image of the man clinging to the bridge as Briggs spoke to him provoked an outpouring of support from the Bay area community.
After he received the award, Briggs said he was 'very humbled, honored and happy' to have the recognition for his team's hard work.
'I (accept this award) on behalf of the California Highway Patrol and police officers across this country who strive to do their best each and every time they receive a suicide call.
'During my career I've encountered numerous suicide attempts on the Golden Gate Bridge. Of those attempts, I've only lost one person. It's something you never forget.
'Kevin found the courage in himself that day to climb back over the rail, thus beginning a new stage in his life. Here, standing before us, is the reason we do what we do.'
A climber and his faithful dog have perished in Arizona after they appear to have been attacked by killer bees as he scaled a cliff.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office says that 55-year-old Steven Johnson, a counselor with some 30 years experience hiking and climbing was found dead, hanging 70-feet from the ground in his climbing gear in the Santa Rita Mountains on Monday night.
The cause of death has not been determined yet, but officials said that Johnson was covered in bee stings when he was found while his dead dog was discovered at the top of the cliff.
Johnson was last seen Friday when he went hiking, and friends became worried when he didn't go to work on Monday.
Sheriff's Lt. Raoul Rodriguez says Johnson may have disturbed bees by hammering a spike into the cliff.
Rodriguez of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office said the 55-year-old man was found hanging from his climbing gear on a cliff near Mount Hopkins
'He had anchored himself to the wall as he was going down so he was actually anchored and he must have been attacked and was not able to climb back up or go back down,' said Rodriguez.
He said Johnson's dog had also been attacked by bees and was found dead nearby.
Johnson is described as a father, climber and friend, who was well-liked throughout the climbing community in Southern Arizona.
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Once stung, the bee releases a pheromone that attracts other bees to attack - which is why most African bee attacks are in swarms.
A 46-year-old soccer referee who was punched by a teenage player during a game and later slipped into a coma has died, police said.
Ricardo Portillo of Salt Lake City passed away at the hospital, where he was being treated following the assault last weekend, Unified police spokesman Justin Hoyal said Saturday night.
Police have accused a 17-year-old player in a recreational soccer league of punching Portillo after the man called a foul on him and issued him a yellow card.
“The suspect was close to Portillo and punched him once in the face as a result of the call,” Hoyal said in a press release.
The teen, whose name hasn’t been released because of his age, has been booked into juvenile detention on suspicion of aggravated assault.
A police report said the incident happened April 27 at a youth match at Eisenhower Junior High School in Taylorville. As players jostled for position, Portillo saw the suspect – a goalkeeper — push an opponent with his hands.
Portillo issued a yellow card to the suspect and began writing the infraction in his official’s notebook.
After that, the suspect punched the referee on the head. Feeling dizzy, Portillo sat down and began vomiting blood, according to police officer Jason Huggard in his report.
How Not to Die: The videos of Angelo Volande
Angelo Volandes's low-tech, high-empathy plan to revolutionize end-of-life care
He decided to go to medical school, not just to cure people but “to learn how people suffer and what the implications of dying and suffering and understanding that experience are like.” Halfway through med school at Yale, on the recommendation of a doctor he met one day at the gym, he took a year off to study documentary filmmaking, another of his interests. At the time, it seemed a digression.
That man is Angelo Volande who may very well revolutionize the way you die.
Unless you are a doctor or nurse, you don't have much experience in medical end-of-life decisions. So when it comes to medical decisions that must be made for a family member who is very ill and probably dying, most people would choose the medical care that is most life-prolonging. Of course, I want my mother to be feed even if it means a feeding tube.
But doctors who have lots of experience in such end-of-life decisions choose quite differently. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But, they choose not to have 'heroic' and aggressive treatments. They chose comfort care and quality of life. As a result, they are far more likely to have a gentle and serene death.
Angelo Volande is bringing videos to those who are making end-of-life medical decisions so they will know what doctors know.
How Not to DieAngelo Volandes's low-tech, high-empathy plan to rend-of-life care.
Volandes nods. “Here’s the sad reality,” he says. “Physicians are good people. They want to do the right things. And yet all of us, behind closed doors, in the cafeteria, say, ‘Do you believe what we did to that patient? Do you believe what we put that patient through?’ Every single physician has stories. Not one. Lots of stories.
“In the health-care debate, we’ve heard a lot about useless care, wasteful care, futile care. What we….have been struggling with is unwanted care. That’s far more concerning. That’s not avoidable care. That’s wrongful care. I think that’s the most urgent issue facing America today, is people getting medical interventions that, if they were more informed, they would not want. It happens all the time.”
I think he's right on the money with this.
Unwanted treatment is American medicine’s dark continent. No one knows its extent, and few people want to talk about it. The U.S. medical system was built to treat anything that might be treatable, at any stage of life—even near the end, when there is no hope of a cure, and when the patient, if fully informed, might prefer quality time and relative normalcy to all-out intervention.
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What should have taken place was what is known in the medical profession as The Conversation. The momentum of medical maximalism should have slowed long enough for a doctor or a social worker to sit down with him and me to explain, patiently and in plain English, his condition and his treatment options, to learn what his goals were for the time he had left, and to establish how much and what kind of treatment he really desired.
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The first film he made featured a patient with advanced dementia. It showed her inability to converse, move about, or feed herself. When Volandes finished the film, he ran a randomized clinical trial with a group of nine other doctors. All of their patients listened to a verbal description of advanced dementia, and some of them also watched the video. All were then asked whether they preferred life-prolonging care (which does everything possible to keep patients alive), limited care (an intermediate option), or comfort care (which aims to maximize comfort and relieve pain). The results were striking: patients who had seen the video were significantly more likely to choose comfort care than those who hadn’t seen it (86 percent versus 64 percent). Volandes published that study in 2009, following it a year later with an even more striking trial, this one showing a video to patients dying of cancer. Of those who saw it, more than 90 percent chose comfort care—versus 22 percent of those who received only verbal descriptions. The implications, to Volandes, were clear: “Videos communicate better than just a stand-alone conversation. And when people get good communication and understand what’s involved, many, if not most, tend not to want a lot of the aggressive stuff that they’re getting.”
Even now, after years of refinement, Volandes’s finished videos look deceptively unimpressive. They’re short, and they’re bland. But that, it turns out, is what is most impressive about them. Other videos describing treatment options—for, say, breast cancer or heart disease—can last upwards of 30 minutes. Volandes’s films, by contrast, average six or seven minutes. They are meant to be screened on iPads or laptops, amid the bustle of a clinic or hospital room.
They are also meant to be banal, a goal that requires a meticulous, if perverse, application of the filmmaker’s art. “Videos are an aesthetic medium; you an manipulate people’s perspective,” Volandes says. “I want to provide information without evoking visceral emotions.
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Routine use, however, is far, far away. According to Volandes, only a few dozen U.S. hospitals, out of more than 5,700, are using his videos
We all have a lot of reasons to be irate with Islamic extremists these days. I’d like to add one to the list: they’re giving martyrdom a bad name.
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Muslims, it seems, think that they can martyr themselves so long as their suicide involves carnage and the death of infidels. I’m not certain whether any Muslim can choose to initiate the process at any time, or whether further restrictions apply, but in any case it doesn’t work the same way in Christianity. For Christians, killing your way to the glory of martyrdom has never been an option. You have to be the one to die, and not by your own hand; somebody else (motivated by hatred for the faith) has to do the deed.This requirement has been a source of frustration for many a would-be martyr. St. Francis of Assisi hoped for martyrdom, but the poor devil was so likable that he couldn’t convince anybody to off him. He had to settle for being a saint, the first stigmatist, and the founder of one of the Church’s greatest religious orders.
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The Christian way is better, and not only because it clearly does not permit us to place a bomb next to an innocent 8-year-old and detonate it. It is better because it clarifies what martyrdom is really about: not killing, but dying, and dying as a means of honoring one’s deepest commitments.
I think it is not too much to state that, if there is nothing for which you would be willing to die (at least in principle, though in practice we can never know our own strength until the moment presents itself), you have no honor. You may make superficial gestures towards commitment, but at the end of the day, the thing that matters most to you is you. Everything else can be tossed aside if need be, for the sake of preserving your own miserable hide. That is not the state of an honorable person.
it is not necessarily death that we fear, but dying. Dying is something none of us have ever done before, and we tend to fear the unknown. Further, most of us realize the dying involves some degree of agony. Instinctively, and understandably, we draw back from such things.
Even Jesus, in his human nature, recoiled at the thought of the agony before him, so much so, that he sweat blood and asked if possible, that the cup of suffering could be taken from him. Manfully though he embraced Father’s will, and our benefit rather than his. Still, he did recoil humanly at the suffering soon to befall him. So then, here are some reasons that explain and make understandable why we do not run toward death.
But it remains true, that for a faithful Christian, the day we die is the greatest day of our life.
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Addiction to comfort has deceived, and seduced us such that we are no longer in touch with our hearts greatest long and we cling to passing things and (I would argue, as does my family friend) we seem little different from those who have no hope. Put most regretfully, we no longer witness to a joyful journey to God that says, “Closer to Home!….Soon and Very Soon I am going to see the King….Soon I Will be Done with the troubles of this World….Going home to live with God!”
As stated, there are legitimate reasons to be averse to dying. But how about even a glimmer of excitement from the faithful as we see the journey coming to an end. St Paul wrote to the Thessalonians regarding death We do not want you to be like those who have no hope (1 Thess 4:13).
Former employees testified last week that Gosnell gave different explanations for why he kept up to 30 specimen jars containing fetal feet. He told some the feet were for DNA testing and others they were for medical research
The remains of aborted fetuses were stored in water jugs, pet food containers and a freezer at a West Philadelphia abortion clinic, the city's chief medical examiner testified in the murder trial of the doctor who ran the facility.
Medical Examiner Sam Gulino told jurors Monday he had to examine the remains of 47 aborted fetuses, some of which were frozen, as part of the investigation into the charges against Dr. Kermit Gosnell.
Authorities accuse Gosnell, 72, of using scissors to sever the spinal cords of fetuses who emerged from their mothers still alive.
"There was no guidance on how to proceed," Gulino said, adding that the lacerated fetuses had to be thawed slowly so the tissue would not be destroyed. "I was never asked to do that (before)."
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When authorities searched Gosnell's office, they found bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses scattered throughout the building. Jars containing the severed feet of babies lined a shelf. Furniture and equipment was blood-stained, dusty and broken.
"My grasp of the English language doesn't really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was -- rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, blood-stained," Williams said.
Johnson worked as a janitor, maintenance man and plumber of sorts and he was the common-law husband of 51-year-old Elizabeth Hampton, who is herself Gosnell’s wife’s sister. He told jurors some of the morbid details that appear in the grand jury report — including how he threatened to quit working at the abortion clinic because he refused to pull any more flesh from aborted babies out of the plumbing.
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His job was to collect abortion remains and take them to basement — but he eventually refused to participate and bags began piling up.
He told the jury toilets backed up one-two times a week and said he opened the outside clean out pipe and fetal parts such as babies’ arms came spilling out.
Such horrors were the result of how Gosnell's practice of inducing labor in the pregnant women then severing the spinal cords of the live babies.
A young filmmaker is believed to have frozen to death while making a documentary about sleeping rough on the streets as he tried to impress television bosses.
Lee Halpin planned to spend this week on the streets of Newcastle experiencing and filming what life is like for those who are living rough.
In a video explaining his project, he claimed he was applying for a position on a Channel 4 investigative journalism program.
He said that as he had to show the channel he could be 'fearless' - a key 'value' of the broadcaster - he planned to spend a week 'immersed' in the world of homelessness, and wanted to 'sleep rough and scrounge for food.' 'It has caused a huge amount of trepidation among my friends and family.'
But three days after embarking on the project talented Lee, who lived with his family in Heaton, Newcastle, was found dead in a boarded-up hostel on Westgate Road, Newcastle.
He was 27-years-old so this was not a reckless adolescent dare, but rather a desperate attempt to get a job doing what he wanted.
[I] went into anaphylactic shock. A doctor who happened to be seated nearby shot me up with an epipen. The train made an emergency stop in New London where the paramedics were waiting. I was shivering crazily, which was better than the bullets I'd been sweating moments before. The doc told me it was the adrenaline. I kept apologizing. I couldn't believe I was making a scene on the Quiet Car.
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When I got the hospital the doctors took great care of me. Two points: First, my theory of assholes clearly should be revised; the kindness of strangers is always amazing. Second, America, whatever its flaws, is very often amazing in its efficiency and compassion. It did not escape my mind that in some other place I might have died. This is not chest-thumping or jingoism. It is a fact of my residency.
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When I fell out on the train, everyone on the car was white. So were all the paramedics and all the doctors and nurses.
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What I know is I live in a time that people who made me possible only dreamed of. And then yesterday I almost lost it all.
A 12-year-old girl searching for a high has died after she collapsed in her grandmother's bathroom when she huffed freon from the air conditioner outside.
Kristal Salcido, a seventh grader in Victorville, California, was declared brain dead after the incident last week. Her family took her off life support four days later.
Kristal's horrifying death is a nightmare for her parents and a warning for families everywhere about the dangerous trend of teenagers tapping air conditioning units to inhale the freon gas.
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Ron Postoian, who owns an air conditioning repair service in Victorville, said many - if not most - of his repair calls are to recharge the freon in air conditioners.
He believes that most of the time the lost freon is the result of young people huffing the gas.
Mr Postoian said the gas doesn't actually provide a high - it just deprives the brain of oxygen, which can have dangerous side effects.
He is encouraging parents to install safety locks on the air conditioners that prevent access to the freon gas.
A 62-year-old veteran has keeled over and died in a California court while fighting a legal battle against banking giant Wells Fargo, which foreclosed on his home by mistake. Larry Delassus, of Hermosa Beach, lost his house two years ago after a typo in his assessor's parcel number suggested he was behind in his property taxes - but the number actually corresponded to his neighbor's home. Despite records proving he was in fact ahead of schedule on his mortgage payments and had paid his property taxes in advance, Delassus still had to go to court, which is where, on December 19, 2012, he suffered a massive heart attack and died.
His attorney and friend, Anthony Trujillo, was arguing against a tentative ruling issued by a Torrance Courthouse judge that sided with Wells Fargo, according to the Easy Reader. Trujillo noticed the bank's error while going through his friend's accounts and informed the bank, which acknowledged the blunder and fixed Delassus's credit history. But they went ahead with selling his home at a cut price auction, the Easy Reader reported.
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Judge Laura Ellison told Trujillo the case facts didn't justify his client's claim of fraud and negligence.
After almost an hour going through bank documents to prove Wells Fargo's mistake and his friend's innocence, Delassus went into cardiac arrest.
'He was sure that when a judge heard that he was never even late on a payment, that (the judge) would do something,' Debbie Popovich, a friend who accompanied Delassus to court, told Easy Reader.
In a statement, Wells Fargo called the death of their customer 'tragic' but said he had no business being in the courthouse.
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The coroner determined heart disease killed the Navy veteran but his friends say the system that made undoing the bank's careless but catastrophic mistake near impossible really took his life.
'He was very sensitive,' Popovich told LA Weekly. 'He was a very good person. He was kind of shy, and he had a really good sense of humor — really, he was a very simple guy who just liked to work and do his thing.'
An undertaker murdered his wife while enjoying an affair with a widow he seduced after arranging her late husband’s funeral, a court heard today. John Taylor, 61, is accused of killing wife Alethea, six months in to the ‘intense’ affair with Alison Dearden, 53.
A court today heard he began bombarding the widow with text messages within weeks of Mr Dearden’s death. Taylor even left red roses on her doorstep, a jury heard, and dipped into the marital joint bank account to buy a ‘love nest’ he planned to share with his mistress. Mrs Dearden told the court she began sleeping with Taylor in July 2011, eight months after liaising with the funeral director over her husband David’s funeral.
The Taylors had known Mrs Dearden, who lived in a nearby village, for 12 years, after first meeting at church, the jury were told. But following Mr Dearden’s death Taylor began confiding in her about his ‘unhappy’ marriage, she said.
Taylor is charged with his wife’s murder even though no trace of the former teacher has been found since she was last seen at their home in January last year. The court heard Mrs Taylor, 63, had discovered the affair, and had written that her husband had become ‘besotted with a certain little widow’.
Mrs Taylor's blood found on the couple's bedding and on the rear seats of her husband's car. Defendant spotted vacuuming car trunk. Wife had not abvisou signs of mental illness.
President Hugo Chavez mouthed 'I don't want to die… please don't let me die' just before he suffered a heart attack and died, it was revealed today.
The head of Venezuela's presidential guard said the 58-year-old leader, who was battling cancer, died after 'great suffering'.
It came as Russia's communist leader called for an investigation into claims the U.S.had 'infected its enemies in Latin America with the disease'.
Gennady Zyuganov said: 'This was far from a coincidence. How did it happen that six leaders of Latin American countries which had criticised US policies and tried to create an influential alliance in order to be independent and sovereign states, fell ill simultaneously with the same disease?'
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Venezuelan authorities have not said what kind of cancer Mr Chavez had or specified exactly where tumors were removed.Tens of thousands of ‘Chavistas’ dressed in revolutionary red lined the streets of Venezuela yesterday to witness President Hugo Chavez’s coffin being driven through the city centre.
His coffin, adorned with his country's flag, was placed on the top of a car and driven slowly to the military academy where his body will lie in state for three days before a massive state funeral on Friday.
Chavez, who was 58, died after a two-year cancer battle that has been shrouded in secrecy. And it appears his death is to take on the same level of mystery as claims emerged yesterday that he died in a Cuban hospital instead of a military hospital in Venezuela's capital, Caracas. Spanish newspaper ABC claimed that after Chavez's health deteriorated after he returned to Cuba on Friday for emergency treatment. Unnamed sources told the paper Chavez was secretly moved back to Cuba and died there yesterday morning. ABC claims that Chavez died at 7am Cuban time when his family made the decision to withdraw care. To back up the claims it was noted that government ministers were not seen attending his bedside.
Yesterday there was a heavy military presence amid fears of unrest with soldiers deployed after Venezuelan officials called for peace and unity stating in television broadcasts that the government and the military were standing together. The outspoken left-winger, was staunchly anti-American and enjoyed close ties to states such as Russia and Iran.
When Hugo Chavez opponent Cardinal Ignacio Velasco died in 2003, the Venezuelan strongman declared the pro-democracy cleric was “in hell.” At Velasco’s wake, Chavez’s flock brandished pictures of the cardinal with devil horns and hurled stones while chanting Chavista slogans. After all, Velasco had committed a cardinal sin in the eyes of the autocrat: questioned Chavez’s self appointment as supreme being and urged the people to embrace democracy and human rights instead of the Simon Bolivar fanboy. “Every day we turn another cheek. I have no cheeks left because every day there is a new insult,” Velasco said of his nemesis the year before he died.
The cardinal was succeeded in Caracas by Rosalio Castillo Lara, who was equally vilified by Chavez for using his influential post — governed by the Vatican, not by the Bolivarian thought factory — to note “the only solution is democratic, which must involve the resistance of all the people.” “If the Venezuelan people fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation and fail to categorically speak out in favor of democracy and freedom, we will find ourselves subjected to a Marxist-style dictatorship,” the cardinal said shortly before his death in 2007.
Castillo Lara was once asked if he’d like to give Chavez a blessing. “More than a blessing,” the cardinal responded. “I’d give him an exorcism.”
In announcing Chavez’s death to the nation on March 5, Vice President Nicolas Maduro said the Venezuelan leader died “clinging to Christ.” The source in Venezuela told CNA that during the last weeks of his life, Chavez requested spiritual direction and asked to receive the sacraments.
Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela, liked to present himself as a revolutionary, a socialist for the 21st century. Many members of the American Left presented him this way too. In reality he was the latest in the long line of caudillos, the strongmen who have been the scourge of Spanish America; “throwback” and “reactionary” are therefore more fitting ways to describe him.
Violence was his medium. A junior army officer, he did not hesitate to mount a coup, and once in power to devise a constitution that made him leader for life. He drove thousands into exile, expropriating their land and property. Venezuela depends on its oil, and nationalization of the oil companies gave him funds with which to buy popularity. Nobody knows the scale of the ensuing corruption, but rumor has it that Chávez and his family have amassed a fortune of $2 billion.
First, the good stuff. Chavez spent Venezuela’s oil money on reducing destitution and expanding access to healthcare and education. As a result, poverty was cut in half, child mortality fell by a third and death from malnutrition fell by 50 per cent. Homelessness was reduced and almost everyone gained access to clean drinking water. To his fans, this was all part of new model of development that was socialist without rejecting some element of free enterprise and activist without sacrificing democratic checks and balances. Between communism and capitalism, Chavez’s revolution held out the hope for a future without the exploitation that invariably accompanies both.
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Chavez himself entered politics by way of a coup attempt in 1992 (the government he tried to overthrow was incompetent and corrupt but technically legitimate). He was a late convert to the ballot box and when he did finally form a government he wrote his own constitution and, even then, regularly broke its spirit. He persuaded a loyal legislature to grant him the right to rule by decree and he used it to pursue a revolution based on exploiting high oil prices to build a powerbase among the poor. His critics were basically anyone with an interest that conflicted with his – the Catholic Church, trades unions, private business, liberal parties. There is a global Left-wing myth that Chavez survived so long in power because his only opponent was the USA. In fact his domestic critics were plentiful, but they were either too divided to exploit their numbers or else were overpowered by Chavez loyalists in the military or the slums. It also helped that the great leader shut down over 30 radio stations and many newspapers and TV stations.
As Brendan O’Neill notes, this was not democratic socialism on the liberal European model but rather authoritarianism on the Peronist model.
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Chavez should have spent the oil money on building a capitalist economy and a stronger civil society. Instead his administration was notorious for corruption and waste. During his time in office there were 120,000 murders, a rate four times that of post-war Iraq. The causes were inflation running at highs of 30 per cent, stubborn unemployment and poorly paid police.
'We have decided to prepare the body of our `Comandante President,' to embalm it so that it remains open for all time for the people. Just like Ho Chi Minh. Just like Lenin. Just like Mao Zedong,' Maduro said…. the body would be held in a 'crystal urn' at the Museum of the Revolution, a mile from Miraflores presidential palace.
The announcement followed two emotional days in which Chavez's supporters compared him to Jesus Christ, and accused his national and international critics of seeking to undermine his 'revolution.'A sea of sobbing, heartbroken humanity jammed Venezuela's main military academy Thursday to see Chavez's body, some waiting 10 hours under the twinkling stars and the searing Caribbean sun to file past his coffin.
The body of Hugo Chavez will no longer be embalmed and placed on permanent display, after Venezuelan's acting president said it had not been properly prepared in time.
The rumors that he died in Cuba seem more likely now.
A university student known as 'Mr Muscles' has died after apparently taking 'lethal' bodybuilding pills to help him lose weight.
Fitness fanatic Sarmad Alladin, 18, who had posted snaps of his new muscles online, was taken to hospital just hours after praising the fat-burning tablets called DNP on Facebook.
Mr Alladin, an international student and son of an Indian millionaire, called an ambulance as he suddenly collapsed.
Last week the University for the Creative Arts warned its students: 'It has come to the University's attention that some very dangerous weight-loss and body-building drugs could be circulating among students. 'If you have bought or obtained Dinitrophenol or Dymetadrine tablets online or anywhere else, please stop using them immediately. The drugs are potentially lethal.'
Police believe a man may have died from spontaneous combustion after they found his burned body in his home but no other fire damage or evidence of accelerant use.
Sequoyah County authorities are determining the circumstances surrounding the death of 65-year-old Danny Vanzandt after his charred remains were found at his Tulsa home on Monday. After neighbors saw smoke coming from the house they called the fire service and attempted to put out what they thought was a pile of burning trash.
They soon realized it was in fact a body.
Sequoyah County Sheriff Ron Lockhart said: 'This is very bizarre. You’re thinking someone poured something on him, but there was no fire source.
'The body was burned and it was incinerated. I think there is only about 200 cases (of spontaneous combustion) worldwide. I'm not saying this is what it is, but I haven't ruled it out.'
Sheriff Lockhart spent about 20 years as an arson investigator for the Fort Smith, Arkansas Police Department, and said he had never seen anything like it.
The floor below the 65-year-old was not damaged and there was no sign that any accelerant was used.
Authorities said the man had a history of heavy drinking and smoking, according to Tulsa World. But Lockhart said the way his body was burned was inconsistent with an accidental fire - such as from a cigarette dropping.
The sidebar to the Daily Mail story 'AN INSIDE OUT CANDLE': HOW THE HUMAN BODY CAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST
There have been a number of documented cases where police have found corpses burned almost to ashes but no burned furniture around them.
Temperatures of 3,000 degrees would be required to burn a human body to this extent, yet in these cases only smoke damage is reported.
Puzzled scientists have come up with the ‘wick theory’ to explain such events. The theory is that the human body can become an ‘inside out’ candle.
The person’s clothes are the wick, while their body fat is the wax or flammable substance, that keeps the blaze going. Limbs may be left intact because of the temperature gradient, with the bottom half of the body being cooler than the top.A grisly aside is that greasy stains left after such an event could be a residue for the person’s body fat.
The combustion would not be ‘spontaneous’ however, because it would need an external source to start it off, such as a cigarette. Some have postulated that static electricity could cause the needed spark.
A body would take around five hours to burn in this way to ashes. Victims are often elderly, sick, or under the influence of alcohol, which might explain why they would not have been able to escape.
Charles Dickens provides a very graphic depiction of the death of the shopkeeper Mr Krook by spontaneous combustion in his 1852 novel Bleak House, where the author does away with the alcoholic rag-and-bone man Krook by making him mysteriously burst into flames.
Dickens had done his research: in the 1850s, the main theory used to explain these occurrences was alcohol — that, if you drank enough, it seeped into your skin and made it possible to catch alight if you brushed past a flame.
A mother-of-eight, 30, died suddenly from a cardiac arrest because she drank up to 18 pints of Coke every day for years, a coroner has ruled. Natasha Harris died on February 25, 2010, after her partner Christopher Hodgkinson found her seated on the toilet, slumped against the wall and gasping for air at their home in Invercargill on New Zealand's south island.
An inquest last year revealed that she would drink at least four 2.5 litre bottles of the fizzy drink each day, consuming more than twice the recommended daily caffeine consumption and more than 11 times the recommended sugar intake.
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The coroner's report revealed Ms Harris suffered from a myriad of medical conditions, including a racing heart and 'absent teeth', which her family say was caused from Coke consumption.
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An autopsy showed Miss Harris had a diseased liver.Medical evidence stated that the main finding of death was from a cardiac arrhythmia.
Dr Dan Mornin told the court Miss Harris probably had severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood, relating to excessive consumption of soft-drink. He said although it was difficult to confirm this from postmortem tests, it was consistent with her symptoms of tiredness and lack of strength and other cases of heavy soft-drink consumers
It wasn't the cola. She could have drunk the same amount of Sprite or Mountain Dew with the same result. Anyone who consumes that much sugar-- more than 11 times the recommended sugar intake - day after day, year after year, so much so that her teeth fell out, is seriously damaging her body.
A 55-year-old man from a small town in Vietnam was not arrested after he told an online newspaper that he’d dug up his dead wife’s body and slept in bed with it for five years—but his house definitely received a lot less visitors. When Le Van’s wife died in 2003, he slept on top of her grave. Twenty months later, the elements were really starting to get to him, so he dug a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her.” That arrangement proved unsustainable as well, at least once his children found out and prevented him from going to the burial site. The only thing left to do was dig up his wife’s body and bring it home, so Van could hug her in bed. Vietnam.net reported the story five years later with a photograph of Van and his dead wife, still at his house.
Alexandra Hospital in Redditch is writing to 38 families after a massive legal action that exposed years of bad practice, ranging from nurses taunting patients to leaving an elderly woman unwashed for 11 weeks.
In one of the worst cases, a man had starvation recorded as the cause of his death after being treated at the hospital for two months.
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Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said last night that he was “disgusted and appalled” by what the families had been through, and that the Government was acting to ensure that failings in care were detected more quickly.
Bereaved relatives had told how vulnerable patients were left to starve when trays were placed out of their reach, while others were left in soaking bedsheets.
Many of the families are to receive compensation for cases that their lawyer described as “appalling”.
The move will serve to intensify debate on why some nurses and doctors are treating patients without compassion, and will add weight to the warning by Mr Hunt that patients can experience “coldness, resentment, indifference” and “even contempt” in NHS hospitals.
He warned that in the worst institutions, a “normalisation of cruelty” had been fostered.
A macabre new gambling trend is starting to gather pace in Taiwan where bets are being placed on the life expectancy of sick patients.
\Worth more than £20million ($30m) the death gambling market in the town of Taichun is allowing people to wager a bet on when the old, the cancer-ridden and terminally-ill will die. The craze is not just restricted to ghoulish gamblers - bets have also been placed by doctors, nurses and other hospital staff as well as families and guardians.
According to local media some 60 so-called 'senior citizens clubs' are in place posing as charitable organisations for the elderly.
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Some pots are reported to have run to more than £1million. The Times reported that some families agree to take part to pay for funeral costs.
Police are said to be investigating the practice and the legal implications. In some cases families are thought to have been offered special bonuses by organisers if they instruct doctors to withhold life-prolonging treatments.
Two high school students desperately begged for help after their bicycles fell through a frozen-over New Jersey lake, with one screaming 'I don't want to die,' in his final moments.
Clyde Schimanski III, 15, and Nick Cianciotto, 14, have been pictured for the first time after they collapsed into the icy waters of Budd Lake on Monday night during a wintry bicycle ride.
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According to witnesses, the boys' chilling screams brought help to the lake on Monday night, but rescuers couldn't find the pair in the darkness.
'Please help me!' one of the teens screamed. 'I don't want to die!'
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Bartender Christine Stanat told the Hackettstown Patch that she heard one of them yelling, ‘Help, help, don’t let me die!’
William Hardy, 25, and his roommate also heard the screams. They had been smoking outside of their house, which is on the banks of the lake. Hardy told the Star-Ledger that he called the police, grabbed a flashlight, and then ran out onto the ice to see how he could help. The New Jersey resident went around 700ft out onto the ice before he heard it began cracking beneath his weight. Hardy said he saw a blue light that could have come from a cell phone.
'It hurts my heart. Until they pull him out, I'll…hold tight. I want to know they find him.' Father Clyde Schimanski about missing son, Clyde III
He, too, heard the teenagers saying they don’t want to die. Assuring them that help was on the way, Hardy watched as the blue light vanished and the voices fell silent.
An official confirmed that the two were a great distance from shore. A later report from MyFoxNY said that one of the boys, Clyde, had ridden his bicycle out to rescue the first boy who fell in.
His father, Clyde Schimanski, Jr. told the station that his son saw another person fall through the ice into the water below and tried to rescue him.
As he got into the giant ball, an unnamed friend - who filmed the horror - is heard saying: 'Denis, you'll be like Jackie Chan in the Armour of God movie!'
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The friend filming the death ride plunge asks: 'What's going on there?'
The voice replies: 'Nothing.' But then calmly adds: 'A catastrophe.' At this the footage stops.
At terrifying speed, the ball had plunged down Ganachhirskiy Gorge in the Dombai resort complex in Russia's North Caucasus mountain range. Falling steeply and battered by rocks, it was pulled down relentlessly by gravity.
Reuters photographer Sheng Li reports on “death experience therapy” at Ruoshui Mental Health Clinic in Shenyang, China:
Then I met 42-year-old Mr. Yang, who had booked his therapy appointment for that day. During the psychological preparation talk, I learned that Yang had lost his mother when he was only 11 months old. Lacking maternal love and constantly being insecure in his childhood made him unable to cope with the pressure of work and daily life, and thus he became profoundly pessimistic.
With his wife’s accompaniment, he followed the therapist’s instructions and got in the coffin while the funeral music began. Maybe it was the music – I found myself completely absorbed in the atmosphere, and felt somewhat sad during the entire process. Mr. Yang told me later that for a few seconds he really felt as if he were dead inside the coffin, and his desire to keep on living became stronger. And when he heard his wife reading a letter to him, he cried. He said that it was so strange that when he was “dead,” he actually felt closer to his wife and loved ones.
Since the clinic’s opening in 2009 more than one thousand people have “attended their own funerals”, as it were, each one lasting between four and five hours, during which the “patient” lies in the coffin listening to eulogies prepared by family and friends. Tang Yulong, a therapist at the clinic, says many burst into tears upon their “resurrection”.
A slightly different (and less expensive) form of “coffin therapy” can be found in Eastern Europe, where one coffin maker allows patrons to settle in and “slowly get used to eternity”.
Even Jean-Paul Sartre seems to have glimpsed that, for as death approached he began to speak of some sort of Messianic Judaism. Later his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, acidly called it “this senile act of a turncoat.” In a testimony recorded by his friend and former Marxist, Pierre Victor, Sartre said: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”
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It would be difficult to think of anyone more unlike Sartre than his contemporary political philosopher Charles Maurras who recovered his Catholic faith only late in life. In Sartre’s better moments, in the Second World War, he resisted the barbarism with which Maurras cooperated. But each had his last Advent. Sartre’s last words were, “I have failed.” As for Maurras, who had become deaf as a teenager, he said to the doctor at his bedside: “At last I can hear someone coming.”
The baby boomers, the largest generation in American history, are now almost all in the last third of their lives (if average life expectancy is 78). They have spent the previous, early and middle thirds of their lives transforming cultural ideas, expectations and practices (e.g with the civil rights movement, environmental movement and women’s movement, etc).
The question now is, “Will the baby boomers also transform our cultural ideas, expectations, and practices regarding the end-of-life?”
I say yes! Here are my predictions and recommendations for this generation of “revolutionaries”:
1. Baby boomers expect to live longer and will seek out technologies to do so. We continue to see life expectancies extended (although the obesity problem may soon change that) and the boomers will focus on ways to further extend their years on the planet. I strongly recommend however that they seek technologies that will extend quality life rather than quantity alone. For example, but do not choose medical interventions that will prolong your days if those days are going to consist of lying in a bed, unable to poop or pee without assistance. Choose technology that creates quality alone, quality plus quantity, but never quantity only, at the expense of suffering.
2. Baby boomers will author and create the “natural death” movement. The natural birth movement was predominately a product of the baby boomer consciousness. Taking root in the 1960s, a movement occurred to “de-medicalize childbirth” with varying degrees of penetration into general culture.
Death will become “de-medicalized” and will again be viewed as a natural event that can be managed in natural settings such as the home. The hospice industry will see phenomenal growth to accommodate this shift in desiring to manage dying at home. (90 percent of Americans already say they want to die at home but nearly 80 percent of us presently die in medical institutions.)
3. Boomers like to be in charge and will seek more control over the dying process. One present expression of this is the right to die movement. While I am opposed to physician assisted suicide and euthanasia, I understand and support the impulse to gain control over the dying process and to minimize suffering. I personally feel that this can be accomplished without choosing to ingest a life-ending substance, however. At the right time (for you), choosing comfort-focused medicine over cure-focused medicine will allow you to gain control over the dying process: physical suffering can be controlled with appropriate medications, allowing time for quality emotional, social and spiritual closure and reconciliation to be obtained between you and others. Additionally, choosing comfort-focused care more often enables you to die, expectantly, where you desire to be the most (usually at home).
4. Expect more non-traditional, cost-conscious funeral preparations. A great example of this is my husband, Kris, who is one of the trailing baby boomers, born in ’61. He wrote a great treatise on this topic entitled, “Final Resting Places and Dealing With the Funeral Industry Monopoly” (Chapter 22 of It’s OK to Die). In this chapter he argues compellingly that the funeral industry hangs us out to dry if we haven’t made plans in advance. We don’t “shop around” in the midst of our grief and just pay for whatever is easiest (but not most economical), while wiping our tears.
Kris gives unusual tips for saving thousands of dollars on funeral costs and tells a story about how we drove his deceased father, in a full–sized casket, across multiple states in an SUV to save on flight costs for the casket and the whole family. It was a very “thinking out of the box” experience (slight pun intended), which turned into a trip that gave final closure to the whole family, saved thousands of dollars, and felt like an adventure. Sounds like something every baby boomer should look into.
Ann Clwyd broke down as she spoke about the final moments of Owen Roberts, who contracted pneumonia after being admitted. They had been married nearly 50 years…. “Nobody, nobody should have to die in conditions like I saw my husband die in,” she said during a radio interview.
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Ms Clwyd, 75, was called in at 5am on the morning of the day he died.
“He didn’t have any clothes over him. He was half-covered by two very thin, inadequate sheets, his feet were sticking out of the bed at an angle," she told BBC Radio 4's World at One.
“It was extremely cold and I tried to cover him with a towel. He was very distressed, totally aware of his situation. Although unable to speak because of the oxygen mask he let us know he was cold and that he wanted to come home.”
Ms Clwyd said she had seen a nurse’s round once between 2.30pm and 10.30pm on the previous day.
“I stopped one nurse in the corridor and asked why he was not in intensive care, and she said ‘there are lots of people worse than him’ and she walked on.
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My husband died like a battery hen. He was six foot two, he was cramped, squashed up against the iron bars of the bed, an oxygen mask that didn’t fit his face, his eye was infected
“Because the air from the oxygen was blowing into it, his lips were very dry. I used my own lypsyl to try and moisten them. There were no nurses around.
“Just at eight o’clock, just before he died, all the lights of the ward went on, and somebody shouted ‘anybody for breakfast?’
“Now, it was obviously totally inappropriate when they knew there was somebody dying in that four-bedded ward.
“The man in the bed next to him had been feeling hot all along. He had a fan on and it was blowing the cold air towards my husband.
“So I really do feel he died of cold and he died from people who didn’t care.”
Breaking down in tears, she said: “It gives me nightmares. I really find it very difficult to sleep, and very difficult to talk about.”
But Ms Clwyd said she had to speak out “because I think it’s just too commonplace”.
Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.
But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.
One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.
Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.
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Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.
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‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.
‘Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues.
‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’
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Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticize the use of death pathways for children. '‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die'
She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.
After 55 years, the final patrol for cases of the mysterious ‘laughing death’ in remote Papua New Guinea has returned from the highlands. From this pursuit came Nobel-winning science, clues to ‘mad cow’ and insights into Alzheimer’s disease. It also revealed a little bit of cannibal hidden in us all.
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Everyone understood too well that no-one recovered from kuru, which progressively stole control, mobility, speech but, tragically, not always faculty from the afflicted. Bursting into gales of uncontrollable laughter was another cruel quirk of the disease.
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There have been just eight kuru cases this century — three in 2000, two in 2001, one each in ’03 and ’05, and the last in 2009. In each case, it is believed the victim had incubated the disease for an astonishing 50 years or more, having been exposed to infection as a child when participating in mortuary feasts that were an intrinsic part of Fore culture: that is, the cooking and consumption of the dead, every last piece of them, in order to hasten the journey of the departed loved-ones to the land of the ancestors.
A groom died hours after marrying his bride during the wedding reception after he tripped over and landed on a beer glass. Fabio Jefferson Maciel, 33, had wed fiancee Geise Guimaraes six hours before bleeding to death following the freak tragedy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Witnesses said Mr Maciel, a Brazilian navy sergeant, was fooling around with one of the young bridesmaids at 2am on Monday morning when he tripped and fell on his front. A beer glass which he had put in the left-side trouser pocket shattered and a piece severed his femoral vein - a major artery to the top of the leg - causing rapid blood loss.
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Friends said Mr Maciel had been planning the perfect wedding since the start of the year, when he had also started building a home for him and his wife-to-be to begin their married life. The house was finished just a week ago.
In the old paper system someone from the funeral home would bring me the death certificate, I’d complete it as accurately as I could, and the grieving family could bury their beloved. That has all changed now. In an attempt to speed the process up and make it more efficient, the state has created a website where I log on and complete the form. I thought this would be an improvement, and it was presented to me as a way to simplify, expedite and improve the process. I’m reasonably computer savvy, and so when the first EDRS (electronic death registry service) request came to me I logged on and tried to complete the form.
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In a paper world the medical examiner could have just signed off on the death certificate and all would have been fine. Now as an unintended consequence of the inflexible nature of this EDRS program, it seems we just have to be selective in our choices of contributing factors on the death certificate so that families can bury their dead and the computer programmers can have the answers they want. I had been told that the new electronic form was to insure more accurate and complete death certificates. It seems that the result is that only answers the program likes are acceptable causes and contributing factors to death.
it’s now almost universally accepted that we should exercise regularly, not smoke, drink only in moderation (if at all), avoid too much fat in our diet (and now probably too much carbohydrate), and not gain too much weight as we age.
Even a quick perusal of this admittedly incomplete list of healthy behaviors reveals that most of the actions within our control aim at reducing our risk of death from heart disease. Certainly, we’re lucky that we have so many ways to reduce this risk as heart disease remains the number one cause of death worldwide. But here’s a strange paradox: as we’ve gotten better at preventing death from heart disease, we’ve increased our exposure to the risk of death from other diseases that kill far less quickly and that arguably end up causing far more suffering. The older we get, the more likely we are to become ill with diseases like cancer, dementia, and stroke, to name just three of the most common illnesses that preferentially affect the elderly.
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Having watched so many patients die unpleasant and lingering deaths, I have little doubt that death from heart disease is better than death from many other maladies. Yet an early death from heart disease seems equally undesirable. Which has led to another uncomfortable paradox: all the work we’re encouraged to do to minimize our risk of death from heart disease actually increases our risk of having an unpleasant death.
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What, then, is the best disease from which to die? Unfortunately, the one we’re the best at preventing.
'Those bandits in white coats gave up too quickly because they wanted an organ donor'
The girl who wouldn't die Incredible story of the 19-year-old who woke up as doctors were preparing to harvest her organs
A teenage girl in a coma after a catastrophic car crash came round just as doctors were about to declare her brain dead. Carina Melchior had had life support withdrawn on the advice of medics and was being prepared for organ donation.
But to the astonishment of staff at the Aarhus Hospital, in Denmark, the 19-year-old suddenly opened her eyes and started moving her legs.
She is now making a good recovery at a rehabilitation centre and is able to walk, talk and even ride her horse Mathilde.
Her family is now suing the hospital for damages, claiming that doctors had been desperate to harvest her body parts. 'Those bandits in white coats gave up too quickly because they wanted an organ donor,' her father Kim told the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.
Ms Melchior, now 20, crashed her car in October last year. She was in hospital for three days before doctors realized her brain activity was fading and consulted her family about stopping treatment. It was at this point they agreed to donate her organs.
Takeaway: Do not give up the possibility of recovery too soon, especially for young patients.
"You guys better get back over here! He's either going or coming."
From Letters of Note, Ken Kesey writes to 5 of his closest friends about the funeral of his son Jed, a wrestler at the University of Oregon when the driver of the team bus lost control. Jed was left brain dead and passed away within days. What a world.
Partners, it's been a bitch.
I've got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you're the best backboard I know. So indulge me a little; I am but hurt.
We built the box ourselves (George Walker, mainly) and Zane and Jed's friends and frat brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond. Page found the stone and designed the etching. You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box — clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Girl by Owsley 15 years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenix bird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box.
It was a double-pretty day, like winter holding its breath, giving us a break. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed — "Everlasting Arms," "Sweet Hour of Prayer," "In the Garden" and so forth. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. While we were singing "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole. The preacher is also the Pleasant Hill School superintendent and has known our kids since kindergarten. I learned a lot about Jed that I'd either forgotten or never known — like his being a member of the National Honor Society and finishing sixth in a class of more than a hundred.
We sung some more. People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. One of our frat brothers put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every 15 minutes for five years. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus. Paul Foster put in the little leather-bound New Testament given him by his father who had carried it during his 65 years as a minister. Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets. The Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged) (Jed and Zane and I are all members, y'unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the boys lowered the box with these ropes George had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thunderclaps of Revelation
But it's an earlier scene I want to describe for you all, as writers and friends and fathers…up at the hospital, in cold grey Spokane:
He'd finally started moving a little. Zane and I had been carrying plastic bags of snow to pack his head in trying to stop the swelling that all the doctors told us would follow as blood poured to the bruised brain. And we noticed some reaction to the cold. And the snow I brushed across his lips to ease the bloody parch where all the tubes ran in caused him to roll his arms a little. Then more. Then too much, with the little monitor lights bleeping faster and faster, and I ran to the phone to call the motel where I had just sent most of the family for some rest.
"You guys better get back over here! He's either going or coming."
A two-time Purple Heart veteran was killed while protecting his wife from a car that spun onto the sidewalk along New York City's Park Avenue on Saturday night.
'He pushed me out of the way,' Denise Baum, 62, told the New York Daily News of her husband, 80-year-old Rubin Baum, who would be swept beneath the vehicle while she was thrown into a parked truck. 'I tried to lift the car. I was so ashamed. I couldn't lift it,' Mrs Baum said while biting back tears.
Ending a night out taking in a jazz performance nearby, the couple were attempting to hail a cab home on the Upper East Side when police say a black Mazda sedan ran a red light. The vehicle immediately ploughed into a northbound Toyota sienna minivan carrying a Pakistani diplomat, who has not been named, spinning the Mazda out of control.
'I stepped out from the sidewalk … I saw a black shiny car,' Mrs Baum recalled of that life-changing moment around 10.30pm.
'He sacrificed his for life for me. He really gave me a good shove. It was in a second, he saved my life,' she told the New York Post. 'He was pinned under the car,' she told the Daily News. 'I want to know who did this? Was he drunk? Was he on drugs?'
Both Mrs Baum and her husband, who had served as a medic in the Korean War, were transported to New York Cornell Hospital. Mrs Baum was hospitalized in serious but stable condition with a leg injury, while her husband was pronounced dead on arrival.
From Codeblog, tales of a nurse. She made a Rookie Mistake at her new hospice job.
In ICU, if you are actively dying, you look terrible. In most cases, people dying in the ICU are there because we were or are trying to save their life. This requires some treatments that cause other problems. The fluids and medications we give cause pretty severe swelling. Add in mechanical ventilation and the patient may even end up with scleral edema – where the whites of the eyes fill with fluid from pressure and swell to the point of not allowing the eyelids to fully close…..That is what dying looked like to me for 14 years. Turns out it’s a pretty exaggerated version of how it is when people naturally die without life-saving interventions.
On my second night out sans preceptor, I was called to a house early in the evening to help with symptom management. I was told that the patient was minimally conscious and was starting to have labored breathing. The family had started giving oral morphine liquid to help with this and were panicking about the whole thing a little. I went and assessed the patient. She was mostly unconscious, her breathing a little labored.
The family’s greatest concern was that she was going to die that night.
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They asked me if I thought it would be that night. Honestly, despite being unconscious and breathing a little differently… ok, maybe her color wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful – her feet felt only the tiniest bit cool and weren’t discolored at all (there was no mottling, which is when the skin becomes discolored and blotchy). Compared to what I was used to seeing in patients who were dying, she didn’t look too bad.
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a dying person’s condition can change very rapidly. This is different from what I’m used to for sure. The ICU course follows a fairly predictable pattern most of the time. Not so predictable outside of the hospital!
One of America’s most highly respected private equity bosses has been found dead after he apparently killed himself, leaving those on Wall Street and beyond asking why. The death of Robert McKeon, who was in charge of Veritas Capital, was ruled a suicide by a coroner who revealed that the cause of death was ‘asphyxia due to neck compression’.
McKeon's body was discovered at his $5m mansion in Darien, Connecticut, where he lived with his art expert wife and their children.
Mr McKeon, 58, was a well known figure on Wall St who managed the $2bn Veritas fund. He was also a passionate art collector and a philanthropist who supported a number of charities, including the New York Police & Fire Widows & Children's Benefit Fund.
In a statement Veritas said: ‘Bob was an extraordinary person, a consummate professional, and a cherished friend and colleague. ‘We are all deeply saddened by this tragic loss and have his family in our thoughts.’
Mr McKeon was born to a working class family in the Bronx, and was the son of a cake deliveryman. He went to Fordham University and Harvard Business School before joining now shuttered investment bank First Boston.
He helped found Wasserstein Perella & Co. in 1988 as head of private equity and then later chairman - the company’s successes included turning around cosmetics firm Maybelline.
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Now an extremely wealthy man, Mr McKeon’s 1929 Connecticut home is a five-bedroom, six bathroom mansion set on three acres. He is also thought to have properties in The Hamptons and Telluride, Colorado.
His wife Clare works at Christie’s in New York where she is an expert on 20th Century British Art and Victorian & British Impressionist Pictures. A graduate of Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she is also Vice President in the Department of Sporting Art.
Experts said that such incidents were rare, but it was impossible for a stowaway to survive a long-haul flight and bodies had been known to fall when the wheels come down before landing.
Annie Williams, 47, a resident, said: “I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car. There were two fellows going to church and they said there’s a dead body in the street.”
Residents also spoke of body parts being strewn over a 30-yard area and pools of blood.
Experts believe the man had hidden in the landing gear somewhere in North Africa, but fell as the aircraft prepared to land at Heathrow and the pilot put the wheels down early on Sunday.
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Richard Taylor, from the Civil Aviation Authority, said the man was likely to have been dead for the entire journey because he would either have been crushed by the wheels being raised after take-off or frozen in temperatures of up to -40F (-40C ).
He said: “The chances of survival for a stowaway are very slim, particularly in the recess of the landing gear if someone tried to stowaway there.
“More likely they would be crushed when the landing gear retracted.”
He added that, even if someone had survived take-off, without specialist Arctic clothing there was no chance of surviving the low temperatures. He said: “I don’t know of anyone who has survived being stowed away on a long-haul flight and it is surprising that so many people still try. When the landing gear comes down at the other end, a couple of miles from the runway and about 2,000ft in the air, if there is a person who had died they would fall out.”
After his terminal diagnosis became public, Hitchens wrote, in a characteristic turn of phrase, that he was “living dyingly.”
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I have seen up close and personal how the process of dying can paradoxically strengthen and improve us. My father died of colon cancer in 1984. The disease hollowed him out physically, reducing him to a husk. But he grew—oh, how he grew—and died a far stronger, wiser, and better man than he had been before falling ill.
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I strongly believe that how we die matters corporately. Dad, like Hitchens, inspired others by the way he lived dingily. No surprise there: Aren’t we all bucked up when we see or hear of others facing death with mettle and pluck? Think Ulysses S. Grant, writing his memoir while dying in great pain from tongue cancer. Some will remember the great admiration America felt when actor Michael Landon—with frankness rarely seen in those days—went on Johnny Carson’s show to discuss his terminal pancreatic cancer. Then there was Ronald Reagan, announcing his own Alzheimer’s disease, turning his face steadfastly toward “the journey that will lead me to the sunset of my life,” and patriotically expressing the belief that “for America, there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
This is one reason I find the assisted suicide movement so subversive. It rejects the ideal that those who go toe-to-toe against terminal disease uplift the human experience. It seeks to alter our cultural expectations from “Do not go gentle into that good night . . . rage, rage against the dying of the light,” to “Do yourself, your family, and society a favor by getting it over with.”
A couple who spent five years traveling the world together died just two days after returning home when they were hit by a train meters from their apartment.
Daniela Weiss and partner Daniel Oelter, both 38, had journeyed across some of the planet's most dangerous areas in a marathon tour that took them through Asia, the Middle East and South America.
But they were killed when they were struck by a train as they crossed a rail track near their home in Granichen, Switzerland, at around 9.20pm on Wednesday evening.
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‘When the police told me what had happened my throat just seized up. I thought I could not breathe. Daniela is our only child.
‘Daniela was the best daughter you could wish for and Daniel was a great boyfriend to her. They were just great together.
‘It was so good to see my daughter again and have her home - but she died at the place which should have been the safest in the world,’ she added.
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A witness who saw the accident has claimed the pair were having a discussion shortly before they died and that they were seen cuddling by the tracks.
Daniela’s mother Margit said: ‘They were not deliberately standing on the tracks. They were excited about their future in Switzerland. She had taken her walking sticks with her, they were just out for a walk.
'The pair were probably discussing Daniela’s new job. Perhaps they were distracted as they would normally have used the underpass.’
For Margit her world too ended under the wheels of the train.
She said: ‘Losing your child is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. You just do not imagine it can happen to you - just when we thought we had our child back and had even felt we had gained a son - we lost them both her forever.’
A pair of identical twins, who became famous through their desperate battle with anorexia, have died in a house fire.
Clare and Rachel Wallmeyer, 42, were killed after a fire broke out in their home in Geelong, near Melbourne, one perishing in the flames, the other succumbing to her severe burns on the way to hospital.
It was a tragic end to two turbulent lives, for the sisters had appeared on Australian TV several times to talk about the anorexia which had turned both into virtual living skeletons and a problem pair for their parents, social workers and the police.
In a poignant review of their lives they said in recent years that they had never been in love, never had a job and they believed that it was only a matter of time before they died – and they would die together.
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In an interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes program me the twins gave a startling insight into their eating habits.
Said Clare: ‘Essentially, we don’t eat anything. We might have a piece of watermelon.’
Rachel added: ‘And Diet Coke we have, and coffee.’
They also revealed they took at least 20 laxatives.
Rachel said that Clare was the only person who remained by her side. ‘And at least we’ll die together.’
Clare said: ‘Being with Rachel…makes it somewhat easier to die.’
Real estate agent Maria Pantazopoulos, 30, drowned after her dress got wet and she was dragged into the river near a 'violently' rushing waterfall in Canada. Ms Pantazopoulos slipped and fell into the Ouareau River near Dorwin Falls, north of Montreal, on Friday afternoon. Her body was found about two and a half hours later.
The newly-wed yelled 'I'm slipping, I'm slipping, I'm slipping,' before falling off the rock she was perched on for her wedding pictures, according to CBC.
Friends said she had been taking part in an increasingly popular ritual called 'Trash the Dress', in which brides pose for pictures while playfully destroying their wedding gowns.
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Ms Pantazopoulos had commissioned the shoot following her June 9 wedding. Family friend Leeza Pousoulidis said: 'She’s a really fun girl, and she just didn’t want her wedding dress sitting in a box in the closet. 'She said "I want to have fun with my wedding dress. I want to have great pictures and memories of me in my wedding dress."'
Ms Pantazopoulos slipped while she was being photographed by Louis Pagakis, who told CTV Montreal that he did everything he could to save her. She had her wedding dress on and she said, "take some pictures of me while I swim a little bit in the lake,"' he said.
'She went in and her dress got heavy, I tried everything I could to save her.' 'She was doing the photo shoot in about six inches or one foot of water when part of her wedding dress got soaked and became extremely heavy,' Mr McInnis told MailOnline.
'She started slipping and falling down when the photographer grabbed her but she was too heavy that he couldn't pull her from the edge.
Another person tried to grab her but also was unable to save her from falling into the river.
The wedding dress and shoe of bride who fell and drowned during photo shoot.
A nurse has drowned just weeks after she helped save the lives of victims in the Aurora Batman massacre in Colorado.
Jennifer Gallagher, 46, of Denver, died earlier this month while she was on vacation in Iowa with her husband and her five-year-old son. She went swimming in West Lake Okoboji the night of August 6 and was reported missing the next morning. A family member found her body in the water later that day; it is not clear how she got into difficulty while swimming.
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Pinson said Gallagher had moved from County Meath, Ireland, to Colorado in the 1990s and studied to become a nurse. A devastated Pinson described his late wife as a ‘brilliant’ nurse who ‘loved treating people in bad situations.’ Gallagher’s siblings flew over from Ireland for her funeral and a mass was held for the mother-of-one in Ireland.
An 18-year-old student who was celebrating her graduation on Saturday at her home died along with her brother after a bonfire exploded. Savannah and Christopher Blewett, from St Clair Township, Michigan, were enjoying a party in their backyard with close friends and family.
Christopher, 27, poured a large amount of gasoline on a two-story pile of wood they had built for a fire and asked his sister to light it.
When she did, according to the Detroit Free Press, the gasoline exploded, killing them both and injuring four other people.
The blast was so strong, it shattered the windows of a nearby house and scattered wood about 100 yards away.
When I was a young officer, wearing my dress uniform, attending ceremonies was fun because it always seemed to be about celebration. For the past 11 years it has symbolized death and tragedy. Over the past 11 years I’ve been to way too many memorial services for my fallen brothers.
Last Friday I buried my 40-year-old brother in my hometown of Whitman, Massachusetts. My brother Brendan left behind a wife and three small children. In February of 2011 he was diagnosed with lung cancer that spread to his lymph nodes and brain.
After I stoically delivered my eulogy, someone asked me if I had ice going through my veins. I had some choice words to say but opted for a simple statement: “No, I’ve just seen a lot of death in my life.”
This was my fourth eulogy. One for my father, one for my blood brother, and two for soldier brothers.
People that have never been to war just don’t understand the death and destruction war causes. They don’t understand what these experiences do to us service members. But the war is only part of the challenge we face as service members. I was in Afghanistan at the time Brendan was diagnosed and was unable to be there for him. Fortunately our family, his friends, and nearly the entire 13,000 residents of Whitman rallied around Brendan and his family.
Nicoli Grossi, a computer programmer, had rediscovered a passion for exercise last year, according to his wife, and lost 100 lbs. He would cycle to work every day and take rides along the highway for hours at a time. Married with one daughter and three step-children, Grossi, 42, was wearing a helmet on the intense 155 mile Climb to Kaiser, considered to be one of America's ten toughest bike rides. R.I.P.
Teenager wearing earphones killed by freight train as he walked on tracks because he didn't hear it coming. Michael Maserang, 15 years old, honor student, a good kid, on his way to a flea market to buy some Hot Wheels for his collection, did something extraordinarily stupid. If you are going to trespass to take a shortcut by walking on railroad tracks, for God's sake, leave your iPod in your pocket. Condolences to his parents.
The family thought their pit bull dog was ''protective" and "friendly" but with one swift bite to the head of little 8 month old Tyzel McWilliams, he killed the baby. The mother said, "…I really had no reason to think to treat the dog and the baby differently."
His mother Rita Cronin, a civil servant told Westminster Coroner's Court that staff tutted at her and repeatedly refused to listen to her concerns that her son hadn't been given vital medication. At one point he became so desperate and upset that staff sedated and restrained him – and on the night before his death, his mother said, he was not checked on by medical staff, despite being in a room on his own.
Mr Gorny, who worked in Waitrose and was training to be a locksmith and shoe repairer, had survived a malignant brain tumor in 2008. The cancer affected his pituitary gland, which controls the body's mechanisms, such as fluid levels. Part of his treatment included a course of steroids to regulate the fluid levels in his body. These drugs, however, weakened his bones and he was in hospital for a routine hip replacement.
Doctors told him that, without regular medication to control his fluid levels, he would die….But, despite the repeated reminders and insistence by both Mr Gorny and his family, staff failed to give him the tablets and he became severely dehydrated after being refused water.
An elderly woman was sliced in two when she was hit by a plane as she tried to take a short cut across a runway. Sinangele Asuza, 78, was struck by a light aircraft on Monday as it came in to land in the town of Ermelo in South Africa's eastern Mpumalanga province. Police said they believed she was one of three women who had scaled a perimeter fence to collect wood from around the airfield.
"The modern world of scientific technique and human control is wholly inadequate in its response to death"
Jake Meador remembers his grandmother's death when he was only 7 because she chose to reject life-preserving medical care.
One of my favorite stories from my grandma’s last weeks is that after she decided to go off dialysis— meaning she would be dead within a week—one of her nurses loaded up a cart with nothing but fresh fruit and wheeled it down to her room. “Mary,” she said, “you can have as much of this as you want.” Fruit had always been my grandmother’s favorite but it’s strictly verboten for dialysis patients.
All of these images and ideas serve as background for the story told in Wendell Berry’s Fidelity, one of the lesser-known but most touching and evocative of Berry’s short stories. Burley Coulter, one of Berry’s most beloved characters, is dying. Initially, his son and family do what everyone does in such a situation. They check their dying loved one into a hospital. But as they watch Burley dying, they realize their mistake and they realize that the modern world of scientific technique and human control is wholly inadequate in its response to death:
When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that was wrong with him had simply been unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to ‘the best of modern medical care’ – which means, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him. If Lyda was wakeful, then, it was because she, like the others, was shaken by the remorse of a kind of treason.
This is what Berry expresses so clearly and so perfectly in Fidelity: The fact of death (to say nothing of the grotesque mode of death it has created) demonstrates conclusively the philosophical failure of modernity.We must eventually come to the end of our tether, the point beyond which our control is of no use, our technology rendered impotent. And when we come to that point, the naked lust of modernity is revealed as the dehumanizing system that it truly is. There are other resources upon which we must avail ourselves at such times: mutual knowledge, home (which must be an emplaced home, not simply a pleasant-sounding sentiment), tenderness, and the greatest of all, love. A system premised on control and exploitation can know nothing of these things.
Holland America offers 100-day-plus "Grand Voyage" cruises, taking the retired and those with a phenomenal amount of vacation time across the globe. Due to the length of these cruises, the average age floats around 75 for passengers on multi-month cruises. When a ship is dominated by septuagenarians prepared for a long journey, a certain number of deaths from natural causes is likely.
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Cruise ships are required to carry body bags, and maintain a small morgue. This morgue is not merely additional space in a ship kitchen's freezer area, but a separate area for storing the bodies of deceased passengers. Most ships dedicate more space than needed, featuring individual refrigerated units for six to ten bodies.
The bodies of deceased passengers are unloaded when the cruise ship stops at its next port, but only if the port country is willing to accept the body and issue a death certificate. This can be a very complicated process filled with plenty of paperwork left for those alive, when a friend or loved one traveling with them dies abroad.
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In one bizarre case in 2009, an 87-year-old woman died thirty-six days into an 114-night Holland America trip around the world. (This extremely long cruise often sees multiple deaths: three passengers had died on the previous voyage.) The woman's son was accompanying her, and he dealt with the paperwork and arranged the cremation of her body at a nearby port. And then he stayed on board ship for the remainder of the journey, accompanied by the cremated remains of his mother.
A huge gap exists between what Americans want for end-of-life care and what they actually receive. 90% of people wish to die at home, yet nearly 80% of us actually die in institutions (hospitals and nursing homes.)
So, how did we end up here? How have we tolerated such an extreme disconnect between our desires and our reality? Such a profound disconnect is fundamentally un-American.
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This crisis was unintentionally created by our modern beliefs and practices regarding death and dying.
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1, Death has become a “medical event” that must be treated in a medical facility.
2, We have become hopeful that high technology can “cure” us of death or at least delay it for a later or more appropriate time.
3. We don’t talk about death socially, so therefore, no one plans for it (ex: living wills, powers of attorney, etc).
4. We have lost deep connectedness and intimacy with others in the modern world. This translates into a scramble to keep the actively dying alive at all costs in efforts to gain time for creating closure and saying the things which need to be said.
These four issues have created this very real social crisis and they contribute to the strain that exists within the Medicare and Medicaid systems.
So, now I ask you: How do we solve the 90-80 dilemma? How do we find a way to allow those who desire it, to pass away in the peace and comfort of their own homes, surrounded by those who love them most; instead of dying alone, in an ICU, in the middle of the night, or in a nursing home.
Here are my 4 recommendations to solve the 90-80 dilemma:
1. Take a natural view of death. Understand that death is a natural event that can usually be comfortably and peacefully managed at home or in a pleasant hospice setting.
2. Understand that the most appropriate use of medical technology at the end of life is the aggressive treatment of pain or any uncomfortable symptoms, and not the selection of medical technology that artificially prolongs the dying process such as ventilators, ICU admissions, and CPR.
3. We must effectively move from “high tech” to “high touch” medicine at the end of life.
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4. we must discover the power and gifts inherent in the end-of-life period. In the face of the sure knowledge of coming death, an emotional window of opportunity opens—love may be freely expressed, old grudges may fall away in insignificance, and closure may be obtained that remained elusive at other times of life. We must focus on creating quality of time at the end of life so that these gifts may be enjoyed.
She was shaking her side to side, staring into the distance down the hall. “He just wanted to die at home.”
“We all do,” I said. Quoting medical literature, I explained, “90 percent of us want to die in our own homes, but nearly 80 percent us die in hospitals or nursing homes. Whenever I talk to families in this room like you guys, the majority of them wish they had made different choices a few weeks or even months before. The problem is that we doctors don’t speak the truth. We don’t tell people where they really are in curve of life, so you don’t have the knowledge and resources to make the decisions to get your loved one home for the dying process. The medical system has failed you and it has failed Mr. Barnes tonight. I am keeping him alive with my machines, in a state and in a place that neither of you wanted; but you were never asked the right questions so that you could make the right plans. I am very sorry.”
Imagine for a moment you are lying in a sterile hospital bed, in the last few quiet moments of your life, taking your final breaths.
A smooth white robot starts gently rubbing your arm with a swing-saw motion and then, with a metallic voice, says: 'I am the Last Moment Robot. I am here to help you and guide you through your last moment on Earth.
'I am sorry that your family and friends can't be with you right now, but don't be afraid. I am here to comfort you. You are not alone, you are with me. Your family and friends love you very much, they will remember you after you are gone. '
Far too creepy. Thank God it's only an art project.
A Minnesota woman died of severe head injuries on Wednesday when she was thrown off her motorcycle and hit by an SUV.Brittany Larson, 22, was not wearing a helmet when she hit road debris and was thrown into the path of the large vehicle on Interstate 694 in Ramsey County.
Her devastated mother, Inge Black, is now pushing the state's lawmakers to force motorcyclists to wear helmets, claiming her daughter would have been saved had she been wearing one.
Ms Black said she had argued with her 'extremely feisty daughter' about getting a helmet prior to the fatal crash but she had resisted. Young people 'think they are infallible,' said Ms Black. 'She liked her long hair flowing, and now I've lost my daughter.'
Her daughter was wearing flip-flops on her ride home to White Bear Lake from her new clerk's job in Columbia Heights. 'She wasn't dressed properly for the bike,' Ms Black said.
If she had worked in an emergency room or seen one crash, I've no doubt she would have worn a helmet.
BOWIE, Ariz. — The rescuers had rappelled from a helicopter, swaying in the brisk April winds as they bore down on a cave 7,000 feet up in a rugged desert mountain on the edge of this rural hamlet. There had been a call for help. Inside, they found a jug with about an inch of water, browned by floating leaves and twigs. They found a woman, Christie McNally, thirsty and delirious. And they found her husband, Ian Thorson, dead.
Related
The puzzle only deepened when the authorities realized that the couple had been expelled from a nearby Buddhist retreat in which dozens of adherents, living in rustic conditions, had pledged to meditate silently for three years, three months and three days. Their spiritual leader was a charismatic Princeton-educated monk whom some have accused of running the retreat as a cult.
Strange tales come out of the American desert: lost cities of gold, bandit ambushes, mirages and peyote shamans. To that long list can now be added the story of the holy retreat that led to an ugly death.
When Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who told author Charles Brandt where, how, and when he put Hoffa down he was near the point of death. Sheeran, who was suffering from cancer, said he had just enough time to square things with God. “During his final illness … he told me he had made his confession and received communion from a visiting priest … the following day, a week or so before he lost strength and stamina, Frank Sheeran asked me to pray with him, to say the Lord’s Prayer and and Hail Mary with him, which we did together.”
Hugo Chavez, facing the prospect of personal extinction, temporarily forgot his Marxism and begged Jesus to grant him life. Richard “the Iceman” Kulinski, who worked as a hitman for the Mafia and killed and sometimes tortured people for fun, also got the urge to confess in face of a terminal illness. Recently, a man confessed to murdering six year old Etan Patz in 1979 after learning that he was dying from cancer.
Pedro Hernandez, 51, confessed to police that he lured Patz to his death with the promise of a soda. He took police back to the basement of a Manhattan boedga and showed them where he claimed he strangled Patz …
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What is it about dying that motivates people to confess to crimes on their deathbed? A cynical person might argue it is nothing but the same self interest that motivated them in life. After all when a person has reached a point essentially beyond any effective human retribution what downside is there to admitting to any crime?
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People who gone through life outsmarting their marks might be making a mistake by thinking they were still playing the same game. What mathematics tell us about phase changes and broken symmetry is that the rules which govern transitions are anything but simple. They are driven by considerations which are not only subtle, but non-obvious.
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Perhaps John von Neumann, who was the most rational of persons, got it right. “While at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he invited a Roman Catholic priest, Father Anselm Strittmatter, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation. This move shocked some of von Neumann’s friends in view of his reputation as an agnostic. Von Neumann, however, is reported to have said in explanation that Pascal had a point, referring to Pascal’s wager.”
An Atlanta teenager has died after a white chocolate and macadamia nut cookie gave him a violent allergic reaction.
Diallo Robbins-Brinson, 15, from Macon, was rushed to hospital on Saturday night after eating the cookie at buffet restaurant Golden Corral, where he had been dining with his soccer teammates.
The Central High School freshman had been allergic to peanuts but regularly ate the macadamia nut cookies without developing a reaction.
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Mr Robbins-Brinson was accustomed to avoiding peanuts, having been allergic to them his whole life.
As such, he'd left his Epi-Pen, a device carrying medicine that stops an allergic reaction, at home, his mother said.
'He thought he was eating something safe,' Ms Robbins-Brinson said. 'He loved them. If he had smelled peanut butter, he wouldn't have picked them.'
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School counselor Dorothy Krakow told the AJC the popular student was known for his constant smile.
'Diallo was just a wonderful student, she said. 'He was gracious and kind to everyone.
'He had an absolute bright future ahead of him. So much potential and possibility for him. It’s heartbreaking.'
Condolences to his family and may he rest in peace.
Mourners at a funeral in Egypt swapped tears for cheers when the 'dead' body they were burying woke up.
Hamdi Hafez al-Nubi, a 28-year-old waiter from Naga al-Simmanm, near Luxor was declared dead after suffering a heart attack at work. His body was being prepared for burial when a doctor, sent to sign his death certificate, discovered he was still warm. Family members were so convinced Mr al-Nubdi was dead they had already washed his body, according to Islamic tradition, and were preparing to bury him on Friday evening.
After finding he was still warm, the doctor checked his vital signs and discovered he was still breathing.She quickly revived Mr al-Nubdi - along with his mother, who had fainted when she heard her son wasn't dead.
Rather than cancel the funeral, mourners turned the party into a celebration of Mr al-Nubdi's 'resurrection'.
It's not the first time someone has come 'back from the dead' at their own funeral.
Just last month a 95-year-old Chinese woman climbed out of her own coffin six days after she was thought to have died following a fall.
Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by a neighbor two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.
When the neighbor who found her could not wake the pensioner up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had passed away. She was placed in a coffin which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.
But the day before the funeral, neighbors found an empty coffin, and later discovered the 95-year-old, who had since woken up, in her kitchen cooking.
Beauregard says the theory that NDEs are caused by a decrease of oxygen to the brain cannot be sustained. He points out too that people who have been born blind have the same NDE experiences as those with sight.
Dreher's update:
Forgot to say that I somewhat knew a Texas guy who claimed this happened to him after a near-fatal car crash — except his was a pretty dark story. He had been living a pretty bad life, and went to hell, or an approximation thereof. He claimed that Jesus Christ came to him there, told him it wasn’t his time yet, but that he should change his life, and turn to the Light. He said Jesus also told him “your days are numbered” — meaning that he didn’t have much time left. He had a dramatic, instant turnaround in his life, and became a far more peaceful and even saintly man. Sure enough, not long after this happened, he learned that he had a terminal illness. He’s dead now, but he spent the rest of his days serving God and doing good for others. Interestingly, after this experience, he had an almost preternatural spiritual sensitivity. I did not know the man before his alleged NDE, so I have no way of knowing if this was true. He was an exceptionally humble and gentle man when I met him, by the way, and didn’t like to talk about all this (I only found out about it because he’d told a friend of mine at his church, who asked.) FWIW.
The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.
These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.
NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.
The family of a Texas-based Army medic serving in Afghanistan says his wife witnessed the officer's death, which happened as the two were video chatting via Skype.
Captain Bruce Kevin Clark suddenly looked 'alarmed' and disappeared from his wife's computer screen during a conversation on Monday, according to an Army spokesman.
'Mrs Clark was Skypeing from the family home here in El Paso with her husband when he all of a sudden fell away from the computer keyboard and fell out of sight,' said Colonel John Modell.
'He assumed an alarmed look and fell back out of the picture,' he continued.
A spokesman at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center told MailOnline that Capt Bruce Kevin Clark's death on Monday came from natural causes and was not combat-related or suicide.
Family said: 'Although the circumstances were unimaginable, Bruce's wife and extended family will be forever thankful that he and his wife were together in his last moments'
The wife of a US Army captain who died while he was on Skype with her says she saw a bullet hole in the closet behind him after he collapsed.
An Army spokesman says medic Bruce Kevin Clark died of natural causes while he was serving in Afghanistan.
His wife, Susan Orellana-Clark, made a statement on Sunday saying she doubts that assessment.
'(Capt) Clark was suddenly knocked forward,' Mrs Clark said in remarks released by her brother.
'The closet behind him had a bullet hole in it. The other individuals, including a member of the military, who rushed to the home of Capt Clark's wife also saw the hole and agreed it was a bullet hole.'
Mrs Clark sat in in El Paso, Texas, and watched the computer screen helplessly for two hours on Monday as she frantically tried to contact her husband's colleagues 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan to get him help.
Finally, two Army personnel arrived in Capt Clark's room and checked his pulse. They did not, however, tell Mrs Clark what had happened to her husband, the family said.
A spokesman at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center in Texas, where Capt Clark was stationed, told MailOnline on Friday that the officer's death came from natural causes and was not combat-related or suicide.
Susan Orellana-Clark said she was revealing the details of what she saw “to honor my husband and dispel the inaccurate information and supposition promulgated by other parties.”
An Army spokesman had initially said Clark’s death appeared to be from “natural causes” but later said he misspoke, CNN reported.
The Pentagon has since said Clark’s death is under investigation.
Newest info.. Army investigators release statement: ‘NO BULLET WOUND, NO TRAUMA’
Philip Gould was the brilliant Labour Party strategist who helped bring Tony Blair to power in 1997, and was awarded a peerage in 2004. Here, in the first of two extracts from his new book serialized in the Mail he describes movingly the journey from being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2008 to being told he had three months to live. He died at 61 last November, with his wife Gail and their daughters, Georgia, 25, and Grace, 22, by his side.
--
Recurrence is a very different thing from the original diagnosis. My immediate response to being told I had cancer had been that I would battle through and win. I had a vision of a dark road leading to a light.
But the diagnosis of recurrence had a very different effect — the road ahead just collapsed, and I was left effectively with nothing, just the kind of fuzzy picture you get if your television stops working.
--
We spent Christmas out of London in the snow. Just us and the kids. There was no hiding here, we all knew the situation. The family was under strain, but we were close.
My relationship with my children was deepening all the time. We implicitly decided to bring the future forward, to compress ten years or so into one.
The kids sucked me dry. Georgia wanted to know all about the way I thought. How did I develop a concept? What were my values? Why did I believe what I believed?
Grace wanted hard, usable, practical advice. She asked me to write down every likely eventuality that might befall her and supply a satisfactory answer. Facing the possibility of my departure, she wanted a handbook for life.
For Gail it was different. She did not want intensity, or purpose, or accelerated living, she wanted quiet and normality — not the future brought forward, but the present extended. She had always envisaged a future free from work where we would just potter around, grow old as companions.
--
It is only when they said: Philip Gould, you are going to die. Get used to it. This is going to happen in months or weeks, but it is going to happen. Only then do you become aware of death, and suddenly life screams at you with its intensity.
I have entered the Death Zone.
--
But when cancer came, bringing with it a great deal of fear and pain, I found I could deal with it. Time and time again I found the courage to deal with this acute and terrible pain.
And so my death has become my life. And my life has gained a kind of intensity and power that it had never had before.
You can go for a walk in the park and have a moment of ecstasy. I go to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opposite our house. I go to the exhibition tent and I sit there and have a coffee and I feel ecstasy after ecstasy after ecstasy.
This is built upon this feeling of certainty, of knowledge, of death. There is ecstasy because I am not dead yet.
--
What good is it to me to think in terms of conventional time? Six months or nine months no longer exist for me. So I am trying to make sense of the world not through time, but through emotion, through relationships, through feeling.
'He’s going to get a drive-by, see mom two hours, and that’s how you end a 46-year marriage.'
You have to wonder how some health care workers can be so inhuman that it takes a desperate battle to reunite dying husband and wife who had not been apart for 46 years.
A 71-year-old man who had battled to die next to his wife of 46 years has passed away in their shared hospital room.
Matt Monschein died from pancreatic cancer at 1am on Tuesday - six days after he was reunited with his wife Pat, who was in hospital after having both legs amputated due to diabetes.
In March, doctors told Mr Monschein that nothing else could be done for him in the final stages of his cancer and added that he might be restricted in the time he spent with Pat due to her operation.
The couple, from Lorain, were left devastated that they might not be able to spend their last moments together at Grace Fairview Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio - as it did not offer the hospice care that Mr Monschein needed.
Yet Mrs Monschein could not be looked after at a hospice as she required round-the-clock care including dialysis.
One of the couple's two sons, Mike Monschein, told Fox 8: 'He’s going to get a drive-by, see mom two hours, and that’s how you end a 46-year marriage.'
Mike had appealed to local politicians, authorities and media outlets in the hope of bringing his parents back together.
After being helped by a local TV station to navigate the bureaucracy, the elderly couple were allowed to spend Mr Monschein's final few days lying in beds side by side at the hospital.
Both remained in the same room and according to cleveland.com, the hospital chaplain renewed their wedding vows.
But on Tuesday, Mr Monschein lost his fight with pancreatic cancer.
His son Mike told The Chronicle Telegram: 'Seeing my mom again has meant the world to my dad and has put smiles on both of their faces.
'Dad will be missed greatly. Mom will go on with the support of family and friends.'_
LEICESTER, England, April 25, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - According to the Daily Mail newspaper, a young British man owes his life to an insistent father who would not allow his son’s organs to be removed from his body, despite assurances from four doctors that his son could not recover from the wounds he had suffered in a recent car accident.
They were told there was no chance of their son surviving after he suffered devastating injuries in a car crash.
But Steven Thorpe’s parents refused to give up hope – despite four specialists declaring that the 17-year-old was brain dead.
Convinced they saw a ‘flicker’ of life as Steven lay in a coma, John and Janet Thorpe rejected advice to switch off his life support machine.
They begged for another opinion – and it was a decision that saved him.
A neurosurgeon found faint signs of brain activity and two weeks later, Steven woke from his coma. Within seven weeks, he had left hospital.
And four years on, the trainee accounts clerk says he owes everything to the persistence of his parents.
From his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Steven, 21, said: ‘I feel so lucky that my parents wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
Ghoulish as it is, people in hospitals are looking for fresh organs to transplant. If a loved one of yours is ever in this position, insist upon a brain wave test before agreeing with the person is brain dead. Even then, insist on pain-killers to be administered during the harvesting.
You should put this in your end-of-life instructions as well.
Researchers acknowledge that it’s not clear how psilocybin reduces a person’s anxiety about mortality, not simply during the trip but for weeks and months following. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” Grob says. “I don’t really have altogether a definitive answer as to why the drug eases the fear of death, but we do know that from time immemorial individuals who have transformative spiritual experiences come to a very different view of themselves and the world around them and thus are able to handle their own deaths differently.”
“On psychedelics,” Halpern says, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now. The experience gives you, just when you’re on the edge of death, hope for something more.”
A 'stillborn' baby was found alive in a drawer in a hospital morgue by her distressed mother 12 hours after the girl was declared dead, it emerged today.
Analia Bouter was 26 weeks pregnant when she gave birth to her fifth child prematurely at a hospital in Resistencia, in Argentina's northern Chaco province.
But after medical staff told her that the infant was born with no vital signs, her distraught parents went home with a death certificate.
Twelve hours later, Mrs Bouter and her husband decided to go to see their baby's body, which was being kept in a refrigerated drawer at the Perrando hospital morgue.
She told Argentina's Clarin newspaper: ‘That night, we went to the morgue. We wanted to take a photo of our daughter.
'But when a worker opened the drawer, we heard a cry and she was alive.’
She said she ‘stepped back and fell to my knees’ after she ‘saw her stretching,' the mother added.
‘My baby was born at 10.24am and at 11.05am was already in the drawer. She spent 12 hours in the freezing cold of that morgue. I saw for myself the ice on her body.’ --
She said: ‘At first the doctors said that she was born dead, then said she had died shortly after birth because she was too small to survive.
‘I don't know who is to blame, and I'm not thinking about it at this moment. The joy of knowing she's alive is covering every other feeling. I'm a Christian, and I believe this was a miracle of God.’
Ulysses S. Grant, Commander of the Union Army and President for two terms, became embroiled in a Ponzi scheme that wiped out his entire fortune. Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with terminal mouth and throat cancer.
Wanting to leave his widow financially secure, he rushed to write his account of the war, something he had no interest in before he was financially ruined.
As he toiled away with his pen, sometimes writing as many as 25 – 50 pages a day, The New York Times and publications across the country offered daily updates on Grant’s condition. His suffering was immense. His throat had to be constantly swabbed with cocaine to relieve the pain. As the illness progressed, it literally began to suffocate him and he would often wake at night in a panic, trying to gasp for air. Just swallowing was especially agonizing.
--
Grant received an abundance of personal letters and well wishes from North and South. He felt his illness was helping to further heal the sectional divide and noted as much.
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Grant had his share of well wishers in the South because of the respect he showed for General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox and the brave men of the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant also later intervened on Lee’s behalf when President Andrew Johnson and others in the federal government wanted to arrest Lee and have him tried and hung for treason.
--
Grant died three days after completing his memoirs in 1885. He dedicated the publication to the “American soldier and sailor.” When it was suggested that maybe he should change the dedication so that it read “the Union soldier and sailor,” he declined.
--
The well wishes poured in for one of the most beloved leaders in American history. Church bells across the country chimed 63 times, one for each year of Grant’s life. The former Confederate General James P. Longstreet called him “the soul of honor,” adding that Grant “was the highest type of manhood America has produced.”
So dense is the vegetation at the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji, it is all too easy to disappear among the evergreens and never be seen again.
Each year the authorities remove as many as 100 bodies found hanging at the country's suicide hotspot - but others can lie undiscovered for years.
Exactly why so many choose to end their lives in the forest remains something of a mystery, though it has been suggested that the first among them were inspired by a novel set there.
--
Mr Hayano, for all his familiarity with death, appears shaken. His job has given him a unique perspective on those who kill themselves.
For him, suicide in Japan has changed over the years. Whereas it was once the preserve of samurai, who would commit ritual 'harakiri' to preserve their honor, today it is merely a mark of social isolation in the modern world.
'I think it's impossible to die heroically by committing suicide,' he says.
Mr Hayano believes it is a symptom of an increasingly impersonal and lonely way of life that emerged with the internet.
He adds: 'Now we can live our lives being online all day. However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, hear their voices so we can fully understand their emotions - to coexist.'
In Japan "kodokushi" means "lonely death" something I learned while reading a piece in the New York Times, Afraid of Dying Alone.
In February, a 45-year-old woman and her mentally disabled four-year-old son were discovered dead in their Tokyo apartment. Authorities believe the mother passed away from a stroke a month or two previously, and the boy, emaciated when recovered, had subsequently starved to death. Last month, an 87-year-old woman living in a private apartment in a retirement complex was found collapsed and dead in her bathroom an estimated one week after her demise.
--
Of course, not every death alone should be classified as “lonely.” In fact, Japanese government and academic papers tend to use a more emotionally neutral term, “koritsu chi,” which means isolated death.
The media frenzy likely reflects the country’s ongoing struggle to fill the void in the safety net left by the breakdown of once-strong family and neighborhood ties. There is also confusion about how to get a population that often wants to keep personal difficulties private to reach out to social services.
The 'Santa Muerte' (Holy Death) cult in Mexico places great importance on the dead
Eight people have been arrested in northern Mexico have over the killing of two 10-year-old boys and a woman in what appears to be ritual sacrifices.
Prosecutors in Sonora, in the north-west of the country have accused the suspects of belonging to the La Santa Muerte (Holy Death) cult.
The victims' blood has been poured round an altar to the idol, which is portrayed as a skeleton holding a scythe and clothed in flowing robes.
The cult, which celebrates death, has been growing rapidly in Mexico in the last 20 years, and now has up to two million followers.
--
Mr Larrinaga said the murders took place at a ritual during the night, lit by candles.
'They sliced open the victims' veins and, while they were still alive, they waited for them to bleed to death and collected the blood in a container,' he said.
Many of those arrested belonged to the same family, reports said.
Silvia Meraz, one of the suspects, and her son, Ramon Palacios, were allegedly leaders of the cult, according to prosecutors. Speaking to reporters, she said: 'We all agreed to do it. Supposedly she [one of the victims] was a witch or something.'
Human sacrifice has existed from the beginning of human history. I thought immediately of Father Barron who says in his review of The Hunger Games that as society de-Christianizes, you can expect human sacrifice to return.
Brian Greene explains Rene Girard's theory of scapegoat and sacrifice - 'something is wrong and somebody has to pay for it,' reality-TV, and Christ's sacrifice which exposed the scapegoating ritual thus ending it in Christendom.
You can read Shirley Jackson's story of The Lottery online. One teacher who has taught the story over 20 years noticed a disturbing change in the attitude of the students. Archbishop Chaput writes
A few years ago, a college writing professor, Kay Haugaard, wrote an essay about her experiences teaching “The Lottery” over a period of about two decades.
She said that in the early 1970s, students who read the story voiced shock and indignation. The tale led to vivid conversations on big topics -- the meaning of sacrifice and tradition; the dangers of group-think and blind allegiance to leaders; the demands of conscience and the consequences of cowardice.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, reactions began to change.
Haugaard described one classroom discussion that -- to me -- was more disturbing than the story itself. The students had nothing to say except that the story bored them. So Haugaard asked them what they thought about the villagers ritually sacrificing one of their own for the sake of the harvest.
One student, speaking in quite rational tones, argued that many cultures have traditions of human sacrifice. Another said that the stoning might have been part of “a religion of long standing,” and therefore acceptable and understandable.
An older student who worked as a nurse, also weighed in. She said that her hospital had made her take training in multicultural sensitivity. The lesson she learned was this: “If it’s a part of a person’s culture, we are taught not to judge.”
--
Haugaard’s experience teaches us that it took less than a generation for this catechesis to produce a group of young adults who were unable to take a moral stand against the ritual murder of a young woman. Not because they were cowards. But because they lost their moral vocabulary.
Haugaard’s students seemingly grew up in a culture shaped by practical atheism and moral relativism. In other words, they grew up in an environment that teaches, in many different ways, that God is irrelevant, and that good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood can’t exist in any absolute sense.
"The traditional estimate has become iconic. It's been quoted for the last hundred years or more. If you go with that total for a minute -- 620,000 -- the number of men dying in the Civil War is more than in all other American wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War combined. And consider that the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, about one-tenth the size it is today. If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million."
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Like earlier estimates, Hacker's includes men who died in battle as well as soldiers who died as a result of poor conditions in military camps.
"Roughly two out of three men who died in the war died from disease," Hacker says. "The war took men from all over the country and brought them all together into camps that became very filthy very quickly." Deaths resulted from diarrhea, dysentery, measles, typhoid and malaria, among other illnesses.
Ira Byock has been writing books about the way Americans die since 1998, when he published “Dying Well.” For most of that time, he has been appalled.
He still is. Dr. Byock, director of palliative medicine at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., pulls no punches in his new book, “The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life.” The American way of dying, he points out, involves too much suffering for both patients and families, and routinized medical response with not enough individualized care. It means not enough listening, not enough support for families, way too much expense. “A national disgrace,” the author calls it in his introduction. --
What makes Dr. Byock’s book particularly valuable is the chance to eavesdrop on the doctors we’re often quick to blame. He tells what it’s like on the other end of the stethoscope.
Physicians who comment here sometimes argue that they’re more than willing to stop futile treatments, to refer patients with advanced disease to hospice care so that they can die gently at home. It’s often families, they report, who angrily demand that patients remain in intensive care units, that doctors try one more procedure and then another, as though yielding to death were a moral failing.
A loyal horse died of a 'broken heart' just a day before its young owner tragically passed away from leukaemia.
Emma Smith, 23, of Minster, Kent, died on January 20 almost a year to the day she was diagnosed with the condition.
Her beloved horse Lavender died a day earlier from a rare form of colic, despite having never been ill in her life.
According to Emma's parents Julie, 52 and Malcolm, 57, the horse and rider shared a 'special', intuitive bond, which makes them believe Lavender knew something was seriously wrong.
Emma’s mother Julie, 52, said: 'Lavender had never been ill before, the vets couldn’t explain it, we think must have been a broken heart.
'Emma used to always be there looking after her and she hadn’t been because of her illness.
--
Emma only rode her twice after she started chemotherapy early in 2011 and her family believe the loyal steed had been simply been unable to live without its owner.
Haley Verzani was fatally pinned to her bed when the 100-foot-tall fir tree, crashed down onto her house in the Northern California town of Arnold.....
The family told Fox 40 they noticed the towering pine tree was leaning and looked like it was about to fall, but they said it was growing on someone else's property so they didn't know what to do about it.
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It was the worse snow storm of the winter.
More than 90 Iraqi students have been stoned to death for their Emo haircuts by religious extremists in Baghdad in the past month after Iraq's interior ministry dubbed it 'devil worshipping'.
Iraq's Moral Police released a statement on the interior ministry's website condemning the 'emo phenomenon' among Iraqi youth, declaring its intent to 'eliminate' the trend.
The move is part of a wider clampdown on young people taking on what government officials call 'Western appearances' in Iraq.
A group of armed men dressed in civilian clothing led dozens of teenagers to secluded areas a few days ago, stoned them to death, and then disposed their bodies in garbage dumpsters across the capital, according to activists.
The armed men are said to belong to “one of the most extremist religious groups” in Iraq.
“First they throw concrete blocks at the boy’s arms, then at his legs, then the final blow is to his head, and if he is not dead then, they start all over again,” one person who managed to escape told Al-Akhbar.
Iraq’s moral police was granted approval by the Ministry of Education to enter Baghdad schools and pinpoint students with such appearances, according to the interior ministry’s statement.
Al-Arabiya English reported lists have turned up with the names of dozens of teenagers who have been warned that if they don’t drop the “emo” culture they will be murdered.
The busy scene on the banks of the lake appears to show our emergency services at their dynamic best.
An air ambulance stands by as two specialist officers in yellow ‘immersion suits’ deliver a man who has collapsed into the water to paramedics at the water’s edge.
They attempt to resuscitate him inside an inflatable tent. A queue of ambulances and fire engines stands by ready and waiting near a small crowd of shocked onlookers. Yet the story behind this picture is anything but impressive.
This was Walpole Park in Gosport, Hampshire, on an overcast lunchtime last March when no fewer than 25 members of the emergency services, including a press officer, descended on a 3½ft-deep model boating lake minutes after Simon Burgess, 41, fell into the water when he suffered a seizure. But as an inquest heard last week, he lay floating face-down for more than half an hour while firemen, police and paramedics watched and did nothing.
The reason? Even though they could all swim, the first fire crew to arrive hadn’t been ‘trained’ to enter water higher than ankle-deep. Instead they waited for ‘specialists’ to arrive to retrieve his body. They had decided Mr Burgess must surely be dead because he had been in the water for ten minutes. When a policeman decided to go in anyway, he was ordered not to. A paramedic was also told not to enter the water because he didn’t have the right ‘protective’ clothing and might be in breach of the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992.
Following the inquest, a Mail on Sunday investigation has now discovered that:
The ‘ankle-deep’ rule was meant for fast-flowing water and is taken from guidelines drawn up to deal with floods.
Other rescue agencies believe people can survive submerged for much longer than ten minutes – some will still try resuscitation at 90 minutes.
The incident happened despite a previous reassurance from the Health and Safety Executive that firefighters would not face prosecution if they performed acts of heroism that break rules.
Mr Burgess could have been reached within two minutes of emergency crews arriving at the scene – as proved by our reporter who went into the lake and waded 25ft to the spot where his body had been floating.
Mr Burgess had been feeding swans from a plastic bag that blew into the lake. He went in to retrieve it and while he was in the water he had a fit and fell unconscious. Last week, Coroner David Horsley ruled his death was an accident on the balance of probabilities, but said there was a chance, ‘albeit a slim one’, he could have been saved had the emergency services intervened sooner.
--
Mrs Hughes dialled 999 and watched the Gosport fire crew arrive. But as they waited on the bank, showing little sign of activity, her frustration boiled over.
‘I just could not believe how everybody stood around doing nothing,’ she told me. ‘I said, “Quick, go in and get him. He might be all right.”
‘One of them said, “We’re not allowed.”
‘After the body was recovered and I was brought over to give a statement to police, another fireman came over and said,
“We’re not allowed to go in more than ankle-deep.”
‘I asked why. He replied, “Health and safety.” I’ve never heard of anything so stupid in my life.’
Click on the link above to the the Picture that Shames Britain.
What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently.
Doctors don't want to die any more than anyone else does. But they usually have talked about the limits of modern medicine with their families. They want to make sure that, when the time comes, no heroic measures are taken. During their last moments, they know, for instance, that they don't want someone breaking their ribs by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (which is what happens when CPR is done right).
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more people receive futile "lifesaving" care, and fewer people die at home than did, say, 60 years ago. Nursing professor Karen Kehl, in an article called "Moving Toward Peace: An Analysis of the Concept of a Good Death," ranked the attributes of a graceful death, among them: being comfortable and in control, having a sense of closure, making the most of relationships and having family involved in care. Hospitals today provide few of these qualities.
Written directives can give patients far more control over how their lives end. But while most of us accept that taxes are inescapable, death is a much harder pill to swallow, which keeps the vast majority of Americans from making proper arrangements.
It doesn't have to be that way. Several years ago, at age 60, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight, or torch) had a seizure. It turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. We learned that with aggressive treatment, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months.
Torch was no doctor, but he knew that he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Ultimately, he decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.
We spent the next eight months having fun together like we hadn't had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time, and we hung out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited.
One day, he didn't wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.
As for me, my doctor has my choices on record. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like so many of my fellow doctors.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that by 2020, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women. These non-existent women were killed in the womb because they were girls. The Economist reports on The worldwide war on baby girls.
[W]ithin ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after the first child: parents may accept a daughter first time round but will do anything to ensure their next—and probably last—child is a boy. The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child in some places.
What happens when the natural balance of the sexes is upset .
A Chinese gang of grave robbers was caught trying to sell a dead woman into marriage - days after her family had done exactly the same thing.
The woman's devastated parents,from the rural Hebei Province near Beijing and with the surname Wu, initially chose to sell her body for £3,500, for a 'ghost marriage'.
This is the ancient tradition where dead woman are united with bachelors to stop them wandering the afterlife alone.
But just days later grave robbers snatched her corpse and tried to pair her off, with another dead man in a nearby town.
Police caught the gang of five offering the woman to another family for £3,000, a slight discount to reflect several days of decomposition.
Black market businesses have sprung up, with many acting as cadaver brokers, matchmakers for the dead, body snatchers, crooked undertakers and grave robbers.
In 2007, a man was arrested after killing and then selling six women.
He claimed that 'killing people and selling their bodies is less work than stealing them from graves.'
But don't think that sex selective abortions happen only in China or India.
In England there is shock when it was revealed that doctors were offering mothers abortions based purely on the gender of their unborn child even though abortion based on 'sex-selection' is against the law.
‘This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live.
But art-house cinema and the Catholic church are two of the very few places where death remains part of the public conversation. Elsewhere, death is camouflaged by fluffy euphemisms like "passing away" or "falling asleep", or otherwise approached with detachment through the scientific discourse of medicine. Long before the present government dreamt up its latest reforms to the NHS, death itself had been culturally privatised.
These days, if we are asked how we want to die, we generally say that we want it to happen quickly, painlessly and preferably in our sleep. In other words, we don't want dying to become something we experience as a part of life. This would have made little sense to generations past. For centuries, what was feared most was "dying unprepared". Death was an opportunity to put things right. To say the things that had been left unsaid: "Sorry", "I was wrong", "I always loved you". We used to die surrounded by our extended family. Now we die surrounded by technology, with a belief in medical science often replacing the traditional puzzle of human existence.
A culture that keeps death out of sight and mind is one that is increasingly lost for words when comforting others in their grief. Instead of having that important conversation in the supermarket with the lady down the street who has lost her husband, we slip down the next aisle with the self-justifying thought that we do not want to disturb her
At various times I have acted as a hospital chaplain or as a visitor at a hospice (sadly this is something I no longer do) and this has brought me into contact with a lot of people who were in the process of dying. You learn a lot about life and human dignity when you are with the dying. All of them, without a single exception, were people who died calmly, peacefully, indeed, serenely and happily, which was wonderful to see. I remember the very first dying people I ever visited in hospital: they were the sort of people who cheered you up with their radiant love of God and neighbour. It is some decades ago now, but I still remember them, and I particularly remember the way they so devotedly received Holy Communion in their hospital beds. Having known them gives me great existential confidence.
I really do not mind dying, or the prospect of death, having seen so many people go through it so happily. All I want when I am dying – I suppose I had better mention it just in case people don’t take it as read – is the presence of a priest, who will administer Holy Communion (if possible) and the Sacrament of the Sick. And I also want to hear the prayers for the dying, particularly the wonderful words of the Final Commendation, along with the Apostolic Pardon.
In case you do not know them, the Prayer of Commendation goes like this:
Go forth, Christian soul, from this world
in the name of God the almighty Father, who created you,
in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you,
in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you,
go forth Christian soul.
May you live in peace this day, may your home be with God in Zion,
with Mary, the virgin Mother of God, with Joseph, and all the angels and saints.
Should I discover tomorrow that I have advanced, life-threatening cancer, I won’t go rushing to the doctors for a heavily invasive course of medical treatment. No, I will shut up my London surgery, head to my home in Norfolk, stock up on gin and tonic and have a jolly good time until I meet my end.
Like most doctors, I understand that much of the care we offer patients who have serious, life-threatening illnesses is ultimately futile.
Worse, it can involve many months of gruelling treatments that might possibly extend the length of one’s life, but do nothing for its quality.
But while we give that care to patients, the vast majority of doctors I know would not want this for themselves. Yet this fact has long been taboo in the medical world. The silence has been shattered by Ken Murray, professor of family medicine at the University of Southern California.
He hit the headlines worldwide last month after publishing an essay in the online magazine Zocalo Public Square, which argues that most practising doctors would not put themselves through ‘life-saving’ interventions that are big on promises, but small on success, and involve great pain and distress.
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The vast majority of doctors would know it was time to throw in the towel if they were told by a specialist that they had advanced, aggressive cancer, and that their treatment could, at best, improve their chances of surviving for five years by five per cent.
I can think of only one doctor among all my medical acquaintances who has had cancer and fought it with medicine all the way to their death.
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Read the whole article. Remember this when your time comes. It's the quality, not the quantity of life that counts especially at the end of life. Don't spend it undergoing chemotherapy that may at most just months to your life. You're far better off in hospice or surrounded by those you love, enjoying what life you have to live.
A passionate advocate of home births has died after her own home labour.
Campaigner Caroline Lovell, 36, went into cardiac arrest while giving birth to her second daughter, Zahra, at her home.
She was taken to hospital but died the next day. Her daughter survived.
The tragedy, in Melbourne on January 23, will re-ignite debate about the safety of home births.
Mrs Lovell had made arrangements for a private midwife to assist with the delivery, but unknown complications during the birth caused her heart to stop.
By the time paramedics arrived at her home, she was critically ill.
The photographer, who leaves behind her husband Nick, her first daughter Lulu, three, and newborn Zahra, had lobbied the Australian government for more state support for women who wanted home births.
‘If someone dies in unknown circumstances, if that death is suspicious, unexpected or simply unexplained, then it is our job to find out who died, when, where and how.
‘That is a safeguard for society – people can be reassured that we will always hold a full, frank, fearless investigation that wouldn’t otherwise take place. I don’t think it’s enough to have a trial system because that only answers whether or not there’s been an offence. We’ve got to take it further.
‘They say how we treat the dead is a mark of a civilised society and what we do in terms of investigating how we lost them is part of that.’
The coroner holds one of the oldest legal offices in England and Wales. Alison, 60, says: ‘It’s a distinctly British phenomenon. Europe, for instance, doesn’t have coroners’ courts. It has come through the English legal system and was introduced by Richard I in 1194. That’s when we used to gallop on horseback to see the bodies.’
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Alison is passionate about her work but it inevitably exacts a heavy personal toll. She says: ‘I used to be quite adventurous and hang-glide and such like, but after I started this job I became neurotic about doing anything remotely unsafe. I’ve developed a fear about most things now. You can’t help but see everything in terms of what could go wrong.
Hearing these stories in an age when death had been moved out of the parlor and into the funeral home, it was both spooky and exotic to consider that once upon a time people took care of their own dead; they washed the bodies and made them presentable, and then invited the neighbors in to toast him farewell, “everyone came,” my mother said. “See, they wanted to make sure he was dead, but even the mailman stepped in and tipped his hat and had a healthy dose to his memory.”
Death, for the people of that era, and every era before, was no stranger and brought no squeamishness. There was nothing mysterious about death beyond those questions we still ask—will we see them again in the next life, and why, so often, do the good die young while old bastards hold forth for far too long? A family mourned and drank, and fought and keened and then stumbled into church for the funeral; they buried their beloved and stumbled about some more, and life went on.
We are much more fastidious, these days. Our dead, even when they die at home after a long illness, are collected by authorities who certify them for the bureaucrats and then deliver them to the funeral homes, where trained people work wonders with fillers and cosmetics and open their “presenting room” doors to a family that has been prevented—some might say protected—from so much as straightening a tie knot or fastening a bow for their loved one.
Life expectancy is written into our DNA and is there to be seen from the day we are born.
It all depends on the length of the telomeres, which are described as 'acting like the plastic ends on shoelaces' to protect chromosomes from wear and tear.
Telomeres are being studied extensively - and are thought to hold the key to ageing. Put simply, the longer your telomeres, the longer you will live - dependent, of course, on not dying accidentally, from disease or from lifestyle factors.
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The study – which used zebra finches, one of Australia’s most common bird species – is the first to measure telomere lengths at regular intervals through an entire life. With people, it is usually only the elderly who are studied because of the timescales involved. Blood cell samples were taken from 99 finches, starting when they were 25 days old.
The results exceeded even the researchers’ expectations. The birds with the shortest telomeres did tend to die first – from as early as seven months after the start of the trial. But one bird in the group with the longest telomeres survived to almost nine years old.
To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left.
Related
Now, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have identified 16 assessment scales with “moderate” to “very good” abilities to determine the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations. Moreover, the authors have fashioned interactive tools of the most accurate and useful assessments.
On Tuesday, the researchers published a review of these assessments in The Journal of the American Medical Association and posted the interactive versions at a new Web site called ePrognosis.org, the first time such tools have been assembled for physicians in a single online location.
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The tools are available to anyone who checks a box saying he or she is a health care professional; there is no verification.
Last spring, I wrote about a group of geriatricians and researchers assembling online a variety of geriatric indexes that do a reasonably good job of predicting mortality for those older than age 60. Since a number of tests and treatments ought to take life expectancy into account, they reasoned, physicians should have these validated tools in one handy online location.
Their question was whether the Web site they were putting together should be accessible to the public as well. Would non-professionals be apt to misinterpret the numbers? Or to decide that if they had plenty of life expectancy remaining, they might as well smoke? While the researchers were debating, I put this question to New Old Age blog readers: Do you want to be able to use the site, too?
The near-unanimity of your responses was startling. Roughly 75 people commented, and roughly 72 of you said (I’m paraphrasing), “Hell, yes.”
Citing public records and interviews with friends and neighbors, media reports Monday identified Yazdanpanah and others who had died: his estranged 55-year-old wife, Fatemeh Rahmati, their 19-year-old daughter, Nona Narges Yazdanpanah, and 15-year-old son, Ali Yazdanpanah.
Friends of the family said Fatemeh Rahmati’s 58-year-old sister, Zohreh Rahmaty, and her husband, Hossein Zarei, 59, and daughter Sahra Zarei, a 22-year-old pre-med student at the University of Texas at Arlington, also were killed.
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Grapevine police also searched the Colleyville home where Aziz Yazdanpanah had been living since he separated from his wife last spring. Public records show that the couple had filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and that the property was in foreclosure....
Yazdanpanah said he bought a gun after expressing concern that his daughter’s boyfriend was stalking him. He also insisted on picking up his daughter from her job at a phone kiosk inside Sam’s Club in Grapevine because of concerns about the alleged stalker.
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But a more ominous portrait emerged of Yazdanpanah in interviews with some of his daughter’s other classmates.
“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”
Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.
“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said.
After cheating death three times, Ben Breedlove, 18, finally lost his life on Christmas night after suffering from a heart attack.
But not before he recorded videos of his life and near-death experiences and how at peace he felt when he believed he was leaving the world.
The Austin teenager had a life-threatening heart condition he fought every day as he was growing up.
He had a near death experience when he was four, fourteen and then less than a month ago.
In the video, he shares these experiences, including the bright light that brought him peace the first time around and the time he was wearing a suit and standing in a white room with his favourite rapper Kid Cudi.
Of this experience, he wrote: 'I then looked in the mirror, I was proud of myself of my entire life, everything I have done. It was the BEST feeling.'
This is a flash card video, so you can turn down the sound on the annoying music.
At the deathbed of Kateri Takawitha, the first American Indian saint
Ever since I learned about the Lily of the Mohawks, she has fascinated me. I learned much more about Kateri Takakwitha, daughter of a Mohawk war chief and a captured Christian Algonquin mother, in this article by Brian Fraga.
She will be the first American Indian saint.
During a Dec. 19 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Pope Benedict XVI signed the decree recognizing the miracle needed to canonize Blessed Kateri, whose intercession is credited with the miraculous healing of a Washington state boy who had been afflicted with a flesh-eating bacteria.
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The young future saint’s parents gave her the name Tekakwitha, which means “she who puts things in order” or “she who advances or opens the way before her.”
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In 1660, when Tekakwitha was 4 years old, smallpox, most likely originating from a nearby Dutch settlement, swept through the Mohawk settlement, killing many members of the tribe, who had never been exposed to the disease.
Tekakwitha’s father, mother and a young brother died in the epidemic. Tekakwitha also became deathly ill, but she was nursed back to health by the Mohawk matrons. However, the disease damaged her sight and scarred her face.
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“Her prayer life was so strong and very deep,” said Sister Kateri Mitchell. “She is definitely a model for us of what it means to be a follower of Christ. She radiated that. She lived out her strong convictions and her strong relationship with God to follow that sacred path one day at a time, despite her own weaknesses.”
Watercolor by Dorothy M. Speiser
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In time, she took vows as a woman religious.
However, a year later, she fell fatally ill. She died on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680. Her last words were Iesos konoronkwa (“Jesus, I love you.”).
Those gathered around her said her body suddenly took on a brilliant radiance. The mourners watched in astonishment as the scars disappeared from her face.
Jesuit Father Pierre Cholenec, a witness at her deathbed, later wrote that at the time of her death Kateri’s face, “so disfigured and so swarthy in life, suddenly changed about 15 minutes after her death, and in an instant became so beautiful and so fair that just as soon as I saw it (I was praying by her side) I let out a yell, I was so astonished....”
....and I sent for the priest who was working at the repository for the Holy Thursday service. At the news of this prodigy, he came running along with some people who were with him. We then had the time to contemplate this marvel right up to the time of her burial. I frankly admit that my first thought at the time was that Catherine could well have entered heaven at that moment and that she had -- as a preview -- already received in her virginal body a small indication of the glory of which her soul had taken possession in Heaven. Two Frenchmen from La Prairie de la Magdeleine came to the Sault on Thursday to be present at the service. They were passing by Catherine's cabin where, seing a woman lying on her mat and with such a beautiful and radiant face, they said to each other, Look at this young woman sleeping so peacefully and kept going. But, learning the next lminute that it was a dead body, and that of Catherine, they returned to the cabin and went down on their knees to recommend themselves to her prayers. After having satisfied their devotion for having seen such a wonderful scene, they wished to show their veneration for the dead girl by constructing then and there a coffin to hold such cherished remains
Bonnie Ware worked in palliative care for many years and so saw many people in their last weeks of life and came to know the most common Regrets of the Dying.
The most common regret of all:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. .... Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.
Every male she nursed expressed the regret
I wish I didn't work so hard.
They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners.
By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.
Other regrets
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Some developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.
A growing body of case reports suggests that the popular sleep aid can have a profound — and paradoxical — effect on patients like Chris. Rather than put them to sleep, both Ambien and its generic twin, zolpidem, appear to awaken at least some of them. The early reports were so pronounced that until recently, doctors had a hard time believing them. Only now, more than a decade after the initial discovery, are they taking a closer look.
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People who seemed vegetative for years were waking up.
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According to several studies, about 40 percent of patients who have been declared vegetative are actually minimally conscious. Other studies have shown that a surprising number of vegetative and minimally conscious patients made huge strides toward recovery much later than conventional wisdom would predict.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like to be imprisoned in your own body. Rom Houben was totally paralyzed and no one knew his brain was fully functioning. He was a coma victim who screamed unheard.
For 23 years Rom Houben was imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.
Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.
Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally.
"I had dreamed myself away," said Houben, now 46, whose real "state" was discovered three years ago, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week.
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The moment it was discovered he was not in a vegetative state, said Houben, was like being born again. "I'll never forget the day that they discovered me," he said. "It was my second birth"
Experts say Laureys' findings are likely to reopen the debate over when the decision should be made to terminate the lives of those in comas who appear to be unconscious but may have almost fully-functioning brains.
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Laureys, who is head of the Coma Science Group and department of neurology at Liege University hospital, has advised on several prominent coma cases, such as the American Terri Schiavo, whose life support was withdrawn in 2005 after 15 years in a coma.
Laureys concluded that coma patients are misdiagnosed "on a disturbingly regular basis". He examined 44 patients believed to be in a vegetative state, and found that 18 of them responded to communication.
Perinatal (meaning, around the time of birth) hospice brings the principles of hospice care to those families who, as a result of prenatal testing, receive the heartbreaking news that their baby has a terminal condition. For those wishing to continue their pregnancy, embracing whatever life their baby may have, it provides a “hospice in the womb”. This includes planning the baby’s birth and looking into the question of whether medical treatment might be warranted, as well as more traditional hospice and palliative care at home after birth if the baby lives beyond the first few minutes or hours.
Palliative care teams can involve obstetricians, perinatalogists, nurses, neonatologists, social workers, clergy, genetic counsellors, midwives and therapists. So far, there are around 90 programmes based more or less on this approach in the United States and a handful in other countries. Not all are in hospitals.
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The voices of more than 100 mothers and fathers interviewed for a recent book that Kuebelbeck co-authored with psychologist Deborah Davis, concur. In, A Gift of Time: Continuing Your Pregnancy When Your Baby’s Life Is Expected to Be Brief, they talk about their suffering, yes, but also about the consolation of becoming a real parent to their baby during the months or weeks of pregnancy, the joy of actually meeting their child and holding him or her, however briefly, and the peace of knowing that they did the right thing.
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And the choice she believes most mothers and fathers in this situation will want to make is the one that honours their baby’s life and their capacity to love their child. “They just want to be parents.”
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Pope Benedict XVI told pilgrims to Rome on Sunday that a loss of faith in Jesus Christ has led many people to despair in the face of death.
“If we remove God, if we take away Christ, the world will fall back into the void and darkness,” he said in his Nov. 6 Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square.
“And this is also reflected in the expressions of contemporary nihilism, an often subconscious nihilism that unfortunately plagues many young people.”
The Pope charted the impact that the Christian message had upon the ancient world where “the religion of the Greeks, the cults and pagan myths were not able to shed light on the mystery of death.” He noted that ancient inscriptions read “In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus,” meaning “How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing.”
Thus, St. Paul reminded the Christians of Ephesus that they were “without hope and without God in the world” before their conversion to Christianity, whereas afterwards they no longer grieved “like the rest, who have no hope.”
“Faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said the Pope, is “a decisive watershed.” It is the “definite” difference between “believers and non-believers,” or “those who hope and who do not hope.”
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Our Last Judgment, therefore, will be “based on the love we practiced in our earthly life.” That is why it is “true wisdom” to take advantage of mortal life to carry out works of mercy, because “after our death, it will no longer be possible.”
Today the parents of the 17-year-old Christian student Ayman Nabil Labib, broke their silence, confirming that their son was murdered on October 16, in "cold blood because he refused to take off his crucifix as ordered by his Muslim teacher." Nabil Labib, the father, said in a taped video interview with Copts United NGO, that his son had a cross tattooed on his wrist as per Coptic tradition, as well as another cross which he wore under his clothes.
Both parents confirmed that Ayman's classmates, who were present during the assault and whom they met at the hospital and during the funeral, said that while Ayman was in the classroom he was told to cover up his tattooed wrist cross. He refused and defiantly got out the second cross which he wore under his shirt. "The teacher nearly chocked my son and some Muslim students joined in the beating," said his mother.
According to Ayman's father, eyewitnesses told him that his son was not beaten up in the school yard as per the official story, but in the classroom. "They beat my son so much in the classroom that he fled to the lavatory on the ground floor, but they followed him and continued their assault. When one of the supervisors took him to his room, Ayman was still breathing. The ambulance transported him from there dead, one hour later."
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"I insist that the Arabic teacher, the headmaster, and the supervisors should be charged as well as the two students who committed the crime," said Nabil. "The Arabic language teacher incited the students to attack my son, the headmaster who would not go to the classroom to see what is going on there when alerted to the beatings, but rather said to be left alone and continued sipping his tea, and the supervisors who failed in their supervising duties."
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After the funeral service for Ayman, over 5000 Christians marched along the streets of Mallawi, denouncing the killing of a student whom they described as "Martyr of the Cross," and the repeated killings of Copts in Egypt.
“ The book came to me at a moment when I was intensely receptive to it. It’s an experience that most of us have - a book seems to speak to you directly across a vast chasm of time and culture. It was as if Lucretius was speaking to me.”
The young Greenblatt didn’t fear his own death, but he was instilled with a deep fear of his mother’s death, thanks to his mother, who possessed “an absolute certainty that she was destined for an early grave”. Greenblatt writes: “My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell...even when I simply left the house for school, she clung to me tightly, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again.”
Mrs Greenblatt's fears turned out to be unfounded - she lived until she was almost 90 - but Stephen was very struck by how the fear of death could make life unliveable. And this Lucretius knew and described well: “The poem crystallized things I’d been grappling with - the impatience that Lucretius gives voice to with excessive anxiety in the face of death. ‘Death is nothing to us’, he wrote. There’s a celebrated passage where he expresses quite powerfully how our endless complaints about death just get in the way of living:
Sometimes the phobia of death can grip a man so tight
He comes to loathe his very life and looking on the light,
And in his mournful heart resolves to die by his own hand,
Oblivious this fear’s the source of what he cannot stand.
Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.
All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."
Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now."
"A good life deserves a good death"
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Death in times past was not necessarily less tragic to those who lost loved ones, but death was more prevalent, more public, more visible, and more a natural part of life than it is today. Our society is truly death-denying. Fitness centers, alternative medicines, an endless supply of diets are the order of the day. Consumers want the fountain of youth. You may object, of course, that death is all around us. The news and the movies are filled with death. But I suggest that this phenomenon itself is a further sign of a death-denying society. Death has become so commonplace as to be unreal. We can ignore death because it happens to others and not to us, or it is simply pretend. We can gloss over real fear with pretend fear. This is why people ride roller-coasters and go to horror shows.
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Both of my grandmothers died at home. .... How touching these deaths seem now when death in one’s own home is increasingly rare. What has changed over the span of the past half-century?
First, of course, the vastly increased mobility of society allows for fewer and fewer extended families. Second, people are living longer and often have multiple complex ailments in their final years. Elderly spouses are not strong enough to care for their dying mates, often needing extensive care themselves And the cost of end-of-life care is growing faster than the rate of medical care generally. The expense of round-the-clock nursing at home is one that only the wealthiest can now afford.
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One of my most unsettling hospital visits, even after some 20 years as a priest, was one of the first I made after becoming rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Freeport, Texas. Ed was the husband of one of my parishioners. He had suffered a massive heart attack and was in the coronary intensive care unit. Ed was splayed on a table with more tubes than I could count protruding from his almost naked body. When he turned to look at me, though he could not speak, his face shouted volumes of anger. He died several days later. Were his last days truly ‘better’ than those of my elderly family members because of the immense medical firepower brought to bear to keep his heart beating? Had Ed had become a problem to be solved; a chance to display all the exotic sorcery of modern science? Had he, in some sense, been diminished as a human being at the end of his life?
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Life unquestionably needs positive affirmation. But in a death-denying society, someone must also be speaking out. Someone must declare the truth that no one can avoid death. We will all die, and it is harmful to all of us to try to hide death as if it is a loathsome disease or an unnatural act. If hospice will not make this statement, then who will?
Sheriff's deputies shot nearly 50 wild animals - including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions - in a big-game hunt across the state's countryside on Wednesday after the owner of an exotic-animal park threw their cages open and committed suicide in what may have been one last act of spite against his neighbors and police.
As homeowners nervously hid indoors, officers armed with high-powered rifles and shoot-to-kill orders fanned out through fields and woods to hunt down 56 animals that had been turned loose from the Muskingum County Animal Farm by owner Terry Thompson before he shot himself to death on Tuesday.
After an all-night hunt that extended into yesterday afternoon, 48 animals were killed. Six others - three leopards, a grizzly bear and two monkeys - were captured and taken to the Columbus Zoo. A wolf was later found dead. Another monkey that was carrying the dangerous Herpes B virus, is believed to be dead after being eaten by one of the other animals.
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The sheriff would not speculate why Thompson killed himself and why he left open the cages and fences at his 73-acre preserve, dooming the animals he seemed to love so much.
Mr Thompson, 62, had had repeated run-ins with the law and his neighbours. Lutz said that the sheriff's office had received numerous complaints since 2004 about animals escaping onto neighbours' property. The sheriff's office also said that Thompson had been charged over the years with animal cruelty, animal neglect and allowing animals to roam.
He had gotten out of federal prison just last month after serving a year for possessing unregistered guns.
John Ellenberger, a neighbor, speculated that Thompson freed the animals to get back at neighbors and police. 'Nobody much cared for him,' Mr Ellenberger said.
An Oklahoma woman died of cancer last month after refusing chemotherapy that would have threatened the life of her unborn child, newsok.com reports.
Stacie Crimm was 41, single, and unexpectedly pregnant, when she was diagnosed with head and neck cancer this past July. Faced with the agonizing decision of whether to expose her unborn child to a potentially fatal course of chemotherapy, Crimm decided to put her own life on the line instead.
Her daughter, Dottie Mae, was born August 16th by emergency C-section after Crimm collapsed in her home.
Doctors managed to save the 2-pound baby and resuscitate the mother, placing both in intensive care units in separate buildings. While Crimm seemed to be improving at first, her condition soon deteriorated until three weeks later she stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated again. Her family was told that she was dying.
In a recent interview, Crimm’s brother Ray Phillips told newsok.com about Crimm’s first meeting with her baby, which happened just before she died.
According to Phillips, doctors had initially told the family that it would be impossible for Crimm to hold her child. However, two nurses intervened, and found a way to safely move the baby, who was still in an incubator in the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
“They laid Dottie Mae right on her chest and they just looked at each other. Nobody really said anything. It just got real quiet,” Phillips related. “It was the perfect moment. That’s what I always call it.”
Phillips and his wife, Jennifer, who have four children of their own, are now Dottie Mae’s guardians.
Reading this story about Stacie and her baby will bring a tear to your eye.
Tabatha McCourt, 17, was watching the X Factor on TV when she ran screaming from the bathroom of the family home in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, pulling on her hair and vomiting before she finally collapsed.
Friends told how Tabatha's eyes started to roll and she began having such a violent fit that it took two people to hold her down.
Tabatha's best friend Heather Goodhall called 999 but paramedics who came to the house, were unable to save her.
Heather said: 'Tabatha was always dyeing her hair different colours.
'The dye had only been in around 20 minutes when she got up and went to the bathroom.
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'She came back a couple of minutes later, sat down on the seat, and then began frantically pulling the foils from her hair.
'She started shouting, "no, no" and my mum's boyfriend held her and tried to calm her down.
'It was really scary. Her eyes started going all funny and then she just started being sick. 'It was really frightening. She looked just like a rag doll, limp, just lying there.
Also coming is an authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, due out Oct 24 Why did this famously private man decide to cooperate with Mr. Isaacson?
Isaacson reported in a posthumous tribute to be published in Time this week
"I wanted my kids to know me," Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. "I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did."
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Isaacson said he visited Jobs for the last time a few weeks ago and found him curled up in some pain in a downstairs bedroom. Jobs had moved there because he was too weak to go up and down stairs, “but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant,”
Mr Jobs, who was 56, is survived by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, their three children, Eve, Erin and Reed and his sisters Patti Jobs and Mona Simpson. He also has a 33-year-old daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, whose mother was a high-school girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan.
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Friends say that he spent recent weeks at home in Palo Alto, California, with his immediate family, who will now oversee the fate of his $6.5 billion fortune. Though many potential visitors were rebuffed, he found time to say farewell to a handful of close friends.
One of his final outings was to Jin Sho, a favourite sushi restaurant, where he dined with Dean Omish, a physician and friend. "He was aware that his time on earth was limited. He wanted control of what he did with the choices that were left," Mr Omish told the New York Times.
"He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That's what made him so great," he added. "Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, 'It's 10,000 times better than anything I've ever done'." ---
Mr Jobs died from pancreatic cancer. He had recently started a new drug regime and told friends that there was some cause for hope. But his sister, Mona Simpson, said he was resigned to his fate, adding: "His tone was tenderly apologetic at the end. He felt terrible that he would have to leave us."
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
His difficulty in getting a liver transplant in California because of the long waiting lists - his transplanted liver came from Tennessee - led Jobs to lobby Maria Shriver over a dinner attended and then the Governor. Steve Jobs' Forgotten Life-Saving Legacy
In October 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill that made California the first state in the nation to create a live donor registry for kidney transplants. The bill also required California drivers to decide whether they want to be organ donors when they renew their driver licenses. According to one supporter, this second measure alone should double the number of organ transplants available in California. Neither of these life-saving changes to California law would ever have happened without the help of Jobs.
He was obsessed with the Queen and sent her hundreds of 'strange and offensive' packages to her over 15 years, including obscene photographs. No doubt, Robert Moore, an American loner, was mentally ill.
A skull and bones belonging to Mr Moore were discovered on a rotting yellow cushion in thick undergrowth on March 15 by a tree surgeon working for the Royal Parks, newspaper West End Extra reported.
Nearby lay vodka bottles, and several forms of identification, including a 'degraded' U.S. passport, were found in his clothes.
Michael Faherty, 76, died in his own home and coroner Dr.Kieran Mcloughlin stated that in his 25 years of inquests he had never come across such a cause of death, the Irish Independent reports.
Faherty’s body was badly burnt but there was absolutely no source for the flames other than spontaneous combustion.
A senior police officer and fire officer said that they had completely ruled out that he had caught fire by any outside means.
Two examples of people surviving static flash events[clarification needed] are given in a book on SHC. Author John Heymer claims that the two subjects, Debbie Clark and Susan Motteshead, speaking independently and with no knowledge of each other, give similar histories.
In September 1985, Debbie Clark was walking home when she noticed an occasional flash of blue light. As she claimed, "It was me. I was lighting up the driveway every couple of steps. As we got into the garden I thought it was funny at that point. I was walking around in circles saying: 'look at this, mum, look!' She started screaming and my brother came to the door and started screaming and shouting 'Have you never heard of spontaneous human combustion?'" Her mother, Dianne Clark, responded: "I screamed at her to get her shoes off and it [the flashes] kept going so I hassled her through and got her into the bath. I thought that the bath is wired to earth. It was a blue light you know what they call electric blue. She thought it was fun, she was laughing."
In winter 1980, Cheshire, England, resident Susan Motteshead was standing in her kitchen, wearing flame-resistant pajamas, when she was suddenly engulfed in a short-lived fire that seemed to have ignited the fluff on her clothing but burned out before it could set anything properly alight.
The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris "went up in ashes and smoke" while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work "De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis."
The hundreds of spontaneous human combustion accounts since that time have followed a similar pattern: The victim is almost completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Coroners at the scene have sometimes noted a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident occurred.
What makes the charred bodies in the photos of spontaneous human combustion so peculiar is that the extremities often remain intact. Although the torso and head are charred beyond recognition, the hands, feet, and/or part of the legs may be unburned. Also, the room around the person shows little or no signs of a fire, aside from a greasy residue that is sometimes left on furniture and walls. In rare cases, the internal organs of a victim remain untouched while the outside of the body is charred.
Hitman Carlos Roberto de Jesus, from Brazil, was paid £345 to murder Iranildes Aguiar Araujo.
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But when de Jesus saw his intended victim he fell head over heels in love with her and confessed the plot.
The pair then conjured up a plan to fool his employer into believing he had carried out the hit. The new lovers bought two bottles of ketchup from a local supermarket.
De Jesus then got his supposed victim to rip her shirt and grip a machete under her armpit. He then taped her mouth up, tied her hands, smothered her with ketchup and got her to lie still on the floor as if she were dead.The ex-convict photographed Araujo and sent the picture to the 'cheated' wife saying he had killed her.
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But the ruse was discovered three days later when Simoes saw the hired assassin kissing the very woman he was meant to have bumped off. She then went to the police to complain he had stolen 1000 dollars from her.
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The hitman and his 'victim"' faces extortion charges and the woman who hired him charges of making threats to kill.
Sheriff Lima said: 'In eight years of policing I've never heard anything like it.'
When a loved one vanishes on a cruise, the family is in limbo. Dead or missing? Do they hold a funeral? Collect on insurance? Those families are living a nightmare.
‘It has been incredibly difficult, surreal really, and terrible for the children,’ she says. ‘In my heart I believe he is dead, that he is gone, that he somehow slipped and went overboard. I can’t think of any other explanation.
‘A search of the sea was carried out at the time, but nothing was found. I am told there are sharks in the area: it is very painful to think about.’
But is the idea of someone ‘slipping overboard’ credible? The rails on cruise ships are at least 3ft 6in high, which makes it incredibly difficult for anyone — even someone who might be drunk or ill — to pitch overboard.
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‘Life goes on,’ she says. ‘I need money to pay the bills and we’ve lost John’s salary. John took out travel insurance and I’ve been on to the company to try to make a claim but they simply say: “What are you claiming for?”
‘Thomson haven’t given me any support, either. John was in their care, but I haven’t had so much as a letter from them. I can’t get a widow’s pension because we don’t know if John is dead.
‘We’re living a nightmare and we can’t see a way out of it. It is so unreal that we can’t grieve. We are in limbo. What do we do? Should we hold a funeral? But how can we if we’re not sure he’s dead?’
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Are they the victims of a sinister crime wave? Have they had a mishap at sea and fallen overboard, or perhaps chosen to take their own lives?
The sad fact is that, in many cases, no one knows. And for the family and friends they left behind, that only compounds the heartache. Loved ones such as Ruth Halford and her children, who remain in limbo; bereft, baffled and unable to grieve.
As a hospice worker, Joe Ackerman is in the room when patients take their last breath. These moments, he said, are often filled with dignity and grace.
“It is an honor for me to be allowed in these rooms,’’ said Ackerman, 40, an administrator at the Merrimack Valley Hospice House in Haverhill. “You see the best in people at that time, and I leave with a sense of love and spirit that reaffirms life.’’
Patients come to a hospice when a cure is no longer possible for their illness, whether HIV, congestive heart failure, or neurological diseases. For cancer patients, hospice can be a peaceful end to depleting rounds of chemotherapy, and the pain and nausea that follows.
They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one -- 116 of the 117 -- were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.
Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren't clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped.
Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn't do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.
Twenty-five years later, Shelley Adler's new book pieces together what happened, drawing on interviews with the Hmong population and analyzing the extant scientific literature. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection is a mind-bending exploration of how what you believe interacts with how your body works. Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, comes to a stunning conclusion: In a sense, the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world, even if the mechanism of their deaths was likely an obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in southeast Asia.
Nightmare image from Cure Byte with news about clinical trials aimed to treat nightmares
Sleep paralysis or "nocturnal pressing spirit attacks" or mixture of brain states?
Across cultures, night-mare visits play out in very similar ways. Victims experience the strange feeling of being "awake." While they have a realistic perception of their environment, they can't move. Worse, they feel an "overwhelming fear and dread" accompanied by chest pressure and difficulty breathing. Scientists have a pretty good grasp of how all of this happens. The paralysis, the feeling of pressure on the chest, all that is explained quite nicely within the scientific models of sleep. During sleep paralysis, a person experiences an "out of sequence" REM state. In REM sleep, we dream and our minds shut off the physical control of the body; we're supposed to be temporarily paralyzed. But we are not supposed to be conscious in REM sleep. Yet that is precisely what happens during sleep paralysis: it is a mix of brain states that are normally held separate.
A year earlier, he had been injured in a road accident and made a full recovery.
So the man decided to make a pilgrimage to a shrine to give thanks for his survival – only to be knocked down and killed by a car less than a mile into his trek.
The 40-year-old Spanish man died instantly after being hit by the vehicle just 20 minutes into his journey.
Killed too were his two companions by a driver who had probably fallen asleep at the wheel.
Charles Sr, 84, died of a heart attack while watching the Pittsburgh Steelers' preseason game on television.
His son, Charles Jr, 54, was at that game. When he learned of his father's death, he rushed out of Heinz field with his wife when he suddenly felt chest pains and suffered a heart attack of his own and died in the parking lot.
Erica Abbott was pedaling her bike southbound on Bushwick Ave. and rode through a construction site near Powers St. about 7 p.m., police and witnesses said.
Abbott suddenly lost her balance near a pile of loose wood on the street after a car horn honked and she turned her head, witnesses said.
The cyclist, who was wearing a helmet, fell toward traffic and a 2002 Mercedes-Benz ran her over, police and witnesses said.
Aside from the feeling that I'm giving up yet more of my privacy out of fear of becoming techno-socially irrelevant, the worst part of signing up for a new social network like Google+ is having the service recommend that I invite or classify a dead friend.
Now, I'm aware that I could prevent this happening by deleting this friend from my email contacts list, because I'm a Reasonably Savvy Geek™ and I've intuited that the Gmail contacts list is Google's central repository of everyone with whom I'd like to pretend I'm more than just acquaintances (by ingesting them into the whirligig of my carefully mediated, frequently updated, lavishly illustrated social networking persona).
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We're all leaving a trail of digital bread crumbs across the web, some of us more than others. On the Internet, you can't die so much as join the ranks of the undead. Everyone who's left has to decide whether they can live with your ghost / zombie / poltergeist popping up and re-inserting itself into your life.
I have a number of dead people in my address book so that I can remember details about them. So far, I've not had the problem Christopher Mims describes. But it's only a matter of time.
Nick Pannuto suggests adding the names of your deceased friends and relatives to the 'dead/zombies circle, then blocking that circle on Google+
Fifteen-year-old Jharell Dillard took a bite of a chocolate chip cookie on Wednesday that immediately caused his airway to swell, preventing him from breathing.
The boy's father, Charles Dillard, said Jharell normally didn't carry an injection of epinephrine, known by the brand name EpiPen, because he was aware of his allergy and was usually cautious.
Jharell, a junior at Central Gwinnett High School, was shopping with his aunt at a local Wal-Mart on Tuesday, when he ran back to the parking lot to grab a snack from the car.
But the chocolate chip cookie he ate also contained traces of peanuts, causing his tongue and throat to begin to swell.
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His father said it was a 'freak accident' and told CBS Atlanta
that his son's death is a warning, and asked others to consider if 'we understand as parents the danger of food allergies.'
Mr Dillard said the boy's organs were donated, in hopes his legacy will inspire other parents to do the same.
Courtney Nash, 16, died at Arnold Palmer Hospital for children in Florida on Saturday. She was rushed there with the rare infection known as amoebic meningoencephalitis a few days earlier.
There are typically fewer than five cases a year in the entire country.
Courtney was swimming in St John's River near her home last week and doctors believe the dangerous and rare parasite, which thrives in warm water, entered through her nose or ear and quickly attacked her brain.
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'When the weather is warm, in every lake in every park, every river -- you will find the amoeba. You should not dive into the water, and you should not disturb the bottom of the lake. You should use earplugs and noseplugs,'
Symptoms of an infection include headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, stiff neck, confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance and bodily control, seizures and hallucinations.
The public is urged to contact a medical professional immediately if experiencing any of these symptoms.
Officials urge swimmers to avoid swimming in bodies of freshwater. Those who do should wear nose plugs or hold their nose when they jump or dive in.
The Naegleria fowleri does not pose a threat to swimmers in local springs, well-maintained pools and the ocean, according to the CDC. It can't be transmitted from person to person, either.
A third person has died after being infected by brain-eating amoeba.
Health officials in Louisiana are linking the June death of an unidentified man in his early 20s to the infection that has killed a boy aged nine and a 16-year-old girl this month.
The young man's death was traced to the tap water he used in a neti pot, a small teapot-shaped container used to rinse out the sinuses with salt water to relieve allergies, colds and sinus trouble.
Health officials later found the amoeba in the home's water system.
Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana's state epidemiologist, said the problem was confined to the man's house and was not found in city water samples.
The young man had not been swimming nor been in contact with surface water, Ratard added.
Christian Alexander Strickland, nine, from Virginia, became infected by the parasite after he went to a fishing camp in the state
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He died from meningitis on August 5 and health department officials confirmed that his death was from meningitis caused by an infection by the brain-eating amoeba, known as Naegleria fowleri.
This week, Courtney Nash, 16, from Florida, died from the same infection after swimming in a local lake.
A BRITISH bridegroom was killed by a shark off an idyllic honeymoon island yesterday - as the horrified bride he wed 11 days ago looked on.
Ian Redmond, 30, was attacked in shallow water 100ft off a Seychelles beach. Bride Gemma, 27, from Wigan, was sunbathing and heard him shout "Help, help" as the Bull shark savaged him. He suffered horrific injuries as the monster tore huge chunks of flesh from his body.
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An islander said: "The man was swimming close to the beach. He began splashing and shouting. His arm was ripped off and parts of his torso were missing. There was a horrific amount of blood in the water. It was like Jaws."
Another witness said someone grabbed Gemma and kept her away from her mutilated husband.
He added: "The damage was too great. It was too horrific for her to see."
Beach restaurant boss Jeanne Vargiolu, 56, said Ian had lost one arm and had the flesh stripped off one leg.
A 12-year-old boy has survived after spending as long as 20 minutes immersed in the Pacific Ocean surf.
Charles 'Dale' Ostrander was visiting the southwest Washington coast with members of his church youth group last Friday when he was caught in a riptide north of Long Beach. Doug Knutzen is part of the volunteer surf rescue team that spotted the boy in the water.
When Knutzen carried Dale from the surf and handed him to medics, the veteran rescuer feared the worst 'I've been doing this since 1978,' Knutzen told The Oregonian. 'It's something you never get used to, but I knew that the boy was gone, absolutely gone.'
But he's alive and talking though there may be some permanent brain damage.
The physicians 'were very clear that he had been under for too long, had been without oxygen for too long,' Kirsten Ostrander said, adding, 'We trust (God) no matter what.
'If he chooses to take Dale to heaven, and if he still chooses that, then he's still good,' she said.
'And if he chooses to bless us and give us back our son, he's still good
Child actor Lucy Hussey-Bergonzi, 13, collapsed from a brain haemorrhage just days after filming a walk-on part in 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'.
Lucy, of Hackney, East London, was rushed to hospital and had been kept alive by life support machines for five days when her parents were told she wouldn't make it.
Her collapse was triggered by a rare condition Lucy had carried since birth called Arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a cluster of abnormal blood vessels that remain undetected until they burst.
Lucy was transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital on February 15, 2009, where she got through two operations while she was in a coma,
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‘It was the day after her second operation when I turned to my husband Robert and said 'we have to get her baptised' said Denise.
‘At that point I really thought she was going to die and I wanted to give her the best chance in the next life.
‘We had no idea what we were doing but the hospital were brilliant and organised the whole thing for us in two days.
‘So five days after Lucy was first taken into hospital we were by her bedside saying prayers watching her about to be baptised.
‘Then the moment the priest put holy water on Lucy's head, her arm suddenly moved up. At first I thought she might be having a fit but within 24 hours she was taken off all the life support machines and tubes.
‘It could be she was recovering anyway, but the way it happened, even the nurses said it was a miracle.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1214)
This sacrament is called Baptism, after the central rite by which it is carried out: to baptize (Greek baptizein) means to "plunge" or "immerse"; the "plunge" into the water symbolizes the catechumen's burial into Christ's death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as "a new creature".
Thirty-one U.S. special forces members in Afghanistan died aboard a NATO helicopter that crashed Saturday in an area reported to have insurgent activity, officials said.
The crash occurred in the eastern province of Wardak, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office said in a statement.
It is among the worst single-day losses of American lives in the Afghan war.
Among the 25 U.S. special operations forces killed in Wardak province were 22 Navy SEALS, considered to be the "best of the best." Seven Afghan troops also died.
The majority of the Navy SEALs who died belonged to the same covert unit that conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May, though they were not the same men, the military official said.
The troops died during a "quick reaction" mission to assist military personnel pinned down by insurgents in a fierce firefight, a U.S. military official told CNN.
She asks
Reportedly, the helicopter was shot down. The Taliban are taking credit, but they would. If indeed they shot it down, it is very alarming--the obvious question would be, with what?
Yet the phrase “a happy death” is for most people today a contradiction in terms. For the Church, it is the most desirable conclusion to a good life. The Catholic tradition has for centuries encouraged us to pray for that grace and the Roman Missal has a set of prayers “for the grace of a happy death”. What we are praying for is that at the hour of our death we may be reconciled with God and at peace with our neighbor, strengthened by the sacraments of the Church to pass into everlasting life. In addition to that, each of us will have a particular desire for the time of our death: that an estranged relative might be reconciled or that our country might have made peace with its enemies. Taking all of these together is the happy death for which we pray.
We know that in general we must pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on us. A happy death, however, seems an exception to this because we cannot control our death. People can, however, take steps to make death happy by means of what project managers call “back-planning”. Starting at the end point (the ideal state at the time of death) people need to ask: in order to be in that state, what needs to be done the day before, the week before, the month before and so on, right up until the present moment. Then people can discover what they need to do today in order to prepare for a happy death.
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Back-planning from our death bed will include making sure we give time every day to what matters: the classic virtues of justice and courage, prudence and temperance; the theological virtues of faith, hope and love; daily prayer and regular participation in the sacraments. This is the happiness that we are celebrating in this year’s Day for Life. It is a happiness that all can find in riches and in poverty, in sickness and in health, in death and in life.
Disabled in a car crash as a junior in high school, Zack Fogle, a quadraplegic with limited mobility in his extremities, had a custom motorcycle built to accommodate his disability. He also took up skydiving and had a parachute custom-built with handles located where he could operate them. For five years and with more than 125 jumps, Zack Fogle showed incredible drive to live life as fully as possible.
At the 44th annual Lost Prairie Boogie, he was assisted on his first jump. His parachute did not open and his emergency chute was not set to automatically release.
Mr Fogle didn't deploy his primary or emergency parachutes, and an emergency deployment mechanism that would have released his emergency chute as a fail-safe had not been properly activated prior to the jump.
Skydivers can manually deploy reserve chutes mid-fall, but physical challenges likely prevented Fogle from taking advantage of what is considered a last-ditch but fail-safe practice, said White, a licensed pilot.
He said it also was possible that Fogle experienced spatial disorientation, preventing him from realizing before it was too late how near the earth he was.
'He would never have seen the ground coming; he may not ever have known,' said White.
He was 92 and had suffered declining health in recent weeks, said his son David, who could not specify a cause. “We’re obviously sad,” said the younger Ettinger. But “we were able to freeze him under optimum conditions, so he’s got another chance.”
Mr. Ettinger is widely considered the father of the cryonics movement, whose adherents believe they can achieve immortality through quick-freezing their bodies at death in anticipation of future resurrection.
Mr. Ettinger’s frozen body is being stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at a nondescript building outside Detroit, home to more than 100 fellow immortalists — including his mother and two wives — who are awaiting revival.
If all goes as Mr. Ettinger envisioned, he will remain in a period of icy stasis for decades — or perhaps centuries — however long it takes for doctors, armed with technology of the future, to defrost him and restore him to good health.
“Our patients are not truly dead in any fundamental sense,” he told a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
Robert Ettinger, who died on July 23 aged 92, was the intellectual father of the cryonics movement, whose members have themselves frozen at death pending scientific resurrection.
Ettinger preferred to style himself an "immortalist", since he argued that whole body or head-only freezing ("neurological suspension") was only one means of achieving indefinite life. His rationale for pursuing this goal was contained in his book The Prospect Of Immortality (1964), which revealed him as an unquenchable optimist about mankind's technological future.
His body won’t be buried or burned, as most people in his non-metabolizing state are, because those methods of interment would result in a state that even he and they would have recognized as death. Instead, as his bodily functions progressively failed, with a tub of chilled water at bedside, he was declared legally dead so that he could have himself chilled down, his fluids replaced with an anti-freeze solution, ultimately to liquid nitrogen temperatures, to continue a quest on which he had spent most of his life to date: to live indefinitely long.
These are the three hikers who jumped a guard rail at Yosemite National Park and were taking photographs close to a massive waterfall before being pulled away by raging water.
Hormiz David, 22, Ninos Yacoub, 27, and Ramina Badal, 21, all from California, are presumed dead after the incident at the park’s Vernal Falls. The three friends were playing and taking pictures in waters 25 feet away from the 317-foot falls despite urgings from onlookers to come back.
Their leisurely swim turned deadly as one of them slipped, fell and was dragged toward the falls. Park spokesman Scott Gediman told the L.A. Times that the second victim tried to rescue the first, and the third victim tried to save the other two.
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A guardrail separates visitors from the water atop the falls, and signs in multiple languages warn of the danger created by slippery boulders.
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Other hikers, including several children in their group, could only watch as the rushing water swept all three students over the edge.
‘Everyone was screaming,’ witness Jake Bibee said. ‘People were praying.’
‘They were honest, righteous Christians trying to live their lives the right way,’ said friend Ninos Piro, 36. ‘They were trying to be a good influence on everyone around them. That's why you see everyone so torn up around here.’
Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of tourists climbed the 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometer) Mist Trail to the top of Vernal Fall after the path was reopened. The path to the top of Vernal Falls, a three-mile trek with a 1,000-foot rise in elevation, is one of the most popular hikes in the park.
How tragic for their families and friends, May they rest in peace.
21 hours in the morgue fridge, "How did I get here?"
When they heard someone crying for help inside of the morgue fridge, the owner, thinking it was a ghost, called the police for backup with guns.
SAfrican man wakes after 21 hours in morgue fridge
A South African man awoke to find himself in a morgue fridge - nearly a day after his family thought he had died, a health official said Monday.
Health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said the man awoke Sunday afternoon, 21 hours after his family called in an undertaker who sent him to the morgue after an asthma attack.
Morgue owner Ayanda Maqolo said he sent his driver to collect the body shortly after the family reported the death. Maqolo said he thought the man was around 80 years old.
"When he got there, the driver examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing," Maqolo told the Associated Press.
But a day after staff put the body into a locked refrigerated compartment, morgue workers heard someone shouting for help. They thought it was a ghost, the morgue owner said.
"I couldn't believe it!" Maqolo said. "I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn't scared, so I called the police."
After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.
"I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us," Maqolo said.
He said the man was pale when they pulled him out.
Last week, Madeleine Gauron, a Quebec woman identified as viable for organ donation after doctors diagnosed her as “brain dead,” surprised her family and physicians when she recovered from a coma, opened her eyes, and began eating.
The 76-year-old woman was hospitalized at the Hospital Sainte Croix de Drummondville for an inflammation of the gums, which required a brief operation. During her recovery, hospital staff gave the elderly woman solid food, which she had been unable to consume in her family home for some time, and left her unattended. Choking on the food, she fell into a coma, after unsuccessful resuscitation.
Medical staff contacted her family, explaining to them that their mother was “brain dead,” with no hope of recovery. Citing Gauron’s eyes as particularly viable, the doctors asked if the family would agree to organ donation.
While supporting the possibility of donation, her shocked family first demanded further medical tests to prove Gauron was really dead.
The next day, the family was astonished to learn that Gauron had awakened. Shortly afterwards, she sat up in bed and ate yogurt.
“If we had decided to donate her organs, they would have killed her,” said her son.
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As anecdotes similar to Gauron’s continue to pile up, “brain death” as a legitimate diagnosis of actual death is increasingly being questioned by concerned family members and medical professionals, some of whom have charged that the “brain death” criteria was created simply to ensure that harvested organs are fresh.
Until I read this story, I had no idea how many people have recovered from 'brain death'.
If a patient is able to process oxygen from the lungs into the bloodstream, maintain a normal body temperature, digest food and expel waste, grow to normal adult size from the age of four to twenty, and even carry a child to term, can he or she be considered dead? Can a person who is "dead" wake up and go on later to finish a university degree? Can a corpse get out of bed, go home and go fishing? Can he get married and have children?
These are among the real-life stories of patients declared "brain dead" presented by medical experts at the "Signs of Life" conference on "brain death" criteria held near the Vatican in Rome last week. Ten speakers, who are among the world’s most eminent in their fields, sounded a ringing rebuke to the continued support among medical professionals and ethicists for "brain death" as an accepted criterion for organ removal.
One of the medical world’s key diagnostic tools for determining "brain death" preliminary to organ retrieval, actually causes severe brain damage it purports to determine, neurologist Dr. Cicero Coimbra told attendees at a conference held in Rome last week. With the so-called "apnoea test," Coimbra said, brain damaged patients who might be recoverable are deprived of oxygen for up to ten minutes, rendering the injuries to the brain irreversible.
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Since the world-wide adoption of the "brain death" criteria, developed at Harvard University in 1968, Dr. Coimbra said, "The lives of thousands of human beings, including children, adolescents and young adults, are lost every year in each country."
The premise of the standard Harvard Criteria for "brain death" is that lack of brain function implies absence of blood circulation to the brain, which is what causes brain necrosis, or the irreversible death of brain cells. But since the definition of the Harvard Criteria, he explained, medical scientists have discovered that the absence of discernable brain function cited by the criteria is not the same as "brain necrosis," or true brain death. In many cases where there is no discernable brain activity, patients have recovered with appropriate treatment.
Last week, Madeleine Gauron, a Quebec woman identified as viable for organ donation after doctors diagnosed her as “brain dead,” surprised her family and physicians when she recovered from a coma, opened her eyes, and began eating.
The 76-year-old woman was hospitalized at the Hospital Sainte Croix de Drummondville for an inflammation of the gums, which required a brief operation. During her recovery, hospital staff gave the elderly woman solid food, which she had been unable to consume in her family home for some time, and left her unattended. Choking on the food, she fell into a coma, after unsuccessful resuscitation.
Medical staff contacted her family, explaining to them that their mother was “brain dead,” with no hope of recovery. Citing Gauron’s eyes as particularly viable, the doctors asked if the family would agree to organ donation.
While supporting the possibility of donation, her shocked family first demanded further medical tests to prove Gauron was really dead.
The next day, the family was astonished to learn that Gauron had awakened. Shortly afterwards, she sat up in bed and ate yogurt.
“If we had decided to donate her organs, they would have killed her,” said her son.
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As anecdotes similar to Gauron’s continue to pile up, “brain death” as a legitimate diagnosis of actual death is increasingly being questioned by concerned family members and medical professionals, some of whom have charged that the “brain death” criteria was created simply to ensure that harvested organs are fresh.
Currently, more than half of Swedish intensive care nurses who care for purportedly brain dead patients have doubts about methods for establishing brain death, according to a recent survey released by Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg.
It was a one in three million occurrence park rangers said, when a grizzly bear charged at Brian Matayoshi and his wife, Marylyn, fatally mauling him during a hike through Yellowstone National Park.
Miraculously, Marylyn survived, after the sow bit into the backpack she was wearing, and threw her into the air.
She landed back on the ground uninjured and managed to escape, by playing dead.
Mr Matayoshi, a retired pharmacist and father, was in in the middle of a three-week trip with his wife when they saw a grizzly and her two cubs about 100yds away along the popular Wapiti Lake Trail at 11am on Wednesday.
She said they turned in the direction they had come but when they looked back, the sow was charging.
Yellowstone Superintendeint Dan Wenk reported Mr Matayoshi told his wife to run and she hid behind a falled tree. He was unable to find shelter as the bear attacked.
The woman told park officials she didn't see the bear attack her husband. When the bear went for her, she dropped to the ground, which likely saved her life, Mr Wenk said.
A group of hikers heard her calls for help and were able to call authorities, who arrived within 20 minutes.
Mrs Matayoshi suffered scrapes and bruises but didn't seek medical attention. Her husband died at the scene, according to park spokesman Al Nash.
There had been no fatal attacks by grizzlies for 25 years.
Started screaming as mourners gathered around coffin saying prayers for her soul
'Her eyes fluttered but she only lived for another 12 minutes before she died again, this time for good'
A woman died from a heart attack caused by shock after waking up to discover she had been declared dead - and was being prepared for burial.
As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming as she realised where she was.
Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been wrongly declared deceased by doctors but died for real after hearing mourners saying prayers for her soul to be taken up to heaven in Kazan, Russia
Her husband is furious
'I am very angry and want answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.'
Pope John Paul, and also Pope Benedict, have referred to Western Culture as a “culture of death.” Fundamentally what this means is that, when confronted with human difficulties, the offered solution is increasingly, the death or non-existence of the person with the problem. ---
“Don’t you think that death is a strange therapy? What if you went to the doctor and he said to you, ‘You are obviously alive now, but someday, in the future you might loose a limb, or get sick, or you might loose your job and have to go on welfare, so I am going to kill you right now, here in my office.’ What do you think of this? Isn’t death a horrible and strange therapy? You would probably respond that you would like to live and take your chances.
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The Catholic Bishops of the United States just issued a policy statement on the question of physician assisted suicide entitled, To Live Each Day With Dignity.
The idea that assisting a suicide shows compassion and eliminates suffering is…misguided. It eliminates the person….
The claim of the “Right to Die” Movement that it is all about dignity is once again shown to result in precisely the opposite. For, in order to attribute this supposed dignity to some, it strips many more of the dignity they have. The poor, the disabled, the chronically and terminally ill (we are all terminal), are said, increasingly, to have lives not worth living. It would be better for them (us?) to be dead. Really, says who? Does it really bestow dignity on them for us to speak in this manner. And if some DO suffer anxiety or depression over their state, is killing them really to be considered a legitimate or credible therapy? Is this dignity?
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The Bishops go on to beautifully remind us that the dying process may well be one of the most important and fruitful times in our life if we face it with faith. I have surely learned this in working with the dying. I experienced it most powerfully with my father, as he lay dying. Some very important things happened for him (and me) during those months. The dying process is often a gift in a strange package, and it is anything but meaningless. In fact, it is one of the most meaningful times of life. To short-circuit this by suicidal notions, or false compassion, is a terrible misunderstanding of the truth and grace available to the dying and those who care for them
A man who carved three totem poles used in Princess Diana’s Memorial Garden has been charged with murdering his wife after plotting a new life with his mistress on Facebook.
Carl Muggli is said to have killed wife Linda by dropping a 2,900lbs wooden pole on her as they carved it together in the grounds of their country home.
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According to a complaint filed by the Koochiching County Attorney, police arrived on the scene to find the giant carving across her chest and blood pouring from underneath her.
In an interview with reporters soon after Muggli claimed: ‘The totem we were working on was progressing wonderful.
‘I mean, it was just coming really good, and we were laughing and joking and having a great conversation, just …and then it was over.’
The author, Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847) was an Anglican pastor in Devonshire England, for 23 years. In 1844, Three years before his death Lyte was diagnosed with Tuberculosis. Despite this, he continued to work hard and was known to say, “It is better to wear out, than to rust out.” But his physical condition continued to deteriorate, until finally on September 4, 1847, at 54 years of age, he stood in his pulpit to deliver his farewell message. It is said, He was so weak that he almost crawled to the pulpit.
Later that day he retired to his room and wrote the words to this hymn: Abide With Me, as he meditated on the death he knew would soon approach. Advised by doctors to leave the cold, damp, coastal weather of England, he left for the Mediterranean. He died en route. A fellow clergyman who was with Henry during his final hours reported that Henry’s last words were: “Peace! Joy!”
Abide With Me was set to music by William H. Monk (1823-1889), and was played at Henry Lyte’s funeral service.
I have, when the situation was right, shared this him with the dying. Not all have fully accepted that they are dying, but for those who have reached the stage of acceptance, and when death seems certain, this hymn is very powerful, personal and poignant.
Read the whole thing because Msgr Pope explicates each the verses in this hymn to to pray for and with the dying.
He earned the title 'Dr Death' after allegedly helping 130 terminally ill people to die in just eight years.
Yet today controversial assisted-suicide advocate Dr Jack Kevorkian died naturally in hospital, with his favourite classical music playing in the background.
His lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, said the doctor died from a blood clot early this morning at a hospital near Detroit, after battling pneumonia and heart problems.
So, now that he is gone, what is Kevorkian’s legacy? He assisted the suicides of 130 or so people and lethally injected at least two by his own admission (his first and his last); as a consequence of the latter, he served nearly ten years in prison for murder. But I think his more important place in contemporary history was as a dark mirror that reflected how powerful the avoidance of suffering has become as a driving force in society, and indeed, how that excuse seems to justify nearly any excess.
Thus, while the media continually described him as the “retired” doctor who helped “the terminally ill” to commit suicide, at least 70 percent of his assisted suicides were not dying, and five weren’t ill at all according to their autopsies. It. Didn’t. Matter. Kevorkian advocated tying assisted suicide in with organ harvesting, and even stripped the kidneys from the body of one of his cases, offering them at a press conference, “first come, first served.” It. Didn’t. Matter. And as noted above, he wanted to engage in ghoulish experiments. It. Didn’t. Matter. He was fawned over by the media (Time invited him as an honored guest to its 75th anniversary gala, and he had carte blanche on 60 Minutes), enjoyed high opinion polls, and after his release from prison was transformed by sheer revisionism into an eccentric Muppet. He was even played by Al Pacino in an HBO hagiography.
The 2011 Golden Globe celebration was only the latest sign of a frightening cultural trend. Winning the award for best actor in a TV miniseries, the HBO docudrama about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, You Don’t Know Jack, was also nominated for an astounding 11 Emmys. It ended up winning the top awards for star Al Pacino and, most significantly, for best writing. This blatant piece of pro-euthanasia propaganda was a huge force on the entertainment-award circuit in 2010, grabbing nominations and wins at the TV Critics Association Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the International Press Association’s Satellite Awards.
Critics fawned over Dr. Death and praised the show as a courageous new benchmark in the newest war for civil rights. The right? To die, and to kill.
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We must be aggressive in exposing the deceptions driving the euthanasia movement — lies like the implication that personhood can somehow disappear from a wounded human body. Or that a human life could ever lose its value. Or that suicide can be a courageous act. We must contradict the notion that suffering is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
Devotedly washed and sprinkled with rose petals, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb lies prepared for burial.
But the rituals of death cannot wipe away the horrific injuries that have mutilated his body almost beyond recognition.
Nor do they blot out that Hamza - riddled with bullets, kneecapped and with neck broken and penis hacked off - has the rounded cheeks and gentle face of a child.
The gruesome video of his mutilated body has been posted online and broadcast on Al Jazeera fueling the anger of protestors
Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled human rights activist told the Washington Post the boy had already become a symbol of the Syrian revolution.
'(His death) is the sign of the sadism of the Assad regime and its security forces,' he said.
'Torture is usual in Syria. It’s not something new or strange. What is special about Hamza is that he was only 13 years old. He really is a child.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement, quoted by Reuters, reflects an increasingly harsh position towards Syrian president Bashar al-Assad:
“I think what [Hamza's death] symbolizes for many Syrians is the total collapse of any effort by the Syrian government to work with and listen to their own people.
“Hopeless” and “brain dead” are expressions which have to be used with great caution, it seems, judging from the experience of an Australian woman.
Gloria Cruz, 56, had a stroke in her sleep and was operated on at a Darwin hospital. Doctors told her husband, Tani, that her case was “hopeless” and that she would probably die in 48 hours. They wanted to turn the ventilator off, but Mr Cruz asked for a 48-hour reprieve. "I'm a Catholic - I believe in miracles," he pleaded.
Later a doctor, social worker and patient advocate all rang him and once again insisted that the ventilator should be turned off.
After two weeks it was turned off. And three days later Mrs Cruz awoke, to the astonishment of the hospital staff. Now she is alert and in a wheelchair at the hospital. Her husband told the Northern Territory News: "She's well on the way to recovery.
Which provoked in me the thought: In the absence of death, humans would have no perspective on anything.
If terrestrial life were eternal, it would render everything meaningless, in the sense that value is usually a function of scarcity. Which means that the existentialists -- including Becker -- have it precisely backward and upside down in suggesting that the meaning of death is the death of meaning. Which, when you think about it, makes no sense, for how could meaninglessness mean anything?
Of course, it took at least another decade for me to figure this out: that death is indeed the key, but not in the way existentialists imagine.
Since Death is the existential key to the siddhi, it should come as no surprise that it has a central place in Christianity. For only in Christianity does God submit to Death, which is the only thing that can transform it from the existential negative of Becker and other existentialists into an ontological positive that shapes and transforms our lives in a beneficial way.
To be "born again" is to die to the old existence -- to give Death its due, and surrender to its grim reality. We die before we die in order to be reborn on another plane where death does not rule the night.
There are two errors involved with life and death. The first is to ignore the value of life. Life is a precious gift, a good which should not be unnaturally taken away. Every life is precious, and every person is to be loved because they have life. The second is to try to hold on to life unnaturally, to extend one’s stay in the fallen world when it is time for one to enter into eternity. Those who neglect the care of others, those who ignore the inherent good which is the foundation for all life, are often the same ones who end up striving to prolong their own miserable existence, and they do so at the expense of others. They have not prepared themselves for eternity. They do not understand the meaning of life, and so they cannot understand the meaning of death.
Death is not the end, but a point of transition. We should prepare ourselves for death, for we will all face it one day. Life allows us to find out who we are, to come to know ourselves as we truly are. Once we have properly come to know ourselves, we can (thanks to grace) purify ourselves from all sinful contamination, and then in death, we will be the person we are meant to be, free from all sin, free from the sorrows of sin, in eternity. If we are prepared, eternal life is a blessing, because it allows us to experience ourselves as we truly are in an unfallen, beatified state. Life is a gift; it allows us the opportunity for such a preparation, but, because of sin, temporal existence is riddled with trials and tribulations; death allows us to have a final victory over sin, to overcome the “evils of this life.”
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In the lives of the desert fathers, we find the remembrance and preparation of death was a significant component of their spiritual life. They understood and accepted the significance of death. They knew and understood that because death lies before us, it can be and should be contemplated during our earthly existence, so that we can be ready for death and not be found unprepared for eternity.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers relates the death of Abba Sisoes
It was said of Abba Sisoes that when he was at the point of death, while the Fathers were sitting beside him, his face shone like the sun. He said to them, ‘Look, Abba Anthony is coming.’ A little later he said, ‘Look, the choir of prophets is coming.’ Again his countenance shone with brightness and he said, ‘Look, the choir of apostles is coming.’ His countenance increased in brightness and lo, he spoke with someone. Then the old men ask him, ‘With whom are you speaking, Father?’ He said, ‘Look, the angels are coming to fetch me, and I am begging them to let me do a little penance.’ The old man said to him, ‘You have no need to do penance, Father.’ But the old man said to him, ‘Truly, I do not think I have even made a beginning yet.’ Now they all knew that he was perfect. Once more his countenance suddenly became like the sun and they were all filled with fear. He said to them, ‘Look, the Lord is coming and he’s saying, “Bring me the vessel from the desert.”’ Then there was as a flash of lightning and all the house was filled with a sweet odour.
But, of course, the physical passion of the Christ began in Gethsemane. Of the many aspects of this initial suffering, the one of greatest physiological interest is the bloody sweat. It is interesting that St. Luke, the physician, is the only one to mention this. He says, “And being in agony, He prayed the longer. And His sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground.” Every ruse (trick) imaginable has been used by modern scholars to explain away this description, apparently under the mistaken impression that this just doesn’t happen. A great deal of effort could have been saved had the doubters consulted the medical literature. Though very rare, the phenomenon of Hematidrosis, or bloody sweat, is well documented. Under great emotional stress of the kind our Lord suffered, tiny capillaries in the sweat glands can break, thus mixing blood with sweat. This process might well have produced marked weakness and possible shock.
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Jesus experienced hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting, joint-rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation, searing pain where tissue is torn from His lacerated back as He moves up and down against the rough timber. Then another agony begins -- a terrible crushing pain deep in the chest as the pericardium slowly fills with serum and begins to compress the heart. One remembers again the 22nd Psalm, the 14th verse: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”
It is now almost over. The loss of tissue fluids has reached a critical level; the compressed heart is struggling to pump heavy, thick, sluggish blood into the tissue; the tortured lungs are making a frantic effort to gasp in small gulps of air. The markedly dehydrated tissues send their flood of stimuli to the brain. Jesus gasps His fifth cry, “I thirst.” One remembers another verse from the prophetic 22nd Psalm: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou has brought me into the dust of death.” A sponge soaked in posca, the cheap, sour wine which is the staple drink of the Roman legionaries, is lifted to His lips. He apparently doesn’t take any of the liquid.
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The body of Jesus is now in extremes, and He can feel the chill of death creeping through His tissues. This realization brings out His sixth words, possibly little more than a tortured whisper, “It is finished.” His mission of atonement has completed. Finally He can allow his body to die.
With one last surge of strength, he once again presses His torn feet against the nail, straightens His legs, takes a deeper breath, and utters His seventh and last cry, “Father! Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”
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Apparently, to make doubly sure of death, the legionnaire drove his lance through the fifth interspace between the ribs, upward through the pericardium and into the heart. The 34th verse of the 19th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John reports: “And immediately there came out blood and water.” That is, there was an escape of water fluid from the sac surrounding the heart, giving postmortem evidence that Our Lord died not the usual crucifixion death by suffocation, but of heart failure (a broken heart) due to shock and constriction of the heart by fluid in the pericardium.
Thus we have had our glimpse — including the medical evidence — of that epitome of evil which man has exhibited toward Man and toward God. It has been a terrible sight, and more than enough to leave us despondent and depressed. How grateful we can be that we have the great sequel in the infinite mercy of God toward man — at once the miracle of the atonement (at one ment) and the expectation of the triumphant Easter morning.
After a long time he climbed a tree,
And spread his shining arms,
And hung by them, and died,
His heart an open wound with love.
Qian Liu was murdered as she was speaking to her boyfriend in China on a webcam.
A university student killed in front of her own webcam while her helpless boyfriend looked on was being stalked by a spurned lover, according to friends.
Officers found the semi-naked body of Qian Liu in her Toronto apartment after receiving a tip-off from her boyfriend who had been chatting with her online 6,600 miles away in China at the time of the attack.
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But the mystery over what killed Miss Liu deepened today after a police autopsy failed to show a cause of death, intensifying speculation she may have been given some form of ‘lethal injection’.
A troubled 19-year-old stabbed himself to death on stage at an open mic night after playing a song called Sorry For All the Mess.
Kipp Rusty Walker repeatedly plunged the six-inch blade into his chest as the audience clapped and cheered in the mistaken belief it was piece of performance art.
But when he collapsed in a pool of his own blood they started screaming in horror and rushed to help him, but his wounds were too severe and he died soon after.
The bizarre suicide has left the community of Bend in Oregon stunned and wondering why he would end his life in such a public way.
But questions will be asked of mental health authorities after it emerged that Walker had told friends of his plan and had threatened to kill himself before.
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One of Walker’s friends claimed that he had been planning to kill himself in a public place for some time.
The friend said: ‘It was almost like he wanted to prove a point, like there's no point in being scared of death because it's going to happen to us anyway,’
David Lubisi, 40, was eaten alive after he entered the Lepelle river following an argument with his girlfriend, detectives believe.
The father-of-three has not been seen for more than a week after allegedly telling a colleague about his plan on April 7.
“Our investigations have revealed that at around 7pm on April 7 he told a co-worker he wanted to walk into the river, which he knew to be infested with crocodiles,” said Sergeant Malesela Makgopa.
“He was last seen heading towards the water and never turned up after that. We believe he may have been having domestic problems with his girlfriend .”
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The country’s Sowetan newspaper today reported that the owner of a neighbouring property reported seeing a crocodile with a human leg protruding from its mouth four days after the incident.
A top Wall St executive 31, at home with his wife and three young children, wanted a cigarette and to keep the smoke away from his newborn, Keith Mastronardi leaned out the window of his fifth floor apartment and fell to his death. The family had spent the day in the park and after returning home and putting the children to bed, sat down together to drink a couple of martinis. The mother turned to check on the newborn and when she turned back, her husband had vanished.
winner of a McArthur (genius) Fellowship and Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute; Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine in the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine; and Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
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Dr. Diane Meier: I, as a young person, was strongly in favor of legalization of assisted suicide. I think I was somewhat naïve at the time, you know, kind of doctrinaire about my commitment to patient self-determination and patient autonomy. And as I got a bit older and had more experience taking care of patients and families, and realizing that autonomy was not really relevant to the human condition – We are all parts of families and parts of communities and critically dependent on one another in ways that notions of self-determination and autonomy pretend don’t exist –
...there’s an old Chinese proverb that: “Suicide reverberates for seven generations.” The harm to families when someone decides to leave, rather than having to leave, is substantial and has been understudied.
What’s also very interesting is that the movement to legalize assisted suicide is overwhelmingly driven by the ‘worried well’ – by people who are so terrified of the loss of control that illness and death, dying and death bring – that there’s a sort of reaction formation: “Damn it, I’m gonna take control back” over something that’s so terrifying. But, for millions of years, humans have lived and died in their families. And it’s not that scary. It’s pretty natural, like birth.
And when you look at – “What do sick people want?” – Sick people almost always want to continue to live. And it took my experience with sick people who, if it were me, I’d say, “I want assisted suicide,” and they still want to live. Overwhelmingly, people want to live, in spite of conditions that the “worried well” would think are intolerable.
Three caregivers have been arrested after a disabled woman police believe was bound in a crucifix formation in a small closet was found dead
The suspects were accused of putting a pepper seed in the eyelid of 22-year-old Christina Harms and covering her hands with bandages to stop her getting it out.
The mother-of-one was discovered at her home in Kearns, near Salt lake City, on Friday after emergency crews were called over a possible overdose.
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The victim's cousin said she had fetal alcohol syndrome - damage done to the brain linked to drinking during pregnancy. Her mother was an alcoholic.
Lyle Chapin added: 'She was never quite capable of taking care of herself.'
A husband died while trying to give his wife CPR after she collapsed with an apparent heart attack at their home.
The man, from Joyce, Washington, called 911 on Wednesday to report the emergency.
He told the operator his wife had collapsed and he thought she had a heart attack.
When the medics arrived only eight minutes later, they found his body slumped over hers and both were pronounced dead at the scene of suspected heart attacks.
It's one of the touchstones of Lent, this intentional remembering that life on earth is short compared to the promise of eternity. Our time on planet Earth really means something. And the really big questions of life are always related to certainty of death, but more than that, they are subject to the economy of grace.
She quotes Gaudiam et Spes (Joy and Hope) (1965).
It is in the face of death that the riddle of human existence grows most acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and by the advancing deterioration of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction. He rightly follows the intuition of his heart when he abhors and repudiates the utter ruin and total disappearance of his own person. He rebels against death because he bears in himself an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to sheer matter. All the endeavors of technology, though useful in the extreme, cannot calm his anxiety; for prolongation of biological life is unable to satisfy that desire for higher life which is inescapably lodged in his breast.
Although the mystery of death utterly beggars the imagination, the Church has been taught by divine revelation and firmly teaches that man has been created by God for a blissful purpose beyond the reach of earthly misery . . . For God has called man . . . so that with his entire being he might be joined to Him in an endless sharing of a divine life beyond all corruption. Christ won this victory when He rose to life, for by His death He freed man from death. Hence to every thoughtful man a solidly established faith provides the answer to his anxiety about what the future holds for him.
Don't die of starvation and dehydration. Make sure your advance health care directive allows food and water unlike this one.
Advance Health Care Directive
If the extension of my life would result in an existence devoid of cognitive function, with no reasonable hope for normal functioning, then I do not desire any form of life-sustaining procedures, including nutrition and hydration, unless necessary for my comfort or alleviation of pain.
…
My agent shall consent to and arrange for the administration of any type of pain relief, even though its use may lead to permanent damage, addiction or even hasten the moment of, but not intentionally cause, my death…
That's the document Zombie had to contend with as his uncle lay dying. Death Channels.
There were now frequent hushed conversations in Tagalog and Spanish in the hallways between the upset orderlies. They were concerned about possibly losing their hospice license and their jobs, but it was more than that. Some confided in me that they felt very uncomfortable about being forced to “kill” the patients this way. When I pointed out that the patients had all signed directives to withhold life-extending care and for pain relief, one orderly shook his head, explaining, “The hospital wants to keep them unconscious on morphine so they don’t wake up and change their minds!”
I might have thought this accusation was a little over-the-top had it not been for the attitude of the nurses themselves, in particular the main daytime chief nurse who also confided in me and whom I eventually nicknamed “Nurse Kevorkian.” She flew into a rage whenever she found a hospice worker sneaking food to a patient, going so far as to clean the food out of one patient’s mouth to make sure no more got swallowed. As we sat by Larry’s bed together now and then, she expressed enthusiasm when his vital signs continued to drop, but became annoyed if he seemed to rally with a stronger pulse and more vigorous breathing. She assumed that I too was hoping for as rapid a death as possible for Larry, and complained bitterly about the crazy Filipinos and their weird attitude.
One night, I was alone with Larry in his room, while the night nurse was elsewhere in the building. He was due for another morphine dose in a few hours, so the previous dose was probably starting to wear off. For the first time in days, Larry stirred, and seemed to wake up. He made a faint moaning noise. I got up and leaned closer, and for the only time during the last month of his life, he spoke. It was just two raspy words: “Help me!”
I ran into the hallway and got the nurse, describing to her what had happened. Her response? “He must be in pain!” She came in and quickly gave him another dose of morphine. Before he faded back to sleep Larry made one last gesture: He shook his head, as if to say “No no no.” And then he went unconscious again. He never woke up after that, the nurses ensuring that he was drugged up at all times. He died three days later without saying another word or regaining consciousness.
What killed him? Well, the doctors would likely say he died of AIDS. But the direct cause of his death was, basically, starvation and dehydration. Which, I later learned, is what actually kills many patients in hospice care, who often die from the withholding of nutrition rather than from the more slow-moving effects of their terminal illnesses.
You can still have a natural death just not a grotesque one.
A father was crushed to death by snow while building an igloo for a young boy in his back garden, it emerged today.
Yan Lavalliere, 26, had been helping his girlfriend’s five-year-old son construct an ice dome when it collapsed on top of him at their home in a suburb of Montreal, Canada.
The incident happened after the boy was reportedly asked to pile on snow while the 26-year-old crawled inside.
After the collapse, the child called over to a neighbour in Chambly, Quebec, who rushed over with a shovel to him out from under the 4ft high heap of compacted snow.
His partner, Melissa Tremblay, and relatives eventually released him. But they were too late to save Mr Lavalliere, who had a four-year-old daughter of his own,
‘I started shovelling and then saw his black hat and then I saw his face,’ a witness told the Toronto Sun.
‘I took the snow out of his mouth but his teeth were clenched. I said `stay with us, stay with us` but there wasn’t anything happening.’
How sad. Condolences to his family, especially the poor little boy.
‘It's very difficult for him. He cries all the time. He feels guilty he couldn't help him, but we tell him it's not his fault.’
A high school basketball player collapsed and died on the court moments after scoring the game-winning shot for his team.
Wes Leonard, 16, fell to the ground after teammates and fans had rushed on to the court at the end of Fennville High School's 57-55 overtime win over Bridgman.
Paramedics desperately tried to perform CPR on the teenager, but he was pronounced dead at Holland Hospital last night. A cause of death has not yet been determined.
Wes had just scored the winning shot which secured his team a 20-0 winning season when he collapsed.
The athlete, who was also the high school football team's quarterback, had complained of having flu prior to Fenville's previous game.
His family must be in shock. Deep condolences to them
In June, my mother was looking at what was almost surely her last summer, and very aware of her enviable circumstances—a second house, a beloved husband, four attentive children with their own families. She wanted to get busy making the most of that good fortune, not to dawdle in a Brooklyn hospital submitting to radiation or chemo. She valued youthfulness, and it was true enough, as the pulmonologist reminded her, that she was still mobile. That was precisely why she was ready not to hang on. Prolonged shuffling was what she could not face—dallying and going through money and medical resources better spent, she often said, on the truly young.
In fact, she said almost immediately that she wanted to “be done” as quickly as possible. “I’m impatient to die. Oh, I’ve always been impatient,” my mother murmured one weekend soon after the diagnosis, before she and my father had yet left Brooklyn for Massachusetts.
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It was the beginning of the end, which arrived four days later, mid-morning on December 4, 2009. None of us was granted serenity, but I don’t think it’s wishful thinking to say we were united in a sense that it was turmoil preceding release. “I’m trying to die, I’m trying to die,” she told me in the middle of the second night as I sat holding her hand. By the morning she had slipped into a coma. The five of us gathered around her for her final 24 hours, sometimes taking turns and sometimes all together, talking, stroking, moistening her lips, quietly singing, every so often taking her clenched hand off the bed rail so she could relax, only to watch her grasp it again. My brother was there when our mother called out for her own mother.
Jemma Benjamin, 18, was kissed by fellow university student Daniel Ross, 21, at his home after a night out together.
But Miss Benjamin suddenly slumped onto the sofa - and died in front of Mr Ross's eyes.
The inquest heard Jemma died from SADS, a rare heart condition which kills 500 people in Britain each year.
Mr Ross, who had known Miss Benjamin for three months, tried desperately to save her before paramedics arrived on the scene.
But the inquest heard nothing could have be done for Miss Benjamin, who was described as a "picture of health".
Mr Ross told police that he and Miss Benjamin had been friends for three months - but that was the first time they had kissed.
At the age of 54, in the middle of a distinguished career as a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, the Harvard professor James L. Kugel received a diagnosis of cancer and was given a few years to live. Seven years later, with his cancer in remission, he began writing a book about the experience. Or rather, he began writing a book, “In the Valley of the Shadow,” that uses his encounter with death to investigate and report on a state of mind notoriously resistant to literary exploration: the state of mind in which you intuit something on the order of God.
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Believing in God, Kugel suggests — possibly being a tad ahistorical — originally meant aligning yourself with the force of the universe, of humbly opening yourself up to its grandeur, more than it meant asserting faith in a particular deity.
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Where Kugel is really brilliant, though, is in teasing out of his own brush with death, as well as out of religious texts and artifacts, an account of what intimations of God feel like. They feel, he says, like being awakened to a reality underneath the ordinary reality, a domain that is dramatic and extreme and made up of absolute good and absolute evil.
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But being given a few years to live appears to have engendered Kugel’s own, very intimate shift in perspective, and when he talks openly about his new, chagrined grasp of his all-too-human condition, he adds something raw and beautiful to his exegetical prowess. The scientists “have misunderstood the most fundamental element of religious belief,” he declares. To the religious — or at least to Kugel and his sources — religion is an experience more than a cosmology.
That evil exists and sometimes can possess a person I have no trouble believing and, in fact, that's what I thought of when I read the following story.
German police have arrested a top phone company executive who kidnapped and murdered a 10 year-old boy - because he had a bad day at the office.
--'I drove around aimlessly looking for a random victim, a child because I wanted to have power over somebody,' he said in a reported statement. 'A girl or a boy it didn't matter. I needed somebody so I could relieve my frustration.'
His victim was a boy named by police only as Mirco who was cycling home at 10pm after spending the evening at a skating rink. He made the boy climb into his car before raping and then strangling him.
That executive didn't lack education, didn't lack for a loving family, wasn't suffering from any psychological disorders, so what accounts for his sudden desire to kill a child?
That some people could become possessed with evil is a belief I share with millions. Which is why, I think, there's such an interest in exorcism. I was fascinated when I read The Rite and I plan to see the movie this weekend.
At times the work was unendurable. An unnatural stench filled the room, and though Emma ate little, she vomited dozens of times daily. She screamed and moaned for hours in unearthly voices "that no human could reproduce." Witnesses noticed that her "face became so distorted that no one could recognize her."
..... During the exorcism process it was noted that Father Theophilus seemed to age twenty years. Father Steiger was reaching his own endurance limit, and the Sisters approached collective breakdown. But they became hopeful after St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known as the "Little Flower," appeared to Emma, saying: "Do not lose courage! The end is soon at hand." On the ceiling they saw roses, traditionally understood as evidence of Thérèse's intervention.
TALIBAN SPOKESMAN: 'Anyone who knows about Islam knows that stoning is in the Koran, and that it is Islamic law. There are people who call it inhuman - but in doing so they insult the Prophet. They want to bring foreign thinking to this country'
Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as the woman, Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground. Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free.
But the 19-year-old collapses to the ground, covered in blood - but miraculously still alive.
At this point a Taliban fighter shoots her three times in the head with an AK-47The crowd can be heard shouting allahu akbar as she is killed.
Her lover, Khayyam, is then marched in front of the crowd with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded with his own tunic and crouches down close to the ground as he tried to protect his body from the stones.
But he is battered to the floor by a barrage of rocks. He can be heard sobbing before eventually falling silent.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13
We have two remarkable examples, one a judge, one a boy, who sacrificed their lives for others and we cannot but stand in awe at their last actions before dying.
As the shooting starts, the video shows Judge Roll pushing another man, Rob Barber, onto the ground, Mr. Nanos said. "It looks to us as though he is pushing against Ron Barber to move him out of the way." Both men fall to the ground; both are shot. The judge was shot in the back and died.
"It's pretty evident to me that Judge Roll was a hero … if Judge Roll had not pushed Mr. Barber his wounds might have been fatal," Mr. Nanos said. "Judge Roll's actions are of a man trying to save another man's life."
Jordan Rice, 13, was killed in the city of Toowoomba, 80 miles west of Brisbane, as his family car was swamped. The teenager had insisted that rescuers take his 10-year-old brother, Blake, first. Seconds later, Jordan and his mother Donna, 43, were swept away.
"I had the boy [Blake] in one hand, the rope in the other. I wasn't going to let go but then the torrent came through and was pulling us down," said Warren McEr lean, a rescue worker. "Then this great big tall fellow just came out of nowhere, bear hugged us and ripped us out of the water. When I got back [carrying Blake], I turned … the rope snapped and the car just flipped."
"Jordan was swept off," said John Tyson, 46, Ms Rice's partner of 30 years and Jordan's father. "As soon as he went, Donna just let go, you know, trying to clutch at Jordan. The poor little boy, they just both drowned.''
He added: "He [the rescue worker] went to grab Jordan first, who said, 'Save my brother'. I can only imagine the fear coursing through his body.
"He won't go down with any fanfare or anything like that – I don't think anyone will even wear a black armband for him – but he's just the champion of all champions, a family hero."
"Jordan can't swim and is terrified of water," his father, John Tyson, told the Toowoomba Chronicle. "But when the man went to rescue him, he said 'save my brother first.'"
At the funeral of his son who was buried alongside his mother, the father said
"The fire of my heart will continue to burn until it's my time to join them,"
When Jack Kevorkian came to the nation’s attention in the 1990s, reporters at first depicted him — correctly — as a macabre and megalomaniacal promoter of death. But he was remade into a popular icon, becoming a pet guest on 60 Minutes, treated to uncharacteristically softball interviews by Mike Wallace and fawned over by Andy Rooney, and then declared by Time magazine to be one of the major “celebrities” of the 1990s. Time even invited him to their 75th anniversary gala as a star guest. You knew the world was spinning the wrong way when Tom Cruise rushed up to shake his hand.
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Kevorkian announced his actual purpose unequivocally in his 1991 book, Prescription: Medicide. It was definitely not the relief of suffering, which he called a “first step, an early distasteful professional obligation,” stating, “What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish, in a word, obitiatry.” In other words, Kevorkian wanted to engage in human vivisection.
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● Before beginning his assisted suicide campaign, Kevorkian sought permission to experiment on prisoners as part of the execution process. He only turned to the ill and disabled when he had been thwarted from using the criminal justice system to satisfy his macabre obsessions.
● About 70 percent of Kevorkian’s assisted suicides were not terminally ill. Most were depressed people with disabilities. Five weren’t even sick upon autopsy.
● He is a eugenics believer, stating in a court document, “The voluntary self-elimination of individual mortally diseased and crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare.”
● He ripped out the kidneys of one of his assisted suicide victims and offered them at a press conference, “first come first served.” The “surgery” was so crude that the Oakland County Medical Examiner called it out of a “slaughterhouse” and a “bizarre mutilation.” The media barely reported the story and it is now long forgotten.
A three-year-old boy is believed to have spent days over Christmas sitting alone by the dead body of his ‘sleeping’ mother in the hope that she might ‘wake up’.
At one point, his grandfather telephoned but the young child calmly told him 'mummy’s asleep’. It is not known what the boy did for food and drink.
The heartbreaking tale unfolded in the French town of Loison-sous-Lens, in the northern Pas de Calais region, where Emilie Decroix, 28, collapsed.
Work colleagues in the nearby town of Lens presumed the single mother was off ill and unable to call in.
Instead an aneurysm, or weak bulge in an artery wall, had ruptured close to her brain, causing the office worker to die suddenly.
‘Emilie lived alone with her little boy who clearly believed she was sleeping and might wake up,’ said a police source. ‘
Before the ruptured aneurysm, she would have had all the appearances of a young, fit woman – the child could clearly not envisage that she might be dead.
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The child’s grandfather finally called round to the house on New Year’s Eve, where he found her dead body, with his grandson sitting quietly next to her.
Police are investigating how a cast-iron statue came to be on the Warrego Highway, where it is believed to have caused a freak crash that killed a teenage girl.
Candice Mangan, 18, was killed instantly when the sedan she was travelling in struck the cherub garden statue on the westbound lanes of the highway and careered into oncoming traffic.
A suicidal man plummeted nine stories and survived in midtown Sunday when he landed on a mountain of trash that had piled up since last week's blizzard, officials said.
Vangelis (Angelo) Kapatos, 26, wearing only pajama bottoms, jumped from his family's apartment in the Whitby building on 45th St. near Eighth Ave. just after noon.
The young man, troubled by a threat of eviction from the rent-regulated apartment, was fresh out of psychiatric treatment, relatives said. He had tried to end his life in a number of other ways before leaping, police sources said.
"He landed on a garbage pile," one official said. "That's the only reason he's alive.
Trying every option in the face of terminal illness, pursuing all medical possibilities no matter how unlikely to succeed, and raging against death can easily become the default position in a culture that hesitates to acknowledge or discuss death openly. Yet approaching our own mortality with a greater dose of realism helps us make better decisions about when to roll back the medical interventions and focus our energies on preparing for death. Hospice and palliative care can be important and helpful adjuncts in this process. When done well, these approaches allow us to focus on improving the remaining time for those with a terminal illness. Pain management, comfort care, acknowledgement of the coming death, family support and an opportunity for spiritual reconciliation are essential elements in these approaches. Far from abandoning the needs of patients, hospice and palliative care seek to properly acknowledge that in some cases, efforts at curing should be scaled back while efforts at caring for the patient should be scaled up.
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Terminally ill patients who choose to discuss end of life treatments with their families and doctors more often opt for palliative care or hospice care, leading to more appropriate medical care near death, and better overall outcomes and satisfaction. They also tend to spend less money and do not die significantly earlier. Rather they often die more peacefully than those receiving aggressive interventions, which tend to be associated with a poorer standard of life and a worse bereavement adjustment.
Isabelle Caro, a French actress and model whose anorexic image appeared in a shock Italian ad campaign, has died at the age of 28.
____Caro featured in an ad campaign by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani in 2007 for an Italian fashion house.
Under the headline 'No Anorexia,' images across newspapers and billboards showed Caro naked, vertebrae and facial bones protruding.
At 5ft 4in, she is reported to have weighed just 4st 8lb (68lbs) at the time.
___At the time of the campaign, she wrote: 'I've hidden myself and covered myself for too long. Now I want to show myself fearlessly, even though I know my body arouses repugnance.
'I want to recover because I love life and the riches of the universe. I want to show young people how dangerous this illness is.'
When a career cop on the verge of retirement crossed paths with a paroled thug aiming to restart his criminal career at Kohl’s jewelry counter Sunday night in Woburn, it ended with splatters of blood, scattered diamonds and two men dead in the wind-driven snow.
It was the first and last time in 34 years of public service that Woburn police officer John “Jack” Maguire, 60, a married father, had fired his gun on the job. He planned to retire in October.
“It was like the Wild West,” Woburn Police Chief Philip Mahoney said, his voice cracking as he fought to maintain his composure. “We do not have shootings in Woburn. We do not have that kind of community. Officer Maguire lost his life defending it.”
A dispute over the existence of God between four Russians, drunk on a litre of pure alcohol, resulted in two of them being killed, news agencies reported.
The disagreement began over the weekend when the female house owner, her son, a male roommate and undisclosed male relative drank the litre of pure alcohol, "which they downed with snow," a police investigator told RIA Novosti.
"Soon after the drinking session, the suspect [the son] and the two other men got into a fight about the existence of God," the police official in the western Siberia region of Tomsk reported.
The son ended up attacking both men with a knife, killing them both, the report said.
More than a month since the horrific and ferocious murder of 52 Catholics at Mass inside Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad by militant Islamic terrorists of Al Qaeda. The Cloud of Witnesses.
Now stories are being told by the survivors. What a story! What a heartbreak! What a brave boy!
Among the victims of this senseless tragedy was a little boy named Adam. Three-year-old Adam witnessed the horror of dozens of deaths, including that of his own parents. He wandered among the corpses and the blood, following the terrorists around and admonishing them, ‘enough, enough, enough.’ According to witnesses, this continued for two hours until Adam was himself murdered.” As bishops, as Americans, we cannot turn from this scene or allow the world to overlook it.
Minutes after posing for this portrait while Christmas shopping, Monique Nelson strapped her 2-year-old son in his car seat when suddenly she was shot in the chest. She used her body to cover her son and protect him from the crossfire of a gunfight.
The key question: Should your parent have a D.N.R. order, meaning “do not resuscitate”?
Before you answer, another key question: Would that decision be any clearer, easier or less painful if the order was instead called A.N.D., for “allow natural death”?
Some health care professionals think it might be. Even if the staff’s subsequent actions were exactly the same, if in either case a patient would receive comfort care to relieve pain but wouldn’t undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation, nomenclature might make a difference.
He couldn't identify his wife of ten years, mother of his five children
When his wife was killed in a road crash, Mufleh Mohammed was called to the morgue to make a positive identification. Despite ten years of marriage and five children, he did not recognize his own wife.
He had never seen his wife's face.
“I could not identify my wife after she was killed in a road accidents…I asked security women to put the veil back on her face…after they did so, I recognized her and indentified the dead person as my wife,” he said.
The audience of 120 doctors from 50 countries sat in stunned silence as a renowned heart doctor produced evidence of how, after he had prayed for a patient who had died and was being prepared for the morgue, was brought back to life after prayer.
Dr. Chauncey W. Crandall IV, who serves at the Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida tells the story of what happened a year ago.
“We had a fifty-three year old man who came to the emergency room with a massive heart attack and actually his heart had stopped,” he said. “The medical people had worked on him for over forty minutes in the emergency room and then declared him dead.
“They called me in to evaluate the patient towards the end of his treatment where they had unsuccessfully tried to revive him. The nurse was preparing his body to be taken down to the morgue when the Holy Spirit told me to ‘turn around and pray for that man.’
Can you imagine, you’re grieving the news from the ER team that your young husband–who 20 minutes ago keeled while over eating breakfast cereal–is dead. And then a knock on the door and uninvited strangers come in telling you they want his body to harvest the organs? Good grief. Moreover, one may suspect a cardiac arrest, but only an autopsy can tell for sure.
I don't know how I missed this when it came out in August. It's a great piece. A must-read.
Atul Gawande explores what medicine should do when it can't save your life in Letting Go
Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.
Read Gawande encounters hospice for the first time with one of his two dying patients and what hospice nurse Lee Creed has to say about the difference between hospice care and ordinary medical care for a dying patient.
The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.
In comparing the deaths of his two patients Gawande writes:
Dave Galloway died one week later—at home, at peace, and surrounded by family. A week after that, Lee Cox died, too. But, as if to show just how resistant to formula human lives are, Cox had never reconciled herself to the incurability of her illnesses. So when her family found her in cardiac arrest one morning they followed her wishes and called 911 instead of the hospice service. The emergency medical technicians and firefighters and police rushed in. They pulled off her clothes and pumped her chest, put a tube in her airway and forced oxygen into her lungs, and tried to see if they could shock her heart back. But such efforts rarely succeed with terminal patients, and they did not succeed with her. Hospice has tried to offer a new ideal for how we die.
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People who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.
The twin sisters made a pact to commit suicide together in Colorado on the last day before one of them would be required to return to home to Australia.
The 29-year-olds each put a 22-caliber pistol to her head and pulled the triggers simultaneously at the Family Shooting Center at Cherry Creek State Park Monday afternoon.
One sister fell dead, and Thursday morning the other had recovered enough to tell investigators what happened.
But she would not say why during the emotional two-hour interview.
"We asked that question several times, and each time she declined to answer," said Capt. Louie Perea, of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department. "Obviously we can't make her tell us that."
He characterized her as "devastated, frustrated, distraught, angry at times."
Her parents are scheduled to arrive in Colorado Friday.
In Southwestern France, at a seaside resort , 28-year-old Adrien Monnoyeur ignored the weather forecasts of high winds and went kite-surfing on surfboard, towed by a large kite when a particularly strong gust of wind lifted him high in the air.
A local resident told Sud Ouest newspaper: 'I was on the phone to a friend looking out the window. I was telling him to watch the sea when I saw the kite surfer go past me at breakneck speed.'
The woman did not know what was happening at first, adding: 'It all happened in the space of a second. I even thought I had a hallucination.'
She could see every details of the kite-surfer's face, saying: 'He was a very good looking young man. It was so strange.
'I couldn't even see fear in his face. It was instead an expression of astonishment, but this is just my feeling.'
An Austrian man who was the first in Europe to wear an innovative high-tech artificial arm has died after the car he was driving veered off the road and crashed into a tree.
Christian Kandlbauer lost both arms in an electrical accident in 2005 but was able to live a largely normal life thanks to a mind-controlled robotic prosthetic left arm and a normal prosthesis in place of his right arm.
Kandlbauer, who drove himself to work every morning after getting his driver's license a year ago, had said his quality of life improved dramatically due to the mind-controlled prothesis, which recognized signals from his brain and moved accordingly.
The cause of the crash remains unclear. Both Waltensdorfer and local police said Friday it was impossible to tell whether the accident was caused by problems with Kandlbauer's prosthetic arms.
I'm as happy as anyone when I learn about new devices that enable the disabled to lead fuller and freer lives, but I must confess that though-powered arms to drive a car left me speechless. Since I can be easily distracted, I wonder what else could happen to someone with a 'thought-powered" arm who becomes momentarily distracted. What does one do with all the thoughts in one's head that come unbidden, even unwelcome?
Lydia Paillard, 60, went to a clinic in Bordeaux, France, for a chemotherapy session. She took the prescribed pills and was put on a drip. But, after 14 hours of appearing lifeless, doctors declared dead and staff asked her family for permission to take her off life support, Linda sat up suddenly and said, "I feel so much better. I've had a lovely sleep."
A mother collapsed and died at work after subjecting herself to a crash diet in an effort to look good on a family holiday.
Lucy Prince, 36, lost 20lb in a month by replacing meals with slimming drinks and exercising heavily in preparation for a break with her daughter.
But her heart stopped at work and she collapsed in front of her manager at a car factory.
She died in hospital having never regained consciousness. An inquest yesterday heard that Miss Prince weighed 16st 2lbs in June this year but was only 14st 8lbs when she collapsed in June.
She also suffered from low blood pressure and her potassium levels had dropped dangerously low after the diet.
She had an inflamed heart which, combined with low potassium levels, caused her collapse according to a post-mortem examination.
Miss Prince’s stepmother, Lesley Prince, told the inquest that the manager who witnessed the collapse, at Toyota’s plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, said it came without warning.
She said: ‘Apparently, they were having a normal work conversation when Lucy’s eyes rolled back and she dropped to the floor.
This story gets more and more gruesome. The Mexican investigator searching for the killers of the American David Hartley, the husband who was allegedly shot and killed while jet-skiing on Falcon Lake has been found decapitated.
1.Claiming her husband fell face first in the water and that she tried to pull him out, Tiffany blamed God for why she left him and fled to safety. "I just keep hearing God tell me 'You have to go, you have to go,'" she told one reporter.
No doubt God speaks to people in times of crisis, but it's a bit convenient that He advised her to save her own skin. Let's just say that's not necessarily the Godly thing to do.
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2. First, there is no evidence, other than Tiffany's word, that her husband was even on the water at all, much less in a jet ski getting shot in the head. He was reportedly wearing a life vest, which means his body should have been seen by someone by now, as it floated to shore someplace along the Lake's edge. It hasn't. And nobody heard motors or gunshots or saw anyone removing things from the water. While it's possible pirates might take a person for ransom and steal a jet ski for cash value, it takes time to lug people and heavy objects out of the water. Nobody saw any of it.
3. it makes no sense that they managed such a precise execution in the skull of a man while he was zipping along on a jet ski, but somehow couldn't even graze the jet ski of the guy's wife even as she was stopped, as she said she was, trying to lift her husband's body from the water.
Traumatized and humiliated teen jumps off GW bridge to his death
This is such a sad story, tragic for Tyler Clementi and his family, even for the two students who videotaped him who will have to bear responsibility for his death for the rest of their lives.
to his death after being secretly videotaped during a sexual encounter in his dorm room by two other students, one his own roommate, who posted it live on the Internet.
Paul Mainardi, the attorney representing the Clementi family, released a statement confirming Clementi's suicide.
"Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician. The family is heartbroken beyond words. They respectfully request that they be given time to grieve their great loss and that their privacy at this painful time be respected by all," Mainardi said.
Two students, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy after allegedly placing a camera in Clementi's room and livestreaming the recording online on Sept. 19, according to a written statement by New Jersey's Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan.
Just before his death, Tyler posted on his Facebook page, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."
One of Tyler's friends, Courtney Ayukawa, posted to the group's wall, "I will always remember everything from our preschool's Halloween party to your amazing musical talents. When you picked up the violin and began to play, it was as if everything just paused until you put it down again. We will never forget you Tyler. May you rest in peace."
Astonishing how so few people know of this. Since no literary work has come to shine a light on that terrible period of time, I can only hope that the memories of what the Chinese people suffered are guarded within familes and passed on.
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
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Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.
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His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.
State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.
Brian Wood, a 33-year-old resident of Vancouver, B.C., was killed in an auto collision on September 3, when the driver of an oncoming SUV lost control of the vehicle and crossed the road into his lane. His wife, Erin Wood, said that Brian acted just in time to save her, and their unborn child expected to be born in November, by sacrificing himself.
Evidence from the crash, which also killed two passengers in the other vehicle's back seat, supported Ms. Wood's description of her late husband's final act: unable to avoid the errant SUV, Brian Wood slammed the brakes and swerved his side of the car toward the oncoming vehicle, ensuring his certain death but protecting his wife, pregnant with their first child.
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Erin Wood told the Today Show that the final sacrifice made by her husband of five years was in keeping with the way he had lived, “It's not a surprise at all. He was very excited for this baby, and always … incredibly loving towards me, and putting me first.”
His final act of love, she said “breaks my heart, and it also fills me with gratefulness.” Ms. Wood received only a black eye and a relatively minor blow to her head. The unborn child, a boy, was not harmed.
Wood said that although it was impossible to “cope well” with a situation such as hers, she was drawing consolation from recalling that she was alive because of her husband's decision to save her life and the life of their child.
I've always been mystified by the Incorruptibles and I am not alone as scientists are baffled and cannot explain the phenomenon of certain dead bodies that do not decompose.
Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes who died in 1879
Incorruptibles are typically found lifelike, moist, flexible, and contain a sweet scent that many say smells like roses or other flowers, for years after death.
Incorruptibles are almost never embalmed or treated in any way due to the religious order's beliefs that the person came from.
Incorruptibles remain free of decay, some for centuries, despite circumstances which normally cause decay such as being exposed to air, moisture, other decaying bodies, or other variables such as quicklime, which is typically applied to a corpse to accelerate decomposition.
Incorruptibles many times contain clear, flowing oils, perspiration, and flowing blood for years after death, where accidental or deliberately preserved bodies have never been recorded to have such characteristics.
Other partial incorruptibles have been found throughout the centuries where certain parts of the body decay normally, while other parts such as the heart or tongue remain perfectly free of decomposition.
Read the whole article to see what else they have in common.
August 26, 2010, was the centennial of the birth of young girl in Albania who grew up to take vows as a missionary nun, taking the name of Teresa, in the Irish order the Sisters of Loretto . She taught school for some 17 years in India before she received “the call within the call” to leave the convent and to help the poor while living among them. With permission from the Vatican to pursue her call, she began a school but soon turned to care for people dying on the streets of Calcutta. The Missionaries of Charity was formally recognized by the Vatican in 1950 with the mission to care for, "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."
In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the first Home for the Dying in space made available by the city of Calcutta. With the help of Indian officials she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday).Those brought to the home received medical attention and were afforded the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites.
"A beautiful death," she said, "is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted."
Recently, an Italian journalist, Renzo Allegri published a new book of his memories of Mother Teresa. Here is an excerpt that touches on what she thought and felt about dying. Love until it hurts.
One day I asked her spontaneously: “Are you afraid of dying?”. I had been in Rome for some days. I met her a couple of times and had gone to greet her because I was returning to Milan. She looked at me almost as wishing to understand the reason for my question. I felt I had done wrong in speaking of death and tried to correct my mistake. [---]
She remained again for some seconds in silence; then, going back to the question that I asked her, she continued:
“I would be as happy as you if I could say that I will die this evening. Dying I too would go home. I would go to paradise. I would go to meet Jesus. I have consecrated my life to Jesus. Becoming a sister, I became the spouse of Jesus. See, I have a ring on my finger like married women. And I am married to Jesus. All that I do here, on this earth, I do it out of love for him. Therefore, by dying I return home to my spouse. Moreover, up there, in paradise, I will also find all my loved ones. Thousands of persons have died in my arms. It is now more than forty years that I have dedicated my life to the sick and the dying. I and my sisters have picked up from the streets, above all in India, thousands and thousands of persons at the end of life. We have taken them to our houses and helped them to die peacefully. Many of those persons expired in my arms, while I smiled at them and patted their trembling faces. Well, when I die, I am going to meet all these persons. It is there that they await me. We loved one another well in those difficult moments. We continued to love one another in memory. Who knows what celebration they will make for me when they see me. How can I be afraid of death? I desire it; I await it because it allows me finally to return home.”
"While the son lay in a coffin playing at the oblivion of eternity"
Then, years later, Julian wrote in his Memoirs: "Thus it was that just as my father passed from this earth, I was lying in a coffin during my initiation into Delta Kappa Epsilon." It is, indeed, remarkable that two such men would participate, unknowingly but at the same time, in the ceremony of dying, the father actually doing it at a distance from his son, while the son lay in a coffin playing at the oblivion of eternity for an hour or so.
The Beverly Hills surgeon, who has treated a host of stars, was in his Jeep when it went off the side of the Pacific Coast Highway yesterday outside Los Angeles.He was texting his brother at the time, according to his ex-girlfriend.'He lived up in Malibu on a tiny street and he was texting while driving and he accidentally went over the cliff,' 29-year-old Charmaine Blake told People.com
---- Minutes before the crash, Ryan tweeted: 'After 25 years of driving by, I finally hiked to the top of the giant sand dune on the pch west of Malibu. Much harder than it looks! Whew!'His last Tweet says: 'Border collie Jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune.'
Right up there with Kathleen Collier who was driving lost when she called her daughter for directions. Listening to directions, she drove into the parking lot of a resort and right down a boat ramp into the Sacramento River. Still on the phone she began panicking when her SUV began filling with water. Her daughter could hear the water enter the car, but her mother never got out. Woman on cellphone drives into river, dies
When my good father in law was brutally bludgeoned in the head by a thief he underwent brain surgery in an effort to save his life. The surgery was not successful. He was wheeled out of the operating room and placed on life support systems until the family could gather for our farewell. When he was disconnected from the life support machines, I watched as my father in law breathed his last. I marveled as he peacefully ceased to breathe, and a slight smile appeared on his bruised face surrounded by gentle light not of this world. I contrasted this quiet moment to the violent hours that preceded his death that day. A blanket of peace descended upon the room and I felt privileged to witness dad’s final breath. I was mindful of the breath of God; how the Lord sustains life, and absent His breath, we cease to live on earth. Our father lived a good life, and despite the violence that led to his death, he died peacefully surrounded by the loving prayers and faith of his large Irish-German family.
I recall the special graces associated with the passing of an aunt. She was married but her husband preceded her into eternal life. She did not have children because she was always the caregiver of extended family. She was in the process of dying a natural death in the warmth of the family home. It was not necessary that she be hooked up to machines; no intravenous drips of morphine or any other painkiller was needed. We sat around her bed and conversed with her as she went in and out of consciousness. Suddenly she said, “The room is filled with them. There is hardly enough room for all of them. Don’t you see them? Angels are all over this room.” I believed her because she was credible and the existence of angels is part of Catholic doctrine. She continued, “Oh, John (her deceased husband) is here. He is extending his hand to me. There are other family members too. I see them.” Then, speaking first person to her deceased husband she said, “Oh John, I want to go, but I will miss all these people. I am not quite ready please.” This no nonsense woman of faith was utterly believable. It seemed the natural order of things for a good woman who served others selflessly all of her life. We told her that we would miss her but we would be together again; it would be alright if she went to meet the Lord and her husband. The next day, with her face illumined, she looked up as if acknowledging the presence of someone we could not see and then she closed her eyes and peacefully breathed her last.
The Economist calls it Grim Reapings, an attempt to rank end-of-life care in different countries.
Britain tops the table. For all the health-care system’s faults, British doctors tend to be honest about prognoses. The mortally ill get plentiful pain killers. A well-established hospice movement cares for people near death, although only 4% of deaths occur in them.
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The report combines hard statistics such as life expectancy and health-care spending as a share of GDP with weighted assessments of other indicators. One is the public awareness of the availability of hospices. Another is whether a country has a formal policy or legislation on treating the terminally ill (only seven of the 40 do).
Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.
They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he "doesn't want to see anybody".
Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.
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Mr Kato's relatives told police that he had "confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha," according to a report by Jiji Press.
But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.
A desperate patient texted photos of a deadly rash spreading across her body to her mother as she lay dying on a hospital bed while being ignored by NHS doctors.
Critically ill Jo Dowling, 25, sent more than 40 pictures and messages to her mother and best friend as her life ebbed away.
Doctors ignored the rash and refused to believe she had blood poisoning caused by the meningitis bug, taking her off antibiotics and giving her painkillers instead.
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Her devastated mother Sue Christie, 48, of Milton Keynes, a distribution worker, said: 'Our doctor knew it was meningitis but when we got to hospital all the care seemed to stop.
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Five nurses also told the two day hearing they did not spot any rash on Jo's body.
As her condition worsened Miss Dowling swapped 42 text messages with friends and her mother describing her illness and symptoms.
Just two hours after doctors ruled out meningitis she texted a friend to say 'rash is getting worse'.
She took around ten photos of the purple rash on her legs, hands and arms and sent one to her mum complaining her condition was not improving.
Her death was pronounced at 5.20am on November 24 three hours after hospital logs show she was last checked on.
What should medicine do when it can't save your life?
Atul Gawande on Letting Go. A must read especially for those who have a loved one with a terminal illness.
Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
The difference between hospice and standard medical care.
The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.
Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. --
This is not just a Zen, Christians hold the same. Life is not and can never be a possession. Attempting to grasp life and hold on it in fact diminishes your life. "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:34-5).
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The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
With his £20 million fighter plane hurtling towards the ground, Captain Brian Bews had little time to think. The 36-year-old pilot was forced to choose between battling to save the plane, or bailing to save his life. He chose the latter, launching himself out of the cockpit with the ejector seat and parachuting down to earth – miraculously landing unharmed, as his plane exploded in a mass of flames and black smoke.
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Nick Buckenham, a veteran British aerobatics pilot and a judge at the World Aerobatics Championships, said: "Display aerobatics is an incredibly dangerous sport, where you deliberately fly incredibly close to the ground to astound the crowds. "Obviously being this close to the ground poses huge risks, and the chances of escaping alive in such dangerous circumstances are actually incredibly slim. "At an altitude of just a few hundred feet a pilot has only a fraction of a second to make a decision to eject from his cockpit, especially at high speeds. "Mr Bews' jet was travelling at very high speed, which makes the process of bailing out from an aeroplane even more difficult. "He has been incredibly lucky to escape alive."
By providing a supportive and nurturing environment for those who are dying, we aid them in powerful ways to overcome their sense of isolation. Sister Diana Bader, O.P. has perceptively described this modern health care challenge:
"In the past, death was a community event. Those closest to the patient ministered in a variety of ways: watching and praying with the patient, listening and talking, laughing and weeping. In solidarity, a close community bore the painful experience together. Today, because of the medicalization of the healthcare setting, death is more often regarded as a failure of medical science. The dying find themselves isolated from human warmth and compassion in institutions, cut off from access to human presence by technology which dominates the institutional setting in which most details occur."
Fostering a humanly enriching environment for those facing death often means giving explicit attention to human presence and human contact, even in the midst of a plethora of technology that may surround a patient.
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If a patient is still able to take small amounts of food orally, it may be preferable to feed him or her by hand, rather than relying on a feeding tube. The rich human contact that occurs whenever one person devotes time, energy and love to hand-feed another should not become a casualty to our efforts to streamline medicine or to save money. This focused effort on our part to be present to those who are dying maintains human solidarity with them, it affirms their dignity as persons, it manifests benevolence towards them, and it maintains the bond of human communication with them. It also goes a long way towards helping to overcome their sense of loneliness and their fear of abandonment.
I sat with the syringe in hand, watching her labored breathing. My mother was dying, and dying in pain. And I could make it stop.
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A wave of revulsion washed over me as I realized I had been tempted because I had forgotten a simple truth: The dying are still the living, and their inherent worth is not diminished simply because their remaining moments on earth are few.
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It was only after her death that I could fully appreciate the casual lesson she had taught me. She had once been a hospice nurse and had cared for dozens of people as they began to die, staying with them to the end. I once asked her what the job entailed. “Mostly waiting,” she said. “You just stay with them and make them comfortable. Let them know they are not alone.”
Explosive book on child trafficking by "Suicide Judge"
When Judge Kirsten Heisig, 48, disappeared from Berlin without a trace, the search was on.
The last sign of life is to have a SMS sent to one of her two daughters. Heisig wanted to take the girls to holiday in the next few days.
When her abandoned car was found in a forest, special hunt dogs were sent out.
The judge works in the city’s gritty Neukölln district. There she instituted changes simplifying and accelerating punishment for youth crime.
Searches had been under way in the city since Kirsten Heisig, 48, vanished on Monday evening. Known for a zero-tolerance campaign to crack down on repeat juvenile offenders in the deprived Berlin neighbourhood of Neukoelln, she had been criticized by ethnic minorities.
I am very far away and don't know all the facts but count me suspicious of the suicide conclusion. It is more likely that she ran afoul of very powerful, criminal Arabic drug cartels.
Excerpts are now being printed from her book The End of Patience which will be published in Germany at the end of this month Heisig made final changes to the manuscript on the last day she was seen alive. The excerpts are explosive.
Arabic drug cartels are trafficking children and youths from Palestinian refugee camps into Germany, according to excerpts published on Monday of a book by a Berlin youth judge who committed suicide last month.
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Heisig described the process by which children and youths were flown in from the Lebanese capital, Beirut, by traffickers who took their passports and promised them a better life.
The youths reportedly told German officials they were living with relatives after their parents had died, and said their families had spent their last penny on sending the children to Germany in pursuit of a better life.
In Germany, these young people disappeared from youth homes and were taken in by their own communities, where they were taught how to master the drugs trade...The judge said it had struck her how often youths she sentenced for heroin trafficking in central Berlin had actually been assigned to care homes across Germany, where their disappearance was merely registered with the authorities.
David Kessler had to author three books on grief, the needs of the dying and death, meet Mother Teresa and work with acclaimed thanatologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross before he could develop the maturity and muster the courage to write "Visions, Trips and Crowded Rooms - Who and What You See Before You Die."
"When you're starting out in your professional life, you want to make sure that you're doing credible work," says the vice president of patient support care services, which includes overseeing end-of-life care, pastoral care and social work, at Citrus Valley Health Partners. "If I would have said to anyone early on, 'You know, I've been noticing there's some visions going on here with our dying patients,' they would have thought I was crazy.
What it's like being at a deathbed
The first shared experience reportedly was deathbed visions, most often of the dying person's mother or mother figure. Their eyes became fixed on something no one else in the room could see as they reached out their hands passionately, according to many witnesses of deathbed scenes.
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An oncologist was at the bedside of his brother, who had terminal cancer, with their mother. The patient began talking as if there was somebody right in front of him. And it soon became apparent that he was speaking to his father's parents, whom he'd been particularly close to. The conversation lasted for a couple of hours, with the patient smiling and calling both of his grandparents by name.
"As a doctor, it's very easy to dismiss this sort of thing until you see it firsthand," the oncologist told Kessler, adding, "Before the episode, there was a sense of struggle and tension in the air, but now there seemed to be only peace surrounding my brother. I truly believe that it was a result of my grandparents' visit as he died."
Kessler found that deathbed vision happenings shared a number of things. First, death had to be imminent, within at least a week and sometimes the same day. Only really dying people, in short, had visions. And these end-of-life visions were remarkably similar, with mothers or mother-like figures being the most likely apparitions.
Standing room only
Dying people spoke a lot about getting ready for a trip, which was the second commonly shared deathbed experience, Kessler found. And he emphasizes that the journey was a real concrete trip versus an abstract notion of heading into eternity. People asked "Where's my ticket?" or "What happened to my passport?" not "I'm about to go into the abyss of death."
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"You hear people say, 'we're born alone, we die alone,' but from the deathbed it doesn't seem like a lonely experience," observes David Kessler. "It feels like we're not going into the emptiness but arriving into a fullness."
After a moment, he confides, "One of the most starling things for me in hearing these stories is what if death isn't that lonely experience that we should all fear? What if we are comforted and loved and cared for - and there is standing room only? It changes everything. I mean, it reaffirms our faith.
“Under my promise to always tell you the truth, I have discontinued chemo and other treatments,’’ he wrote, adding, “I’m beyond the place where chemo can help me. I have come home to die. I am near the end of my journey.’’
Father Field, who had stood in the pulpit month after month, performing pastoral duties through intense pain, sat in a wheelchair on June 27. Speaking into a microphone, he asked if anyone had questions. There were none. Instead, the parishioners took their turn to stand. They began to clap, their applause echoing through the church for minute after minute, as if to prolong his time with them.
A masterful teacher who deftly discovered new insights in familiar Gospel passages, Father Field spent the past two years using his own life as a lesson in how to let life shine in the shadow of death. “I am in a place of great peace and gratitude,’’ he wrote. Father Field, who lived in the church rectory, died Monday. He was 59 and had celebrated his 20th anniversary as an ordained priest last month.
While he said his illness provided “a teachable moment’’ for parishioners, it also helped him live a lesson he had taught, and learned, over and over.
“I believe we go into the hands of the God who loves us, and what’s next, we just can’t imagine how wonderful it must be,’’ he said in the interview. “This is a time when you have to figure out — do you believe this or not. You’ve been saying this your whole life. Is this really the truth or not? And, so far, it feels like the truth.’’
In Romania, a woman didn't report the death of her husband for 14 days because she suspected he was playing a trick on her so he could start a new life with his mistress.
"Death is very hard for me to take" said the 91-year-old widow who had the embalmed corpses of her husband and her twin sister dug up so that she could store them at her "tumbledown house on a desolate country road".
No matter they were already dead. Jean Stevens simply had their embalmed corpses dug up and stored them at her house — in the case of her late husband, for more than a decade — tending to the remains as best she could until police were finally tipped off last month.
Much to her dismay.
AP photo
As state police finish their investigation into a singularly macabre case — no charges have been filed — Stevens wishes she could be reunited with James Stevens, her husband of nearly 60 years who died in 1999, and June Stevens, the twin who died last October. But their bodies are with the Bradford County coroner now, off-limits to the woman who loved them best.
From time to time, stories of exhumed bodies are reported, but rarely do those involved offer an explanation. Jean Stevens, seeming more grandmother than ghoul, holds little back as she describes what happened outside this small town in northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains.
She knows what people must think of her. But she had her reasons, and they are complicated, a bit sad, and in their own peculiar way, sweet.
The poor woman, elderly and all alone in her grief
"Death is very hard for me to take" said the 91-year-old widow who had the embalmed corpses of her husband and her twin sister dug up so that she could store them at her "tumbledown house on a desolate country road".
As state police finish their investigation into a singularly macabre case — no charges have been filed — Stevens wishes she could be reunited with James Stevens, her husband of nearly 60 years who died in 1999, and June Stevens, the twin who died last October. But their bodies are with the Bradford County coroner now, off-limits to the woman who loved them best.
From time to time, stories of exhumed bodies are reported, but rarely do those involved offer an explanation. Jean Stevens, seeming more grandmother than ghoul, holds little back as she describes what happened outside this small town in northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains.
She knows what people must think of her. But she had her reasons, and they are complicated, a bit sad, and in their own peculiar way, sweet.
More than 100 nurses admitted to researchers that they had taken part in 'terminations without request or consent'.
Although euthanasia is legal in Belgium, it is governed by strict rules which state it should be carried out only by a doctor and with the patient's permission.
The disturbing revelation - which shows that nurses regularly go well beyond their legal role - raises fears that were assisted suicides allowed in Britain, they could never be properly regulated.
Since its legalisation eight years ago, euthanasia now accounts for 2 per cent of deaths in Belgium - or around 2,000 a year.
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Last night, Dr Peter Saunders, director of the Care Not Killing campaign in Britain, said: 'We should take a warning from this that wherever you draw the line, people will go up to it and beyond it.'
'Once you have legalised voluntary euthanasia, involuntary euthanasia will inevitably follow,' he added.
Only 23, Kelly McDaniel was by all accounts a model employee at the Rothman Furniture store in O'Fallon, MIssouri.
So when he went to retrieve furniture for a customer and didn't return, his manager went looking and found him crushed by a sofa that fell on top of him.
Afraid that if officials discovered the filthy condition of her house that it would be condemned, Gail Andrews, 61, of Ft. Myers, Florida, didn't call emergency responders when her mother fell and Gail couldn't lift her. The body was discovered 14 months later after days of searching, lying hidden under piles of garbage and furniture. The house is now condemned.
For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called the Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
What some consider grim, Ritchie considers a gift. How wonderful, the former life insurance salesman says, to save so many. How wonderful to sell them life.
"You can't just sit there and watch them," says Ritchie, now 84, perched on his green leather chair, from which he keeps a watchful eye on the cliff outside. "You gotta try and save them. It's pretty simple."
Pretty simple too is his way - a calm demeanor, a warm smile and and an invitation to join him for tea.
A smile cannot, of course, save everyone; the motivations behind suicide are too varied. But simple kindness can be surprisingly effective. Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, the man wrote, I will not jump.
By offering compassion, Ritchie helps those who are suicidal think beyond the terrible current moment, says psychiatrist Gordon Parker, executive director of the Black Dog Institute, a mood disorder research center that has supported the council's efforts to improve safety at the Gap.
"They often don't want to die, it's more that they want the pain to go away," Parker says. "So anyone that offers kindness or hope has the capacity to help a number of people."
An award-winning artist died after a fall blamed on the effects of a varnish he sprayed on his paintings.
Govinder Nazran, 44, had used the product – Brasslac – in a confined upstairs room with the wrong protective equipment, an inquest heard.
His widow blamed the product for her husband suffering epileptic-type fits and a coroner ruled his misuse of the product contributed to the tragic fall that killed him.
Father-of-one Mr Nazran, of Saltaire, West Yorkshire, died from head injuries suffered when he collapsed at his home on Christmas Eve 2008.
He was seen staggering and twitching before the fall, in which he suffered fatal brain injuries.
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Coroner Roger Whittaker accepted the head injuries as the cause of death, but said:
‘The underlying cause was two-fold - the chronic damage from the volatile solvent and the acute effect of the alcohol intake contributed to that final fit and fall.’
Recording a verdict of accidental death, Mr Whittaker stressed that Mr Nazran had used the Brasslac incorrectly.
He warned: ‘People using this product and similar products must be extremely careful. They must read the instructions and take precautions.’
“Just sit with her quietly and think about it. She’ll be going to another place, and you’ll be missing her. Not everything has to be verbal. Your thoughts and feelings will get through to her.”
Another approach, he says, is to write a letter. “Visualize the person sitting in a chair and read the letter aloud, even though you won’t send it. You can say things like, ‘Dear Mom, I love you and I care for you, and I want you to know how much I appreciate your life. I want to make our parting good for me and good for you.’”
“In my experience, this really works,” Reb Zalman added. “Your thoughts seep into her awareness, and you’ll get some response — perhaps not directly, but you’ll feel it.”
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He told her that people who’ve had near-death experiences report being “enfolded in unconditional love.” For this woman, Reb Zalman said, “that was a message of joy and hope.”
"Sometimes I feel like the Grim Reaper," Steve sighs back out in the hallway. "It's giving me a complex."
While he's hardly death incarnate, he may be the closest living thing to it. If he's temporarily visiting a church, a parishioner is permanently leaving it.
Mysterious near death experiences may be caused by a surge of electrical activity in the brain moments before it dies, it has been claimed.
Doctors believe that a burst of brain activity occurs just before death and this could account for vivid "spiritual" experiences reported by those who come back from the brink.
The researchers suggest this surge could be why some patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a feeling that they are floating above their body.
“We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen,” said Dr Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical centre in Washington.
“As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.”
In the bloodiest days of Iwo Jima, he spoke the last words over fallen Marines and Navy corpsmen as they were buried in the island’s black sand.
Yesterday, Marines, sailors and soldiers returned the favor to the late Rev. E. Gage Hotaling of Agawam, sending the old Navy chaplain on to join his comrades with military honors.
Hotaling, 94, died Sunday in a Springfield hospital, 65 years after the iconic battle for the Pacific island. In a 2007 documentary, he talked about the grim task he faced as Marines fell in bitter combat against the dug-in Japanese enemy. Of the 6,821 Americans killed, Hotaling believed he buried about 1,800.
“We would have four Marines with a flag over each grave. And while they were kneeling with the flag, I would stand up and I would give the committal words for each one,” he told the filmmakers.
He said he took up smoking to overcome the stench of decay.
“I did it not as a Protestant, Catholic or a Jew, but as a Marine,” the Baptist minister said. “Every man was buried as a Marine. And so I gave the same committal to each one.”
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Thanks to Joe Galloway and Massachusetts State Trooper Mike Cutone on the headsup. Cutone, an Army Special Forces veteran of Iraq, was on a prisoner watch at Mercy Hospital when he learned from an old Marine that Hotaling was dying down the hall, made some calls and saw to it he was attended at his bedside by Marines in dress blues in his last days as he had tended to them in theirs in dirty, bloodstained dungarees.
The Boston Herald has a fine video that brought tears to my eyes.
What men they were! The last are dying now. That war is a terrible thing is much on my mind these days having watched the HBO series, The Pacific and earlier this year for the first time the earlier HBO series Band of Brothers But what examples of manliness - courage, endurance, loyalty, resiliency and sacrifice. How alive they were! One reason why the bonds made between men at war have proved so enduring.
With Memorial Day weekend soon upon us, the quote that comes to mind is
Only 2 defining forces have ever offered to die for you.....Jesus Christ, and the American Soldier. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom
In the bloodiest days of Iwo Jima, he spoke the last words over fallen Marines and Navy corpsmen as they were buried in the island’s black sand.
Yesterday, Marines, sailors and soldiers returned the favor to the late Rev. E. Gage Hotaling of Agawam, sending the old Navy chaplain on to join his comrades with military honors.
Hotaling, 94, died Sunday in a Springfield hospital, 65 years after the iconic battle for the Pacific island. In a 2007 documentary, he talked about the grim task he faced as Marines fell in bitter combat against the dug-in Japanese enemy. Of the 6,821 Americans killed, Hotaling believed he buried about 1,800.
“We would have four Marines with a flag over each grave. And while they were kneeling with the flag, I would stand up and I would give the committal words for each one,” he told the filmmakers.
He said he took up smoking to overcome the stench of decay.
“I did it not as a Protestant, Catholic or a Jew, but as a Marine,” the Baptist minister said. “Every man was buried as a Marine. And so I gave the same committal to each one.”
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Thanks to Joe Galloway and Massachusetts State Trooper Mike Cutone on the headsup. Cutone, an Army Special Forces veteran of Iraq, was on a prisoner watch at Mercy Hospital when he learned from an old Marine that Hotaling was dying down the hall, made some calls and saw to it he was attended at his bedside by Marines in dress blues in his last days as he had tended to them in theirs in dirty, bloodstained dungarees.
The Boston Herald has a fine video that brought tears to my eyes.
What men they were! The last are dying now. That war is a terrible thing is much on my mind these days having watched the HBO series, The Pacific and earlier this year for the first time the earlier HBO series Band of Brothers But what examples of manliness - courage, endurance, loyalty, resiliency and sacrifice. How alive they were! One reason why the bonds made between men at war have proved so enduring.
With Memorial Day weekend soon upon us, the quote that comes to mind is
Only 2 defining forces have ever offered to die for you.....Jesus Christ, and the American Soldier. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom
Talk about "a duty to die" made me think back to my early childhood in the South, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. One day, I was told that an older lady-- a relative of ours-- was going to come and stay with us for a while, and I was told how to be polite and considerate towards her.
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Poor as we were, I never heard anybody say, or even intimate, that Aunt Nance Ann had "a duty to die."
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Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann, nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about "a duty to die."
Elisabeth Mandala, one of the school’s brightest students traveled to Mexico to learn how to smuggle illegal aliens into America. She was murdered last weekend. ABC Local reported
A local high school student has been found murdered in Mexico, after her mother told police she went down there to learn how to transport illegal immigrants across the border.
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According to a Mexican newspaper, Elisabeth Mandala, 18, was found dead this past Saturday in the small Mexican town of Mina. Her body, along with those of two Mexican men, was found in a Dodge truck which appeared to have wrecked. But, according to the newspaper, authorities suspected the wreck was merely a cover-up for murder, believing the victims had been beaten to death hours before.
"It's horrible. It really is," said close family friend Sheila Mayo. "It's such a loss, such a loss. She just didn't have a chance to live her life."
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Mandala, we have learned, was reported missing to Houston police on May 1. Her mother told authorities she had rented a car a few days earlier to go to Mexico to meet up with someone.
According to missing persons, her mother told police that she wanted to be a coyote -- a human smuggler. Her mother also told police Elisabeth was an exotic dancer.
The Holy Father remembered the life and legacy of the recently deceased Cardinal Paul Augustin Mayer on Monday morning. During his remarks, the Pontiff noted that in dying we achieve the "most profound desire of mankind," being reunited with God.
The funeral Mass for the 98-year-old cardinal, who died last Friday, was concelebrated by members of the College of Cardinals led by their dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. The Holy Father gave the homily.
"As is the destiny of the human existence," observed Pope Benedict, "it blossoms from the earth ... and is called to Heaven, to the homeland from whence it mysteriously comes."
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The Pope recalled the words of Christ from the cross, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," and noted that every funeral celebration takes place "under the sign of hope."
Because in his last breath on the cross, Jesus sacrificed himself, taking on our sins and reestablishing the victory of life over death, he explained, "every man that dies in the Lord participates by faith in this act of infinite love, in some way returns his spirit together with Christ, in the sure hope that the hand of the Father will resurrect him from the dead and introduce him in the Kingdom of life.
"The great and unshakeable hope, resting on the solid rock of God's love, assures us that the life of those who die in Christ 'is not taken away but transformed' and that 'the abode of this earthly exile is destroyed, an eternal dwelling is being prepared in heaven'."
Amidst a climate in which a fear of death makes many despair and seek illusory consolations, "Christians stand out for the fact that they place their security in God, in a Love so great as to be able to renew the whole world," commented the Pope.
The vision is to achieve the "most profound desire of mankind," the Holy Father underscored, which is living in the "new Jerusalem," in peace, without the threat of death and in full communion with God and each other.
"Hundreds of thousands of patients are killed in the world each year in this manner, and no police or district attorney will act to investigate or prosecute."
These are the alarming words of Ron Panzer, founder and executive director of Hospice Patients Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving the original mission of hospice care and exposing the pervasive problem of "quiet euthanasia" in the hospice industry. --
"Dehydrating a patient to death is known as The Third Way, says Panzer. "It's a way of side-stepping the laws against medical killing but assuring just as sure a result: death. It's extremely common."
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Regarding sedation, Panzer warns that "a natural death includes total sedation only if the patient is 'terminally agitated' uncontrollably, dangerously psychotic or delusional, or in severe pain where strong pain medications alone do not adequately manage that pain. To sedate without real agitation is a choice to kill. To dehydrate before the patient cannot take fluids is a choice to kill."
Panzer says that death through The Third Way is "the most censored story in the United States and perhaps the entire world."
NYU Researchers Study Use of Psilocybin or 'Magic Mushrooms' to Help the Terminally Ill.
Researchers at New York University say that in a controlled setting, hallucinogens, which alter perception and cognition, can help patients reduce the anxiety, personal isolation and fear of death.
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The three-year study, "Effects of Psilocybin on Anxiety and Psychosocial Distress in Advanced Cancer Patients," is being privately funded by the Zurich-based Heffter Research Institute , which promotes the use of psychedelics for the alleviation of suffering. Fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it adheres to rigorous safety guidelines and protocols.
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"It's daunting working with people in the midst of death," said principal investigator Dr. Stephen Ross, assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction. "To help people to have a good death, and not more chemotherapy, to prepare for the final part of life and to die with dignity and do it in a way that they are not frightened, that is one of the most important endeavors as a physician."
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Patients are screened carefully -- those with psychotic spectrum disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression cannot participate.
"Mysticism is really the cornerstone of all major religions going back millennia," said co-principal investigator Anthony Bossis , professor of psychiatry and anesthesiology at the NYU School of Medicine.
"It is characterized by a sense of unity, transcendence, connecting to the broader universe and a sense of life and the promotion of personal spirituality," he said. "It recalibrates how we see our life and gives a sense of sacredness and reshapes how we view death."
A mystical experience can help root patients like Nicky more in the present, according to Bossis.
More than five years ago I reported that Harvard researchers, with the approval of the FDA were planning on treating Anxiety at the End of Life with MDMA, the active ingredient in the club drug known as ecstasy.
''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.
A boy of three claims he saw his great grandmother in heaven while he was clinically dead after falling into a pond.
Paul Eicke came back to life more than three hours after his heart stopped beating.
It is believed he was in the pond at his grandparents' house for several minutes before his grandfather saw him and pulled him out.
His father gave him heart massage and mouth-to-mouth during the ten minutes it took a helicopter to arrive.
Paramedics then took over and Paul was taken the ten-minute journey to hospital. Doctors tried to resuscitate him for hours. They had just given up when, three hours and 18 minutes after he was brought in, Paul's heart started beating independently.
Professor Lothar Schweigerer, director of the Helios Clinic where Paul was taken, said: 'I have never experienced anything like it. 'When children have been underwater for a few minutes they mostly don't make it. This is a most extraordinary case.'
The boy said that while unconscious he saw his great grandmother Emmi, who had turned him back from a gate and urged him to go back to his parents.
Paul said: 'There was a lot of light and I was floating. I came to a gate and I saw Grandma Emmi on the other side.
'She said to me, "What are you doing here Paul? You must go back to mummy and daddy. I will wait for you here."
'I knew I was in heaven. But grandma said I had to come home. She said that I should go back very quickly.
'Heaven looked nice. But I am glad I am back with mummy and daddy now.'
Paul is now back at home in Lychen, north of Berlin in Germany, and there appears to be no sign of brain damage.
For instance, the secular world seems to truly embrace the idea that there is a “dignified” way to die and that being at the mercy and care of others for every need is not “noble.” After all, who among us wishes to rely on another for our personal hygiene or to help us with our normal bodily functions? There is no apparent or imagined dignity in becoming completely, totally, and utterly reliant on another human being. It is almost degrading — and it is certainly embarrassing, at least at the outset.
So when a person allows him or herself to become that “weak link” in the chain of life, he or she is actually becoming a conduit between heaven and earth. This person is saying, “This is incredibly difficult for me to rely on you, but I will trust that you have my best interests at heart and that you will not think ill of me.” In that way, the person in need of care is allowing the potential caregiver(s) to become mercy and love to another human being.
That is an incredible gift!
We may amass great wealth and thousand of friends but, in the end, we are going to be judged on how we cared for one another.
Everything appears to point to poor judgment in poor weather in the plane crash that killed Poland’s largely symbolic president and much of the NATO nation’s military leadership enroute to a commemoration of the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish POWs by the NKVD in 1940. Apparently this will not effect the running of government though the military has taken a severe blow, as has the psyche of the Polish nation, especially with the association to a massive historic war crime.
Polish television carried black-and-white montages of those killed in the crash and devoted nonstop coverage to the crash, including lingering looks at Kaczynski and his wife, Maria Kaczynska.
Besides Kaczynski, aboard the plane were the national bank president, the deputy foreign minister, the army chaplain, the head of the National Security Office, the deputy parliament speaker, the Olympic Committee head, the civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers.
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That the crash occurred near Katyn served as a stark reminder to Poland of the horrors of that place.
A plane carrying the Polish president and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders to the site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in World War II crashed in western Russia yesterday, killing everyone on board.
President Lech Kaczynski’s plane tried to land in a thick fog, missing the runway and snagging treetops about half a mile from the airport in Smolensk, scattering chunks of flaming fuselage across a bare forest.
The crash came as a stunning blow to Poland, wiping out a large portion of the country’s leadership in one fiery explosion. And in a bizarre twist, it happened at the moment that Russia and Poland were beginning to come to terms with the killing of more than 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps in the same place 70 years ago.
“It is a damned place,’’ former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine.’’
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Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed, including 88 in the Polish state delegation. Poland’s Foreign Ministry said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw’s main airport.
Poles united in grief in a way that recalled the death of the Polish pope, John Paul II, five years ago. Thousands massed outside the Presidential Palace, laying flowers and lighting candles.
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Former President Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland’s transition from Communism, called the crash “the second disaster after Katyn.’’
“They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished,’’ he said.
The people were of all ages and political persuasions, families and groups of boys and girls in scouting uniforms. If there were no answers to be found Saturday night as to why the country had been robbed of many of its brightest minds and most dedicated public servants, Poles could at least find reassurance in the presence of so many others in the same searching state of shock.
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“I felt I had to be here,” said Tomasz Kielar, 40, a civil servant. He said he knew Wladyslaw Stasiak, head of the president’s chancellery, who was one of those killed in the crash of a plane taking Polish officials to Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre.
“Katyn was a page in history in the 20th century,” he said. “Now it’s going to be a page in history in the 21st century.”
Almost everyone interviewed knew someone who died that morning in the thick fog of western Russia, not only the famous politicians and commanding generals, but also the Russian-Polish interpreter, the president’s doctor, the eight members of the presidential security detail.
The issue in Soviet-Polish relations, however, is not a settling of scores. It is the justified Polish desire for an unambiguous Russian apology for Katyn (which the Russians refuse to give) and, equally important, the refusal of the Russians to release most of the results of their own 14-year investigation into the Katyn massacre. Of 183 volumes of collected material, 116 are classified as state secrets — even though, according to the Russian law on state secrets, information about the violation of rights cannot be classified.
In true Bolshevik style, there was a cover story: the Soviets claimed the Nazis did it. But although the Nazis were guilty of many other crimes, Katyn was not one of them. “In April 1943, when the Polish government-in-exile insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on an investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin accused the Polish government in exile of collaborating with Nazi Germany, broke diplomatic relations with it, and started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the alternative Polish pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by Wanda Wasilewska.” That government in exile continued until the end of Communist rule in Poland in 1990. In one of the crash’s cruel ironies of the accident, the last Polish President in Exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, was onboard the doomed aircraft.
Two days ago, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first “became the first Russian leader to ever commemorate the Katyn massacres with a Polish leader [Prime Minister Donald Tusk]“. But Putin stopped short of opening the archives on the subject, which are still sealed.
'The struggle of people against power," Milan Kundera famously observed, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Is there any place that better captures that truth than the Katyn Forest, or any metaphor more apt for Katyn's place in our historical memory than fog?
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one can be forgiven for wondering whether the physical and metaphysical worlds didn't conspire in this latest cycle of Polish tragedy. Fog makes the known world unseen; cutting through it is what Poland's long quest for freedom—itself so often dashed to pieces—has always been about.
'When the family pulled-up in a minibus-style taxi, the older lady told me assistance was needed for her elderly father, who was sat in the front seat of the cab.
'She told me that he was elderly and frail, and also very tired, so I would have to lift him out of the taxi and into the wheelchair.
'I immediately felt unsure about the situation, but I did my best to help by carefully lifting the man from his seat. To my horror his face fell sideways against mine, it was ice cold.
'I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he "always sleeps like that".
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Police suspect that the women tried to get him on the flight to Berlin Schoenfeld in a bid to avoid the costs of around £3,000 connected with repatriating his body.
But there are more strange deaths this week in England
His aunt, Georgina Naylor, said the soldier had joined the army at the age of 16 and served with the Royal Scots based at Dreghorn barracks in Edinburgh before transferring to Southampton.
She added: 'For him to have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq and miss bullets, mines and bombs, then have his head smashed in by a pavement in a fall is beyond us.
'He had been out celebrating his birthday with his friends and he was very happy.'
He was travelling in a Chariot Cabs pedicab when the incident happened. It is thought he jumped from a moving cab.
The 24-year-old woman, who has not yet been named, died a terrifying death today when a fluttering part of her burkha became caught in the wheels of a go-kart she was driving near the town of Port Stephens, north of Sydney.
The Muslim clothing the woman was wearing flew back as she sped around the track and part of it became entangled in the go-kart's wheels.
She was strangled in a second and crashed the vehicle.
A father-of-two died of a heart attack after drinking from a bottle of rum, unaware that it contained pure liquid cocaine.
The alcohol was used to smuggle the drug into Britain from St Lucia but, in a bizarre chain of events, one bottle was handed to cab driver Lascell Malcolm, 63, as a gift.
The bottle was intended to be handed over to drug baron Martin Newman, 49. He had asked unsuspecting flyer Martin Lawrence to carry two bottles of rum in his luggage, claiming his own bags were over weight.
But after landing, Newman was delayed in customs. Mr Lawrence had to catch a connecting flight to Switzerland and could not wait, so gave one of the bottles to his friend Antoinette Corlis.
She was picked up by her friend Mr Malcolm. He refused payment so she handed him the bottle of rum instead.
The father-of-two, from Haringey, London, drank a shot of rum that night and died the following day in front of his terrified son.
“In the first fraught days after my diagnosis, something miraculous happened. I got X-ray vision,’’ Ms. Tifft wrote on Sept. 5, 2007, less than a month after learning she had cancer. “I know that sounds weird, but that is precisely how it felt.’’
“I would walk down the street or look out the window of our apartment onto Cambridge Common and the love and kindness I saw in everyday life practically made me weep. It might be something as simple as someone helping an elderly person into a wheelchair or a father hoisting his daughter on his shoulders or two friends hugging each other. It was as if I were a Martian seeing humans for the first time and being enormously moved by how compassionate and caring we are toward each other, for no obvious reward. It’s truly spectacular, and somehow, in my former busy-ness, I never really noticed.’’
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And it was friends that Ms. Tifft thanked in her last blog entry, on March 24, when illness made typing painful.
“My oncologist on Monday advised me to think about what I want my legacy to be,’’ she wrote. “My conclusion? I want my legacy to be all of you — my friends, loved ones, former students — a human chain of those who have guided and influenced me, and whom I touched and influenced. Final advice? Always do the right thing. It will gratify your friends and enrage your enemies.’’
A patient desperate for a drink of water had to telephone the switchboard of the hospital he was being treated in to beg to see a doctor.
Derek Sauter, 60, used his mobile phone to request medical attention after his pleas for help were ignored. But when the doctor arrived he was turned away by ward nurse Caroline Lowe, who said Mr Sauter was 'over-reacting' and threatened to confiscate his phone.
Eight hours later the grandfather-of-three, who was suffering with a chest infection, was dead.
Rather than offering sympathy to Susan, Mr Sauter's wife of 41 years, Miss Lowe later told her that he could have been prosecuted for harassing the doctor on call.
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She has since been sacked by the hospital, but has not been suspended by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, who are investigating.
Ted and Mary Williams fell in love as teenagers 75 years ago and have been inseperable since tying the knot in 1941
But when they both fell ill earlier this month Mary, 87, was admitted to Southmead Hospital in Bristol with pneumonia and 90-year-old Ted to the city's Frenchay Hospital with heart problems.
From her sickbed, Mary wrote a love letter to her husband asking him to come and see her. So caring hospital staff devised a plan to ensure the pair spent their final hours together - and transferred Ted across the city onto Mary's ward at Southmead.
She passed away just three hours after Ted arrived on March 10th, holding hands in adjacent beds.
After her death he quickly 'faded away' and died three weeks later of heart failure.
A single engine plane from Orlando was flying up the coast when it began experiencing engine trouble. After oil began to leak on the windshield blocking the view of the pilot and a propeller fell off, the pilot decided to make an emergency landing on the beach near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa.
Then it hit and killed a jogger running on the beach.
I'll never forget my mother sitting at home on our couch (as she did until two days before she died -- through a Catholic home hospice) with the computerized morphine drip that gave her steady, always insufficient doses of the stuff, as the tumor quietly thrived -- a tumor she'd earned over decades through the Marlboro "Lungs for Clothing" trade-in program. (Which is really neat, by the way: You send them little pieces of your lungs, and they ship you t-shirts and jackets with their logo. Mom had quite a collection by the end.) Having spent the better part of 20 years at bingo and high-stakes poker games in church basements all through the Diocese of Brooklyn, and slightly addled by the opiates, my mother became convinced that the numbers on the morphine drip were part of a lottery -- and if her number came up, she would "win" and get back her health. In her smoke-stained fingers she clutched the sterile medical plastic, squinting at the numbers on the readout. "Come on seven," is the last phrase of hers that I can remember
Just an amazing, horrific, inspiring story by Matt Labash called Love Among the Ruins about the amazing Father Rick Frechette in Haiti.
Every Thursday—since long before the earthquake—Frechette and a band of Haitian volunteers trek to the city morgue and claim the nameless dead, who lie naked in bloated heaps on a blood-streaked concrete floor. “You’ve heard of Tuesdays with Morrie,” Frechette smiles, “this is Thursdays with the Krokmo” (a Creole pejorative term for undertaker. It translates as the “death hook,” meaning the show is over). The place is jammed and the dead often piled seven or eight high. The workers there are so inured to the stench and spectacle, that Frechette has seen a morgue attendant slaloming on roller blades around the bodies and workers eating their lunch while sitting on stacks of cadavers as though on breaktime in the office kitchenette.
In Haiti, even before the quake, dead bodies were nothing more than background music—as commonplace as they are unnoticed. If they didn’t end up in the stark death-cave that is the general hospital morgue, they were burned in the streets on the spot where they died (a pragmatic hygiene concern). The decency and sentimentality that a better-developed society affords are luxuries here. Father Rick and his men gather the bodies themselves, packing them into makeshift coffins fashioned from supermarket cardboard boxes. They then truck them outside the city, up a sun-bleached highway that runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, to the rolling wastelands of Titanyen, which translates from Creole as the “fields of less than nothing.” A New Orleans-style Haitian jazz-funeral band—all horns and drums—plays graveside. Father Rick, an irreverent sort, calls them “The Grateful Dead.” Then he and his men plant the cardboard coffins in large holes dug by their own gravediggers, endowing their cargo in death with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded them in life.
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He’s been doing the morgue runs for 15 years, but has never gotten used to the smell. It makes him so sick, he brings along rum and cigarettes. “People ask me if I smoke,” he says. “Only on Thursdays.” The Haitians avail themselves of the goods, but for Frechette, they’re not optional. Without the spirit’s fumes and cigarette smoke chasing the smell of the dead out of his nostrils, he vomits, which his Haitian colleagues find amusing.
When he returned to Haiti right after the earthquake, there was an overflow crowd at the morgue, literally thousands of dead laid out in the street in front of it. “They were picking them up with backhoes and bucket-loaders, dumping them into trucks,” says Frechette, adding that the machines crunched the bodies against the walls in order to be able to scoop them. “They were hanging out the sides like crabs in a bucket. Really, really terrible. It was so shocking, so disgusting, I yelled, ‘Give me a cigarette!’”
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When I ask him how he could head back into the jaws of Haiti just a day after burying his mom, he tells me of her death. She knew it was happening, and she had time to prepare, had the best care, had lived a full life, and died with her family surrounding her. When he asked his mother why she wasn’t afraid, knowing she’d die, she told him that she “believes in God, and if she looks at the whole trajectory of her life, life has been very good, why start mistrusting it?” “I think the fuller your life is, the less death is a threat to you,” says Father Rick. “Empty people are scared to death to die.”
And un-bee-lievably Jozef was packed into a coffin and driven to his local undertakers.
is wife Ludmila said: "I could not believe it when they said he was dead and the doctor put a white sheet over him and three hours later local undertakers pulled up and put him in a coffin and closed the lid."
Lucklily the mistake was noticed when a panicked Jozef woke up and started shouting.
Undertaker Darius Charon said: "He was shouting and banging on the coffin - he made enough noise to raise the dead so we couldn't miss him."
He said: "He had a lucky escape - there is not a lot of air in those coffins. And he did need medical attention."
Polish Ambulance Service spokesman Jerzy Wisniewski said the emergency doctor involved had apologised.
He added that the medic had not taken the cold weather into account, saying: "The patient was not apparently breathing and the body had cooled - the usual characteristics of death."
Mr Guzy said: "The undertaker saved my life. The first thing I did when I got out of hospital was take him a pot of honey."
In Born Toward Dying Richard John Neuhaus writes about his first experience of dying. Worth reading and rereading
A measure of reticence and silence is in order. There is a time simply to be present to death—whether one's own or that of others—without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it. The Preacher had it right: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance." The time of mourning should be given its due. One may be permitted to wonder about the wisdom of contemporary funeral rites that hurry to the dancing, displacing sorrow with the determined affirmation of resurrection hope, supplying a ready answer to a question that has not been given time to understand itself. One may even long for the Dies Irae, the sequence at the old Requiem Mass. Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla: "Day of wrath and terror looming / Heaven and earth to ash consuming / Seer's and Psalmist's true foredooming."
The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it. Traditions of wisdom encourage us to stay with death a while. Among observant Jews, for instance, those closest to the deceased observe shiva for seven days following the death. During shiva one does not work, bathe, put on shoes, engage in intercourse, read Torah, or have his hair cut. The mourners are to behave as though they themselves had died. The first response to death is to give inconsolable grief its due. Such grief is assimilated during the seven days of shiva, and then tempered by a month of more moderate mourning. After a year all mourning is set aside, except for the praying of kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on the anniversary of the death.
In The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries calls us to "the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners' bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship—all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity." From the pity we may hope that wisdom has been distilled, a wisdom from which we can benefit when we take our place on the mourners' bench.
A woman who was completely prepared to die, finds the unexpected in Guide to a good life.
Every summer but for three since 1953, Lella has returned to the three-storey towering white clapboard house by a brook in Judique, a rural community hugging the western coast of the island. She was born in the house with windows of wavy glass, walls of Douglas fir and a wood stove burning in June out of necessity. For three months of the year, they would open the kitchen door and serve their friends tea in the afternoon and something stronger in the evening and host ice cream picnics.
Michael, along with daughter Melissa, made the 13-hour drive for his parents. Lella's husband, Bob Dubuque, a retired Walpole police officer, had a serious stroke 10 years ago.
They arrived in July. Lella's brother had opened the house. A cousin had scattered vases of wildflowers, Lella's favourite, about the rooms. Her twin brothers flew in from Windsor, Ont. Her son, Mark, came from Kentucky.
Over the course of a week, more than 100 people came to see her in what has been described as a living wake. They exchanged old stories and brought her rosary beads, prayer cards, holy oil, even blessed salt. Lella assured anyone who asked about her illness that she was "looking forward to the journey" and to being with her relatives in Heaven.
Miracle beauty products may be a staple on women's dressing tables today, but they're not a recent invention.
The mistress of the 16th-century French king, Henry II, drank gold in an effort to preserve her youth, according to a study published in the British medical journal.
Unfortunately the remedy eventually killed her.
When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers last year, they found high levels of gold in her hair.
Since she was not a queen and did not wear a crown, scientists said it was hard to see how jewellery could have contaminated her hair and body.
Experts now say she probably consumed drinkable gold, believed at the time to preserve youth and treat a host of other ailments.
The French court believed gold harnessed the power of the Sun, which would be transferred to the drinker. Alchemists often acted as apothecaries and prescribed solutions made up of gold chloride and diethyl ether. These were popular at the French Court.
Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, a world-wide organization that provides a refuge and life-long home for intellectually disabled people. In their latest exchange of letters Brown asked Vanier, "Are you fearful of death?" Vanier replied, "No, I cannot say I am".
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Traditionally, as Jean Vanier's writings show is still true for him, we have dealt with the mystery of death, through religion or spirituality. But, now, many of us are not religious.
Mystery always involves uncertainty, which makes us feel we don't have control and, in the case of death, that causes intense fear and free floating anxiety. One way to deal with that fear is to try to take control by converting the mystery of death to the problem of death and seeking a technological solution. Euthanasia can be seen as such a response: death is viewed as a problem, not a mystery, and the proposed solution to that problem is a lethal injection.
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We must accept old or dying people's gifts, especially those gifts that are of the essence of themselves, recognizing that they and the person who gives them are unique and precious, as are their lives or last days on earth. In confirming the worth of these gifts we confirm the worth of the giver, and the old or dying person needs that confirmation. But often we refuse and for same reason that we reject disabled persons' gifts. We are frightened: This person is not me and could not be me -- that is, dis-identification is the way we deal with our fear. It seems that all of us have a deep fear of dying alone. Might that be, in part, because, then, there is no one to receive our gifts and affirm the worth of our contribution to life?
And might we be able to deal with old age and death with greater equanimity, if we can experience a sense of gratitude for life and might the gifts we can leave help us to feel that? Another way to experience such gratitude is captured by one of my close friends, who talks about "saving up beautiful memories for when you are dying". I think that's a "gratitude in practice" response.
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The challenge is to maintain death as the last great act of human life, a final human act through which we can still find meaning and, I suggest most importantly, pass meaning on to others.
In other words, in our dying, we need to be given the opportunity to leave a legacy of meaning. We are meaning seeking beings -- that seeking is of the essence of our humanness. Euthanasia is a predictable response to a loss of meaning in relation to death and its practice would augment that loss. Even if we believe that doesn't matter, we should be concerned, because our capacity to find meaning in life may well depend on our being able to find meaning in death.
Some years ago, when a beloved mentor of mine was terminally ill, I asked him what it was like to prepare for death. He told me it was lonely.
I was surprised by his response because he was always surrounded by family, friends and former students. When I asked him about his loneliness, he told me that the dying process is so unique that few could understand it. He said that his only source of consolation was his faith in Jesus Christ.
Five aspects of Christian death and dying by Father Jeffrey Kirby, the first column in a series on dying he wrote for The Catholic Miscellany in South Carolina. He is now in Rome studying moral theology.
If we place our trust in the Lord Jesus, then we see that death has lost its sting and starkness. We unmask the lies surrounding death, and hope destroys fear. In Christ, we are able to see the full reality of human existence, during and after this life.
By our identity in Christ, we see that life is a journey, and death is a process. And while death and dying may be difficult, the Lord Jesus can remove our anxieties. Death does not need to be an ultimate end or final good-bye.
If we allow him, the Lord will claim us as his own, and by the power of his resurrection, death becomes a transition that only initiates a new phase of life that leads us from glory unto glory.
Obviously, the dying process is our most extreme time of transition. We move from one well-known stage of life to a veiled, mysterious one. It is a time of understandable difficulty, of questions to our faith, sometimes of great pain, and a suffering of the heart as earthly farewells have to be given.
In the midst of this internal wrestling, we are reminded of our identity in Jesus Christ.
St. Paul teaches us that in life and in death, we are the Lord’s.
In the dying process, our Christian discipleship receives an abundance of grace, and Mary draws close, as we have prayed throughout our lives: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
Our discipleship, with all its triumphs and failures throughout our lives, does not end in the dying process, but is empowered and intensified.
A fascinating glimpse into the mind and work of a German expert in near-death research, Bernard Jakoby
What happens when a person dies?
One of Jakoby's goals is to disseminate the already-existing knowledge of the dying process, death, and the continued existence of consciousness.
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According to Jakoby, the problem in our present-day society is our unwillingness to be open to these things. Once man accepts the observable processes and pays attention to the many existing reports, then consequently, he would also acknowledge the existence of life after death, the existence of a loving deity, and his responsibility for everything, including himself.
That’s exactly what the dying process actually reflects—we will be confronted with all of the unresolved issues in our lives, and that is something people would rather not hear,” Jakoby said.
“At the moment of death, people are like an open book. The time to waffle has passed, as has the time to blame others for our shortcomings. We are completely left to ourselves, and that is also the reason why some people die easily, and others with difficulty. The more unresolved issues pile up, the harder the process of dying. Presently, one of the biggest taboos is for people in their eighties to deal with unresolved issues from World War II that surface at the time of their deaths,” he continued.
On unresolved issues and forgiveness
Jakoby considers it a grave issue that despite the existing, well-documented knowledge about the death process, so many people don't translate it into their daily lives. For example, he believes that the preparation for death should not begin when a husband is already hospitalized, but much sooner. However, most of his seminar attendees come only after having witnessed death, or once they are overwhelmed by an event and can no longer deal with it.
In particular, Jakoby finds the huge number of reported after-death contacts between the departed and the living family members as an alarming sign of our times, as most of these contacts have to do with unresolved issues.
“As long as we harbor ill thoughts toward a deceased, or have negative thoughts about anyone, we are not free. That’s why forgiveness is so important, and that’s why so many dying people long for reconciliation during their last days."
A cannibal who killed and ate parts of his mother had his sentence reduced by a judge who said 'he needed to eat'.
Sergey Gavrilov secured reduced time in jail after confessing: 'I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was so hungry, I had to eat it.'
The 27-year-old was given a lenient prison sentence because the judge said he was starving and needed to eat after spending all his money on vodka and gambling machines.
In the worst act of terror since 9/11, a "radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!")" killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others at Ft Hood, Texas. I agree with Ralph Peters who says
This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it's an act of terror. Period.
When the terrorist posts anti-American hate speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit -- well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist.
I've read a great deal about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, but little, as yet, about his victims. I've cobbled together what I've been able to learn this morning on the Web about the people killed, the lives disrupted, the families shattered.
With deep condolences to all the families and friends of those killed and wounded.
Russell Seager
Capt. Russell Seager, 51, of Racine, Wisconsin, joined the army a few years ago because he was a psychiatrist who wanted to help soldiers returning from war adapt to civilian life again.
His uncle said, “He just wanted to help the soldiers because they helped us,...“And then he got shot by a psychiatrist.”
Amy Krueger
Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Kiel Wisconsin joined the Army shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, vowing to take on Osama bin Laden. She was part of Captain Seager’s unit, which was headed to Afghanistan.
Her high school principal said "I know she was proud to serve and proud to share her experience. She took pride that she was able to serve her country."
John Gaffney
Capt. John Gaffaney, 56, of the Serra Mesa area of San Diego, who had worked with mentally disabled adults in San Diego, was a psychiatric nurse who arrived at Ft. Hood the day before the shooting to prepare for a deployment to Iraq. His close friend d and co-worker Stephanie Powell said, "He wanted to help the boys in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the trauma of what they were seeing, He was an honorable man. He just wanted to serve in any way he can." He leaves a wife and son.
Michael Pearson
Pfc. Michael Pearson, 21, of Bolingbrook, Ill., joined the Army a year ago, was training to deactivate bombs and was known for his nimble fingers on his Fender Stratocaster guitar. His mother said "He was the best son in the whole world,
Jason Hunt
Specialist Jason D. Hunt, 22, joined the military three years ago because, he told his grandmother, in Frederick, Okla., “it was time to grow up.” And when his two-year commitment was finished, he re-enlisted, right in the middle of the Iraq desert on his 21st birthday. He got married just two months ago.
Francheska Velez
Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago, was just return ing home from Iraq where she disarmed bombs. She was three months pregnant and scheduled to begin maternity leave in December. Ms. Velez had joined the Army three years ago to fulfill her father’s dream of serving the country and enlisted for another three.
“She knew I always wanted to be in the Army,” Mr. Velez, a Columbian citizen, said in Spanish. He learned Thursday of her death. “I didn’t expect it to happen here and not in Iraq. The worst thing was it wasn’t a terrorist. It was an American soldier.”
Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, who grew up in Pittsburgh, also joined the military like her father and grandfather, her sister, Margaret Yaggie, said in a telephone interview. Lt. Col. Warman was a physician’s assistant who was also a member of one of the Army medical reserve units. She leaves behind a husband, two daughters and six grandchildren.
Kham Xiong
Kham Xiong, 23, of St. Paul, Minnesota, was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and was standing in line for a physical at the center and was responding to a text message from his wife, urging him to come home for lunch when he was killed. Hs sister Mee Xiong said the family would have been able to understand if Kham would have died in battle. But the death on U.S. soil just didn't make sense. "He didn't get to go overseas and do what he's supposed to do, and he's dead ... killed by our own people," Mee Xiong said.
He leaves his wife and three children, ages 4, 2, and 10 months.
Michael Grant Cahill
Michael Grant Cahill , 62 from Cameron, Texas, suffered a heart attack two weeks ago and returned to work at the base as a civilian employee after taking just one week off for recovery, said his daughter Keely Vanacker.
"He survived that. He was getting back on track, and he gets killed by a gunman," Vanacker said, her words bare with shock and disbelief.
Cahill, a physician's assistant helped treat soldiers returning from tours of duty or preparing for deployment. He had been married for 37 years to his wife Joleen
Aaron Thomas Nemelka
Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, of the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah, chose to join the Army instead of going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his uncle Christopher Nemelka said.
"As a person, Aaron was as soft and kind and as gentle as they come, a sweetheart," his uncle said. "What I loved about the kid was his independence of thought."
Aaron Nemelka, the youngest of four children, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan in January,
Noor Almaleki is the 20-year-old woman in Arizona who was run over by her father in a Jeep because she had become 'too Westernized'.
Aasiya Hassan of Buffalo was decapitated by her husband who did the deed in his TV studios he set up to promote Muslims as peace-loving people. His motivation? money concerns or upset about the order of protection had taken out against him a week earlier by his wife who was seeking a divorce after bouts of domestic violence.
An aunt and her three nieces were found dead in a submerged car at the bottom of Rideau Canal north of Kingston, Ontario. The parents of the three young girls tearfully explained it was a driving lesson gone wrong. Now they and their son have been charged have been charged with first degree murder . The aunt wanted a divorce and one of the girls was seeing a Pakastani boyfriend, both against the wishes of the father, the patriarch.
Mark Steyn Noor Almaleki, whom I wrote about over the weekend, has died, the latest Western victim of a Muslim honor killing. If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the "climate of hate" in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn't give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it's merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.
Midway through a two-hour sweat lodge ceremony intended to be a rebirthing experience, participants say, some people began to fall desperately ill from the heat, even as their leader, James Arthur Ray, a nationally known New Age guru, urged them to press on.
“There were people throwing up everywhere,” said Dr. Beverley Bunn, 43, an orthodontist from Texas, who said she struggled to remain conscious in the sweat lodge, a makeshift structure covered with blankets and plastic and heated with fiery rocks.
Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray told the more than 50 people jammed into the small structure — people who had just completed a 36-hour “vision quest” in which they fasted alone in the desert — that vomiting “was good for you, that you are purging what your body doesn’t want, what it doesn’t need.” But by the end of the ordeal on Oct. 8, emergency crews had taken 21 people to hospitals.
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About 90 minutes into the ceremony, Dr. Bunn said, someone yelled in the darkness that a woman had passed out just after Mr. Ray closed the tent door between rounds. Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray replied, “We will deal with that after the next round.”
By the end of the ceremony, two people, James Shore, 40, who Dr. Bunn said had dragged an ill woman out of the lodge and then returned, and Kirby Brown, 38, were near death; they died that evening. A third participant, Liz Neuman, 49, fell into a coma and died on Oct. 17.
Two victims, Kirby Brown, 38, and Liz Neumann, 49
Given the accounts of the survivors who said that Ray was intimidating and discouraged people from leaving, I hope that criminal charges are brought against him, if not manslaughter, at least criminally negligent homicide.
I suppose it is to be expected that many will continue to support Ray, but this is shocking.
On a conference call Mr. Ray held last week for sweat lodge participants, Dr. Bunn was shocked to hear one recount the comments of a self-described “channeler” who visited Angel Valley after the retreat. Claiming to have communicated with the dead, the channeler said they had left their bodies in the sweat lodge and chosen not to come back because “they were having so much fun.”
People were vomiting in the stifling heat, gasping for air, and lying lifeless on the sand and gravel floor beneath them, according to participant Beverley Bunn.
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By the time people started collapsing, Bunn had already crawled to a spot near the opening of the sweat lodge, praying for the door to stay open as long as possible between rounds so that she could breathe in fresh air.
At one point, someone lifted up the back of the tent, allowing light into the otherwise pitch-black tent. Ray demanded to know where the light was coming from and who committed the 'sacrilegious act,' she explained.
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As it neared the end, Bunn said some participants found themselves physically and mentally unable to tend to those around them.
After the eighth round, Ray instructed them to exit the sweat lodge just has they had entered - going clockwise, a movement meant to symbolize being inside a mother's womb.
What followed was a triage situation with people laid out on tarps and water being thrown on them to bring down body temperatures.
Some people weren't breathing and had bloodshot eyes. One woman unknowingly walked toward the fire before someone grabbed her, Bunn said.
Shouts of 'we need water, we need water,' rang out. 'They couldn't fill up the buckets fast enough,' Bunn said.
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Ray was standing about 10 feet away, watching, Bunn said.
'He didn't do anything, he didn't participate in helping. He did nothing. He just stood there.'
But as the personal stories of Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Brewer and Ms. Anderson suggest, the motivations of many protesters are more complicated. They see themselves as righteous curbside critics, prophets warning the world with what they describe as the horrific truth no one wants to see. They have endured insults, threats and even estrangement from their families because they have found what nearly every activist craves: conviction, camaraderie and conflict.
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Ms. Anderson smiled. “I can’t tell you how many babies have been saved because of abortion protesters outside the abortion mills,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
Doctors at George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates recorded brain activity of people dying from critical illnesses, such as cancer or heart attacks.
Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.
Writing in the October issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the doctors theorize that the brain surges may be tied to widely reported near-death experiences which typically involve spiritual or religious attributes.
Clearly, the physical evidence of something momentous.
A year ago, several hours after he'd gone to bed, their apparently healthy teenage son George was dead - killed by an undiagnosed tumour that had taken only a few weeks to grow.
It had been a great day and George was in high spirits. A gifted sportsman, he'd spent the afternoon playing football and later enjoyed a meal at the family home in Romsey, Hants, with his parents and younger brother Harry, then 14.At 10.30 pm, George gave his mother, Jane, a goodnight kiss and headed for bed.
Three hours later, she was woken by George calling out that he couldn't breathe. They were his last words. As she rushed in to his room, George was sitting up in bed, clearly disorientated, his lips and face a sinister purply blue. Jane, now 51, ran to call an ambulance and was back in his room with the phone within seconds, only to see George collapse backwards and fall out of bed. As she went to him, she could see that he had stopped breathing.
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George, a chorister at Romsey Abbey since the age of seven, had a deep religious faith. A chaplain prayed over George as the machines were switched off. 'Then, as she anointed him, the most extraordinary thing happened,' says Joe.
'The machine stopped bleeping and as he died a visible wave of peace came over George. His body relaxed, his head returned to its normal size and George was George again. The doctors were at a loss as to how that had happened to someone who had undergone such trauma.'
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George's funeral, at the beautiful abbey where he had spent many years singing, was attended by nearly 600 people.
Surgical flash fires are most often sparked by electric surgical tools when oxygen builds up under surgical drapes.
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But worries have mounted in recent years with increased use of electrosurgical devices and the replacement of cloth hospital drapes with those made of more-flammable, disposable synthetic fabric.
The quote in the title is from the Greek playwright Euripides
While I am glad that more attention is being paid to end-of-life discussions and care, I don't think I would title an article in a national magazine The Case of Killing Granny.
Death was God's severe mercy, the tourniquet around the wound of sin, to limit sin to 80 years or so. Remove the tourniquet, and history would bleed to death. Imagine the Roman Empire forever. Imagine the Third Reich forever. Imagine America forever. Lewis speaks of our "nightmare civilizations" whirling around themselves in never-ending gyrations of selfishness and despair (in Miracles), and (elsewhere, in Mere Christianity) of eggs that never hatched (by death) and so went rotten. "You can't just be a good egg forever; you must hatch or go bad." Death lets us hatch; artificial immortality would make us go bad forever. Hell incarnate would reign on earth. That would have to be the end of the world. And most geneticists estimate we will have it in 2-300 years (according to Osborn Seagerberg in The Immortality Factor).
Gunther Link, a devout Catholic, prayed to be saved after he was trapped in a lift – but was killed when he went to church to give thanks and the stone altar fell on him.
Link, 45, died instantly as he was crushed under the ancient 860lb monument in the Weinhaus Church in Vienna, Austria.
Roman Hahslinger, a police spokesman, said: "He was a very religious man and had been scared when he was trapped in the lift and had prayed for release.
"A short while later he was pulled out of the elevator and he went straight to the church to thank God.
"He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly.
It makes you think when your time has come, it's come, although I am glad he died instantly and in a good place, far better than an elevator .
"Things are going to slide, slide in all directions"
Sarah Capewell encountered the NIS and its respect for a human life in the form of a premature baby and it was devastating.
As her contractions continued, a chaplain arrived at her bedside to discuss bereavement and planning a funeral, she claims.
She said: 'I was sitting there, reading this leaflet about planning a funeral and thinking, this is my baby, he isn't even born yet, let alone dead.'
After his death she even had to argue with hospital officials for her right to receive birth and death certificates, which meant she could give her son a proper funeral.
Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
This is the future, sliding in all directions. I am reminded of Leonard Cohen, the modern day prophet, singer and songwriter who sings The Future in this Youtube video here
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
Most doctors do not excel at delivering bad news, decades of studies show, if only because it goes against their training to save lives, not end them. But Dr. O’Mahony, who works at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, belongs to a class of doctors, known as palliative care specialists, who have made death their life’s work. They study how to deliver bad news, and they do it again and again. They know secrets like who, as a rule, takes it better. They know who is more likely to suffer silently, and when is the best time to suggest a do-not-resuscitate order.
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They are tour guides on the road to death, the equivalent of the ferryman in Greek myth who accompanied people across the river Styx to the underworld. They argue that a frank acknowledgment of the inevitability of death allows patients to concentrate on improving the quality of their lives, rather than lengthening them, to put their affairs in order and to say goodbye before it is too late.
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.
But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.
As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care,
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“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."
The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.
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The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.
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It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.
Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.
They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.
However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.
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He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.
He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.
“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.
Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.
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“Guidelines like the LCP can be very helpful but healthcare professionals always need to keep in mind the individual needs of patients.
“There is no one size fits all approach.”
The stories told by some of the commenters - like dragon are truly horrifying. Another commenter, Andrew Straughan wrote this:
'Whilst sitting through the night in Scarborough by my dying sister's hospital bed six years ago I witnessed a dying, desparately fragile old lady lying prone in a cot, begging for water repeatedly in a faint anguished little cry. This continued for hours. The night staff were a few yards from her bed reading newspapers, playing cards or chatting about trivia. Not one went to this poor soul's bed to touch her hand or speak a word of comfort to her. My sister slept throughout the night as I sat there listening. The memory of such inhuman indifference is etched on one's mind. "
And then, a few weeks before the cruise, a memo circulated among friends: Karen’s cancer had spread widely. “Incurable” short of a miracle. I e-mailed Karen’s daughter Jana Miller: Did this mean they weren’t coming? No, just the opposite — the trip was of great importance, as it would allow the family to spend time together. So on July 8, the guests that boarded the Noordam included Karen Novak. Pushed along in a wheelchair, with a broad smile that never vanished, welcoming all into her aura of happiness, Karen was enjoying every second of her life, and enjoying everyone who was about, whether family member or friend or new acquaintance.
She had one major cruiserly objective: visiting Ephesus. It is the site of the house of Mary, but of greater importance to Karen was its 6th-century Basilica of St. John, the evangelist who was a particular inspiration to her as an artist. We did not arrive there until the end of the day — a very long day, some of it spent crossing terrain that did not seem intended for anyone less than a mountain climber. But here we were, finally, and it was — beautiful. Simply beautiful, as if arranged by the Higher-Ups. And in the midst of it, having communed, sat a woman weathered by her disease but absolutely satisfied, surrounded by her loving husband, children, grandchildren, and in-laws, all of whom were immersed in her overwhelming happiness.
A premature baby declared dead by doctors was found to be alive hours later when he was taken home for a funeral wake.
The baby's father, Jose Alvarenga, was told by doctors that his son had died shortly after birth.
Staff from the state-run hospital in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, delivered the infant's body to Mr Alvarenga's home fours hours later.
Shortly afterwards, the grieving father opened the baby's coffin to bid an emotional farewell to his son.
"I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing," Mr Alvarenga said. "I began to cry."
He rushed back to the hospital with his unnamed baby in his arms and nurses placed the infant in an oxygen chamber.
He is now reported to be in a stable condition.
"This is a very unusual case," said Ernesto Weber, head of paediatric intensive care at the hospital.
Wallace Souza is accused of arranging crimes and then broadcasting exclusive footage of the scenes.
His show built up a huge audience by showing dramatic film of police raids and arrests, with presenters often shown following police chases in a helicopter.
But police chief Thomas Augusto Correa said: "Investigations indicate they created scenes themselves. They determined which crimes would be committed in order to generate news for the programme."
Ex-cop Moacir Jorge da Costa claimed he had carried out at least one hit on behalf of the presenter.
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years
The story of their slow, agonising death was detailed in a vivid diary found on board.
Sharon Arthurs-Chegini, 46, wrote: 'The lights are going out in my heart.
We have not eaten for four weeks. I dream of my mum's steak and kidney pie, roast dinner and sausage and mash.'
An inquest in Truro, Cornwall, was told that the former interior designer and her lover Peter Clarke, 49, had enjoyed a 'champagne and cocaine' lifestyle beyond their means.
They stole the yacht, the Skipper VII, while they were on the run in Portugal after skipping bail for a previous boat theft from Mylor harbour in Cornwall.
Months later, the Skipper was found adrift off the coast of Senegal, West Africa, with their bodies on board.
The emergency-room trauma call and the medical staff's immediate action upon his arrival is only a memory to her now; sitting quietly at the bedside of her brother-in-arms, she carefully takes his hand, thanking him for his service and promising she will not leave his side.
He is a critically injured combat casualty, and she is Army Sgt. Jennifer Watson of the Casualty Liaison Team here.
Although a somber scene, it is not an uncommon one for the Peru, Ind., native, who in addition to her primary duties throughout the last 14 months, has taken it upon herself to ensure no U.S. casualty passes away alone. Holding each of their hands, she sits with them until the end, no matter the day or the hour.
"It's unfortunate that their families can't be here," said Watson, who is deployed here from Fort Campbell, Ky. "So I took it upon myself to step up and be that family while they are here. No one asked me to do it; I just did what I felt was right in my heart. I want them to know they are heroes.
"I feel just because they are passing away does not mean they cannot hear and feel someone around them," she continued. "I talk to them, thanking them for what they have done, telling them they are a hero, they will never be forgotten, and I explain my job to them to help them be at ease knowing the family will be told the truth."
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"Angel" and "hero" are only two of the many titles Watson has been given since arriving at JBB; although she is appreciative of the kind words, she remains humble.
"I am far from an angel," said the sergeant with a smile. "I just do what is in my heart. I guess for me, I think about the family and the closure of knowing the Soldier did not pass away alone. To say I'm a hero ... no. The heroes are my guys who come in [through Hero's Highway]."
Reflecting on her time here, Watson said she is extremely thankful for the opportunity she has had to work side-by-side with the Air Force.
"The staff of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group has done an amazing job since I have been here," she said. "They are incredible. They have done procedures and saved the lives of the most critically injured Soldiers, and have been some of the most professional people I have ever worked with.
Byrd and Melanie Billings had a growing brood of adopted children with autism, Down syndrome, and other disabilities, and took care to make their nine-bedroom house a safe place for them, wiring it with surveillance cameras in every room.
It was those cameras that captured images of the masked men who shot the wealthy couple to death in a break-in executed with chilling precision.
Authorities made three arrests over the weekend, but the mystery around town only deepened yesterday, when Sheriff David Morgan said that as many as eight people in all may have been involved and that the crime appeared to have “numerous motives,’’ though robbery was the only one he would mention.
“Mr. Billings was well-to-do. He was an entrepreneur and he opened his home to the community. You are asking me to speculate on a motive. That could have been one reason,’’ Morgan said, likening the killings to the 1959 slayings of a Kansas farm family that were chronicled by Truman Capote in the book “In Cold Blood.’’
The video from Thursday showed three armed, masked men arriving in a red van, entering through the front of the house, and then returning to the vehicle. Others dressed in what the sheriff called “ninja garb’’ went in through an unlocked utility door in the back. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
Detectives said the 29-year-old was dumping giant chunks of chocolate over the side when he was hit by a mixing blade, causing a fatal blow.
Three co-workers at Cocoa Services in Camden, New Jersey, rushed to turn off the machine. But by the time they could get to the unconscious man it was too late.
He had been in the chocolate – which was at a temperature of about 120 degrees – for about ten minutes by the time emergency crews managed to pull him out.
My condolences to the family who must hard to deal with the jokes about the manner of his death that was really horrible
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”
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“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
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Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.
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Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”
Several priests have moved into this Mother House like Father Shannon.
He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.
“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”
The aunt of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan on the same day Jackson died asked why her nephew's death went virtually unnoticed while the King of Pop got memorial shrines across the country.
"Mr. Jackson received days of wall-to-wall coverage in the media," Martha Gillis wrote to the Washington Post. "Where was the coverage of my nephew or the other soldiers who died that week?"
Gillis' nephew, Lt. Brian Bradshaw, 24, died in Kheyl, Afganistan, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
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He was one of at least 13 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan since Jackson's death on June 25.
Bradshaw's mother, Mary, said she agreed with Gillis, saying the nonstop coverage of Jackson's death has become "totally ridiculous" and laughable.
"I can watch the news many nights and there's no mention of what's going on in Afghanistan or Iraq and there's boys dying over there,
"He had old-fashioned values and believed that military service was patriotic and that actions counted more than talk," Gillis wrote. "He wasn't much for talking, although he could communicate volumes with a raised eyebrow."
This photo and his eyes are heart-breaking. This death stopped me cold. His aunt is exactly right.
I don't understand the lack of coverage of so many like Lt Bradshaw and others who die in the service of our country. It is a wonder so many still volunteer and want to risk their lives and, if need be, sacrifice them for love of country and of us Americans. These are the men whose brave actions go unheralded and whose deaths are unmourned save for those who knew him.
May you rest in peace, Lt Brian Bradshaw. Condolences to his family
Mexican authorities say two professional wrestlers found dead in a low-rent hotel in the capital may have been drugged to death by female robbers.
Autopsies are being performed on the two midget wrestlers, one of whom went by the name "La Parkita" — or "Little Death" — and wore a skeleton costume in the ring. The other was known as "Espectrito Jr."
Authorities say two women were seen leaving the men's hotel room before the bodies were discovered.
Prosecutor Miguel Angel Mancera said Wednesday that gangs of female robbers are experienced at using drugs to knock men out and rob them, but they may have used too strong a dose.
That may have been because of the wrestlers' small stature, although larger men have also died in similar crimes.
The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...
The coverage of and reaction to Michael Jackson's death has been so over the top, I feel no need and have no desire to add to it. Clearly a very troubled man and a tortured soul, he had a tragic life. May he rest in peace. I'm going to keep mine and leave the whole celebrity and media circus alone
I found myself close-up with a lady of early middle-age, who was distraught at Jackson’s passing. I thought at first she was dressed as a clown (as were many who turned out at the UCLA Medical Center), but no, she was costumed as a bicycle courier. Her grief appeared genuine: I was glad not to have made the flip remark then in my mind. The sufferings of other people are real, and the fact we ourselves put little value on what they have lost does not change their suffering.
Notwithstanding, how can anyone — a grown woman in this case — possibly have allowed herself to become so emotionally engaged with a screen image, as the crowds do now, as the crowds did for Diana?
The answer can only be that the image has power. Among people deprived of the sheet-anchor of religious faith, such images have an extraordinary power. And at the root, that power is self-destructive.
The Anchoress sets you straight on why Jackson was an IDOL, not an ICON. An icon is a religious artifact; an idol can be anything. Don't be dumb and confuse the two
The family of an Iranian man killed in a demonstration against the country's contested presidential election has been ordered to pay the equivalent of $3,000 for the bullets that took his life, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Kaveh Alipour, 19, was shot in the head in downtown Tehran on Saturday during one of the most violent clashes between protesters and security forces since the riots began last week.
Iranian authorities later told the family they would not turn over the slain man's body for burial until they received compensation for the bullets security forces used to shoot him.
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All mosques in Tehran have been prohibited from holding memorials or publicly mourning the deaths of the riot victims, it emerged on Monday. According to official count in Tehran, 17 people have been killed in more than a week of demonstrations.
Nevertheless, Iran's defeated moderate candidate Mehdi Karoubi has called on Iranians to hold mourning ceremonies on Thursday for killed protesters, an aide told Reuters on Tuesday.
I am a medical student. There was chaos last night at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don’t even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they’ve asked everyone to stay and help—I’m sure it will even be worst tonight.
What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?
This issue is not about cheating(election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflicted on the people.
My mother taught me to respect my father and to love and take care of him, regardless of what he’d done. She’d always quote the Bible: it says, “Honour thy mother and thy father.” And it doesn’t say “unless…”, “except…”, or “if…”. That’s what it says and that’s what your job is to do. And I had a hard time with it, but I did it.’
Eventually, his father had to go to hospital. That’s where it happened.
'It sounds like…’ Kravitz begins, and then says, 'It’s going to sound like whatever it sounds like, but this is what it was. I mean, spiritually hospitals are very intense places. It’s like death’s doorstep. And he was in his bed one night and he looked at me, and he wasn’t on drugs, and he said to me, “There are these things flying around my bed, and these things crawling on the floor.” I said, “What are you talking about?” This is from my dad. He doesn’t do with any kind of spiritual thing. No heebie-jeebie kind of thing. And he’s, “There’s black-winged things and they’re flying around my bed… the things that are crawling on the ground, they look like they’re rats and they’re not… I see them.” I didn’t quite know how to take it. And he then began having this revelation and he accepted Christ – this is a non-religious Jewish man – and somehow the spirit world opened up to him. Almost like he had spiritually been bound his whole life and now this thing was released.’
After this spiritual experience, his father started answering some of the questions Kravitz would never get answers for. When Kravitz asked him before, “Why did you do what you did? Why did you do this to Mom?”, his father would stonewall. 'That’s just the way it is,’ he would say. But a couple of nights after the experience, sitting in hospital with Lenny and his two half-sisters, Sy started talking. 'He apologised to us in the most sincere, heartfelt manner. “I am sorry for what I’ve done, how I’ve been, how I’ve treated you, and I love you.” Real. And it was shocking… And what he said to me is that he always wanted to change his life, and he felt there was this thing on his back and he couldn’t get it off. His whole life, he knew inside himself that he wanted to change. But, he said, “I couldn’t.”’
There would be one further unexpected moment: 'As he got closer to his death, another night in the hospital, he was really tired and he looked over at me and he goes, “There’s angels all around the room. Because of Jesus.” And that was it. He turned and looked away. If you knew my dad – it was the furthest thing from him.’
These were the last words Sy Kravitz would say of this kind. But for the son, something real happened in those hospital days that changed everything. 'The last three weeks of his life was the best relationship I had with him. And it cancelled out the 40 years before.’
An Oxford University graduate died after being injected with an experimental anti-ageing drug by her sister, a GP.
Yolanda Cox, 22, suffered a massive allergic reaction after being given three times the normal dose as part of a test of the unlicensed drug invented by their mother.
Mrs Cox had been married for just nine months when she agreed to be a guinea pig for the drug, which the family also believed to be effective against cancer and diabetes.
The Italian woman who arrived too late to board the doomed Air France Flight 447, managed to get a flight the next day from Rio. She and her husband were driving in Austria when it crashed into an oncoming truck and she was killed, her husband gravely injured.
The title is a reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an old story, which appears as an epigraph for the novel:
A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
Originally from Uganda, the eminent hematologist Dr. Salim Vergee was dropped off at the golf club by his two sons who then began an impromptu driving lesson that would change the rest of their lives.
The car lurched towards him as it pulled away, crushing Dr Verjee's leg. As golfers ran to his aid, Dr Verjee suffered a cardiac arrest but although paramedics were able to restart his heart using a defibrillator, the father-of-two died later in hospital.
It is understood the car was being driven by Dr Verjee's eldest son, Zoolfikar, 33, who was being taught at the wheel by his younger brother Ash, a 30-year-old musician and composer.
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'After he was dropped off, one of the sons, who was learning to drive, was being given a lesson by his sibling,’ he said.
'Unfortunately the car lurched into the elderly father and knocked him down.
'The boys were distraught after they saw what had happened. They went in a separate ambulance from their father.'
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During his medical career he has written a number of medical journals on haematology, and specialised in blood stem cell harvest work.
Yvonne Milward, practice manager at Kennington Health Centre, said her former colleague was a 'superb GP'. She added: 'He was loved by colleagues, patients and friends alike.
'He was a true gentleman in every way, with a unique sense of humour.'
My heart goes to the two sons who have not only lost their father, but must come to grips with such a tragedy, a mighty burden they will carry for the rest of their lives.
The Rev. James A. Field has spent years helping others cope with death and dying. He has anointed the sick, buried the dead, and comforted the bereaved.
But now he is confronting his own mortality, much earlier than he had expected. He is 58 years old and he has pancreatic cancer, an incurable and fast-moving disease that he knows he can't survive. And, in a step that has rallied the Parish of the Incarnation of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ around its pastor, Field is bringing the congregation along on his uncommonly public final journey, preaching and writing about each up and down. "This is what I got, and this is how I deal with it," he says. "I'm a teacher, and this is a teachable moment."
More from the priest who knows he is dying as well as a short video on the Boston Globe site at the link.
"This is a time when you have to figure out - do you believe this or not," he says. "You've been saying this your whole life. Is this really the truth or not? And, so far, it feels like the truth."
For the first time in his life, he has insomnia, and that, he says, gives him more time to think.
"When you're awake at 2 in the morning, your alternatives are to watch "Bridezillas," or the vacuum cleaner ads, or to pray," he says. "Sometimes I just go through my life and look at the blessings, the goodness. Honestly, before I was sick, I didn't have time to do that. You take a long lens and look at your life."
Haunting video released in murder trial of Meredith Kercher
'You send your daughter away to study and she doesn't come back. We will never, ever get over it.'
A quite spectacular murder trial is underway in Italy. British student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her apartment in the Umbrian town of Perugia, her throat cut. She shared the apartment with an American girl from Seattle with an 'angel face', Amanda Knox, who is charged with the murder along with her former lover, Raffaele Solllecito. Another man, Rudy Guede, described as an "Ivory-coast drifter," was charged in the murder as well and is now serving a 30-year sentence.
He said: 'It was made by a group of Meredith's friends sometime during 2007 - I think she knows the lead singer.
'The people on the video are friends of hers who were at Leeds University and it is unreal to see her in the video and to know that a few months later she was murdered.
'It was a very emotional experience for them to come and give evidence but they coped very well.
'They just wanted the court to know what a special and much loved person Meredith was not just to her family but all her friends as well.'
In the opening sequence, Meredith is seen walking down a flight of stairs and makes several other appearances including a haunting scene where she walks through a set of doors and looks straight at the camera.
In another shot, she again looks directly at the camera before glancing at the singer, as snow appears to be falling around.
When anyone dies under suspicious circumstances that look a lot like suicide, shocked family members and friends think back to see whether the deceased showed any signs of depression and whether they could have done anything.
In David Carradine's case where the actor was found deed in a luxury hotel room in Bangkok, the consensus seems to be absolutely not. Famous actors or anyone in public life do not enjoy the same privacy and lack of scrutiny that most of us have. So the question had to be asked What was in doing in a closet with a rope around his head and 'another part of his body'?
Now just what the circumstances of his death were are being speculated about all over the world, to his shame.
I remember his character as the half-Chinese, half American Shaolin monk who traveled through the American wild west, like a Chinese Gary Cooper, armed only with his skill in martial arts,in search of his lost half-brother. The 1970s television series Kung Fu may have been the first to introduce some Asian philosophy into the mainstream of American culture in the form of childhood flashbacks to the sayings and teachings of his old master. More recently his career enjoyed a resurgence with his role as Bill in Quentin Taratino's widely popular Kill Bill vol 1 and 2.
His obituaries, published around the world, will have to include some mention of the suspicious circumstances of his death. How far will they go?
I suspect we'll read more than we ever wanted to know about his five wives and his drinking and drugging.
The New York Times skirts around the circumstances in its obituary
John Nolte at Big Hollywood is not interested in hearing the story or passing it on, instead prefers to appreciate his Carradine's skill as an actor especially his performance as Woodie Guthrie in the Harold Wexler's film, Bound for Glory.
Thanks to a real screen presence and a quiet, understated performance, Carradine carries the film all on his own thin, angular frame. He inhabits most every scene and quickly makes you forget all that “Grasshopper” stuff. His Woody Guthrie is mostly silent but always fascinating; conflicted by ambitions and a loathing for what it takes to fulfill them, he’s willing to risk death in order to rouse the working man to stand up for himself, but can’t summon the everyday decency to remain faithful to his own wife. And that’s Carradine singing the songs and playing the guitar, but not one note is impersonation, just pure performance.
It's a shame all around, the way he died, the attention that is paid to how he died, our knowledge of how he died, and the shame his widow and children must feel that can only compound their grief.
research shows that dying people who request euthanasia do so far more frequently because of fear of social isolation and of being a burden on others, than pain.
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But surely the answer to loneliness and grief is not to help the person commit suicide? As I once suggested to a Dutch physician who had carried out euthanasia on an old woman in similar circumstances . . . "Did you think of buying her a
cat?"
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Legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide causes death to lose its moral context and us to lose our proper emotional response to it, a loss which recent research shows detrimentally affects our ethical judgment.
It delivers a "better off dead" message that treats dying humans as disposable products. As one Australian politician expressed this: "When you are past your 'use by' or 'best before' date, you should be checked out as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible."
Now that they have found a debris trail, we are beginning to learn what happened to Air France 447. France is sending a research ship equipped with two mini-subs but the chances of retrieving the "black box" in the vast deep ocean remain slim.
"It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible," passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. "The worst experience of my life." Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. "She crashed headfirst into the roof above us," he told a reporter. "People were screaming," said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. "We saw our own deaths," said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son's wedding. "We decided to die together and embraced each other."
After seemingly an eternity — in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds — the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer and made an emergency landing at a remote military and mining airstrip 650 miles short of Perth.
Neo writes about the initial emotional impact on the families.
This tragedy, already almost unbearable for the loved ones of those who died, contains the added painful possibility that the bodies of the lost may never be recovered. And all of this happened in an instant; families and friends were waiting at the Paris airport for an ordinary happy arrival, and then they received the dreadful news that will change their lives forever.
They were dancers and doctors, engineers and executives, and even royalty. Many were parents, and eight were children.
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The airline said victims included 2 Americans, an Argentine, an Austrian, a Belgian, 58 Brazilians, 5 Britons, a Canadian, 9 Chinese, a Croatian, a Dane, a Dutch citizen, an Estonian, a Filipino, 61 French citizens, a Gambian, 26 Germans, 4 Hungarians, 3 Irish, an Icelander, 10 Italians, 5 Lebanese, 2 Moroccans, 3 Norwegians, 2 Poles, a Romanian, a Russian, 3 Slovakians, 2 Spaniards, a Swede, 6 Swiss and a Turk.
In our dying, we need to given the opportunity to leave a legacy of meaning
Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arch, a organization that provides a life-long home for intellectually disabled people. In an exchange of letters with Ian Brown, a writer for the Globe and Mail, who has a disabled son, they explore the profound issues posed by death and all that leads to it.
Vanier's writings gently show that among the many gifts disabled people can offer us are lessons in hope, optimism, kindness, empathy, compassion, generosity and hospitality, a sense of humour (balance), trust and courage. But, as he recognizes, to do that they must be treated justly; given every person's right to the freedom to be themselves; and respected as members of our community. That requires us to accept the suffering, weakness and fragility we see in them, which means, as Vanier emphasizes, we must first accept those realities in relation to ourselves. Most of us find that an enormous challenge and flee.
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Even terminally ill people can have hope -- what we can call "mini-hopes" -- for instance, to stay alive long enough to see a grandchild born, to attend a daughter's wedding, to see an old friend the next day or to see the sun rise and hear the birds' dawn chorus.
Like hope, leaving a legacy also connects us to the future, one we will not see. Palliative care professionals try to help people to identify their legacy, their gifts to those who remain, because they know that can help them to die more peacefully. But those gifts must be accepted and valued by the receiver.
We must accept old or dying people's gifts, especially those gifts that are of the essence of themselves, recognizing that they and the person who gives them are unique and precious, as are their lives or last days on earth. In confirming the worth of these gifts we confirm the worth of the giver, and the old or dying person needs that confirmation.
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And might we be able to deal with old age and death with greater equanimity, if we can experience a sense of gratitude for life and might the gifts we can leave help us to feel that?
The challenge is to maintain death as the last great act of human life, a final human act through which we can still find meaning and, I suggest most importantly, pass meaning on to others.
In other words, in our dying, we need to be given the opportunity to leave a legacy of meaning. We are meaning seeking beings -- that seeking is of the essence of our humanness. Euthanasia is a predictable response to a loss of meaning in relation to death and its practice would augment that loss. Even if we believe that doesn't matter, we should be concerned, because our capacity to find meaning in life may well depend on our being able to find meaning in death.
Kass adds that he "hated the autopsy room, not out of fear of death, but because the post mortem exam could never answer my question: What happened to my patient?" The medical explanation of the cause of death "was utterly incommensurable with the awesome massive fact" he could see with his own eyes. Death is "the extinction of this never-to-be repeated human being, for whom I had cared and for whom his survivors now grieve." Science is incapable of wondering properly about both the reality of and the utter disappearance of the unique and irreplaceable person. Our desire to know is not properly animated without some assistance from personal care and grief.
Only about half of the 1,517 patients with metastasized lung cancer who were surveyed had discussed hospice care with their physician or healthcare provider within four to seven months of their diagnosis.
The vast majority of such patients do not survive two years.
Hospice care - which can be delivered in a home, hospital, or other facility - focuses on managing a patient's pain and emotional and spiritual needs, rather than trying to cure the terminal illness.
For some ethnicities and races, the likelihood of a discussion about hospice was even lower. About 49 percent of African-Americans and 43 percent of Hispanics had a conversation with their physicians, the study found, compared with 53 percent of whites and 57 percent of Asians.
It may be that some do not understand their prognosis.
Huskamp theorizes that patients who said they had not discussed or considered hospice may not have fully understood their prognosis, or may be choosing to believe a rosier outcome. She also said that, in general, physicians are not well-trained to handle such delicate conversations.
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"You have a lot of doctors out there who weren't trained in these conversations about end of life or breaking any kind of bad news, whether it's a prognosis or difficult treatment," she said.
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How many tests and treatments are you willing to undergo when you're 80 or so?
Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States on intensive treatments for older patients in the last six months of their lives, according to the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.
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Some studies have recently concluded that hospice care can substantially lower costs for many terminal illnesses, and may often be more in line with what patients want.
How do you want to spend your last months? Undergoing chemotherapy or just being outside in the sun?
"As baby boomers get older and see how their parents are dying, they don't want that type of death," said Rigney Cunningham, executive director of the Hospice & Palliative Care Federation of Massachusetts, and a member of the state panel.
"I don't think anymore that death is a taboo conversation with these consumers," she said. "I think people are just struggling with how to start the conversation."
"If you are hearing this message," Rosenberg begins, "unfortunately, it is because I have been murdered by the president's private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala's president and first lady].
"I do not want to be a hero," Rosenberg says at one point during the sensational video that was distributed at his funeral on Monday, but he has now become a martyr in a nation weary of drug running, money laundering and corruption, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Rosenberg explains that he was a lawyer who would have preferred to continue quietly practising his profession, but it was the murder of two clients in April that led directly to his own death.
But amid this week's non-stop media coverage of the special, replete with a red-carpet premiere and interviews with her on-again paramour Ryan O'Neal - who, ever the gentleman, referred to Fawcett in the past tense - one question has yet to be asked: Is this weird? Or is this just the natural progression of things, the logical next step in a culture where the pace of oversharing and electronic communications are perfectly, symbiotically matched?
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Fawcett herself, as she has throughout her career, comes off as extremely likeable and well-intentioned, if - like most celebrities of her era - a bit unhooked from the actual world. She rails against the lack of funding for research into cancers such as hers, and bemoans the lack of experimental treatments in the US. Yet it does not register with her that her wealth and fame, which afford her private jets to Germany and an international team of doctors, are unavailable to the vast majority of cancer sufferers, and that, if not for her station in life, she would not have had extra time. She does not seem to wrestle, at all, with the notion that there may be some experiences best kept private, that the unintended consequences of oversharing can be a cheapening and coarsening of the most meaningful moments.
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Fawcett's story, of course, is real, and it will be interesting to see how many Americans watched, and if the nation's attitudes towards death - really the last taboo - begin to change. Maybe death will be discussed more openly, or maybe most people will decide that it's too ghoulish, too voyeuristic, to watch a deathbed goodbye, to watch an American icon of youth and beauty waste away.
I didn't see it, but I don't think I would have watched. I know these people have lived all their lives before a camera, but to me making such private moments public lacks dignity. Watching someone die is a profound and deep moment. Making a private video for family members is one thing, making a public show about it is another.
"Warning signs on one hand and dollar signs on the other"
You're the director of a non-profit that operates an alternative school and runs programs for people with developmental disabilities when you get a call from someone you never met who says he plans to leave your organization his entire estate. Of course, you'll meet with him and together you set a date.
But there's a death in your family and you have to leave town. You tried to cancel and reschedule but you couldn't reach him. The caller comes by anyway and leaves a large white envelope for you. Scrawled on the bank in large capital letters are the words:
WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR FROM THE CORONER" (PLEASE DON'T CALL EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT).
When you get back, did you open the envelope?
Of course you do. Annie Green did.
Inside she found the last will and testament of John Francis Beech and yes, indeed Beech left Laradon Hall, the non-profit in question, all his estate. Beech also left the keys to his house, instructions and $100,000 check, post-dated for two weeks, for Laradon Hall.
John Beech and his mother
If you couldn't surmise from the writing outside the envelope that this man was contemplating suicide, surely you could by what was inside.
What would you do?
Annie Green put the check into a safe until she could deposit it.
Beech had a mother, three sisters and a brother. The news of his death left them and other relatives reeling in shock and bewilderment. Jack, as he was known to his younger siblings, had always been the family's pillar of strength — the oldest, the most confident, the one who was the life of the party. He collected beautiful cars and performed magic tricks in bars; he had money, globe-trotting adventures and lots of girlfriends. He'd never shown signs of depression and, as far as they knew, had never been treated for mental illness. He'd never talked about suicide around them — except to express outrage when an old friend took his own life in 2007. Why, Jack had seethed, didn't the guy come to him for help? But Jack was also an extremely private person. He'd disappear for weeks on a trip or something, then abruptly resurface. The family knew there were parts of his life he simply didn't share with them, and maybe not with anyone. "If you needed help, he'd give you the shirt off his back," says his brother, David Beech, a news director for a television station in Reno, Nevada. "But if you tried to help him with anything, he'd refuse. He was like a father; he was our father.
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Now the family is suing on pubic policy grounds so that the non-profit can not benefit from its failure to take action to prevent the suicide.
But Malonson's attorney, Susan Harris, says the message Beech left for Green was unmistakable. "The only people he revealed his suicide plan to was Laradon Hall," she says. "There's no note that says, 'I'm going to commit suicide,' but there's a lot of indications. Who gives their house keys and financial information to a perfect stranger? He writes about the coroner, about where to find his car titles — and here's a postdated check for $100,000. One of the classic signs of impending suicide is the property giveaway.
"Laradon Hall deals with the mental-health issues of the clients it serves," Harris continues. "They have psychologists on board, all kinds of mental-health professionals. They do assessment; they do treatment. But they never tried to save him. They didn't contact him. They didn't call a hotline. They didn't talk to one of their own psychologists. They stuck the check in their safe."
A fascinating story by Allan Prendergast, you have to read.
Romain Blanquart's photographic essay The Bride Was Beautiful is heart-breaking and beautiful.
Young Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, fought off cancer long enough so she could marry her childhood sweetheart. She died five days later, a married woman. Roman recounts her story in a few words and masterful photographs.
"I want my son's sperm to live," Carmen Moreno, Quintana's 56-year-old mother, said through sobs as she testified.
Judge allows mother to harvest her dead son's sperm for the son's finance. The race against time really began at 3:30 a.m. Thursday when Quintana, a seemingly healthy, 31-year-old concierge and auto mechanic, collapsed and died while watching an episode of NBC's "The Chopping Block" on a computer with his brother.
Through her tears, Marrero remembered their last talk about the future and immediately asked Jacobi if it would be possible to remove and preserve Quintana's sperm.
Under law, it takes a court order.
So while Quintana's body was placed in a cooling room and an ice bag was placed on his testicles to preserve his potential progeny, Marrero set about preparing a funeral - and building a legal argument.
Much of Thursday was spent frantically calling sperm banks, lawyers and arranging for an emergency hearing before Sherman.
I find this story quite off putting. Rather than grieve over the sudden death of her 31-year-old son, the mother and finance spent their time frantically calling sperm banks, hiring lawyers and arranging for emergency hearings before a judge so they could get what they wanted.
Such was the curious bond between Jesus and Mary, in the cradle and on the cross. As a baby he first awoke to the Absolute—to “God”—in the loving presence of a mother who was for him the reassuring field of reality. She was the secure field of all being in which he received unqualified permission to be. The alternative to her was not to be, and that alternative was unimagined and unimaginable because she was. Only later, and with difficulty, does the child learn to distinguish between the love of God and the primordial love of the parent. For most of us the distinction is never absolute, and perhaps is not meant to be.
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Her heart would break before she fully understood, with a shudder of fear and wonder, what it was that she had been telling him when she whispered to the baby, “You will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. And of your kingdom there will be no end.” Perhaps, she was at times tempted to think, it was a mistake to tell him. But she finally had no choice except to follow, step by step, the way of the strange glory to which she had said yes. She was the instrument, she was the mediator, of the secret into which he would grow. And now his “hour” had come, and it had come to this, here at Golgotha.
The head of the Dignitas Euthanasia Clinic in Switzerland thinks suicide on demand for the healthy is a peachy keen idea, one that could save money for the National Health Service.
Ludwig Minelli, whose organisation has supervised the deaths of 100 Britons, said suicide was not just for those already dying but 'a marvellous possibility given to a human being'.
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Anti-euthanasia campaigners said Mr Minelli's willingness to kill anyone who requested it bore out fears that legalising assisted suicide for the dying rapidly leads to euthanasia for anyone.
Nurse Soraya Vernili who believes in assisted suicide was appalled at the way people were treated and the contemptuous behavior of her boss who was cashing in on despair.
Nominated for the Prize of Courage by a Swiss newspaper in 2007 - she garnered praise for her efforts in exposing what she claims is a 'production line of death concerned only with profits' - Mrs Wernli has embarked on writing a book.
It has the title The Business With The Deadly Cocktails, and she promises an in- depth expose of a 'principled and necessary organisation gone bad'.
He made them sign over all their possessions and sold their personal effects to pawn and second-hand shops rather than return them to their families.
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'Mr Crew arrived in the morning and was dead just hours later,' she says. 'This was another of my many clashes with Minelli. I argued that it wasn't right that people land at the airport, are ferried to his office, have their requisite half-an-hour with a doctor, get the barbiturates they need and are then sent off to die.
'This is the biggest step anyone will ever take. They should at least be allowed to stay overnight, to think about what they are doing. But Minelli would have none of it. He once said to me that if he had his way, he would have vending machines where people could buy barbiturates to end their lives as easily as if they were buying a soft drink or a bar of chocolate. I support assisted suicide - but not the way he went about it.'
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'And Minelli has the cheek to call his practice Dignitas, when dignity is the last thing afforded to these poor people.'
This is a horrifying example of the culture of death. There has to be legal prohibition against euthanasia otherwise those dying are easy prey for others who seem them only as an opportunity to make money or save money.
Jade fascinated me. While I was overseas, I devoured every newspaper story, every photograph and diary entry and detail about Jade's wedding (she got hitched to her twenty-one-year-old ex-con boyfriend a few weeks before her death) to her and her boys' christening (conducted, with cameras present, at the hospital chapel) to her eventual journey home to die.
The analogy most frequently applied to Goody's life was from The Truman Show, the movie in which Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, doesn't realize he's living on a giant sound stage under constant scrutiny: that he has been, in fact, created for public consumption.
That, it seems, gets it exactly wrong. Poor Truman had no idea there were people watching. Jade never forgot. In courting, and keeping, the fickle public's gaze for an astonishing length of time, Jade proved herself a master at real-time reinvention, crafting a character -- the girl you hate, the girl you love to hate, the girl you hate again and, finally, the martyred young mother, bald from chemotherapy, dying on camera -- that viewers would eagerly consume, pacing her scenes and delivered her lines and photos ops with an expert sense of timing.
Goody was outspoken. That was part of her charm and part of her downfall. She was a loose cannon. The tabloids and their readers followed Goody, waiting to see what mess she would find herself in next. Goody was the personification of the “human car wreck” — a British Britney Spears if you will. People couldn’t help but rubberneck.
After apologizing for her in 2007, Brown praised Goody’s public fight after her death, speaking of her efforts to raise awareness about the disease, the need for screening, and the fact that cervical cancer can hit a woman at any age. He said: She was a courageous woman both in life and death, and the whole country has admired her determination to provide a bright future for her children.
Her funeral will be this coming Saturday and even Michael Jackson will be there.
James Brewer could now face the death penalty over the unsolved killing in Tennessee 32 years ago, according to US reports.
Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted shooting dead 20-year-old neighbour Jimmy Carroll.
Mr Brewer had reportedly moved to Oklahoma from Tennessee after jumping bail after he was originally arrested and charged with Mr Carroll's murder in 1977.
The former factory worker changed his name to Michael Anderson and settled down with his wife, Dorothy, in the town of Shawnee.
The couple became active members of the local church, where Mrs Brewer established a Bible study group, reports say.
After suffering a stroke, Mr Brewer called police to his hospital bedside earlier this month, where he reportedly made the confession.
Detectives said Mr Brewer had admitted killing Mr Carroll, who he believed had been trying to seduce his wife.
On a dream round the world voyage, Malcolm and Linda Robertson anchored their yacht off the coast of Thailand when, in the early hours of the morning, they were awakened by a commotion.
Malcolm went to check when he was beaten to death with a hammer and thrown overboard by three Burmese migrant workers.
They took Linda out of the cabin in which she was sleeping and tied her up in ropes below deck. They sailed the yacht through the night until the next morning when they loaded up a small dinghy with their loot
Linda managed to wriggle free of the ropes, outrunning the pirates and sailed to a nearby fishing vessel for help. The fishermen contacted the police who captured the three men still in the small dingy.
Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh. Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February morning.
Six years later Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered four-year-old Shura in the process.
and down through the generations.
....but his life had also moved on. A family friend said last night: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.”
It appears Dr. Hughes was battling depression. I would not be at all surprised if, in his depression, he thought the only way out was the way shown by his mother and the woman who succeeded her.
Aokigahara Forest is known for two things in Japan: breathtaking views of Mount Fuji and suicides. Also called the Sea of Trees, this destination for the desperate is a place where the suicidal disappear, often never to be found in the dense forest.
Japan's Aokigahara Forest is known as the "suicide forest" because people often go there to take their own lives.
Taro, a 46-year-old man fired from his job at an iron manufacturing company, hoped to fade into the blackness. "My will to live disappeared," said Taro. "I'd lost my identity, so I didn't want to live on this earth. That's why I went there."
Taro, who did not want to be identified fully, was swimming in debt and had been evicted from his company apartment.
He lost financial control, which he believes to be the foundation of any stable life, he said. "You need money to survive. If you have a girlfriend, you need money. If you want to get married, you need it for your life. Money is always necessary for your life." Watch Taro describe why he wanted to die in "suicide forest" »
Taro bought a one-way ticket to the forest, west of Tokyo, Japan. When he got there, he slashed his wrists, though the cut wasn't enough to kill him quickly.
He started to wander, he said. He collapsed after days and lay in the bushes, nearly dead from dehydration, starvation and frostbite. He would lose his toes on his right foot from the frostbite. But he didn't lose his life, because a hiker stumbled upon his nearly dead body and raised the alarm.
Taro's story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the "suicide forest." The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.
Japan's suicide rate, already one of the world's highest, has increased with the recent economic downturn.
Natasha Richardson was excited about learning to ski on the beginner's slope at Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec when she lost her balance and fell down. She didn't hit anyone or anything, nor did she show any signs of injury. An hour later, she complained of a headache and was taken taken to a hospital near the ski resort, then to a Montreal hospital. After she was declared brain dead, she was kept on life support and flown to New York City where her family gathered at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City to say goodbye before she was taken off life support.
A family spokesman said: 'Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha.
'They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time.'
New York Times obit She was a blond, beautiful English actress, he was her ruggedly handsome Irish co-star, and the two were thought to be courting right on stage, during a New York production.
Ms. Richardson was an intense and absorbing actress who was unafraid of taking on demanding and emotionally raw roles. Classically trained, she was admired on both sides of the Atlantic for upholding the traditions of one of the great acting families of the modern age.
Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave, one of England’s finest tragedians. He passed his gifts, if not always his affection, to his daughters, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, and his son, Corin Redgrave. The night Vanessa was born, her father was playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Ms. Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the film director Tony Richardson, known for “Tom Jones” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Married in the early 1960s, they were divorced in 1967. He died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 63.
She seemed to be a lovely woman who survived a difficult childhood and adolescence in her famous family of actors and activists to make a successful career and marriage. What a terrible loss.
From the Body Farm to mystery writer to celebrity, Bill Blass will give you facts you'll never forget like: “It takes longer to burn a 90-pound individual than a 300-pound individual,. The increased amount of fat on the larger individual accelerates the cremation process.”
The Cult of Forensic Expert Dr. Bill Blass
Such is the extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting, appeal of forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass. His straight talk about pulverizing bones and rotting cadavers has found a dedicated audience that cuts across age, gender, socioeconomic, education, and even international boundaries. He’s always been popular with students at UT, where he founded the Forensic Anthropology Center, also known as the Body Farm, and retired 14 years ago. He’s long been deeply appreciated by academician colleagues, scientists, and the law enforcement agencies that benefit from his detective work.
But now Bass has another fan base: mystery readers. Since 2006, he’s collaborated with Jon Jefferson to produce four Body Farm forensic detective novels as “Jefferson Bass.” Half a million Jefferson Bass books have been printed as of 2008, the first in 14 languages, and two have already become New York Times bestsellers. The main character in all is one Dr. Bill Brockton, who works as a forensic anthropologist at UT’s Body Farm and consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
The latest addition, Bones of Betrayal, came out Feb. 3, a couple weeks after the packed house speech at the UT Center. The sign in front of Hargreaves Booksellers for two weeks before said simply, “Dr. Bass book signing,” and the date.
At an age—81—when most are quietly contemplating a round of golf or what’s for lunch, Bass is once again half of a book tour celebrity team.
How does he deal with dead bodies?
Both of Bass’ first two wives died of cancer. “My first wife and I met in the service,” he says. “I was in the infantry, and then transferred to the Medical Corps. When we first came to University of Tennessee in 1971, she taught Home Ec, and I taught anthropology. She died of colon cancer in 1993. My second wife, Annette, and I were married less than three years when she died of lung cancer—she never smoked a day in her life, but her first husband did.
“I hate funerals. I hate death. I hate mourning. I don’t like that scene at all.
“I never see a forensic case as a dead body. I see it as a challenge to see if I can figure out who that individual was and what happened to them. It is interesting what your mind can do. I think that you will find quite a few people in the forensic area who are like that, who shift that thing to something that is science and not emotion.”
For many, this would seem counter-intuitive unless one concludes that they believe that life is sacred and have more hope; but there's no excuse for not having legal documents in place
Patients who rely heavily on their religious faith to cope with terminal cancer are more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging measures in their last week of life, Boston researchers reported yesterday.
In a study at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and five other sites, 345 people with advanced cancer were interviewed about the importance of religion in dealing with their illness, and their preferences for care. Most of them were Christian.
About 80 percent of the patients said they used religion to some extent to cope with their illness and more than half said they prayed, meditated, or engaged in religious study daily. More than 30 percent said their faith was the most important thing that kept them going.
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The patients who leaned the most heavily on their faith were nearly three times more likely to choose and receive more aggressive care near death, such as ventilators or cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They were less likely to have advanced care planning in place, such as do-not-resuscitate orders, living wills, and healthcare proxies.
"Death is very likely the single-best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new" Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.
Last June, management consultant Grant Thornton surveyed 250 CEOs of companies with revenue of $50 million or more. Twenty-two percent said they have had an experience when they believed they would die and, of those, 61% said it changed their long-term perspective on life or career. Forty-one percent said it made them more compassionate leaders; 16% said it made them more ambitious; 14% said it made them less ambitious.
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People who recount pure NDEs sometimes say they are accompanied by out-of-body experiences and trips toward a light. NDEs are described as both pleasurable and not. A Gallup Poll found that about 8 million Americans have had a near-death experience. That number is surely on the rise, because victims of cardiac arrest — which kills 1,000 people a day in the USA, according to Cardiac Science — are increasingly being saved with automated external defibrillators.
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Of the 250 CEOs surveyed by Grant Thornton, 3% said they have been brought back to life after having died. Another 3% said they did not want to respond to the question.
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Ned Dougherty, once a millionaire real estate broker who owned popular discos in New York and Florida, went into cardiac arrest two different times in 1984 but did not go fully public with his near death experiences until 2001 in his book Fast Lane to Heaven. He says he met deceased loved ones and was enveloped by the light of God. A casual drug user and an alcoholic who always had his first drink before noon, Dougherty said he was suddenly cured of addiction.
Dougherty says those who ditched into the Hudson River have had a spiritual experience that they will have to come to terms with over time. He says he has lost all interest in business and money. Where he once was angry at God for "ruining the party," he now considers his two trips into death a blessing. Like most who have NDEs, he says he no longer fears death.
Pinned to the metal grating of an MBtA escalator that clenched her scarf and hair, 82 year old Helen Jackson lay dying while many commuters walked past her to the exit.
commuters walked past her toward the exit, either unaware of the dire circumstances or unwilling to get involved.
A few good Samaritans intervened. One slammed the button that stopped the rising escalator. Another pleaded for any sort of help - scissors or even nail clippers to cut her free. Amid the muted chaos, a municipal security officer just outside the station radioed an emergency, then waited by his car for paramedics to arrive.
Moments mattered, and in the end, as one middle-aged man crouched at the top of the escalator, holding Jackson's hand while urging her to keep breathing, her grip loosened, her hand fell away, and she died. She was pinned so tightly to the escalator grating that the man couldn't fit his fingers between her scarf and her neck.
Condolences to her family. "She didn't have to go like that"
Death can be beautiful, they say. Here's a quite moving story by British expat writer Michael Wright, who stayed with a frail widow friend for her last few hours on earth, in a hospital room, holding her hand, talking and singing hymns.
He had never been close to anyone dying.
I have never been close to anyone dying. Not physically, anyway, if we discount sheep and chickens. But now comes a phone call to say that our friend Laura – a frail widow who, at 56, is Jolibois' poshest and longest-serving English resident – has collapsed into unconsciousness. At the hospital in Limoges, the doctors barely expect her to last the night.
"You must go," says Alice, who is breastfeeding our newborn baby. "I can't bear to think of her all alone there, surrounded by foreign voices." Laura's parents, siblings and husband are all dead. Her only surviving close relative is her son, who is in prison.
Muzzammil Hassan set up Bridges TV in 2004 to counter anti-Islam stereotypes following 9/11. In 2009, he beheaded his wife Aasiya Hassan in the TV studio.
Headless body in gutless press is Mark Steyn's headline
Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don't remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response.
"Heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold "
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death, the bubonic plague killed 30-60% of the population of Europe.
How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold and covered with a little earth.
Boccaccio
Nobody knew what caused it or what to do. It is unimaginable today the horror of so many dying so quickly. It must have seemed like the end of the world.
Natasha's pregnancy had been normal, and the birth itself was straightforward. It was with huge happiness that she and Ava went home the day after the birth.
But already in those idyllic first hours a terrible story was unfolding.
Ava had been born with a genetic condition called methylmalonic acidaemia (MMA). This meant her body didn't produce an enzyme to break down protein.
In the womb, Natasha, 33, had been breaking the protein down for her.
But on her own, Ava's tiny body was unable to cope with any protein and even her own mother's milk was highly poisonous, leading to a build up of toxic substances, methylmalonic acid and ammonia. Untreated, it can lead to a coma, brain damage and death.
In America, newborns are routinely tested for this condition. There are no such tests in the UK and Natasha and her husband Grant, 37, were unaware of Ava's condition.
Santiago Meza Lopez, known as El Pozolero (the Stew Maker), says he stuffed bodies into barrels of lye for drug cartels. He may be a good source of information about missing loved ones.
Santiago Meza Lopez, a stocky 45-year-old taken into custody after a raid near Ensenada, was identified as the pozolero who liquefied the bodies of victims for lieutenants of the Arellano Felix drug cartel. Authorities say he laid claim to stuffing 300 bodies into barrels of lye, then dumping some of the liquefied remains in a pit in a hillside compound in eastern Tijuana.
His capture riveted Mexico with sickening details behind drug violence that has left more than 8,000 dead in two years. For the families of the disappeared, however, it was a chance to revive cases that seemed long forgotten.
Catholic author and blogger Michael Dubriel collapsed at a gym and could not be revived. The suddenness sent shock waves throughout the Catholic blogosphere. But nothing compared to shock his widow and young children felt.
In announcing his death his wife Amy wrote simply We are devastated and beg your prayers.
In response to an outpouring of prayers and notes, Amy wrote
Many thanks for all of the prayers and notes. It is overwhelming. Many have asked what they can do of a material or concrete nature. All I can say is to simply buy his books. Not from me, because I am in no position to fill orders, but from anywhere else. He long ago promised God that he would give all the royalties of The How To Book of the Mass to the children’s college funds, which he did faithfully. It is in good shape because of that. Buy them, read them, and give them away to others. Spread the Word. That is what he was all about.
On the night before he died he wrote his last column which deserves reading in full.
The “big lie,” Father Benedict said, (and I’m paraphrasing him at this point), is to think that if we say all the right prayers and live correctly, then nothing bad will ever happen to us. Sadly, there are many good people who have lost their faith by believing such a lie, and that makes it a big one indeed!
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What is the opposite of the “big lie”? Trust.
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None of us knows what the future holds, but hopefully we can embrace what is inscribed in our coinage, “In God we Trust.”
Imagine that, his last written words, "In God we Trust."
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way many people are going to be saved is if they are rescued at the last minute as they are departing this world. In a sense, I’m being spiritually placed in the last hours of souls. When all else fails, I’ll come in to mop up the mess with abundant prayers and offerings of the Divine Liturgy to save the souls who have slipped through everyone else’s fingers.
So, without further ado, I hereby inaugurate the “Abbot Joseph Final-hour Mop-up Ministry.” Now I say this in a somewhat light-hearted manner, but in fact I’m dead serious.
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Here’s what’s in it for you. Are there any incorrigible teenagers, irascible old folks, lapsed Catholics, ardent unbelievers, or heedless profligates among your family or friends? Or do you know someone who is dying without faith or repentance or the sacraments? Well, just send their names to me at john1fourteen@inbox.com. I will keep a list of these “hard cases” and will pray for them (including them also in the divine mercy chaplets I pray especially for this intention), and I will also regularly offer the Divine Liturgy for their salvation.
Imagining this priest saying prayers every day for those about to die gives me comfort and reminds me of what The Anchoress once wrote
Dame Laurentia McClachlen of Stanbrook Abbey, Sussex once said “a monastery is like a powerhouse; you do not lock up a powerhouse to restrain the power, but to keep anyone from coming in and gumming up the works. A monastery is a powerhouse of prayer, meant to give light to the whole world.”
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Prayer is a force, and it has power.
There are things seen and unseen. Things corporeal and things spiritual. Things natural and supernatural. A society bent on utilitarianism serves only the seen, the corporeal, the natural, and neglects the things unseen - at great risk.
Two years ago, Virginia Tech was the site of the worst school massacre in history. Last week, a foreign student from China Xin Yang was having coffee at Au Bon Pain when another Chinese foreign student Zhu Haiyang walked up to her and cut off her head with a kitchen knife.
"There were seven witnesses in the cafe. There had been no argument, no shouting" when the young woman was attacked,
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the officer said that when she arrived at the scene she found Zhu holding Yang's head in his hand.
Mariana Bridi da Costa was a model on her way to becoming Brazil's entrant to the Miss World contest when she began feeling ill just a month ago.
At first, it was thought kidney stones, then a urinary infection. Whatever infection she had, it soon developed into septicemia that causes insufficient blood flow to the organs and limbs. Necrosis followed. Doctors amputated her hands and feet to no avail, she died yesterday.
A doctor who recently published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on the disease, told CNN that little was known about the illness, although it is the tenth leading cause of deaths in the United States.
"We know a lot about what happens once a patient contracts the illness but we know very little about what causes it," said Dr. Greg Martin of Emory University in Atlanta.
"It is a leading health threat in this country, killing at least 800,000 people a year," he said.
Martin said sepsis is a "response" to an infection that can cause the immune system to lose its balance.
"Basically, the immune system goes haywire after contracting an infection and begins to overreact," he said.
A British student sent a text message reading ‘I’m lost’ seconds before plunging to her death in an Alpine river.
Rachel Ward, a 20-year-old undergraduate from Durham University, was on her way to her apartment from a party in the upmarket French ski resort of Val d’Isere when the tragedy happened late on Monday night.
She had been taking part in ‘On The Piste’ - annual celebrations filled with alcohol, parties and skiing involving hundreds of British university students.
The message sent to friends was received just after 1am, some half-an-hour after she had left the gathering of fellow students, all of whom had been drinking heavily.
Detectives fear that she slipped on ice and fell into the river, before dying of hypothermia. She had been walking in the wrong direction.
An investigating detective in Val d‘Isere said: ‘The young woman had been enjoying herself with friends when she decided to set off home alone.
‘It was dark, of course, and temperatures were extremely low.
Doctors told Mr Soliman and Mr Phillips that Mrs Soliman had suffered from a haemorrhage caused by an aggressive tumour that had hit a major blood vessel.
Mr Phillips said: “Jayne and I had both been at the ice rink in Bracknell that day and she was absolutely fine – nothing seemed wrong.
“She was as happy as she could be because she was pregnant – it was her dream.”
David Brooks on Richard Neuhaus In Defense of Death Neuhaus was no stranger to death. As a young minister, he worked in the death ward at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a giant room with 50 to 100 dying people in it, where he would accompany two or three to their deaths each day. One sufferer noticed an expression on Neuhaus’s face and said, “Oh, oh, don’t be afraid,” and then sagged back and expired.
Much later, Neuhaus endured his own near-death experience.
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While most people might use the science of life to demystify death, Neuhaus used death to mystify life.
When he wrote about his experience later, his great theme was the way death has a backward influence back onto life: “We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way.”
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In his final column for First Things, he wrote again about his mortality.
“Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”
This awareness of death, and of the intermingling of life and death, gave Neuhaus’s writing an extra dimension — like a metaphysician who has been writing about nature within earth’s atmosphere and suddenly discovers space.
I'm a physician in a large hospital in Minneapolis, where I help care for patients struggling through the winter of their lives.
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But taking care of the threadworn elderly, those facing an eternal winter with no green in sight, is definitely the most difficult thing I do.
That's because never before in history has it been so hard to fulfill our final earthly task: dying. It used to be that people were "visited" by death. With nothing to fight it, we simply accepted it and grieved. Today, thanks to myriad medications and interventions that have been created to improve our health and prolong our lives, dying has become a difficult and often excruciatingly slow process.
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Nothing in my medical training qualifies me to judge what kind of life is satisfying or worth living. Many would say that if we were to become paralyzed in an accident, just let us die. But many quadriplegics, once they've gone through an initial period of adjustment, find their lives very satisfying. Patients can and do make enormous efforts and fight precipitous odds to get back to life as they knew it, or even just to go on living. But the difference for many elderly is that what's waiting for them at the end of this illness is just another illness, and another struggle.
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To be clear: Everyone dies. There are no life-saving medications, only life-prolonging ones. To say that anyone chooses to die is, in most situations, a misstatement of the facts. But medical advances have created at least the facade of choice. It appears as if death has made a counter-offer and that the responsibility is now ours.
In today's world, an elderly person or their family must "choose," for example, between dialysis and death, or a feeding tube and death. Those can be very simple choices when you're 40 and critically ill; they can be agonizing when you're 80 and the bad days outnumber the good days two to one.
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This isn't about euthanasia. It's not about spiraling health care costs. It's about the gift of life -- and death. It is about living life and death with dignity, and letting go.
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At some point in life, the only thing worse than dying is being kept alive.
Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things, has died.
This is what he had to say about death when he came very close to the gates seven years ago.
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word "good" should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.
Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.
Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take." Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.
"It's just such a shock," Peters, who has three children and two grandchildren, said. "I still don't believe it. In 20 years, we've won two, maybe three dollars - but never more than that."
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"There's nothing that I really and truly want," Peters said, adding that she already saved up enough to replace her car. "I have a mobile [home] that I love, so I doubt I'll be moving."
Instead of dwelling on what to buy, Charlotte Peters said her thoughts have been on her husband and how grateful she is she decided not to toss his final gift to her. "I had just never handled the lottery tickets," she said. "I'm still surprised that I bothered to have them checked."
Nizar Rayan, his four wives and 10 of his children were all killed by in an Israeli air strike on his home after he ignored warnings they should go into hiding.
In grisly scenes, mourners held up the bloodied bodies of the children to the cameras in a clear attempt to blacken Israel's name and highlight its brutality.
" None of us know what happens in those infinitesimal moments between life and death"
The Anchoress eulogizes her "birth" brother who died yesterday after A sad painful life.
I don’t blame him for not having faith. I can’t think of any example of love he ever encountered that did not - ultimately - get distorted or misrepresented or prove itself to be wholly untrustworthy, not to be counted on, not to be believed.
I loved him, but I was much younger than he, and of a completely different nature. I doubt he believed it, that I loved him. He had no tools to believe it.
How tragically sad is that?
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I say to hell with that. He was loved into being; he was baptized and sealed. The people who were supposed to teach him the way in which to go spun him madly, incessantly - then allowed him to get dizzy and lost. He lived a sad, tortured life the best way he knew how - quite imperfectly, but then his tools were also very insufficient and his trust was non-existent. I cannot claim to know anything, but I do not believe that a loving God would look upon this much-sinned against man and reject him once again, as he was rejected all his life.
For one thing, none of us know what happens in those infinitesimal moments between life and death, if mercy is offered one more time, and accepted.
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Tonight, I am believing that my brother John is finally in the presence of the all-encompassing and unconditional love in which he can finally trust, finally surrender to…or that he has glimpsed enough of it to want more, however long it takes to become fit for it.
Dominic Mallary, a 24-year-old lead singer of an emerging rock band that just landed a record contract had a signature move,
howling into his microphone as he coiled the wire tighter and tighter around his neck.
But this time, the edgy flourish proved deadly. The pressure caused a clot in his jugular vein, later cutting off the flow of oxygen to his brain, according to his mother, band members, and friends. Mallary, an Emerson College graduate who counseled the homeless, died Friday afternoon at Boston Medical Center.
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Mallary appeared fine during and immediately after the show, but about an hour later complained of dizziness and a lack of sensation in his legs. But even as he was taken by ambulance to Boston Medical Center, he remained conscious and called his girlfriend to let her know what had happened.
"I figured he was going to be all right," said Murphy, a 21-year-old who lives in Douglas. "We didn't think it had anything to do with our performance."
But when Mallary arrived at the hospital shortly after 11, he suffered a seizure and lost consciousness, Murphy said. He later fell into an irreversible coma and was pronounced dead Friday.
The terror in Mumbai has been horrific, both in the numbers of people killed and the failure of the Indian police to fight back, thereby causing more deaths of innocents
Sebastian D'Souza, the Mumbai photographer who captured a photo of the "baby terrorist" caught alive and now pleading for his life, said, "I wish I'd a gun, not a camera. ...
...what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."
Just a few of the victims:
A selfless young couple, Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivka left Brooklyn to open a Jewish outreach center in Mumbai as part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Chabad.org says of them,
For five years, they ran a synagogue and Torah classes, and helped people dealing with drug addiction and poverty,
Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched. We will continue the work they started.
Firing grenades and automatic weapons, the men took the Holtzbergs and at least six other people hostage, according to friends of the Holtzbergs. The cook, who was also a nanny, managed to escape with Moshe about 12 hours into the siege, the friends said. The boy’s pants were soaked in blood when he emerged.
Rabbi Kotlarsky said that Rabbi Holtzberg had called the Israeli Embassy from inside Nariman House and was describing the situation when the line went dead. His last words before being cut off were “Lo tov,” Rabbi Kotlarsky added, which means “not good” in Hebrew.
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“This is a tragic loss for the Lubavitch community, and for our entire city,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “That their son survived is a miracle, and our entire city is grateful for his nanny’s heroic act. During a time of terrible sadness, her courage reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil.”
Yaacov Ben Moshe at Breath of the Beast writes They were neither Missionaries nor ultra-Orthodox zealots they were, simple, devoted and loving people serving a very high purpose.
They were murdered by zealots for purely political and bloody purposes.
Zealots indeed. Doctors were shocked at the torture of the hostages this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said....Another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words,"
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"Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,"
Andreas Liveras, a self-made businessman went out for a quiet meal with three members of his staff.
After the initial attack on the hotel, Mr Liveras, a father of four and grandfather of eight, phoned his family to say that he had survived Wednesday evening’s assault – and he had also spoken to the BBC to describe the scene in the hotel.
“We knew that he had been taken from the restaurant, through the kitchen and to the basement – and then on to another room. There were a lot of people milling about.
“Typically, my father remained calm throughout his ordeal. He was fearless man – he had flown round the world in his own plane, he had travelled around the world in his own boat. He had done things that most people would be afraid to do.
“Eventually, however, the gunmen got into the room where my father was and sprayed bullets. He was fatally injured and died from multiple wounds."
The family suspect that Mr Liveras’s courage may have contributed to his death. “He would put the safety of his staff before his own. He would not bow down, or crawl and hide, in the face of these people [the terrorists]. I think that is why he got it [the bullets] first,” said his son.
May they all rest in peace and may their memories be a blessing to all who knew them.
"This is the only thing that is equal to my father's death."
"This is the only thing that is equal to my father's death
Condolences to David Warren on the death of his father.
He writes about another whose response in losing his father was to attend Catholic masses in the old, Latin rite.
Went to hear, and inevitably, went to think, while the words of the Mass were sung for him, from the invocation of the Kyrie, a text old as the Psalms if not older: "Lord have mercy."
From one Mass, he was drawn curiously to another, until in due course his diverse thoughts organized themselves into a single thought. And that thought was: "This is the only thing that is equal to my father's death."
I learned of this when my own father died, the Sunday before last.
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Father Harry Meyer tried to imagine God’s reaction when St. Susanna pastor Dan Schuh appeared in heaven.
Probably, he said, it was the same as the teenaged skier who witnessed the 50-something priest tumble head over skis down the slopes one winter night at Perfect North Slopes.
"Awesome, dude!" Meyer told the 1,500-plus parishioners and priests who gathered for Schuh’s funeral Mass Wednesday morning.
Father Z comments sadly:
We can’t avoid death. We cannot control death. We don’t understand death and we fear what we don’t understand. Fear, at its root, is a result of the Fall. Death and fear are inseparable, as cause to its effect.
This is why, I think, so many funerals today are as described above.
Death’s mystery is supremely confronted in Holy Mass, and in its deepest way during the Requiem. Perhaps this is why funerals tend to reveal the worst of our tendencies toward illicit liturgical creativity and bad taste. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Holy Mass must be celebrated in such a way that it leads us into the mystery of Christ’s death, and our death. Mass is therefore like the Cross. It is a mystery. It thus will allure and repel, reveal that things are hidden and demand faith in what is unseen, or rather seen only darkly as if through a glass.
We mustn’t dodge the reality of death. We shove death aside, or paint it over with bright colors and candy music, at our peril. So many funerals are arrange so that people can get through another hour or so without having confronted anything either frightening or meaningful. We avert our gaze from what Christ did for us and from what we must yet experience.
If Holy Mass is reduced to the banal it becomes merely another worldly distraction. It becomes a show.
But Mass is a sacrament, in the sense of its being a mystery. It prepares us for death, Christ’s and our own.
"The largest single identification of remains in U.S. history"
Jules Crittenden reports that researchers using ground-penetrating radar have found what they believe is a lost USMC graveyard on Tarawa and he has lots of photos.
Some 139 graves already located could lead to the largest single identification of remains in U.S. history.
One man, Mark Noah, raised the money to find these unmarked graves by selling vintage military aircraft rides at air shows. MSNBC tells the tale.
Sixty-five years ago, Nov 20-23, 1943, some 1687 Americans were killed and 2296 were wounded while 4836 Japanese and Koreans were killed and 146 taken alive in the bloody battle of Tarawa.
I had to turn to Wikipedia to learn just what was so important about this atoll in the Pacific. I was left as always awed by the ingenuity of the planners and the courage of the soldiers and humbled by the thought of so many lives lost in pursuit of victory.
In a case the coroner described as 'the saddest story I have ever come across' in a 20-year career, the inquest heard how Joshua Aldred was heartbroken after losing both his mother and grandfather to cancer within a year.
Joshua was still struggling with the death of his grandfather, John, when his mother Sarah, 42, died in March after battling breast cancer, the inquest also heard.
His father Jason, 41, who has lost his father, wife and only child within ten months, said he thought Joshua had been adjusting.
In a statement, Mr Aldred said he last saw his son alive before he left for work that morning. He said: ‘I know he missed his mum’s hugs and he had done a drawing of her in his Manchester United notebook which was put next to his bed.
He added: ‘I didn’t notice any change after Sarah had died. He was just a normal, happy, well-adjusted little boy.’
I imagine father, grandmother and son all beset by grief and each trying to act as normal for the others.
Blackpool coroner Anne Hind recorded a verdict of misadventure, saying 'it was an intended act with unintended consequences.'
She said: 'He did intend to hang himself, but in law he did not in fact for a minute intend the consequences of his actions, not for a minute.
'This is a terrible, terrible tragedy. I cannot tell you how my heart has gone out to you and how I have prayed for you.'
After countless accounts of near-death experiences, dating as far back as ancient Greece, science is now taking serious steps forward to explore the nature of the phenomenon. A new project aims to determine whether the experience is a physiological event or evidence that the human consciousness is far more complicated than we ever believed.
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the near-death experience could be another state of consciousness with a different set of rules than what we currently understand, and beyond the limits of what current scientific methods can explain.
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During the time that people report the feeling of detachment from their physical body, or an out-of-body-experience, they report a perception of floating above their body, or floating near the ceiling in the room where the experience occurs. This aspect of the experience plays an important role in the study.
When folks have near-death experiences, they often return with a completely different view of the world, and their role in it.
Almost to a person, they become more spiritual. Their accent becomes love. They look at everyday worries -- in the light of eternity -- as trivial.
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That question (and it is only a question) arises because of the famous line in 2 Corinthians 12:4, whereby the great disciple, Paul (once Saul), wrote, "I know this man -- whether in or outside his body I do not know, God knows -- was snatched up to Paradise to hear words, which cannot be uttered, words which no man may speak."
Scientists have created clones of a mouse that had been dead and frozen for 16 years.
It is the first time they have been able to clone a frozen animal.
The Japanese researchers say their work will benefit mankind - and could be used to bring back extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth or sabre tooth tiger.
But ethical watchdogs branded the experiment disturbing.
Critics say it brings the world closer to the day when people try to clone long- dead relatives stored in cryopreservation clinics.
It could even lead to a macabre new industry - in which people leave behind 'relics' of their bodies in freezers in the hope that they could one day be cloned.
Faith doesn't free believers from the anguish of having to die, but it soothes us with hope. A preface of the Mass (for All Souls' Day) says: "If the certainty of having to die saddens us, the hope of future immortality consoles us." In this sense, there is a moving testimony that also comes from Russia. In 1972, in a clandestine magazine a prayer was published that had been found in the jacket pocket of a soldier, Aleksander Zacepa, composed just before the World War II battle in which he would die.
It says:
Hear me, oh God! In my lifetime, I have not spoken with you even once, but today I have the desire to celebrate. Since I was little, they have always told me that you don't exist. And I, like an idiot, believed it.
I have never contemplated your works, but tonight I have seen from the crater of a grenade the sky full of stars, and I have been fascinated by their splendor. In that instant I have understood how terrible is the deception. I don't know, oh God, if you will give me your hand, but I say to you that you understand me …
Is it not strange that in the middle of a frightful hell, light has appeared to me, and I have discovered you?
I have nothing more to tell you. I feel happy, because I have known you. At midnight, we have to attack, but I am not afraid. You see us.
They have given the signal. I have to go. How good it was to be with you! I want to tell you, and you know, that the battle will be difficult: Perhaps this night, I will go to knock on your door. And if up to now, I have not been your friend, when I go, will you allow me to enter?
But, what's happening to me? I cry? My God, look at what has happened to me. Only now, I have begun to see with clarity. My God, I go. It will be difficult to return. How strange, now, death does not make me afraid.
The teammates say he was giving a high-five minutes before. They tried to revive him but Doane never spoke another word. He died of what was apparently a massive heart attack "He looked fine, reached across the table and gave me a high-five and he fell over," says Place.
"I think he died by the time he hit the floor." Don Doane was a member of the "Nutt Farm" bowling team at Ravenna Bowl for 45 years. His teammates says its strange not to see him on league nights.
"It was like a book, a final chapter," says Place. "He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face." "Don will be a legend," says Nutt. 'It's something that will never be forgotten as long as people bowl here." Ravenna Bowl is planning a memorial ceremony for Doan's' wife Linda and son Chad.
The encounter with a chaplain can be profound and spiritual, and sometimes religious in a traditional way. More and more, though, ministering to the terminally ill in hospice care is likely to be nonsectarian, or even secular.
In the quarter-century since Medicare and some private insurers began picking up the bill for hospice care, it has become a common recourse for the terminally ill. With doctors, nurses, social workers and ample supplies of pain medication dispatched to their homes or nursing facilities in the final weeks and months, about 1.3 million Americans died last year in hospice care.
Spiritual counseling has always been an optional part of the service. But recently, the proportion of patients choosing to receive it, and the number of new chaplains entering the field to meet the need, have risen sharply.
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In the hospice idiom, the job of the chaplain is to make dying easier. In a way that perhaps only Americans would understand, some chaplains refer to what they do as fostering a more “successful” experience — by whatever definition of success can be negotiated in the final hours between a dying person and a compassionate stranger.
Health care and religion experts cite several reasons for the new pastoral model: a growing consensus in the medical world that spiritual care comforts terminal patients; the shortage of clergy, especially priests; a decline in traditional worship; and the apparently unchanged need most people have near the end of life to make sense of existence.
As four generations of the family say their goodbyes, a woman they have just met sits in a corner, playing her harp. Over the past three years, Jennifer Hollis has been accompanist to hundreds of these intimate gatherings at Lahey Clinic. Hollis, 35, is trained as a music thanatologist and plays her harp and sings to dying patients and their loved ones.
Playing music for the dying is an ancient ritual that Hollis - the only practicing music thanatologist in a Massachusetts hospital, according to Lahey officials - and others are helping to revive. Music thanatologists point to studies suggesting that music can ease pain and breathing difficulties, as well as soothe agitated patients and help them sleep.
As life ebbs, healing music flows.
"Many times families will not expect to have the emotions that they have," said Collins, who encourages patients' relatives to stay in the room when Hollis plays. "They just start to weep. Or people will touch each other. Normally, in the hospital, with the bars up, it's not that easy to make that connection. There's something so healing about it."
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"I do see a lot of suffering," Hollis said. "I see people who have to say goodbye to each other, who are coming to terms with what it means to leave this world, or this life that they've known. But what I also get to see is people being incredibly beautiful and loving and tender with each other, patients saying wonderful things to their families, families saying wonderful things to them. For me, it's a real education in what it means to be human."
Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.
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So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.
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It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.
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Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.
Sister Emmanuelle, France's "Mother Teresa," dies aged 99. Sister Emmanuelle, France's answer to Mother Teresa, who has died aged 99 was an unorthodox nun who spent 20 years helping the poor in a Cairo slum before returning to France to defend the homeless.
The diminutive Roman Catholic nun, whose real name was Madeleine Cinquin, was best known in France for her frequent appearances on television to campaign passionately for the poor and homeless.
She came to media attention with her work with some of the world's poorest people, the residents of the Ezbet El-Nakhl slum in Cairo who eke out their living by scavenging in the garbage produced in the giant city.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sister Emmanuelle was a woman who "touched our hearts," a "woman of action for whom charity meant concrete actions of solidarity and fraternity."
The Vatican said her work, like that of Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa, "showed how Christian charity was able to go beyond differences of nationality, race, religion."
Sent off by her expressed request from the small-town convent where she spent her last years, Paris came to a halt yesterday to commemorate Soeur Emmanuelle -- the "French Mother Teresa" who died Monday at 99.
Following her private funeral liturgy and burial at Callian in the country's southeast, the capital's Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois celebrated a nationally-televised memorial Mass in Notre-Dame, its high-watt congregation led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor Jacques Chirac and -- in a tribute to the two decades the self-described "rag woman with the rag pickers" spent working among the poor in Cairo -- Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, as a crowd of thousands packed the square outside.
She left a message with her publishers.
"When you hear this message, I will no longer be there. In telling of my life -- all of my life -- I wanted to bear witness that love is more powerful than death," she said, according to the text.
"I have confessed everything, the good and the less good, and I can tell you about it. Where I am now, life does not end for those who know how to love."...
Gerard Vanderleun on Hitchhiking in the Land of the Dead It seems strange that a day for the contemplation of mortality has been turned into a carnival of corruption in this country, but perhaps not all that strange. I'd suggest that, as the country becomes more secular; as it ceases to believe in anything other than the here and now, the moment in the meat, it becomes increasingly terrified of the extinction of the self by death. It is one thing to profess a belief in the Great Nothingness, it is quite another to have to face it. The only weak weapon that can be raised up against it is its denial.
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What the empty among us are compelled to do when confronted by death is a bit of mass-culture symbolic magic. We dress as what we fear most, and we deck our halls with symbols of death and decay. We pretend that shaking these shibboleths and feathered fetishes against the dark will protect us much as hiding under the covers kept us safe from the monster under the bed. It's a child's response to fear and it is not at all surprising that, as the worship of the Great Nothingness grows and festers among us, the ever escalating morbid gestures of Halloween do nothing to fill the Great Nothingness that roils the souls of many of our fellow citizens. It's a bit like the ceaseless urge to "keep ourselves in shape" that obsesses so many.
Alas, it will not avail us. You can drape yourself with the rubber raiments of Zombies all you want, the world will always, in time, eat your flesh down to dust. And without faith, that's the hard-core horror of existence as mere meat. Without faith, more and more of us find ourselves hitchhiking on the cold plains with no chance of being picked up. Without faith, the vehicles that pass us on the high road just aren't going our way.
yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead.
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So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
Yet we can imagine the time before our parents were born. What's the difference?
After handling repeated demands that her dead son appear before local magistrates, Ann Thompson just wanted them to stop.
It was almost a year later when the first letter from the DVLA dropped on the mat at the family home in Salkeld, near Penrith, claiming he had not logged details with them about a vehicle he apparently owned.
'The letter included the registration of the vehicle but there was no indication whether it was a car, a bike or anything else,' said Mrs Strange. 'But Paul did not own any vehicle when he died.
'I rang the DVLA to tell them that and that he was dead. I then wrote to them enclosing a copy of his death certificate. Another letter followed and I rang them. Then another letter came and I rang again. When another letter came I just ignored it.
Known best today for his elegant, edgy and often erotic black and white drawings that seem the essence of a decadent age and a new style called Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley began his career as a musical child prodigy only turning to drawing and illustration in the last five years of his young life.
Infected with tuberculosis since he was six, Beardsley became a famous fop, living life hard if languidly.
Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Beardsley was meticulous about his attire: dove-grey suits, hats, ties; yellow gloves. He would appear at his publisher's in a morning coat and patent leather pumps.
He became part of the
homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and the English aesthetes, Beardsley was basically heterosexual--though perhaps his only female partner had been his adored elder sister, Mabel (who may also have borne his miscarried child). Some biographers suggest that Wilde's celebrated downfall and the public revulsion that followed it may have precipitated Beardsley's final illness.
He was only twenty-three when he turned to God
In March, 1897, after converting to Roman Catholicism, he and his mother traveled to Paris. Doctors advised against spending the winter in the city, so in November they went to southern France. There, ravaged by chills and weakness, Beardsley took to bed and never left his room after a bad lung hemorrhage on Jan. 26. Thoughts of religion and guilt about the frank eroticism of his past work haunted him, and he spent hours reading about the lives of Roman Catholic saints
Nine days before his death,
he scribbled a note to his London publisher with the heading "Jesus is our Lord & Judge." The note read: "I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata. . . . By all that is holy--all obscene drawings." ..... Early in the morning on Mar. 16, when his mother and Mabel were out of the room, the artist apparently tried to draw, for when Ellen Beardsley returned, her son was dead and his favorite gold pen--either thrown or dropped on the floor--was standing upright like an arrow
Daniel Mitsui at The Lion and the Cardinal notes that the final request written by Beardsley "in my death agony" was ignored.
But the letter leaves an enduring testimony to the sincerity of its author's conversion. The world of arts and letters has no shortage of insincere converts; men for whom religion is simply another element in the creation of an interesting public personality. But in the dying Aubrey Beardsley is seen the will to mortification and the shame for notoriety that mark a true penitent
Researchers led by Dr. Alexi Wright of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of the American Association on interviews with 332 terminally ill cancer patients recruited at seven outpatient clinics. Patients who said they did not have end-of-life conversations got significantly more aggressive care in their final week of life, which was linked to lower quality of life near death. Their caregivers also suffered, feeling regret, poor quality of life, and a higher risk of developing depression.
Patients who said they did have end-of-life discussions were more likely to have a better quality of life in their last days, less likely to get aggressive care, and more likely to receive hospice services. Their loved ones said they felt less regret, and better quality of life, during their bereavement.
"Our results suggest that end-of-life discussions may have cascading benefits for patients and their caregivers," the authors wrote.
Via Jason Kottke comes the filmmaker Pes who came across this tombstone in Woodlawn cemetery.
Intrigued he did more research and found this article in the New York Times in 1909 about poor George Millett who was "stabbed to death in an office frolic".
The girls only tried to kiss him for this birthday but George fended the girls, reeled and fell over as he did pierced in the heart by a blade for scraping ink that was in his breast pocket.
A FEARSOME mutant fish has started killing people after feeding on human corpses, scientists fear.
They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals.
Locals have believed for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to snatching unwary bathers who venture into the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border.
The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV documentary to be shown on Five.
He said: “The locals have told me of a theory that this monster has grown extra large on a diet of partially burnt corpses. It has perhaps got this taste for flesh by feasting on remains of funeral pyres. There will be a few freak individuals that grow bigger than the other ones and if you throw in extra food, they will grow even bigger.”
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He caught one which tipped the scales at 161lb and was nearly 6ft long – a world record weight and far bigger than any landed before.
He said: “If that got hold of you, there’d be no getting away.
An 18-year-old Nepali disappeared in the river last year, dragged down by something described as like an “elongated pig”.
Dr. Diane Meier, 55, won a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation for her work as a geriatrician improving treatment for critically-ill patients.
Her goal is to make palliative care "part of the genome of American medicine" writes Jane Gross in the New Old Age blog at the New York Times A Time When Listening is 'Sacred"
Dr. Meier, 56, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and professor of geriatrics and medical ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, parted ways a decade ago with an outspoken group of physicians nationwide who sought the legalization of assisted suicide.
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Her argument then — and even more vociferously now — is that the American health care system reimburses doctors for doing procedures, not spending hours plumbing the souls of their patients. Thus no physician has time for the discussion, reflection and explanation necessary to conclude, knowledgeably and honorably, that helping a patient die is a reasonable and ethical choice
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Her research has shown that virtually nobody actually wants to die if given access to adequate pain control, emotional and spiritual support for themselves and their family, and what Dr. Meier calls the “sacred level” of attention necessary to “validate their suffering.” As with hospice care, but without the requirement of a terminal diagnosis, palliative care physicians spend most of their time talking to patients and caregivers.
Frank McGarahan, 45, was out with relatives the night before his niece's christening when he saw the pair being attacked near a taxi rank.
The area is close to Norwich's main police station and the area is surrounded by CCTV cameras.
But as he shouted at the gang of ten men to stop, they turned on him. In the fracas, he suffered a serious head injury.
The father-of-two was the chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, the bespoke finance arm which caters for the bank's richest customers, and managed their combined assets of £133billion.
On Saturday evening the family went out for dinner in Norwich city centre. His wife Alison and their two children, aged seven and four months, returned to their hotel but Mr McGarahan stayed out for another drink with two male relatives.
They were waiting for a taxi home when the attack happened.
McGarahan only wanted to stop the beating. He certainly didn't know it would be the last thing he would ever do.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13
Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, is still a bestseller after 100 years. In addition to Anne, my grandmother wrote 19 other novels, personal journals and hundreds of short stories and poems. As well, she has been the subject of several biographical studies.
Despite her great success, it is known that she suffered from depression, that she was isolated, sad and filled with worry and dread for much of her life. But our family has never spoken publicly about the extent of her illness.
What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life at the age of 67 through a drug overdose.
Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband's mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman's wife and mother in an era when women's roles were highly defined.
"There's lots of people in an emergency department at HSC at any given time who aren't only the patients waiting. But how this person could be there for 34 hours and go sort of undetected is really surprising to us and is the focus of our investigation," Wright said.
Benedict administered the sacrament of the sick to pilgrims in wheelchairs and on gurneys, many bundled in quilts against the chill.
In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find "the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God."
The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.
"At his Mass with thousands of sick people Sept. 15... [the Pope] thanked Catholics at Lourdes and all over the world who volunteer their time and effort to help the infirm.
World's most bizarre deaths
Oh, nuts!
Willie Murphy was more than a bit shell-shocked when an avalanche of peanuts buried him at a processing plant in Georgia, USA, in 1993. He never made it out alive.
Oh, chute!
Experienced skydiver Ivan McGuire went plane crazy one day in 1988 when he decided to film his 3,000m jump above North Carolina – he remembered his camera but forgot his parachute!
Water way to go
Things didn’t go swimmingly at all for a 59-year-old Californian when he sat on a pool’s badly covered drain. With a sucking power of 300lbs per square inch, he never really stood a chance. He died when his small intestine was sucked clean out.
Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers an extended meditation on human mortality, but one that is neither clinical nor falsely consoling.
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"For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?"
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While Julian examines various attitudes toward death and admits to envying those with religious faith, he himself is agnostic. As he says, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." ("Soppy," says his atheist brother.) He then goes on to discuss what the French call "le réveil mortel" -- the wake-up call to the reality of death, that recognition of personal mortality that marks the end of childhood. He also reviews what Montaigne called "the death of youth, which often takes place unnoticed. . .
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While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness: "A few hours before dying in a Naples hospital," the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller "said (presumably in Italian) to a male nurse who was cranking up his bed, 'You have beautiful hands.' " Barnes calls this "a last, admirable catching at a moment of pleasure in observing the world, even as you are leaving it." Similarly, the poet and classicist "A.E. Housman's last words were to the doctor giving him a final -- and perhaps knowingly sufficient -- morphine injection: 'Beautifully done.' "
A bell-ringer plunged 30ft to his death seconds after a bride and groom tied the knot in a romantic church wedding ceremony.
The bride and groom, and their assembled guests were walking out of the church when 80-year-old bell-ringer Jack Sturgeon fell 30ft down a church tower, moments after ringing the bells for the happy occasion.
His devastated wife Beryl, 81, was in church at the time.
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After ringing the bells, he is believed to have climbed a second set of stairs to inspect the clock when he suddenly fell at St Mary's Church in Mildenhall, Suffolk, about 2.15pm on Saturday.
Mr Sturgeon, a bell-ringer of 40 years, suffered a suspected heart attack, however it is still unclear if it caused him to slip off the stairs, or whether the fall triggered the condition.
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Reverend Hodges said Mr Sturgeon was a '100 per cent reliable' bell-ringer.
'All we can say is that at least he died doing what he loved best in our church, a place he loved.'
She said the newlyweds, Mr Keane and Miss Brown, had also been shattered by the tragedy.
'They're local people and they've been left devastated. 'They'll never ever forget what happened on what should have been the happiest day of their lives.'
Christians Burnt Alive in India; A Crucifixion Parade
Swami Laxmananda Saraswat was a senior leader in the VHP, a movement organized in 1964 to organize and preserve the Hindu world from Communism, Islam and Christianity. In 1992 they demolished the Babri Mosque. Muslim mobs rioted and over 900 people were killed across the country. In 2002 there were more riots and some 2000 were killed in what came to be called the Gujarat violence. Mobs attacked Christians in December 2007, burning shops and churches forcing 700 Indian Christians to flee.
On August 23, the Swami and four associates were found murdered in their monastery. The police suspected the Communists Maoists who later took responsibility for the murder.
In a horrifying display of week-long violence in Orissa, believing the Christians were to blame mobs went on a horrifying rampage of murder and arson, a "religious cleansing" as it were.
One priest who escaped describes his ordeal They had poured kerosene on my head, and one held a matchbox in his hands to light the fire. But thanks to divine providence, in the end, they did not do that. Otherwise, I would not have been there to tell this horror,"
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"They vandalized everything and set it on fire. It has been reduced to ashes," he added.
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"They began our crucifixion parade," said Father Chellen. The gang of about 50 armed Hindus "beat us up and led us like culprits along the road" to the burned pastoral center.
"There they tore my shirt and started pulling off the clothes of the nun. When I protested, they beat me hard with iron rods. Later, they took the sister inside (and) raped her while they went on kicking and teasing me, forcing (me) to say vulgar words," said the priest who has cuts, bruises and swollen tissue all over his body and stitches on his face.
"Later both of us, half-naked, were taken to the street, and they ordered me to have sex with the nun in public, saying nuns and priests do it. As I refused, they went on beating me and dragged us to the nearby government office. Sadly, a dozen policemen were watching all this," he said.
Angry at his plea to the police for help, the mob beat the bleeding priest again.
"Before, they were like slaves. Now, some of them study in our schools, start businesses in the villages, demand their rights. And those who – even in the India of the economic boom – want to keep intact the old division into castes are afraid that they will gain too much power. Orissa today is a laboratory. What is at stake is the future of millions of Dalits and tribals living all over the country."
Published in 1999, "100 Things" was one of the first contemporary books to create a travel agenda based on 100 sites and then market it with a title that reminded mortal readers that time was limited.
The "100 Things" approach later swept the publishing industry, said Neil Teplica, who wrote the book with Freeman.
The title meant "you should live every day like it would be your last, and there's not that many people who do," Teplica told The Times. "It's a credit to Dave -- he didn't have enough days, but he lived them like he should have."
This life is a short journey,” the book says. “How can you make sure you fill it with the most fun and that you visit all the coolest places on earth before you pack those bags for the very last time?”
Mr. Freeman’s relatives said that he had visited about half the places on his list, and that either he or Mr. Teplica had been to nearly all of them.
A rumor that Howard died has been circulating throughout Columbia County — and beyond — for the past few days.
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The Howard family was celebrating one of their three son’s 9th birthday with a party Saturday afternoon, so there were a lot of cars in the driveway, which certainly didn’t help matters.
“People thought it was an impromptu wake,” Howard said and stopped by to offer condolences to his family.
It’s one thing to get the phone calls, but “it’s a little freaky when they show up,” he said. When one person stopped by during the party and asked what they can do to help, he was told he could help by “flipping some burgers.”
A Puerto Rican man has been granted his wish to remain standing — even in death.
A funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the corpse of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina standing upright for his three-day wake.
Dressed in a Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses, Pantoja was mourned by relatives while propped upright in his mother's living room.
His brother Carlos told the El Nuevo Dia newspaper the victim had long said he wanted to be upright for his own wake: "He wanted to be happy, standing."
The owner of the Marin Funeral Home, Damaris Marin, told The Associated Press the mother asked him to fulfill her dead son's last wish.
Pantoja was found dead Friday underneath a bridge in San Juan and buried Monday. Police are investigating.
The lead investigator
Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol has said Fossett, whose body or plane was never found, could still be alive.
She said: "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found.
"It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do.
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Robert Davis, the lead investigator for Lloyd's of London which is facing a
£25 million payout said
"I discovered that there is absolutely no proof that Steve Fossett is actually dead. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a man who deals in facts, and I don't really care if he is alive or dead, it make no difference to me.
"What I am interested in is the truth - and a proper criminal investigation of this man's disappearance was never undertaken by law enforcement or officials in the state of Nevada."
An eight-year-old boy who had battled cancer for half of his life 'married' his school sweetheart - before telling his mother 'I can go now' and dying just hours later.
Reece Fleming refused to give in to leukaemia until he had fulfilled his wish of a mock wedding to his special friend Elleanor Pursglove.
The two children, who had been friends for years, had taken part in an emotional ceremony in Reece's front room in which he handed his 'bride' a red rose.
Coming back from the weekend, I was shocked to hear that Tony Snow had died. Of course, I knew he had colon cancer, but death, especially sudden death, is always shocking. He was a good and decent man who became great by force of his character. He will be missed by many but no one will miss him more than his wife and three children. To them, the deepest condolences.
There are a score and many more personal recollections online about the force of his character.
Bill Kristol marvels at his calm courage and cheerful optimism His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance to give him an upbeat world view. Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?
President Bush said It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day,” the president said in a statement from Camp David, where he is spending the weekend. “He brought wit, grace and a great love of country to his work. His colleagues will cherish memories of his energetic personality and relentless good humor.”
Gaghdad Bob says The essence of his soul comes through quite vividly -- his decency, his passion, his generosity, his desire to help lift mankind. ....
I don't know why there aren't more people who are able to convey the joy, excitement, creativity, expansiveness, optimism, hope, compassion, decency, humor, spirituality, and love that animate conservatism. Maybe they just don't get it the way Snow did, and connect all the dots, both horizontal and vertical.
Mark Steyn on his grace, affability and generous advice.
Susan Estrich says Tony Snow was a Gem Tony had a sweetness about him, a sweetness that, in the mean world that Washington and the media can be, sometimes led him to believe that everyone operated from the same place he did...
He was so earnest, so dear, he liked everyone and assumed the same about everyone else; he was honorable and honest, and assumed it about others.
Here's a David Gregory interview with Snow talking about living and working with cancer. Kathryn Jean Lopez says it's impossible not to cry to hear Snow talk about his family and the 'depth of happiness' that cancer made possible in his life.
New York Times obituary Mr. Snow’s death was announced by the White House. When a recurrence of the cancer interrupted his tenure there, he chose to talk about it openly, saying he wanted to offer hope to other patients. His message to them, he said, was: “Don’t think about dying. Think about living.”
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His snappy sound bites made Mr. Snow an instant hit among Republicans. “It’s like Mick Jagger at a rock concert,” Karl Rove, the president’s former political strategist, once said.
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He also had a musical flair; he grew up playing the flute, taught himself the acoustic guitar and played in an amateur rock ’n’ roll band, Beats Workin’. When they performed at the White House Congressional picnic, Mr. Bush jokingly called them “a bunch of, well, mediocre musicians.”
Washington Post obituary In his brief tenure as Bush's public advocate, Snow became perhaps the best-known face of the administration after the president, vice president and secretary of state. Parlaying skills honed during years at Fox News, he offered a daily televised defense of the embattled president that was robust and at times even combative while repairing strained relations with a press corps frustrated by years of rote talking points.
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ABC News correspondent Ann Compton, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said yesterday that Snow was "the first press secretary who chose to use the podium as a way to argue the president's case -- not just in the president's words, but in his own."
There is a new, disturbing and completely uncivil tendency for some to make partisan remarks, often quite vile, when a person dies. Ben Johnson describes some of them in "Goebbels With Better Hair." No one is above criticism, but people who make crude and hateful remarks about someone who has just died should be shunned says Howard Kurtz. Amen to that. Fortunately, they are a tiny minority, but shunned they should be.
Better than any words about him are his own and none are better than his commencement address last year to the graduates of Catholic University. If you read nothing else, read his address, "Reason, Faith, Vocation."
"I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been."
"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God? God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."
"Work at being a humble person."
The above quotes are from John Templeton who died yesterday in Nassau, the Bahamas, at 95.
Boston Globe/New York Times obit John M. Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune as a pioneer in global mutual funds, then gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding of what he called "spiritual realities,"
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In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality, and promoted a search for answers to what he called the "Big Questions" in the realms of science, faith, God, and the purpose of humanity.
Along the way, he became one of the world's richest men, gave up American citizenship, moved to the Bahamas, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor, and an array of prominent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.
Telegraph obit Templeton boasted one of the longest and most successful track records on Wall Street. From its foundation in 1954, his Templeton Growth Fund grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 16 per cent a year until Templeton’s retirement in 1992, making it the top performing growth fund in the second half of the 20th century
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The Templeton formula was simple in theory, though not easily achieved in practice.
He looked for bargains — shares selling well below their asset values due to temporary circumstances — and would usually hold on to them for five years or more until they reached what he considered to be their true worth.
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He was one of the first to invest in post-war Japan, and one of the first to sell Japanese stocks in the mid-1980s before the bear market set in.
Templeton once described his speculative activities as a “ministry”, and saw the workings of the money market as part of God’s plan for His creation.
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In 1973 he inaugurated the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, an annual award to remedy the Nobel Foundation’s omission of religion from its prizes.
A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel, and arranged for the Duke of Edinburgh to present the award at Buckingham Palace, thus ensuring full press coverage.
10. Karl Scheele died from tasting his discoveries
9. Jean-Francois De Rozier was the first victim of an air crash
8. Sir David Brewster was nearly blinded
7. Elizabeth Ascheim was killed by X-rays
6. Alexander Bogdanov killed himself with blood 5. Robert Bunsen blinded himself in one eye
4. Sir Humphrey Davy was a catalog of disasters
3. Michael Faradat suffered chronic poisoning
2. Marie Curie died of radiation exposure
1. Galileo Galilei blinded himself 5.
“Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan,” said the unsigned letter Wagner received from LIPA, the Eugene company that administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County.
it was only a matter of time before our pragmatism trumped our principles. Once the absolute that physicians should be healers not hangmen was heaved overboard, it was inevitable that the relentless march of relativism would reach its logical port of call.
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Death, after all, is expensive — the most expensive thing in life. It was not always so. In remote pasts, it was the very currency of life, short and brutal, with man’s primitive intellect sufficient solely to deal out death, not to defer it. There followed upon this time some glimmer of light and hope, wherein death’s timetable remained unfettered, but its stranglehold and certainty were tempered by a new hope and vision of humanity. We became in that time something more than mortal creatures, something extraordinary, an unspeakable treasure entombed within a fragile and decomposing frame. We became, something more than our mortal bodies; we became, something greater than our pain; we became, something whose beauty shown through even the ghastly horrors of the hour of our demise. Our prophets — then heeded — triumphantly thrust their swords through the dark heart of death: “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” We became, in that moment, something more than the physical, something greater than our short and brutish mortality. We became, indeed, truly human, for the very first time.
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We will, no doubt, congratulate ourselves on the wealth we save. We will no doubt develop ever more ingenious and efficient means to facilitate our self-immolation while comforting ourselves with our vast knowledge and perceived compassion. Those who treasure life at its end, who find in and through its suffering and debilitation the joy of relationships, and meaning, and mercy, and grace, will become our enemies, for they will siphon off mammon much needed to mitigate the consequences of our madness.
His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species.
"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."
He's the only comedian whose case, the "Seven Words" went to the Supreme Court which upheld the right of the government to sanction radio stations for broadcasting offensive words when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
New York Times, George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71
By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his irreverent jests about religion and politics, he openly talked about the use of drugs, including acid and peyote, and said that he kicked cocaine not for moral or legal reasons but after he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.” But the edgier, more biting comedy he developed during this period, along with his candid admission of drug use, cemented his reputation as the “comic voice of the counterculture.”
Like everyone who was familiar with him on television, I was shocked at the sudden death of Tim Russert and then surprised at the outpouring of affection for him. But I shouldn't have been surprised, I loved him and everyone who knew him and millions who didn't loved him too. He was fair, tough, passionate and ebullient.
Tom Brokaw broke the news. My friend and colleague collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work at NBC News...
Tim loved his family, his faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees, and the Washington Nationals.
Tributes pour in from people in the media, collected at MediaBistro's TV Newser.
New York Times
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of “Meet the Press” nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
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Mr. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had just returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy, where his family had celebrated the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College. When stricken, he was recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program.
With his plain-spoken explanations and hard-hitting questions, Mr. Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — “Florida, Florida, Florida,” he had scribbled in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.
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Behind the scenes, Mr. Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understandable and compelling.
“He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.
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He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America,” said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal
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In the Boston Globe, Mike Barnicle said
"Tim was uniquely without a mean bone in his body," Barnicle said last night. "He had a joy about him that was nearly unmatched. At the end of the day or the end of the week, there was a part of him that would pinch himself: 'Can you believe I'm allowed to do this show?' "
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Russert was shaped by his own father, known as "Big Russ," and by his childhood in Buffalo. The city remained his emotional touchstone for his entire life. "He's better able than anybody I know to live in two worlds," Brokaw told the Globe in 1997. "He has a house in a tony neighborhood in Washington, and his heart's in Buffalo." Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, yesterday ordered all flags at city buildings lowered to half-staff in Russert's honor.
Russert wore many hats -- onetime Democratic operative, Washington insider, NBC bureau chief, MSNBC commentator, sports fanatic, committed Roman Catholic, biographer of his father, dubbed "Big Russ" -- but his greatest legacy was his sustained style of interrogation. Grounded in prodigious research, Russert would press his guests on past statements and contradictions, often for a full hour, spawning legions of imitators.
Friends were stunned by the news. "I just loved him," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation." "When I scooped old Tim, I felt like I'd hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league."
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Despite his eventual wealth and house on Nantucket, Russert never seemed to forget the summers he spent emptying pails of spoiled food into a garbage truck. His patter was filled with average-Joe lingo and constant references to his beloved the Buffalo Bills. Russert viewed himself as a translator who made politics accessible to the average voter.
Russert wrote two best-selling books, "Big Russ & Me" and "Wisdom of Our Fathers," which brought fame to his working-class dad and enshrined Russert's reputation as a man of modest western New York roots.
Joe Klein in Time Back when he was just starting in television — and ever since but particularly back then — Tim Russert was astounded by the joys of the job. Early on, he helped arrange an interview with the Pope for the Today Show — and Tim did it up right: He brought along red NBC News baseball caps for the Cardinals and a white one for the Holy Father. "He put it on!" Tim told me when he came home. "We have pictures!" Then he said, more quietly, "But, you know, it was really something being in his presence. You felt something holy. It was almost as if the air was different." And that was Tim — exuberant, irreverent, brilliant and devout, a thrilling jolt of humanity.
He will be missed. Condolences to all his family and friends
Her first assignment was with an elderly man with Alzheimer's disease. "I began to realize how much difference you can make in the patient's life, and in the family's life," Peden says. "At the moment of death, I was able to comfort him. I held his hand and told him, 'I'm here with you.'
At Charlestown-based Beacon Hospice, the largest hospice organization in New England, the number of volunteers in their teens or 20s has increased by nearly 80 percent in the past year...Nationally, "The age and demographics for hospice volunteers is widening as hospices serve more and more families,"
Prayers for the countless dead in China's earthquake
The Chinese earthquake in Sichuan province was so huge in its impact, in the numbers of dead, in the tragedy of the schoolchildren crushed in their schools, in the grief of parents losing the one child they were allowed, that I've been unable to get my mind around it.
They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.
The newspaper carrier called her as the "Prayer lady" because she would leave him tips in letters to which she often appended a prayer.
`I've been praying for you at night whenever the weather's bad, realizing you're out in it delivering our papers,'"
He knew something was wrong when the newspapers piled up outside her door.
"That wonderful, small voice inside me said, `This isn't right.'"
After his route early Sunday, Pitts went home, napped briefly and, with his wife, returned to Blanche and Fred Roberts' home, just outside Marion, Ill.
They repeatedly rang the doorbells but got no answer. Pitts then eased open an unlocked side door and saw the couple about two feet inside, 84-year-old Blanche Roberts helpless looking right back at Pitts.
Her right leg was pinned beneath the body of her 77-year-old husband Fred, who apparently had died last Wednesday evening of a heart attack after mowing the lawn.
"The good Lord was with her. She was not scared, wasn't panicking," Pitts said during a telephone interview. "She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."
It's no surprise that some, bedazzled at our technological progress, believe that the same progress can be made with biotechnology. There is a human inchoate yearning for immortality that believers say points to heaven. But to that age-old question Quo vadis or Where are we going, the singularians answer We ain't going nowhere, we're staying.
They fail to recognize the very humanness of our nature, especially our susceptibility to boredom. Even William Buckley, by all accounts a prodigious lover of life, confessed to Charlie Rose near the end of hhis life confessed that he was tired of life. The time will come, no matter how long we live, when the will to live is lost and death soon follows.
This soaring photo is the last one known of the Roman Catholic priest who wanted to raise money to build a worship center for truckers by breaking the 19-hour world record for flying with balloons.
An experienced skydiver, Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off under a column of a thousand helium-filled balloons. He was equipped with a bouyant chair, a thermal suit, a parachute, a satellite phone and a GPS device.
Siobhan Kilfeather was a beautiful professor of English and Irish Literature at Queen's University, Belfast and happily married with two very young children when she was diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer melanoma. Nine months later, x-rays showed that the cancer had reached her lungs.
She decided to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and her mother-in-law jumped at the chance to go with her.
Siobhán's "miracle" happened one bitterly cold day in the French Pyrenees in February 2000. There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.
With hands outstretched and eyes full of fire, she beseeched the statue. "Holy Mary," she prayed aloud, "you know better than anyone on earth the love a mother has for her children. Surely you won't deprive my babies of their mother. "They need me. I beg you; find it in your heart to give me more time. Let me see them grow up a bit first - then I'll be ready."
Siobhán was begging not for survival, but merely time to see her children grow to an age where they would know and remember her. Constance and Oscar, then aged four and two, and back home in England, were too young to know about the cancer which was already ravaging their mother's body.
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Although she was tired after our flight from London, by evening Siobhán declared she was well enough to walk in a candlelight procession with thousands of other pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Our Lady. Before her illness Siobhán had been a vibrant, energetic young woman. Now she walked painfully slowly and her breathing was laboured.
She took my arm as we struggled to keep up with the procession. Suddenly she turned to me and with complete conviction declared: "I felt a shift inside my body today. I believe the cancer has left me. Mary has answered my prayer. She says I'm to be allowed more time with my children."
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Siobhán certainly never doubted that she had been spared by the grace of God. She never ceased giving grateful thanks for her reprieve and returned to the faith of her childhood with a renewed fervour.
When you have been so close and stared death in the face, life becomes more precious than ever. >Siobhán set about completing all the things she thought would be denied to her for ever.
Her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson tells her story in a soon-to-be published book previewed in the Daily Mail,
Yesterday I found myself alone in a room with the body of a deceased person.
What surprised me about that was that it didn't feel all that different from the last time I went to a viewing before a funeral, back when I was a teenager. Not that I expected a chorus of angels or to hear the voice of God or anything, but I guess I thought it would feel noticeably different to see death face-to-face now that I'm aware of God's existence. But it didn't. It didn't feel different because seeing death so close up, then as now, stripped away any high-minded theories or explanations I might try to invoke and left me only with a certain unmistakable feeling, a feeling that came from some primordial part of my mind.
Yesterday, I was able to put my finger on just what that feeling was. I realized in that moment, standing next to a body in an open coffin in a silent room, that I was aware of something at the very deepest level of my consciousness. It was something simultaneously obvious yet easy to ignore, like the fact that there was a ceiling above my head and a floor beneath my feet. It was something I'd felt before, when I looked at my grandmother in her coffin as an atheist teenager so many years ago:
Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.
That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.
Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.
"I felt like I had known her for years," Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I just stared."
In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications in Hilton Head.
From their previous marriages, the couple had six children and six grandchildren scattered across South Carolina and Georgia.
Life Before Death, photographs by Walter Schels, interviews by Beate Lakotta
Before her death Eldegard Clavey, 67, said
"Death is a test of one’s maturity. Everyone has got to get through it on their own. I want very much to die. I want to become part of that vast extraordinary light. But dying is hard work. Death is in control of the process, I cannot influence its course. All I can do is wait. I was given my life, I had to live it, and now I am giving it back"
In the Guardian Joanna Moorhead writes about German photographer who was terrified of death, but felt compelled to take these extraordinary series of portraits of people before and on the day they died. She writes
Nothing, it is said, teaches us more about living than dying. But if so, isn't it odd how little we face up to death? And isn't it odd that modern societies, which appear so keen to find meaning in the business of living, push death to the periphery, minimising our contact with it and sanitising its impact?
A German photographer captures the dying "What I was used to," says Schels, who has taken hundreds of portraits during his career, "was people who smiled for the camera. It's usually an automatic response. But these people never smiled. They were incredibly serious; and more than that, they weren't pretending anything any more. People are almost always pretending something, but these people had lost that need. I felt it enabled me as a photographer to get as close as it's possible to get to the core of a person; when you're facing the end, everything that's not real is stripped away. You're the most real you'll ever be, more real than you've ever been before"
one thing you never get used to is the feel of a dead person - it's always shocking," she says. "It's like cement - that cold, that hard, and that heavy."--
horrifying though photographing the bodies was, more shocking still for Schels and Lakotta was the sense of loneliness and isolation they discovered in their subjects during the before-death shoots. "Of course we got to know these people because we visited them in the hospices and we talked about our project, and they talked to us about their lives and about how they felt about dying," explains Lakotta. "And what we realised was how alone they almost always were. They had friends and relatives, but those friends and relatives were increasingly distant from them because they were refusing to engage with the reality of the situation. So they'd come in and visit, but they'd talk about how their loved one would soon be feeling better, or how they'd be home soon, or how they'd be back at work in no time. And the dying people were saying to us that this made them feel not only isolated, but also hurt. They felt they were unconnected to the people they most wanted to feel close to, because these people refused to acknowledge the fact that they were dying, and that the end was near."
That last bit about how lonely they dying, isolated, even hurt, because people they most wanted to feel close to, refused to acknowledge they were dying just pierced my heart.
The last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a “Mine is shorter than yours”: you want a death that is painless and quick. Even here there are choices. What is “quick”? You might prefer something instantaneous, like walking down Fifth Avenue and being hit by a flower pot that falls off an upper-story windowsill. Or, if you’re the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion. Take a couple of months, pain-free but weakening in some vague nineteenth-century way. You can use the time to make your farewells, plan your funeral, cut people out of your will, finish that fat nineteenth-century novel that you’ve been lugging around since the twentieth century, and generally tidy up.
Stephanie Kuleba had a charmed life: captain of the varsity cheerleading squad at West Boca High, a nearly perfect grade-point average, good looks and a ticket to the University of Florida, where she would start her journey toward becoming a medical doctor.
Her friends said she was "perfect," so when Kuleba died Saturday of complications from breast augmentation surgery, none of them could understand how the girl whose success in life "was a sure thing" could perish in such a strange and devastating fashion.
Flemming Rose reports that one of the 12 Danish cartoonists who contributed to the infamous Muhammed cartoons in 2005, Erik Abild Soerensen, has died at age 89.
The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.
In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."
He had spent more than 6 years in jail after being convicted of shooting a Boston police officer when DNA evidence freed him. Awarded a total of $3.7 million for his wrongful conviction, Stephan Cowans was
the happiest man in the world," said his grandmother, Laura Lenard, who spent her savings trying to free him from prison. "But it didn't stay that way, and the money didn't help."
A year later he was shot to death in his new home in Randolph
which he bought several months before in an effort to escape the increasingly consuming fear he felt in Boston. Authorities have yet to find the killer.
Relatives, friends, and lawyers who represented Cowans say the money took a toll, and some blame his sudden wealth for his death.
Near the end of his life, Cowans was telling them he wished he never received the money.
He faces 8 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Much as I am in favor of organ donations willingly made, I am inalterably opposed to hastening any death to harvest organs. In law school, it's called a "bright line" - one step over the line and that's it. I don't care how sympathetic a case can be made for the doctor. He went over the line and should be punished. Let his experience of being charged and maybe his conviction stand as a warning to other doctors.
His lawyer argues that the doctor did nothing to adversely affect the quality or length of his patient's life.
We can not know that because we do not know what is in the mind of a dying person.
"Adversely affecting the quality or length" of life is such a slippery standard. Who is to say what the 'quality of life' is? Yet everyone can understand what 'hastening death' is.
What the doctor did is see his patient as an object not a subject, a life to be shortened for his convenience. By so doing, he denied his patient the dignity we owe every person. We don't have to kill people to get their organs.
His mother got it right.
“He didn’t deserve to be like that, to go that way,” she said. “He died without dignity and sympathy and without respect.”
The chief executioner of the Khmer Rouge wept when he returned to the place where thousands died on his orders.
Around 15,000 people are believed to have been taken from the S-21 torture centre in Phnom Penh, where Duch was commandant, to Choeung Ek just outside the city, known as the killing fields.
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Duch, 65, a born-again Christian whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, wept and prayed before the tree on which his subordinates dashed out the brains of babies and small children.
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More than 1.7 million people are thought to have been executed or died as a result of torture, disease, starvation and overwork during the Maoist regime of the Khmer Rouge, which lasted from 1975 to 1979.
The five most senior surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are now in custody, waiting trail. Duch, a former maths teacher, was arrested in 1999 after being tracked down by Nic Dunlop, the Irish journalist and photographer.
A call for solidarity: "No believer should die alone and abandoned."
So spoke Pope Benedict XVI when he received participants at an international congress entitled: "Close by the Incurable Sick Person and the Dying: Scientific and Ethical Aspects."
In keeping with the teaching of the Church for centuries, the Pope Strongly Condemned all Forms of Euthanasia. Death", said the Pope, "concludes the experience of earthly life, but through death there opens for each of us, beyond time, the full and definitive life. ... For the community of believers, this encounter between the dying person and the Source of Life and Love represents a gift that has a universal value, that enriches the communion of the faithful". In this context, he highlighted how all the community should participate alongside close relatives in the last moments of a person's life. "No believer", he said, "should die alone and abandoned".
The Holy Father called for time off so that relatives could care for the terminally ill.
"A greater respect for individual human life inevitably comes through the concrete solidarity of each and all, and constitutes one of the most pressing challenges of our times".
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"The synergetic efforts of civil society and of the community of believers must ensure not only that everyone is able to live in a dignified and responsible way, but also that they can face moments of trial and of death in the finest condition of fraternity and solidarity, even where death comes in a poor family or a hospital bed".
Does the promise of eternal life deny the reality of death and help us escape from grief? Is faith an evasion, a psycho-social narcotic developed to avoid the pain of loss?
The Tears of Abraham by R.R. Reno in First Things . If we turn to the Bible, then we will be surprised to discover that, in the primal history of humanity, death seems to evoke no strong emotional responses.
But something odd happens. With Abraham comes the promise: land, prosperity, and the immortality of countless descendants. ...for the very first time in the Bible, we find a scene of mourning. Abraham enters her tent and weeps over his dead wife (Gen. 23:2).
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Thus the psychological paradox of faith: a belief in God’s promises heightens rather than softens the existential pain of death.
-- Faith blocks this easy deliverance from the afflictions of loss. But with hope comes more than heightened affliction; it also stiffens our resistance to the power of death. Abraham does not weep forever. The pain of loss has brought him low, but he “rose up from before his dead” (23:3). Stricken by the power of death—what could be more powerful we often wonder?—he straightens and prepares himself for action. He goes to the local chieftains. He wants a burial place for Sarah, a place to put her “out of my sight” (23:4)
-- “Out of my sight!” It is a shocking thing to say about the body of a loved one, but it is a sentiment repeated in the Bible. Jesus chastises one who would follow him but wishes to delay on order to bury his father. “Let the dead bury their dead,” he says (Matt. 8:22, KJV). The principle is not general, as if Christ came to abolish the law (both natural and revealed) that compels children to mourn for, bury, and remember their parents. Rather, like Abraham who rises from his distress, those who follow Christ must recognize that even as death continues to crush life, it cannot control the future. “O death, where is thy victory?” asks St. Paul with haughty confidence in the power of life. “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55).
A simple practice for the dead that is appropriate for Christians, Buddhists or a person of any spiritually, is to visualize God, Buddha (or who ever) on the top of the head of the deceased and while saying out loud or silently to the deceased "Now you have died and will leave your body, your work here is finished, there is nothing you can take with you, let go of everything including all regrets and be your true self, a being of light and love for all those you have known and not known. Now you can learn everything you need, generate supreme faith and devotion to your refuge and the wish to be unified with your (divine source, your God, your spiritual master, the Dharmakaya, or Amitabha Buddha).
A South Florida man pronounced dead from a massive heart attack and then brought back to life. His doctor says the man was raised from the dead by a simple prayer.
A man in Germany has committed suicide by hiding deep in a forest and starving himself to death.
The man, who has not been named, kept a diary as his life ebbed away...in which he wrote of his pain at the break-up of his marriage, his estrangement from his daughter and his long-term unemployment.
From This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University.
Mortality defines the human condition. "We all have our dead — we all have our Graves," a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consolation." Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though "we all have our dead," and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War's rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II.
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In the Civil War the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a "harvest of death." By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, "nearly every household mourns some loved one lost." Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death's threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war's experiences. As a Confederate soldier observed, death "reigned with universal sway," ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response
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The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
It is work to deal with the dead as well, to remove them in the literal sense of disposing of their bodies, and it is also work to remove them in a more figurative sense. The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.
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The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
The mother of three didn't know that she had bowel cancer probably for years. Not until she was four months pregnant with her fourth child did she learn that she had cancer, it had spread to her liver and doctors gave her little hope for recovery.
She refused to terminate her pregnancy and delayed her chemotherapy to give her baby the best chance of life.
She told her husband: "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live."
Mrs Allard, of St Olaves, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, spent just two months with her son before losing her fight for life eight days ago.
Her husband Martyn, an oil field technician, yesterday paid tribute to her as the "best wife and mum in the world".
"Lorraine was so brave. I can't begin to describe how brave she was," 34-year-old Mr Allard said.
"She knew all too well she didn't have long to live. So she put little Liam's life before her own."
Immediately after Liam was born, she began chemotherapy but to no avail. Her husband was with her when she died.
On the day Lorraine died, she hadn't eaten for two weeks and couldn't drink.
"I laid beside her and she was gripping my hand quite tight.
"We were like that for about half an hour. I could feel against my chest that her heart was slowing down. She just slipped away after that. It was very peaceful.
"When Liam is old enough, I won't tell him that Lorraine gave her life for him, but I will say she made sure he had a good chance of life.
"She told me she didn't want him to feel bad about it."
"It's the final straw, a stab in the back," Iriondo's mother, Rosa Trinidad said, according to El Pais. "Before the lawsuit we thought the poor guy would find it hard to live the rest of his life with the thought of having caused our son's death.
A Polish sailor who came back from a fishing trip to find he'd been declared dead has failed to convince bureaucrats he's still alive.
Piotr Kucy, 37, said: "I stood there in front of them and said look, I'm alive, but they wouldn't accept it."
Kucy left his home in the port town of Swinoujscie for a two week fishing trip - but when he came back he found local authorities had declared him dead after wrongly identifying a body washed up-ashore.
He said since then local authorities have refused to recognise him as being still alive.
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"But now I'm alive the authorities don't seem to want to do anything. I have contacted the prosecution in Swinoujscie asking them to bring me back. Five months have passed since then and nothing. No response. I have to work, insure myself, but I can't because I'm still dead!"
The news that Heath Ledger was dead at 28 shocked everyone who knew him personally and those who knew him only through his acting. HIs great fame came with particularly in Brokeback Mountain. He was very good at seeming sadly troubled. He said of his character Ennis
"The challenge was to capture the stillness of him. I have kind of semi-frantic, nervous energy. Harnassing that was something I thought I'd have to work out. Shooting in the wilderness, the stillness became like this innate quality
Of course, being a celebrity death, we learn every small detail of how his dead body was discovered in Soho by the housekeeper and a masseuse. Were pills strewn all around? Was it suicide? Was he troubled or happy? Distraught over the breakup of his relationship with Michelle Williams? Despairing over his separation from their 2-year-old daughter Matilda Rose? Most likely it was the mixing of prescription drugs for sleeping and anxiety that lead to the accidental overdose.
All these questions and more will be endlessly asked and debated as our culture's celebrity maw likes nothing better than the sudden death of a talented young star.
But first of all, he was somebody's father, lover, son, brother and friend and for them this is a great tragedy and to them condolences.
Said his grieving father in Perth,
He was a down-to-earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving and unselfish individual who was an inspiration to many.
It's very sad to see a young life of such promise cut short.
Although they did not know each other, all are linked in a 'suicide chain' on the social networking site Bebo.
Melanie Davies, whose son Thomas killed himself in February following the deaths of his friends Dale and David said: "It's like a craze – a stupid sort of fad.
"They all seem to be copying each other by wanting to die.
His body felt limp and cold so his family, convinced that his hour had come, called the funeral home. They dressed him in his best suit and then gathered round to bid him a final farewell.
"I couldn't believe it. I thought I must be mistaken and I shut my eyes," Mr Carrasco's nephew Pedro told the Ultimas Noticias newspaper.
"When I opened them again, my uncle was looking at me. I started to cry and ran to get something to open up the coffin to get him out."
The man who "rose from the dead" said he was not in any pain and only asked for a glass of water.
Wei Wenhua, a Chinese blogger, happened upon a confrontation between city inspectors and villagers who were protesting over the dumping of waste near their homes in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
When Wei took out his cell phone to record the protest, more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him brutally for more than 5 minutes.
He was dead on arrival at the Tianmen hospital reported CNN.
A national outcry followed with thousands posting internet messages calling for the abolishment of the Chengguan, the Chinese municipal inspectors, a para military force used by local officials as trouble-shooters.
One official was sacked and more than 100 people are under investigation in the murder reports the BBC
He approaches people in pain, people in comas, with dementia and paralysis, disfigured and frightened, always softly, carefully, and lovingly. He threads his way around IVs and oxygen tanks. I've never had a dog that could do this kind of work, nor could I begin to imagine how to train a dog to do it.
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Izzy was watching carefully. When she put her right hand on her knee, he made his move, slithering toward her and placing his nose beneath her hand.
She froze, as if shocked, and her eyes widened. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. I saw her hand close over Izzy's slender nose as he sat stock-still. A slight smile came over her worried face, and she calmed, visibly. "Oh," she said, softly, with pleasure. "Oh. It's a dog."
Izzy didn't move for at least 10 minutes. Neither did Etta. She moaned still, but more softly.
One of the aides came in on her rounds and looked shocked. "My God," she said, "that's the first time I've ever seen her smile."
One Rose Bowl Parade float will carry 24 people whose lives were saved and renewed by organ, eye, tissue and blood donors sponsored by OneLegacy, a nonprofit organ and tissue recovery agency in Los Angeles.
Christopher's corneas have given two people sight. His bones have been used to prepare 39 bone grafts, with two transplanted already and the remainder released for hospital use in procedures such as spinal and reconstructive surgeries. Christopher's cardiac tissue was used to patch a defect in a young boy's heart in Massachusetts.
In all, Christopher's tissue donation will have gone to almost 50 people in need, according to the New England Organ Bank.
When she gave birth to an out-of-wedlock baby boy, the result of an affair with her dancing instructor, Gladys Mary Briggs locked the baby's body in a suitcase and kept it with her in her council flat for 50 years.
She died three months after council staff discovered the body.
The baby's father, now 102, had no comment because he "was very worried about the consequences."
In effort to add holiday cheer to an East Palo Alto neighborhood ended in a gruesome tragedy Saturday when a man stringing lights in a tree at an apartment complex struck a high voltage power line, sending 12,000 kilovolts of electricity through his body and killing him instantly, fire officials said.
Hundreds of neighbors looked on for more than an hour at a grisly scene as the body of the 23-year-old man was suspended about 60 feet above ground because the electricity that had passed through him had affixed him to the tree, according to Menlo Park Fire Protection District Chief Harold Schapelhouman.
"Electricity always tries to find a ground and it went through his arm and leg and essentially welded him to the tree," Schapelhouman said.
"Our heart goes out to this young man and his family; he was trying to improve things a little bit for Christmas and he made a small miscalculation and it cost him his life."
The motives for the killings remain a matter of speculation, and no evidence has been found to link them to a single killer. In some cases, the musicians appeared to have ties to organized crime figures, making them potential targets in reprisal attacks from rival gangs.
Others had composed ballads known as narcocorridos, glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which can offend other drug dealers and hit men. In still other cases, as the musicians’ fame grew, they may have become embroiled with criminals unwittingly.
The father of the boy is grief-stricken. A friend said, "She adored Lewis and I guess she didn't want to be apart from him - even in death. I think that's why she did it."
To me it seems the ultimate in selfishness and confusion, a sad tale of dying woman who couldn't think straight.
It seems to be an affliction of the times when some women see their children not as persons but as extensions of themselves.
Remember the story about the world's oldest mother who gave birth to twins a week short of her 67th birthday. She lied about her age to get IVF treatment because she always wanted children even though she had never married. She choose the donors of eggs and sperm from a catalogue and paid the estimated $40,000 by selling her flat in Spain. She's been struck down with cancer.
Since 1983, Medicare has paid for hospice care for people in their last six months of life, about $135 a day.
It worked quite well as long as most hospice patients were cancer patients who died pretty quickly once curative treatment stopped and only palliative care continued.
But now more patients are using hospice and those patients are living longer in hospice, often well past the 6 month limit. Hospice payment has become one of the fastest growing components of Medicare with spending nearly tripled since 2000.
Hundreds of hospice providers across the country are facing the catastrophic financial consequence of what would otherwise seem a positive development: their patients are living longer than expected.
Can there be anything sadder than parents who have anticipated heir baby's birth for months, to have the baby born so sick that it soon dies?
When such sorrow replaces joy, who knows what it takes to heal? Yes, parents have to go on, but they also have to remember.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep is a foundation and a network of professional photographers who will come to a hospital or hospice and take professional portraits of the tiny baby so their parents and family will remember them. Once the baby dies and is unhooked from tubes and machines, it may be the first and only time the parents have to hold the little one that they loved so much.
Thanks so much to Hootsbuddy who alerted me of this site and wrote a wonderful post, Remarkable Photo Ministry.
That's just what these photographers do, minister like angels, at the saddest times parents can experience.
Remembrance photography began in the Victorian era when a photo of a deceased loved one was treasured, especially if no other photographs existed.
Said one woman,
“What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes.”
Israeli fashion model died weighing only 60 pounds. Two years ago she was admitted to the hospital when, unable to bear her own weight, she collapsed into the arms of her fashion photographer and friend Adi Barkan.
"When she fell down, I felt the bones going into my legs, like a knife. When she fell down, I felt like I took hold of something from the grave,"
He is now campaigning to end the use of underweight models
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was strangled with a boot lace, stuffed into a suitcase and buried in a back garden.
Her death is the latest in an increasing trend of such killings in Britain, home to some 1.8 million Muslims. More than 100 homicides are under investigation for being potential "honor killings."
Because the European authorities are bringing more of honor killings to trial, it seems that in Turkey anyway, women are forced to commit suicide for bringing dishonor on their families.
Young girls can be accused of dishonouring the family simply for wearing jeans or glancing at a boy or even being looked at by a man in a wrong way.
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Sky News spoke to another woman whose identity cannot be revealed. She married at the age of 15. Her husband beat her and was unfaithful.
When she complained and asked for a divorce her own family told her to commit suicide.
"My sister said kill yourself, kill yourself. Your husband, your family disowns you.
Only the code of silence, the blanket of secrecy is keeping these crimes from coming to the attention of the prosecutor. The shame of such families who abet such actions is misplaced, it belongs on them.
After his girlfriend kicked him out, 32-year-old Charles Tucker, Jr decided to sneak back into her house using the cat door.
The girlfriend found him dead in the door and called 911.
"He's a big guy. I don't even know how he could fit through there," Elliot (his good friend) said. "Probably to get in and unlock the door. They said he had one arm through there and his head was caught in there like he was to reach up and unlock the door because there's no way he could fit through there."
From the Deacon, She sees dead people. "I was reading St. Mark's account of the resurrection and the words seemed to jump off the page: 'When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.' It hit me that those three women were the first ones to witness the resurrection because they were going to minister to Jesus in death as they did in life. Now it's called embalming. I just couldn't get it out of my head.
She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. "Consoling the sorrowing and burying the dead are directions in the Rule of St. Benedict, the way of life we as Benedictines follow," Sister Chris said. "And, I knew that the best gift I had been given in my lifetime was the gift of compassion, along with the ability to listen. I realized I should use that gift; I didn't have the right to ignore it. So I went to Sister Mary Agnes Patterson, who was the prioress at the time. She looked at me and asked, 'Where would you go to study?' There was a program offered at Kansas City Kansas Community College, so I wouldn't have to travel very far. With my community's blessing I took the first steps toward this ministry."
More "Funerals are for the living, not the dead. A funeral is a time for family and friends to express their love and gratitude for what that person has done for them."
The day before the New York City Marathon, runners were stunned when they learned that 28-year-old professional runner Ryan Shay collapsed and died in Central Park during the Olympic marathon trials.
“To have someone so young and so well trained die in the race, it is just an incredible fluke,” said Dr. Lewis Maharam, the medical director of the New York City Marathon. “Something had to be underlying.”
It snowed the night they brought Ryan Shay home to bury him. Three hundred candles in paper bags lined the inner lane of the high school track. The wind extinguished some candles and ignited several bags into balls of flame.
“A kid from a village of 1,000 makes it big, that’s a million-to-one shot,” Quinn Barry, the athletic director at Central Lake High, said as he patiently relit candles, maintaining his frozen vigil.
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He died at 28, and Ryan Shay will be remembered here as the precocious, dedicated boy who could do 25 one-armed pushups in kindergarten; who was co-valedictorian of his high school class and four times the state cross-country champion; who was a cardiovascular marvel with a standing heart rate from youth of 30 beats a minute.
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Autopsy and toxicology reports have yet to be completed. Given the tarnished nature of running, where doping has been widespread, Shay’s father has asked that the toxicology report be made public so that it might absolve any suspicion that Ryan used illicit substances.
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His father said that Shay was found to have an enlarged heart at age 14 and was told last spring that his low heart rate might require him to wear a pacemaker when he got older
My sincere condolences to his wife Alicia who married him in July. This is not her first experience with death. When she was 16, her boyfriend, also a runner, died of a rare form of leukemia.
A 24-year-old lab technician has been arrested in New Jersey on a charge of sexual penetration of human remains.
A new employee, he conned a guard into giving him access to the morgue at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. There he unzipped the body bag of a 92-year-old woman and was having sex with her corpse when the guard saw him.
Yesterday, the Feast of All Saints, Catholics celebrated all those now in heaven. Today, Catholics commemorate All Souls Day for all the faithful departed.
Many churches display the Book of the Names of the Dead which contains the names of all those who have died in the parish.
Souls that are not yet in heaven are undergoing purification in Purgatory. Prayers can speed their passage from Purgatory to the Beatific vision of Heaven, so prayers for the dead can be especially useful.
In Mexico, the "Dia de Los Muertos" is celebrated on November 2. Catholic beliefs have merged with some pre-contact beliefs and the Day of the Dead has become a happy celebration with family ancestors that have died. The Day of the Dead Blog has many photos of vigils and the parade of the children.
After lighting candles and praying at the tombs of their loved ones, Filipino families spend the whole day in the country's graveyards, eating and chatting.
"We celebrate this every year, no fail. We all come here together and bring food, and we stay all day," said Lolita Capoquian, who came to pay her respects to her daughter who was killed in a car accident 14 years ago.
The Day of the Dead festival has its origins in a pre-Hispanic belief that the dead return to earth one day each year to visit their loved ones.
They were newlyweds spending a brilliant autumn day hiking through the White Mountains, a pair of Harvard graduate students enjoying the foliage of the northern woods.
When Brian Wood and Stine Rossel sat on a fallen tree at the top of a crest, they thought they had found the perfect perch to view the fall colors. Then, from the simplest act - a picnic in the woods - a bizarre, rapid-fire series of events led to unimaginable tragedy Saturday.
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Wood said he "scooted over" to be closer to his new wife, then heard a snapping sound - the tree breaking at its roots. In a flash, the part of the tree where they were sitting shifted, sending the couple tumbling down the hill. The tree rolled down on top of them, slamming into Rossel's head and knocking her unconscious.
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"She was extremely happy" Matskevich said. "She got married to the man she loved. She finished her PhD. She was full of plans. Who could have guessed it was her last evening?"
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"She was like the sun," Wood said of his wife. "It's like the sun disappearing from the sky."
What a sad story. Condolences to her family, especially her husband.
Writing in Encounter magazine in 1955, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argued that death had become the great unmentionable. The Victorians were prudish about sex and candid about death, he said, whereas Westerners of the mid-20th century were garrulous about sex and, well, stiff about stiffs. Death be not loud.
The New Death by Stephen Bates in the Wall St Journal.
But we shouldn't be too hasty in congratulating ourselves and deriding earlier generations as uptight and self-deluded. We can chatter and chortle about death without honestly confronting it. In fundamental ways, our culture is reinventing death rites and, in the process, growing further apart from death itself.
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What's wrong with all this? At the individual level, funerary frivolity trivializes both the death and the life that preceded it. At the social level, tradition and ritual, passed from generation to generation, create a common framework for discussing life's ultimate questions. When we choose customized, individualized, let-it-be-me funerals, we start slipping from lingua franca to tabula rasa. Soon, we're talking only to ourselves.
The Gorer quote brings to mind a favorite quote, Money has replaced sex as a driving force, death has replaced sex as a taboo, and sex has replaced bridge as a social event for mixed foursomes, Reginald Perrin.
A deranged cannabis smoker who was obsessed with Satanism stabbed a country vicar to death in his churchyard.
Father Paul Bennett, 59, was killed in a vicious daylight attack by Geraint Evans as he tried to protect his family.
His horrified wife fought desperately to fend off paranoid the schizophrenic as he knifed the grandfather repeatedly in the head and throat.
Georgina Bennett grabbed the first thing she could find - her grandson's toy sword - in a brave effort to protect her husband but was unable to stop the killer land a final knife blow through the vicar's heart.
What a terrible way for a country vicar to die. May in rest in peace and deep condolences to his family.
I never understood why the dead were painted and made to look alive, but now I see that’s not really the purpose. Watching Joe at work, I see that he restores bodies to a restful state, rather than an unnatural one. They don’t look like they’re going to sit up in the casket and say howdy, they look dead. But they look readied for a journey; dressed up, cleaned, and arranged just so. He creates an environment that helps people say goodbye.
I suppose what my brother in law does for a living gives a lot of people the creeps, and sure, there are some creepy aspects to it. It’s not a career for everyone. But when I picture the great web of people he has influenced, whose tears have soaked the shoulder of his suit jackets, whose loved ones’ bodies he prepared for their last reunion, I am incredibly proud to know him. I’m amazed by him, really.
You’ve got to love a guy who once sent out a picture of himself in mortuary school holding up a corpse’s hand in the thumb’s up position, with the text “I PUT THE FUN IN FUNERAL” underneath.
The obituary editor of the Economist reflects on death and the afterlife in The Glad Reaper.
Lives as they are lived are far from neat. But the summing up of a life in a thousand words needs the imposition of a shape, and a circle is as good as anything.
Although I write biographies in my spare time, I’ve never been happy with the chronological or longitudinal form. I seldom read biography for fun, and when I do it’s in a strange way: first the childhood, usually until the subject falls in love, and then the death. Sometimes I read no more than that: the beginning and the end. It seems to me that these are the times (before the chaos of existence really closes round) when the essence of the person is most naked and exposed. We see who they are.
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In this strange age―where we fear death from left-behind back-packs and parked cars, and where we watch the deaths of strangers on the evening news but shrink from attending the deaths of our friends―obituarists have the easier cases. I deal generally with natural mortality in lives full of years and doings. But whether death comes slowly and privately, or randomly and publicly, its cause is not what most interests me. The vital question is, what next?
A cheerful approach it isn't, but a careful scrutiny of Twain's life and career discloses a man fascinated with suicide, murder, funerals, wakes, corpses, damnation and reincarnation to a degree well beyond mere morbidity. Rumors of Mark Twain's obsession with death cannot possibly be exaggerated.
Ultimately, of course, death is one of the few things we all have in common. However, Twain survived a youth more shadowed by mortality than many, and they were deaths of a particularly immediate and grisly kind.
Not only did his forbidding father, Judge Clemens, die of pneumonia when Twain was 11, but Twain is said to have witnessed the autopsy through a keyhole. Not only was he at his "sinless" brother Henry's bedside as he lay dying after a steamboat explosion, but Twain would forever blame himself for getting Henry his fateful job on board.
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But the uncanniest evidence for Twain's fixation on mortal matters is simply this: that in his two most enduring books, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and its habitually underrated junior partner, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," both title characters essentially attend their own funerals
Twain came very close to suicide in San Francisco in 1866.
When Twain put the pistol to his head that day in San Francisco, he couldn't know that he was holding the future of American literature at gunpoint. No man in that position ever knows just how much one bullet can wing. As always, best not to chance it.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more
than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
George Bernard Shaw
Rawlins Gilliland writes in Dying Laughing about the time his next door
neighbor Chuck died.
At the funeral home, his widow was hurt to see so few flowers in his viewing room. So, spotting a sea of unattended flora next door, I decided to briefly borrow a triumphant standing easel spray and placed it next to Chuck. Unfortunately, the family of the intended recipient began arriving. There was no discreet way to return their show-stopper from Chuck's room since the entire family was admiring his splashy arrangement, although confounded; who were "Denise and Tony", the names on the card? Feeling guilty, I impulsively entered a third room and purloined a carnation showpiece and delivered IT to the original man's congregation. However, when someone read this card aloud, inscribed, "We'll make love in heaven. Love, Marla", the dead man's significant someone became bellicose, bellowing, "Who the hell is Marla?"
Catholic clarification on administration of food and water to those in "vegetative states"
First question: Is the administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a "vegetative state" morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or cannot be administered to the patient without causing significant physical discomfort?
Response: Yes. The administration of food and water even by artificial means is, in principle, an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life. It is therefore obligatory to the extent to which, and for as long as, it is shown to accomplish its proper finality, which is the hydration and nourishment of the patient. In this way suffering and death by starvation and dehydration are prevented.
Second question: When nutrition and hydration are being supplied by artificial means to a patient in a "permanent vegetative state", may they be discontinued when competent physicians judge with moral certainty that the patient will never recover consciousness?
Response: No. A patient in a "permanent vegetative state" is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means.
I agree that the administration of 'extraordinary' methods such as ventilation and respiration are not required, and, if used can cruelly prolong dying, but the deliberate starvation of any human is abhorrent.
These days when the boundary between life and death can be so murky, when people often don't know what to do, the position of the Vatican is bracing.
Did Ddemetrio Nagtalon cause his own death by rushing to help a after a truck he rented and brought back because the parking brake repeatedly malfunctioned while a worker inside tried to fix the brake?
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.
But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severe decree.
These are Leonard Cohen's lyrics for Who by Fire And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche, who by powder,
who for his greed, who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling? And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?
In Argentina, thousands are seeing the serene gaze of a remarkably preserved mummy of an Inca maiden. La Donacella or the Maiden was found at the bottom of an icy pit on a volcana, still dressed in fine clothes.
She was probably sacrificed in a ceremony marking the annual corn festival, given alcohol to sleep, and left to die at an altitude of 22,000 feet on a volcano over 500 years ago.
Struck and killed by a school bus, the office of the medical examiner tried for two days to identify the victim who had only an iPod and some keys in his possession.
With help from Apple employees, they used the digital music player’s serial number to trace the device to Adam Ray Finley, 30, a former Des Moines man who moved to the Twin Cities five years ago.
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Finley was a TV and film reviewer for America Online and wrote for several digital publications. He is survived by his parents and two siblings. His funeral will be Monday at Lake City Union Church in Lake City
“He was a tender-hearted gentle young man. We are devastated,” his father said. “It’s all just a blur.”
Let this be a lesson to those of you out there who don't bring beer and soft drink cans back to the store for the nickel deposit or throw them in the trash.
A Cincinnati area man who died in a house fire early Wednesday morning may have survived if his escape had not been blocked by a large pile of beer cans.
A Cincinnati area man who died in a house fire early Wednesday morning may have survived if his escape had not been blocked by a large pile of beer cans. Fire crews were called to the home near Cincinnati before 6 a.m. and found heavy smoke and fire coming from the structure. "My daughter woke me up because her bedroom is over in the front of the house and she seen the flames on her window," Wayne Kendrick said Firefighters initially said no one was hurt, but one person, Robert McCarty, 37, was unaccounted for. Crews working inside the home found McCarty's body shortly after 10 a.m., and investigators said his exit was blocked by a 5-foot tall stack of beer cans. A caller to 911 said he couldn't get the door open. Caller: "Yeah I tried to kick the front door open. It feels like something is in front of the door. I kicked the lock open but I can't get the door all the way open and nobody responded. " 911 Operator: "It feels like something is in front of the door?" Caller: "Yeah." Damage to the home was extensive and estimated at $70,000. The cause of the fire was determined to be an overloaded circuit breaker.
UPDATE: The link was broken, so I am now linking to another blog with a full version of the news story
Mabel Lopez, mother of 8, GED graduate and teacher of English as a second language lived in Phoenix for 40 years, reached out to anyone who needed help.
Two men, illegal immigrants, were on the street when Mabel found them. She let them live in a studio apartment behind her house, even gave them work painting rental houses she owned.
When she found them drinking beer at her house, she asked them to leave. They stabbed her.
"At the first trial, they asked him (Martinez), 'What was the lady saying, was she screaming for help?' And he said, 'No, she said, "May God have mercy on your souls," ' " Paddack recalled. "With her dying breath, she was praying for her murderers. She wasn't praying for her children; she wasn't praying to have her life saved. She was praying for her murderer's souls. That's a hell of a lesson."
Hanging from the inside of a two-story high tent, I assume with a rope around his neck, yet it was two hours before anyone in the large tent thought to take him down.
"His friends thought he was doing an art piece," reports the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Land Management.
At Slate, Daniel Kevles gives us a history of poison. Favored more by women, trusted with food preparation and administration of medicine, as an undetectable way to get rid of husbands, cover up theft, and gain inheritances, arsenic became know as poudre de succession, "inheritance powder."
Poisoning was also relatively easy to get away with for centuries because possession of the murder weapon was by no means a clear indicator of guilt. Would-be poisoners could easily obtain the requisite materials from the shops of apothecaries or chemists, under the guise of using them in small doses for a cosmetic or medical purpose.
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Emsley, an accomplished science writer based at Cambridge University, dons his own detective's hat. He deploys recent scientific analyses of hair and exhumed bone, matches them against historical reports of victims' symptoms, and offers plausible explanations of the victims' bizarre behavior and mysterious or disputed deaths.
Mozart probably died of antimony poisoning, King Charles II of Britain, likely died from inhalation of intense mercury vapors while The Madness of King George was a textbook case of acute lead poisoning.
Most interesting is the case of Napoleon Bonaparte who was exhumed from his grave on St Helena to be reburied in Paris at Les Invalides twenty years after his death. His body was chemically tested and found to contain high levels of arsenic.
Who poisoned him? Was if the British? A jealous husband? Emsley argues that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper.
or more precisely, drawing on the work of an Italian scientist named Bartolomeo Gosio, by the green, arsenic-rich pigment in the wallpaper's star pattern.
At the end of the 19th century, Gosio was prompted to investigate why so many Italian children were inexplicably sickening and dying. Physicians suspected arsenic poisoning. Gosio demonstrated that a microorganism that grew on the flour-paste backing of the wallpaper could turn the arsenic in it into a gas that was powerful enough to make people ill and even kill them. If Napoleon chose the colors of his wallpaper to commemorate his imperial colors, Emsley writes, "[H]e did himself no favours … though they reminded him of his glorious past."
UPDATE: A new report from Vienna claims that Beethoven was done in by his physician who overdosed him with lead in a case of a cure gone wrong.
UPDATE 2: How could I have forgotten Oscar Wilde's last words, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
Fallaci returned to Italy in her final days because, she said, she didn't want to die in exile. She asked Fisichella to help arrange a room for her in Florence where she could look out at the famous dome of Brunelleschi atop the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. She also requested a CD with the sound of church bells to play softly in the background.
It was Fallaci's desire, Fisichella said, that on the day of her funeral, the bells of the cathedral would ring out. It wasn't easy to arrange, Fisichella said. Though he didn't elaborate, it's well known that some Catholics objected to bestowing such an honor upon a professed atheist, while others argued that it would be seen as an endorsement of her stridently anti-Islamic views. Nonetheless, Fisichella said, he managed to pull it off.
"With a great deal of difficulty, due to various polemics, it happened that when her coffin left the clinic to go to the cemetery, the bells of the Cathedral of Florence pealed for Oriana Fallaci," he said, to thunderous applause from the crowd in Rimini.
"We're prolonging life, but we're also prolonging dying," says Mercedes Bern-Klug, an end-of-life researcher at the University of Iowa, who studies what she terms "ambiguous dying syndrome." Hundreds of thousands of people are surviving longer with advanced dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or in coma states. For their loved ones, "coping with the ambiguity creates a unique type of stress," says Dr. Bern-Klug. "It's a form of angst we don't even have a name for in our culture."
Jeff Zaslow in the Wall St. Journal on Waiting for the End: When Loved Ones Are Lost in Limbo. As medical advances continue to "deform the dying process," Dr. Bern-Klug predicts, families will have to deal with variations of limbo that are now unimaginable. It's territory that must be charted carefully, she says, as more of us share that experience of standing on a riverbank, waiting.
As a long-time mystery fan, I've been enthralled from time to time with the idea of the perfect murder.
Not that I have any plans or anyone in mind, I assure you. Seems like the best place for a perfect crime is aboard the high seas as Congressman Christopher Shays warns us in Missing on Cruises.
Disposal of the body is the difficult part so the prospect of being able to toss the body overboard is inviting.
The other big problem is keeping the secret and not telling anyone how brilliant you were.
A perfect murder is just too delicious not to share especially if it's about "the most missingist man in America", Judge Crater. An old woman who left a letter "Do Not Open Until My Death" in her safety deposit box broke open that case 73 years after Judge Crater stepped into a cab never to be seen again.
The desire to confess may prove irresistible.
And so, we come to the crime of the decade in Poland.
Crime author charged with murder after police read his perfect plot. An author leafing through a newspaper comes across tantalising details of a murder so grisly that he becomes obsessed, and imagines the events into a novel. Or a murderer, so self-satisfied with the brilliance of his perfect crime, pens an account to pass off as fiction and enshrine it in literary history....
Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.
Prolonged litigation can split marriages, estrange families and deform lives. So I was delighted to read Pearl Buck heirs reach accord
The long-squabbling heirs of Pearl S. Buck's legacy have discovered a way to resolve their complex litigation: Banish the lawyers.
The Nobel laureate's children and Pearl S. Buck International, the charity in Bucks County the writer established before her death in Vermont in 1973, announced an amicable settlement yesterday of their dispute over who owns the recently recovered manuscript of The Good Earth, Buck's masterwork.
They sat down in the kitchen and locked out the lawyers.
"I don't think it was Pearl Buck's intent to have everybody at each other's throats over this," Long said. "This is the first time in 30-some years that everyone is talking nice, and that's important."
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Buck, who spent her later years promoting international harmony and racial understanding, left a legacy of disharmony among her closest survivors.
In her final years, the widowed writer took up with a dance instructor half her age, disinherited her children, and bequeathed her belongings to various competing interests. It took her heirs seven years in Vermont probate court to sort out ownership, though some issues were unresolved until yesterday.
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The agreement also calls for all litigation to cease.
"Abe Lincoln had useful advice - avoid litigation at all costs," Walsh said. "I wished we had been able to, but we couldn't. But now we have."
They were one of those New York couples: good-looking and ridiculously gifted. She had a voracious mind that intimidated nearly everyone, and blond hair she kept in braids. He was a certified art star, with appearances at the Whitney Museum and a CD cover for Beck among his lengthy list of credits.
Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were a formidable pair, and by all accounts, soul mates for the last 12 years. So a few weeks ago, when Duncan committed suicide at the age of 40, friends and family knew that Blake, 35, was devastated. No one, though, knew how devastated -- not his mother in Takoma Park, where he grew up, nor the curator putting together an upcoming solo show in Washington at the Corcoran.
A week later, on July 17, witnesses on Rockaway Beach in New York saw a man take off his clothes and walk into the ocean. On Monday, police confirmed that Blake had taken his own life, leaving behind a note that authorities would describe but not quote. "It was basically about wanting to be reunited with Theresa Duncan," said Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department. "It referenced her suicide and said that he hoped to rejoin her."
Ernest Norton was playing cricket with his 17-year-old son in Kent, England, when a group of 15 youths gathered at the fence around the outdoor tennis courts and began shouting abuse. The verbal abuse grew worse and the group began throwing stones and pieces of wood until one stone hit the side of his face and Norton collapsed and suffered a major heart attack.
Eugene Pilouw has diabetes that has damaged the nerves in his nose. That's why he says he couldn't smell his dead wife's body decomposing in a storage room in the back of their house.
Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves
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Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices. [...]
SPIEGEL: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of enormous desperation?
Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: Whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it.
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SPIEGEL: In 1987 in your interview with SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein you said it was really hard for you to speak about religion in public. What does faith mean for you?
Solzhenitsyn: For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.
SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?
Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me -- he died at the age of 27 -- and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
The Ambulance Driver recalls the moments, over seven years, when he had to tell anxious loved ones the person he was crouched over was dead; beyond his help. There were men gone from old age, young blond accident victims, the middle-aged expired from a heart attack, daredevil young men on their shattered motorcycles. And the anxious survivors “… and then I say The Words. ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’
The most popular grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is that of an American.
Jim Morrison, the lead singer for the Doors, was only 27 when he died, supposedly in a bathtub of natural causes. But a recent book says Morrison died of a heroin overdose in a hot Paris club, the Rock ' n Roll Circus.
How Jim Morrison died "There was foam coming out of his lips," the former nightclub owner told TIME. A doctor who was in the club that night concluded that Morrison had overdosed, and "said Jim was dead," he says. "I wanted to call the police or rescue people to help. They [Morrison's drug dealers] said no," and instead had the body driven back to the apartment the singer had rented with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. It was then soaked in the bathtub.
This might sound like a juicy tale concocted to sell books. But Bernett isn't the only person in Paris who remembers that night 36 years ago, although it appears to have taken the publication of his book to prompt them to finally speak up. Patrick Chauvel — now a renowned war photographer — told TIME he was 19 and drunk that night, when he was dragooned into helping load Morrison's body into a car. Since he had just returned from photographing the Vietnam War, Chauvel was deemed especially suited to dealing with corpses. "We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," recalls Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison and did not cooperate with Bernett's book. Explaining the cover-up, Chauvel says: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it is not good p.r.
He was only arrested after he tried to steal a purse from a woman and the police happened to come up the decomposing corpse in his pickup truck in the parking lot.
Condolences to the family of Maynard Samuel Anthony.
He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin.
They are described in his statement as about 1.2m tall, with disproportionately large heads.
Towards the end of the affidavit, Haut concludes: "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space".
What's particularly interesting about Walter Haut is that in the many interviews he gave before his death, he played down his role and made no such claims.
Personally, I think anyone who uses penis enlargement creams is a bit tetched in the head.
But concocting your own is just plain nuts.
The Cambodian government is warning delusional men against trying their own home remedies after a 35-year-old construction worker self-injected hair tonic cream into his own penis in the hopes of growing a thicker, more lustrous one. His treatment caused massive ulceration and left him in such permanent agony that he killed himself.
Legacy Matters
