All Souls Cottage
...Where Mourning Has Broken
Monday, June 13, 2016
Book of the Moment
Gone to the Grave
A gathered set of memories from those who grew up in the Ozarks, away from the cities and a good distances from hospitals and funeral home. This is a recollection of the last days of home funerals when it was still the norm rather than the exception. There is a community structure seen here that, excepting the resurgence of home funerals and some pockets left in the US, is rarely seen today.
Late, but Not That Kind of Late...
Life gets distracting, but with two years additional knowledge and recently becoming a certified Mercy Doula (more on that another time), I am ready to webinate again.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Today's Post Courtesy of Lifehacker
How Do I Prepare for the Death of a Family Member?
Dear Lifehacker,
I've seen my friends lose their loved ones and, in many cases, find the process even more trying and stressful because they weren't prepared. While I'm still lucky to have my parents, my dad's sick and our time is limited. What do I need to do to prepare for the inevitable? P
Sincerely,
MBP
Dear MB,
I'm sorry to hear about your dad. Handling a death in the family is always difficult, especially when it's a parent, but you're doing the right thing by planning ahead. Rushing through arrangements and figuring out legal details are among the last things you'll want to do during a time of mourning. Aside from being terribly sad, the death of a loved one can be complicated, expensive, and a lot of work. While you can't eliminate the stress entirely, you can plan and ask for help in advance to minimize it.
Discuss and Arrange Funeral Plans in Advance
Funeral plans are complicated, often expensive (upwards of $10,000 in many cases), and payment in advance is required. Life insurance policies and other benefits often take a month or two to arrive, so while you may be able to cover the cost in the future you'll actually need the money in advance.
If the financial burden has been placed on you in full or in part, you essentially have two options: save the cash ahead of time or ensure you have credit available. While credit isn't the best option, as you may end up paying interest while you wait for benefits to come in, many banks will extend your line temporarily in the event of a death if you simply call and ask. This is not an easy call to make last-minute, so make it early. Some banks may require proof of of a life insurance policy or even a death certificate when the day finally comes. Knowing these details in advance will help you approach the situation more practically when you'll likely be very emotional.
Making the actual arrangements will be difficult regardless of if you're doing it alone or with other family members. When multiple people are planning, arguments can often arise regarding minor details. When you're handing the arrangements alone, you simply have a lot of work for one person. Chances are, however, that a number of decisions have been made already. Cemetery plots are often purchased in advance. Some people prefer cremation and have decided that's what they want. While it's never an easy conversation, you'll need to discuss preferences with your terminal loved one. In the case of a parent, sometimes that conversation is best had with the healthier of the two. In some cases, the surviving parent may be too distraught to discuss details. Who to speak to about the arrangements is a personal and situation-specific decision. You'll have to judge what's best for you and for your loved ones. Of course, the sooner you discuss the details the better. Talking about death is much easier when it feels farther away.
Ask for Help Before You'll Need It
Aside from the planning you can do yourself, you can enlist help from a number of people before and during the process. Funeral homes provide services to help you through the process. If you're having a religious service, leaders of your church, synagogue, or other congregation have dealt with many deaths and can be a great source of comfort and assistance during the process (whether you, personally, hold any religious affiliation or not).
Of course, friends and family will be the greatest help. Decide who you want by your side and who you don't beforehand. Ask for assistance before you need it so you know you'll have it. While most everyone will want to help you, if you're asking for it just days in advance they won't be prepared. Additionally, you'll want to inform your boss in advance as well. You obviously won't know dates, but if you're expecting an upcoming loss your employers will most likely accommodate your needs to take time off when it comes. They're far more likely to help if they know what to expect.
Acquire Forms and Legal Documents
When planning for a death, there are several documents you may need and calls you'll need to make. If you're publishing an obituary in a newspaper, for example, find out the process from the paper before you have to submit so the task can be handled without much thought. If you're responsible for notifying the government of your family member's death, acquire those documents ahead of time. You may also need to close bank, investment, and other financial accounts. If you can fill any of them out in advance, at least partially, you'll be better off. Paperwork is not something you'll want to do when you lose someone you love. Additionally, if you're in charge of the will you should obtain a copy early. If a lawyer or other family member is handling the reading and dispensation of property, just find out what they need from you so you're prepared.
Although a more unusual suggestion, you should prepare your smartphone (if you have one) for the inevitable torrent of calls you'll receive. If you can get call blocking software that will prevent anyone not in your address book from calling, you should consider it. You may not want lots of condolence calls from people you don't know or don't know well. You definitely won't want calls from businesses trying to capitalize on your inheritance. If your have an iPhone, you can just use the Do Not Disturb feature in iOS 6 to filter out most people. On Android, try Mr. Number orDroidBlock. For more information on blocking calls, read our guide. Of course, this sort of thing may not bother you. If it does, however, take necessary measures to prevent unwanted calls in advance.
Additionally, find a friend to handle your mail for a couple of weeks. Just hand them a mail key and your checkbook so they can get your mail and handle as much of it as necessary. It's not a huge task, but you'll likely fall behind in a time of grief and you don't want to incur any charges. Having someone write a few checks on your behalf and make sure you don't miss any important mail makes all the difference. It's everyday life that can be the toughest, so assistance with regular tasks can help you get through the initial period of grief.
Love,
Lifehacker
Friday, November 22, 2013
DIY Funerals
Source: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/11/diy-death-natural-home-funerals
WELLFLEET, Mass. – When 20-month-old Adelaida Kay Van Meter died of a rare genetic disease last winter, her father, Murro, gently carried her body out of the house to his wood shop in the pines near Gull Pond. He placed her in a small cedar box and surrounded her with ice packs. For three days, the little girl’s grieving parents were able to visit her and kiss her and hug her. Then, on the third day, after the medical examiner came to sign the last bit of paperwork, Van Meter and his wife, Sophia Fox, said good-bye to their baby, screwed the lid on the box and drove to a Plymouth, Mass. crematorium, where they watched the little coffin enter the furnace.
“We took care of Adelaida when she was an infant, we took care of her when she was healthy, we advocated for her in the hospital, we took care of her when she was sick,” her father said. “Why wouldn’t we take care of her when she was dead?” Sophia Fox added: “There was no way I was going to hand her over to some stranger at a funeral parlor where she’d be put in a refrigerator with a bunch of other dead bodies. This way was so much more natural. We saw the life leave her body and we were better able to let go.”
Death remains a topic that many of us would rather avoid. And when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of caring for the dead, most of us tend to think it’s best — and furthermore, required by law — to let professional funeral arrangers handle the arrangements.
Well, it turns out that in most states it’s perfectly legal to care for your own dead. And, with new momentum to shatter longstanding taboos and stop tip-toeing around death — from “death with dignity” measures sweeping the country to projects promoting kitchen table “conversations”about our deepest end-of-life wishes — a re-energized DIY death movement is emerging.
This “personal funeral” or “home death care” movement involves reclaiming various aspects of death: for instance, keeping the dead body at home for some time rather than having it whisked it away; rejecting embalming and other environmentally questionable measures to prettify the dead; personally transporting a loved one’s corpse to a cemetery; and even, in some cases, home burials. Families are learning to navigate these delicate tasks with help from a growing cadre of“death midwives” “doulas” or “home death guides.”
When Adelaida Van Meter died last winter, her parents kept her little body at home for three days to say good-bye. (Courtesy Murro Van Meter)
The DIY death movement is loosely knit, and motivations vary, ranging from environmental concerns to religious or financial considerations. (Traditional funerals can cost around $10,000 or more; when you do-it-yourself, the cost can be reduced into the hundreds, experts says.) Each case is fiercely personal — there’s no playbook — but they all share a very intimate sense that death should unfold as a family matter, not as a moment to relinquish loved ones to a paid stranger or parlor.
This Is Legal?
The highly personal nature of home funerals appealed to Janet Baczuk, 58, of Sandwich, Mass. So, when her 93-year-old father, Stephen, died in September, 2011, she said, “I thought, I’d like to do that for my dad.” “It’s more humane, more natural…and more environmentally sound.”
Baczuk and her sister washed their father’s dead body using essential oils, and got a permit to drive the corpse to the cemetery in their (covered) pickup truck. A World War II veteran, Stephen Baczuk was buried at Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, where officials allowed his simple pine and cherry casket to be placed directly on the ground, covered by an inverted concrete vault with no lid, “like a butter dish,” Baczuk said. When her mother died back in 2006, Baczuk said, she had no inkling that home funerals were an option — but wishes she did. “I didn’t know it could be done,” she said. “I think a lot of lay people don’t know this is legal or possible.”
She’s right.
“When it comes to death, it doesn’t matter where you are on the scale of education or socioeconomics, many people are shocked to find that it’s legal to care for your own dead at home,” says Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a Burlington, Vermont, nonprofit that works on all aspects of funeral education, from helping consumers reduce costs to advocating on DIY methods. “And I think this speaks to how distant death has become for us in just over a century. In the late 1800s, even turn of the century, caring for the dead was as prosaic and ordinary as taking care of the children or milking the farm animals.”
Slocum offers this analogy: If a woman wants to run a restaurant, she needs approval from the health department and officials, of course, would be permitted to inspect her kitchen. But the health department would have no jurisdiction over the same woman’s own kitchen at home. “They cannot come in and tell her that her refrigerator is subpar, and they have no authority to tell her she is not allowed to cook dinner for her kids. They can’t compel her to order dinner from a commercial, licensed restaurant,” Slocum says. “The same holds with state funeral regulatory boards. Their job is to ensure public welfare and protect paying consumers. Bizarrely, however, many think their jurisdiction extends to telling families they must pay an unwanted third party funeral home to do something the family could do for themselves."
Kyle Gamboa, 1995-2013 (Courtesy Kymberlyrenee Gamboa)
What characterizes the DIY death experience is that it’s so very personal. Consider these vastly different snapshots:
• In northern California, Kimberlyrenee Gamboa’s son Kyle committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in September, three weeks into his senior year in high school. A seemingly happy 18-year-old with lots of friends and into competitive lasertag, Kyle’s death was such a shock, his mother said, she doesn’t know how she’d have managed it through a typical funeral. Instead, with help from her church and and home death guide, Heidi Boucher, Kyle’s body was returned to the family home one day after his death. Boucher washed Kyle and helped arrange the body on dry ice changed every 24 hours; she gathered information to fill out Kyle’s death certificate and managed all coordination with the mortuary. For three full days, Kyle’s body lay in the family living room in an open casket, not embalmed. During that time, day and night, surrounded by pictures and candles and flowers, all of his friends and family could say good-bye and remember his short life. For Kyle’s mother, that time was critical to her healing.
“If I had to hand him over to funeral parlor, have him embalmed and get two hours on a Tuesday afternoon for everyone to see him — I couldn’t have done that,” she said. “It would have been extremely hard, not only for me, but for everyone who knew him…I still have my ups and downs, but I had three more days with my son — of him physically being there and accessible to me. I didn’t want to leave the house because I knew these were my last three days with him. Until you go through it, you don’t realize how very important that time is for your healing.”
• Kanta Lipsky, a yoga teacher in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard, compared her 66-year-old husband John’s “home death” to a “home birth.” “A couple of days before I could see it coming,” Lipsky says. When he died of cancer in March 2011, she said, a nurse from the local hospital prepared his body. “We did a very beautiful ceremony at the house. Friends came over to wash John’s body, a rabbi said prayers during the washing. There was lots of water and towels all over the floor. We put him in the traditional Jewish white loose pajamas; my tradition is Hindu, so we placed rice balls in the casket and had a garland of roses. We did a waving of lights and we all sang — there were 20-25 people in the house. He was wrapped in beautiful comforter, and we lifted him up and passed him hand to hand through hallway. It was very moving…It was like a home birth, but it was a home death, very hands on…there were no rules, it just unfolded, evolved and we all felt really comfortable with it…it was such an easy slipping out, his spirit just slipped right out and we were with him, it was a part of life.”
• In Hubbardston, Mass. near Worcester, it took three months of haggling with town officialsbefore Paul Flint was allowed to bury his 14-year-old stepson, who died in a car accident in 2011, on the family’s property. Because the accident happened in Minnesota, Flint said, the family was keen on having the boy, Daniel Davis, laid to rest at home. “My wife wanted him buried on the property,” Flint said. “There’s a couple of favorite spots he liked and he’s buried there, near the rope bridge across the creek.”
Even Bill Cosby chose to bury his son the family property in Shelbourne, Mass., “beneath the hills and trees where young Ennis played as a child.”
Not All Victorian Sitting Rooms and Cadillacs
Obviously, families taking care of their dead loved ones isn’t new. Indeed, it was the norm until the last quarter of the 19th century, when a burgeoning funeral industry evolved. Today, “the funeral business is so effectively insulated from free-market competition that many families can’t even imagine a funeral home free of faux-Victorian sitting rooms and a fleet of Cadillacs,” writes Slocum, also the co-author of Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death.
The home funeral movement isn’t new either, Slocum says (think of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death and on to the funeral business reformers of the 1960s and 70s). But even as interest grows in the DIY death movement, many people still believe that death should be left to the professionals. “Americans have a neurotic relationship with death,” Slocum says. “Most people are convinced they are physically or emotionally unable to handle it.” He says death should be no more legally controversial than any other “do it yourself” matter:
We’d never put up with this in any other sphere; it would be laughable to contemplate state workers going around forcing citizens to go to Jiffy Lube instead of changing their own oil, or to hire licensed daycare workers instead of staying home with the kids. But that’s what some funeral boards do. The only reason we accept this is that we’re so psychologically removed from and afraid of death that we assume such absurdities are normal even when we’d recognize how ridiculous they are in any other context.
But emotional complexity is another story. Many people are profoundly grateful to leave funeral arrangements to outside professionals. Still, there’s often an assumption that the grieving are simply too fragile to cope with death head on.
While caring for his wife through late stage melanoma, another Cape Cod man, Grey, who asked that his full name not be used, made a decision: in discussions with his dying wife and daughters the family decided to keep her body at home after death. But when Grey told a hospice worker what he planned to do, he said the worker spent half an hour on the phone trying to talk him out of it: “She said, ‘You’re going to be distraught and you’re going to have your wife’s dead body in the house and…you may think you can handle this, but so many things can go wrong, I think you should reconsider.’”
In the end, though, Grey stuck to his plan: he had attended to his wife at home through her brutal illness, and it was almost a relief (at least for a short time) to care for her after death, when she was no longer in pain. Grey and his daughters bathed her body with lavender oil, built her a cedar coffin and watched over her for three days in the house before taking her to the crematory. “We all felt it was a very important ritual,” he said. “I’m glad we did it that way.”
A National Movement
As a measure of how DIY death has flourished, Slocum says, ten years ago there were a handful of (mostly women) around the country helping families learn about home funerals. Now there’s a nationwide organization, the National Home Funeral Alliance, with about 300 members, a code of ethics and rules governing their practices (they can charge for educating individuals and families privately or at workshops, for instance, but can’t act as pseudo funeral directors.)
At their fourth annual meeting last month, about 70 home death guides, hospice nurses, doctors, students and funeral directors met in Raleigh, North Carolina, to talk about home death care and green burials, among other topics, says Lee Webster, vice president of the NHFA and a home funeral guide in Plymouth, New Hampshire. They also tried to figure out a way to more systematically collect data on home death care and build a central repository for consumer information.
Webster, a longtime hospice volunteer, says while data-gathering remains tricky, it’s clear the movement is growing. “There’s an explosion” of interest in home funerals or blended, hybrid funerals with some elements done personally and some left to traditional funeral directors, she says.
What’s driving this explosion? It’s a Boomer thing, according to Webster. “This is the generation that fought for breast-feeding in public and home births; and they want to bring back the idea of a natural death. It’s the ethic of this generation.”
Ecopods and Banana Leaf Urns
Cost and the environment are also driving factors. People like the idea of “fewer chemicals, no rainforest woods and Chinese steel,” Webster says, noting that when you avoid embalming you’re not “draining blood into the public septic system and not subjecting loved ones to violent procedures — the embalming process is quite brutal — just for cosmetic reasons and for no health benefits.”
(One casket designer in Arlington, Mass., for instance, offers artist-embellished Ecopods for burials, hand-made from recycled paper and covered with materials of silk-and-mulberry, as well as biodegradable coffins, caskets, and urns made of paper mache, bamboo, banana leaf, wicker, and cardboard.)
Webster adds: “Once people’s fears are relieved about body care, body mechanics, smells and fluids, a light goes off and they say, ‘Why would I not want to do this?” Even while many of us shudder at the prospect, Webster says the dead “can be very beautiful. To go back to the birth model: it’s like birthing people out in as natural a way as possible.”
You might think there’d be some funeral industry push-back against all this embrace of more personal, no-frills death care. (Of course, with no national numbers, it’s hard to know how many people are actually embracing the trend.) Still, it doesn’t seem like the industry is particularly threatened.
Daniel Higgins, a second-generation funeral director in Rockland, Mass., and spokesperson for theNational Funeral Directors Association, said he doesn’t have any direct experience with families interested in home funerals, but has no problem with people making their own choices.
Indeed, he said, more families want to personalize even traditional funerals to better reflect their lives. For instance, he said, last year he helped arrange a memorial service at a local golf course. The dead man, a golf fanatic, was cremated and placed in a biodegradable urn in the main pond at the course. “Several hundred people gathered around the pond,” Higgins said. “And all his friends hit a golf ball into the pond with a personal message as a final goodbye.”
The My-Choice Generation
Heidi Boucher, who says she’s helped over 100 families care for their dead loved ones, is completing a film, In The Parlour: The Final Goodbye, about the “resurgence” of the home death movement. A home death guide for over 25 years, she says: “I’ve watched from only a handful of us doing this in this country…to now, when it’s become vogue. A lot of this generation, we’re the ones who took control of where we’re going to send our kids to school, what car to drive. Our generation is the one that wants to find out what’s in it before we eat it.”
One problem is that states and local municipalities are all over the map when it comes to regulating death.
There remain nine states with laws or other impediments (from requiring a funeral director’s signature on a death certificate, to mandating that a funeral director be present at the final disposition of the body) that make it difficult for families who want to care for their own dead, Josh Slocum says.
On the other end of the spectrum, the state of Massachusetts offers clear instructions for home funerals right on its website, including what you need for a death certificate, guidance on burials and preparing the body. “The human body decomposes rapidly after death,” the website says. “Care must be taken to keep the body as cool as possible in order the slow the decomposition that results in noxious odors and the leakage of body fluids from body orifices. A human body can be kept in a cool room at least 24 hours before decomposition begins. Heat in the room should be turned off in winter, and air conditioning should be turned on in summer.”
Reclaiming A Death Tradition
But even in an evolved state like Massachusetts, many families’ first reaction to home funerals is something like: “‘You mean that’s legal?!’ says Heather Massey, a longtime home funeral guide who runs the education and consulting center “In Loving Hands” on Cape Cod. Massey says her goal is the creation of a robust home death support system, “a volunteer care circle, comprised of community members trained and experienced in home funerals, who can in turn assist and guide other families who wish to care for their own at death, thereby truly bringing this loving tradition back into the hands of family and community.”
For Adelaida Van Meter’s parents, taking personal control of their daughter’s death was “imperative,” said Sophia Fox. There were some obstacles, however. “I had several funeral homes tell me over the phone that what I was trying to do was illegal,” Van Meter said. “I didn’t try to argue with them, I just hung up.”
Eventually, with help from a pediatric social worker and Heather Massey, the family was able to fill out all the required paperwork and keep the baby’s body at home after she died.
I recently emailed Murro to check in and see if there’d been any news since we talked during the summer. It had been about a year and ten months since Adelaida died; the couple’s new daughter, Annabelle, was nearly 7 months old. Here’s what he said:
“The only news is that we continue to be head over heels in love with our daughter Annabelle, who is doing great. With that said, not a hour goes by that we don’t feel the loss of Adelaida. So I guess these things would qualify as no new news.”
WELLFLEET, Mass. – When 20-month-old Adelaida Kay Van Meter died of a rare genetic disease last winter, her father, Murro, gently carried her body out of the house to his wood shop in the pines near Gull Pond. He placed her in a small cedar box and surrounded her with ice packs. For three days, the little girl’s grieving parents were able to visit her and kiss her and hug her. Then, on the third day, after the medical examiner came to sign the last bit of paperwork, Van Meter and his wife, Sophia Fox, said good-bye to their baby, screwed the lid on the box and drove to a Plymouth, Mass. crematorium, where they watched the little coffin enter the furnace.
“We took care of Adelaida when she was an infant, we took care of her when she was healthy, we advocated for her in the hospital, we took care of her when she was sick,” her father said. “Why wouldn’t we take care of her when she was dead?” Sophia Fox added: “There was no way I was going to hand her over to some stranger at a funeral parlor where she’d be put in a refrigerator with a bunch of other dead bodies. This way was so much more natural. We saw the life leave her body and we were better able to let go.”
Death remains a topic that many of us would rather avoid. And when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of caring for the dead, most of us tend to think it’s best — and furthermore, required by law — to let professional funeral arrangers handle the arrangements.
Well, it turns out that in most states it’s perfectly legal to care for your own dead. And, with new momentum to shatter longstanding taboos and stop tip-toeing around death — from “death with dignity” measures sweeping the country to projects promoting kitchen table “conversations”about our deepest end-of-life wishes — a re-energized DIY death movement is emerging.
This “personal funeral” or “home death care” movement involves reclaiming various aspects of death: for instance, keeping the dead body at home for some time rather than having it whisked it away; rejecting embalming and other environmentally questionable measures to prettify the dead; personally transporting a loved one’s corpse to a cemetery; and even, in some cases, home burials. Families are learning to navigate these delicate tasks with help from a growing cadre of“death midwives” “doulas” or “home death guides.”
When Adelaida Van Meter died last winter, her parents kept her little body at home for three days to say good-bye. (Courtesy Murro Van Meter)
The DIY death movement is loosely knit, and motivations vary, ranging from environmental concerns to religious or financial considerations. (Traditional funerals can cost around $10,000 or more; when you do-it-yourself, the cost can be reduced into the hundreds, experts says.) Each case is fiercely personal — there’s no playbook — but they all share a very intimate sense that death should unfold as a family matter, not as a moment to relinquish loved ones to a paid stranger or parlor.
This Is Legal?
The highly personal nature of home funerals appealed to Janet Baczuk, 58, of Sandwich, Mass. So, when her 93-year-old father, Stephen, died in September, 2011, she said, “I thought, I’d like to do that for my dad.” “It’s more humane, more natural…and more environmentally sound.”
Baczuk and her sister washed their father’s dead body using essential oils, and got a permit to drive the corpse to the cemetery in their (covered) pickup truck. A World War II veteran, Stephen Baczuk was buried at Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, where officials allowed his simple pine and cherry casket to be placed directly on the ground, covered by an inverted concrete vault with no lid, “like a butter dish,” Baczuk said. When her mother died back in 2006, Baczuk said, she had no inkling that home funerals were an option — but wishes she did. “I didn’t know it could be done,” she said. “I think a lot of lay people don’t know this is legal or possible.”
She’s right.
“When it comes to death, it doesn’t matter where you are on the scale of education or socioeconomics, many people are shocked to find that it’s legal to care for your own dead at home,” says Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a Burlington, Vermont, nonprofit that works on all aspects of funeral education, from helping consumers reduce costs to advocating on DIY methods. “And I think this speaks to how distant death has become for us in just over a century. In the late 1800s, even turn of the century, caring for the dead was as prosaic and ordinary as taking care of the children or milking the farm animals.”
Slocum offers this analogy: If a woman wants to run a restaurant, she needs approval from the health department and officials, of course, would be permitted to inspect her kitchen. But the health department would have no jurisdiction over the same woman’s own kitchen at home. “They cannot come in and tell her that her refrigerator is subpar, and they have no authority to tell her she is not allowed to cook dinner for her kids. They can’t compel her to order dinner from a commercial, licensed restaurant,” Slocum says. “The same holds with state funeral regulatory boards. Their job is to ensure public welfare and protect paying consumers. Bizarrely, however, many think their jurisdiction extends to telling families they must pay an unwanted third party funeral home to do something the family could do for themselves."
Kyle Gamboa, 1995-2013 (Courtesy Kymberlyrenee Gamboa)
What characterizes the DIY death experience is that it’s so very personal. Consider these vastly different snapshots:
• In northern California, Kimberlyrenee Gamboa’s son Kyle committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in September, three weeks into his senior year in high school. A seemingly happy 18-year-old with lots of friends and into competitive lasertag, Kyle’s death was such a shock, his mother said, she doesn’t know how she’d have managed it through a typical funeral. Instead, with help from her church and and home death guide, Heidi Boucher, Kyle’s body was returned to the family home one day after his death. Boucher washed Kyle and helped arrange the body on dry ice changed every 24 hours; she gathered information to fill out Kyle’s death certificate and managed all coordination with the mortuary. For three full days, Kyle’s body lay in the family living room in an open casket, not embalmed. During that time, day and night, surrounded by pictures and candles and flowers, all of his friends and family could say good-bye and remember his short life. For Kyle’s mother, that time was critical to her healing.
“If I had to hand him over to funeral parlor, have him embalmed and get two hours on a Tuesday afternoon for everyone to see him — I couldn’t have done that,” she said. “It would have been extremely hard, not only for me, but for everyone who knew him…I still have my ups and downs, but I had three more days with my son — of him physically being there and accessible to me. I didn’t want to leave the house because I knew these were my last three days with him. Until you go through it, you don’t realize how very important that time is for your healing.”
• Kanta Lipsky, a yoga teacher in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard, compared her 66-year-old husband John’s “home death” to a “home birth.” “A couple of days before I could see it coming,” Lipsky says. When he died of cancer in March 2011, she said, a nurse from the local hospital prepared his body. “We did a very beautiful ceremony at the house. Friends came over to wash John’s body, a rabbi said prayers during the washing. There was lots of water and towels all over the floor. We put him in the traditional Jewish white loose pajamas; my tradition is Hindu, so we placed rice balls in the casket and had a garland of roses. We did a waving of lights and we all sang — there were 20-25 people in the house. He was wrapped in beautiful comforter, and we lifted him up and passed him hand to hand through hallway. It was very moving…It was like a home birth, but it was a home death, very hands on…there were no rules, it just unfolded, evolved and we all felt really comfortable with it…it was such an easy slipping out, his spirit just slipped right out and we were with him, it was a part of life.”
• In Hubbardston, Mass. near Worcester, it took three months of haggling with town officialsbefore Paul Flint was allowed to bury his 14-year-old stepson, who died in a car accident in 2011, on the family’s property. Because the accident happened in Minnesota, Flint said, the family was keen on having the boy, Daniel Davis, laid to rest at home. “My wife wanted him buried on the property,” Flint said. “There’s a couple of favorite spots he liked and he’s buried there, near the rope bridge across the creek.”
Even Bill Cosby chose to bury his son the family property in Shelbourne, Mass., “beneath the hills and trees where young Ennis played as a child.”
Not All Victorian Sitting Rooms and Cadillacs
Obviously, families taking care of their dead loved ones isn’t new. Indeed, it was the norm until the last quarter of the 19th century, when a burgeoning funeral industry evolved. Today, “the funeral business is so effectively insulated from free-market competition that many families can’t even imagine a funeral home free of faux-Victorian sitting rooms and a fleet of Cadillacs,” writes Slocum, also the co-author of Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death.
The home funeral movement isn’t new either, Slocum says (think of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death and on to the funeral business reformers of the 1960s and 70s). But even as interest grows in the DIY death movement, many people still believe that death should be left to the professionals. “Americans have a neurotic relationship with death,” Slocum says. “Most people are convinced they are physically or emotionally unable to handle it.” He says death should be no more legally controversial than any other “do it yourself” matter:
We’d never put up with this in any other sphere; it would be laughable to contemplate state workers going around forcing citizens to go to Jiffy Lube instead of changing their own oil, or to hire licensed daycare workers instead of staying home with the kids. But that’s what some funeral boards do. The only reason we accept this is that we’re so psychologically removed from and afraid of death that we assume such absurdities are normal even when we’d recognize how ridiculous they are in any other context.
But emotional complexity is another story. Many people are profoundly grateful to leave funeral arrangements to outside professionals. Still, there’s often an assumption that the grieving are simply too fragile to cope with death head on.
While caring for his wife through late stage melanoma, another Cape Cod man, Grey, who asked that his full name not be used, made a decision: in discussions with his dying wife and daughters the family decided to keep her body at home after death. But when Grey told a hospice worker what he planned to do, he said the worker spent half an hour on the phone trying to talk him out of it: “She said, ‘You’re going to be distraught and you’re going to have your wife’s dead body in the house and…you may think you can handle this, but so many things can go wrong, I think you should reconsider.’”
In the end, though, Grey stuck to his plan: he had attended to his wife at home through her brutal illness, and it was almost a relief (at least for a short time) to care for her after death, when she was no longer in pain. Grey and his daughters bathed her body with lavender oil, built her a cedar coffin and watched over her for three days in the house before taking her to the crematory. “We all felt it was a very important ritual,” he said. “I’m glad we did it that way.”
A National Movement
As a measure of how DIY death has flourished, Slocum says, ten years ago there were a handful of (mostly women) around the country helping families learn about home funerals. Now there’s a nationwide organization, the National Home Funeral Alliance, with about 300 members, a code of ethics and rules governing their practices (they can charge for educating individuals and families privately or at workshops, for instance, but can’t act as pseudo funeral directors.)
At their fourth annual meeting last month, about 70 home death guides, hospice nurses, doctors, students and funeral directors met in Raleigh, North Carolina, to talk about home death care and green burials, among other topics, says Lee Webster, vice president of the NHFA and a home funeral guide in Plymouth, New Hampshire. They also tried to figure out a way to more systematically collect data on home death care and build a central repository for consumer information.
Webster, a longtime hospice volunteer, says while data-gathering remains tricky, it’s clear the movement is growing. “There’s an explosion” of interest in home funerals or blended, hybrid funerals with some elements done personally and some left to traditional funeral directors, she says.
What’s driving this explosion? It’s a Boomer thing, according to Webster. “This is the generation that fought for breast-feeding in public and home births; and they want to bring back the idea of a natural death. It’s the ethic of this generation.”
Ecopods and Banana Leaf Urns
Cost and the environment are also driving factors. People like the idea of “fewer chemicals, no rainforest woods and Chinese steel,” Webster says, noting that when you avoid embalming you’re not “draining blood into the public septic system and not subjecting loved ones to violent procedures — the embalming process is quite brutal — just for cosmetic reasons and for no health benefits.”
(One casket designer in Arlington, Mass., for instance, offers artist-embellished Ecopods for burials, hand-made from recycled paper and covered with materials of silk-and-mulberry, as well as biodegradable coffins, caskets, and urns made of paper mache, bamboo, banana leaf, wicker, and cardboard.)
Webster adds: “Once people’s fears are relieved about body care, body mechanics, smells and fluids, a light goes off and they say, ‘Why would I not want to do this?” Even while many of us shudder at the prospect, Webster says the dead “can be very beautiful. To go back to the birth model: it’s like birthing people out in as natural a way as possible.”
You might think there’d be some funeral industry push-back against all this embrace of more personal, no-frills death care. (Of course, with no national numbers, it’s hard to know how many people are actually embracing the trend.) Still, it doesn’t seem like the industry is particularly threatened.
Daniel Higgins, a second-generation funeral director in Rockland, Mass., and spokesperson for theNational Funeral Directors Association, said he doesn’t have any direct experience with families interested in home funerals, but has no problem with people making their own choices.
Indeed, he said, more families want to personalize even traditional funerals to better reflect their lives. For instance, he said, last year he helped arrange a memorial service at a local golf course. The dead man, a golf fanatic, was cremated and placed in a biodegradable urn in the main pond at the course. “Several hundred people gathered around the pond,” Higgins said. “And all his friends hit a golf ball into the pond with a personal message as a final goodbye.”
The My-Choice Generation
Heidi Boucher, who says she’s helped over 100 families care for their dead loved ones, is completing a film, In The Parlour: The Final Goodbye, about the “resurgence” of the home death movement. A home death guide for over 25 years, she says: “I’ve watched from only a handful of us doing this in this country…to now, when it’s become vogue. A lot of this generation, we’re the ones who took control of where we’re going to send our kids to school, what car to drive. Our generation is the one that wants to find out what’s in it before we eat it.”
One problem is that states and local municipalities are all over the map when it comes to regulating death.
There remain nine states with laws or other impediments (from requiring a funeral director’s signature on a death certificate, to mandating that a funeral director be present at the final disposition of the body) that make it difficult for families who want to care for their own dead, Josh Slocum says.
On the other end of the spectrum, the state of Massachusetts offers clear instructions for home funerals right on its website, including what you need for a death certificate, guidance on burials and preparing the body. “The human body decomposes rapidly after death,” the website says. “Care must be taken to keep the body as cool as possible in order the slow the decomposition that results in noxious odors and the leakage of body fluids from body orifices. A human body can be kept in a cool room at least 24 hours before decomposition begins. Heat in the room should be turned off in winter, and air conditioning should be turned on in summer.”
Reclaiming A Death Tradition
But even in an evolved state like Massachusetts, many families’ first reaction to home funerals is something like: “‘You mean that’s legal?!’ says Heather Massey, a longtime home funeral guide who runs the education and consulting center “In Loving Hands” on Cape Cod. Massey says her goal is the creation of a robust home death support system, “a volunteer care circle, comprised of community members trained and experienced in home funerals, who can in turn assist and guide other families who wish to care for their own at death, thereby truly bringing this loving tradition back into the hands of family and community.”
For Adelaida Van Meter’s parents, taking personal control of their daughter’s death was “imperative,” said Sophia Fox. There were some obstacles, however. “I had several funeral homes tell me over the phone that what I was trying to do was illegal,” Van Meter said. “I didn’t try to argue with them, I just hung up.”
Eventually, with help from a pediatric social worker and Heather Massey, the family was able to fill out all the required paperwork and keep the baby’s body at home after she died.
I recently emailed Murro to check in and see if there’d been any news since we talked during the summer. It had been about a year and ten months since Adelaida died; the couple’s new daughter, Annabelle, was nearly 7 months old. Here’s what he said:
“The only news is that we continue to be head over heels in love with our daughter Annabelle, who is doing great. With that said, not a hour goes by that we don’t feel the loss of Adelaida. So I guess these things would qualify as no new news.”
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Showtime’s ‘Time of Death’
From Washington Post- Article by Hank Stuever
Showtime’s ‘Time of Death’: An important and honest look at what death is really like.
D&J Productions/Showtime - The six-part Showtime documentary series "Time of Death" looks at people in their last days. Michael John Muth is pictured.
By Hank Stuever, Published: October 31 E-mail the writer
One of our great achievements in American culture over the last few decades has gone mostly, quietly unnoticed: We’re getting a lot better at death.
Despite botox and youth worship, baby boomers and Generation X are changing the rituals and customs of a frank and noble exit. Funerals are more casual, celebratory in tone — with biographical videos, favorite pop songs and even a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses worn by the deceased. Cremation is becoming a more popular and affordable option, dramatically shifting the definition of a final resting place. And enough of us now know first-hand that real angels and heroes work in the fields of hospice and palliative care.
I rarely insist that anybody watch anything on TV, but I strongly recommend that you watch as much as you can of “Time of Death,” Showtime’s unflinchingly honest docu-series (premiering Friday night) about what it’s like to die — and what it’s like for our loved ones to watch us go.
I get that it’s not going to be a TV show for all. It’s hard stuff. If you and your loved ones are planning to live forever then, by all means, skip it. If, on the other hand, you are an adult with a firm grip on reality (and perhaps faith), you will likely find yourself transfixed by the gentle and elegant ways that “Time of Death” takes us into the final weeks of eight women and men, ages 19 to 78, each losing a fight against a terminal illness.
Conceived and produced by some of the same people behind “Project Runway” and “Top Chef,” “Time of Death” bears the dignified, documentary-style traits that reality TV had in its earliest days: It is desperately interested in observing people up-close, as they are, and will not turn away when things get too real. It has a deep well of empathy that is unclouded by saccharine attempts at sympathy. The producers don’t try to guide what’s happening into narrative convenience. All the show has to do is wait patiently for its subjects to die.
Remarkably, this doesn’t feel intrusive. When death comes in each of the six episodes, it often feels like a beautiful release of stress for the dying person as well as for family and friends. And, in an almost profound way, for the viewer.
The series’s main through-line focuses on 48-year-old Maria Lencioni, a free-spirited single mom in Santa Cruz, Calif., who is facing the final stages of breast cancer. Maria’s story continues through each episode as she attempts a final round of chemotherapy and as her adult daughter, Nicole, prepares to take custody of Maria’s miscreant teenagers. It quickly becomes clear that Nicole isn’t ready to be a parent to her half-siblings; one of Maria’s last acts, heartbreakingly, is to put the teens in foster care.
Although the drama in Maria’s household would at first seem to stray from “Time of Death’s” trajectory toward deathbed scenes, it is very much in tune with the show’s real goal of showing how families will — and sometimes stubbornly won’t — come together when a loved one nears the end.
Laura Kovarik, 63, also at the end stage of breast cancer, embarks on a road trip from Long Beach, Calif., to Colorado Springs, accompanied by her single daughter (and care provider) Lisa. Laura hopes the drive will rekindle happy memories of family car trips and frequent stops at tourist traps, but after the first day, her energy flags. Meanwhile, Lisa must deal with resentment toward her older sister, Laura’s other daughter, who keeps death and the family discord at arm’s length.
There are others: A 47-year-old former mixed-martial arts fighter is paralyzed by ALS, but reunites with his estranged mother and the two sons that he never knew. He goes out with calm acceptance and a sharp sense of humor expressed in the robotic voice of his special computer. We also meet a 75-year-old grandmother and psychotherapist (who specialized in grief and death issues) as she throws herself a farewell party before the end in order to tell everyone how much she loves them.
In more than one episode, as the subjects began “actively dying” (in hospice parlance), the families who participated in “Time of Death” shut the bedroom door or asked the cameras to wait outside. The hesitation is understandable and yet vaguely disappointing. In still another episode, neither the camera nor the family members were present when the subject died; the camera is instead there when a relative arrives and discovers that this person died alone.
Most movingly, in episode 6, we meet Nicolle Kissee, a 19-year-old skin cancer patient whose swift decline left her in a fog of pain. Her younger sisters hover on the periphery; one is simply too frightened to join the family in Nicolle’s bedroom when the time comes. The Kissee family is the most open and expressive with their love and grief as they — and we — say goodbye to their daughter.
I watched all the episodes consecutively and came away exhausted, but I also came away with a sense of comfort that I still can’t quite describe. It was gratitude, in part, to the subjects and their families for letting the cameras in. “Time of Death” is vital and meaningful television; if you watch, I hope it gives you the same peace and understanding it gave me.
Showtime’s ‘Time of Death’: An important and honest look at what death is really like.
D&J Productions/Showtime - The six-part Showtime documentary series "Time of Death" looks at people in their last days. Michael John Muth is pictured.
By Hank Stuever, Published: October 31 E-mail the writer
One of our great achievements in American culture over the last few decades has gone mostly, quietly unnoticed: We’re getting a lot better at death.
Despite botox and youth worship, baby boomers and Generation X are changing the rituals and customs of a frank and noble exit. Funerals are more casual, celebratory in tone — with biographical videos, favorite pop songs and even a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses worn by the deceased. Cremation is becoming a more popular and affordable option, dramatically shifting the definition of a final resting place. And enough of us now know first-hand that real angels and heroes work in the fields of hospice and palliative care.
I rarely insist that anybody watch anything on TV, but I strongly recommend that you watch as much as you can of “Time of Death,” Showtime’s unflinchingly honest docu-series (premiering Friday night) about what it’s like to die — and what it’s like for our loved ones to watch us go.
I get that it’s not going to be a TV show for all. It’s hard stuff. If you and your loved ones are planning to live forever then, by all means, skip it. If, on the other hand, you are an adult with a firm grip on reality (and perhaps faith), you will likely find yourself transfixed by the gentle and elegant ways that “Time of Death” takes us into the final weeks of eight women and men, ages 19 to 78, each losing a fight against a terminal illness.
Conceived and produced by some of the same people behind “Project Runway” and “Top Chef,” “Time of Death” bears the dignified, documentary-style traits that reality TV had in its earliest days: It is desperately interested in observing people up-close, as they are, and will not turn away when things get too real. It has a deep well of empathy that is unclouded by saccharine attempts at sympathy. The producers don’t try to guide what’s happening into narrative convenience. All the show has to do is wait patiently for its subjects to die.
Remarkably, this doesn’t feel intrusive. When death comes in each of the six episodes, it often feels like a beautiful release of stress for the dying person as well as for family and friends. And, in an almost profound way, for the viewer.
The series’s main through-line focuses on 48-year-old Maria Lencioni, a free-spirited single mom in Santa Cruz, Calif., who is facing the final stages of breast cancer. Maria’s story continues through each episode as she attempts a final round of chemotherapy and as her adult daughter, Nicole, prepares to take custody of Maria’s miscreant teenagers. It quickly becomes clear that Nicole isn’t ready to be a parent to her half-siblings; one of Maria’s last acts, heartbreakingly, is to put the teens in foster care.
Although the drama in Maria’s household would at first seem to stray from “Time of Death’s” trajectory toward deathbed scenes, it is very much in tune with the show’s real goal of showing how families will — and sometimes stubbornly won’t — come together when a loved one nears the end.
Laura Kovarik, 63, also at the end stage of breast cancer, embarks on a road trip from Long Beach, Calif., to Colorado Springs, accompanied by her single daughter (and care provider) Lisa. Laura hopes the drive will rekindle happy memories of family car trips and frequent stops at tourist traps, but after the first day, her energy flags. Meanwhile, Lisa must deal with resentment toward her older sister, Laura’s other daughter, who keeps death and the family discord at arm’s length.
There are others: A 47-year-old former mixed-martial arts fighter is paralyzed by ALS, but reunites with his estranged mother and the two sons that he never knew. He goes out with calm acceptance and a sharp sense of humor expressed in the robotic voice of his special computer. We also meet a 75-year-old grandmother and psychotherapist (who specialized in grief and death issues) as she throws herself a farewell party before the end in order to tell everyone how much she loves them.
In more than one episode, as the subjects began “actively dying” (in hospice parlance), the families who participated in “Time of Death” shut the bedroom door or asked the cameras to wait outside. The hesitation is understandable and yet vaguely disappointing. In still another episode, neither the camera nor the family members were present when the subject died; the camera is instead there when a relative arrives and discovers that this person died alone.
Most movingly, in episode 6, we meet Nicolle Kissee, a 19-year-old skin cancer patient whose swift decline left her in a fog of pain. Her younger sisters hover on the periphery; one is simply too frightened to join the family in Nicolle’s bedroom when the time comes. The Kissee family is the most open and expressive with their love and grief as they — and we — say goodbye to their daughter.
I watched all the episodes consecutively and came away exhausted, but I also came away with a sense of comfort that I still can’t quite describe. It was gratitude, in part, to the subjects and their families for letting the cameras in. “Time of Death” is vital and meaningful television; if you watch, I hope it gives you the same peace and understanding it gave me.
Funeral Consumer Tips, by Robert Falcon
FUNERAL CONSUMER TIPS FROM ROBERT FALCON
SOURCE: Robert Falcon's Facebook Timeline (October 30, 2013) and the
Funeral Consumers Alliance
"TIP : If you think funeral prices are high wait, until you get to the cemetery.
If your family has chosen to bury your loved one in a cemetery, the cost can be as little as $0 to as much as $100,000. How can this be possible?
Cemeteries are not the same when it comes to price or in some states regulation. So it is very easy for the rules of the game to be changed in the middle of it. You will find cemeteries vary from small family cemeteries, to church or non-profit cemeteries, National and State Veterans Cemeteries and Corporate Owned cemeteries. So how do you know who owns the cemetery? easy ...just ask?
So the basic strategy at a cemetery is to understand that spaces typically closer to a 'feature' (pond, tree, statue, etc) may be more expensive. There are mausoleums (single crypt, family crypt, private crypt to large buildings), lawn crypts ( a space with a glorified concrete container already in the ground). The next thing is to understand if you own the space or if you own the rights to be buried in a space? Many of the larger cemeteries will sell you 'interment rights' which means the cemetery owns the land and you have the right to be buried in the space.
Another consideration is wether the cemetery requires an outer container (gravebox, concrete liner, or vault) to be used. These outer containers are required by the cemetery for maintenance purposes and can add to the overall cost from $300 to as much as $ 40,000. I have encountered many cemeteries in 27 years that will use the term 'vault' when trying to sell this container, but when I ask "what their minimum requirement is?" they will say a gravebox or concrete liner is ok.
Opening and closing (digging the grave and closing the grave) cost can vary from $0-2,000 depending on the cemetery. Some cemeteries have contracts with particular grave services to and your are forced to use their service.
Many cemeteries will also sell monuments (gravestone, markers, memorials, headstone) and they may have some minimum requirements like flat markers only, bronze on granite, some may even have height and size restrictions. The important advice here is. If you are planning a funeral today for a loved one, leave buying a monument out of the discussion today. This is something that should be done in time but not a necessary immediate expense.
So my best strategies for saving at the cemetery.
1. If you are your loved one was a veteran, understand you have a grave space, opening and closing, grave liner and marker provided to you at no cost in a veterans cemetery.
2. If you are dealing with a immediate death. Purchase the items you need today- grave space, outer container, and opening and closing service. Understand the cemetery may have different fees for opening and closing based on weekday versus weekend service.
3. Buy the memorial later. A memorial will be the last thing you buy and the first thing you see every time you come to visit the cemetery. So take your time and shop around. You do not have to buy the memorial from the cemetery in most cases.
4. Understand that unlike a funeral home, a cemetery does not have to offer you a price list. Many cemeteries offer spaces based on location."
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Facing Death Head On
From: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20131004_Facing_Death_Head_On.html#y95ksUTrRrkX02HP.99
Get-Well cards behind Mickey Hirsch, 61, is chronicling his dying days on facebook and has become a facebook sensation. He is termianlly ill with cancer. He is remodeler and has built his own casket (He calls it his hope chest) at his Forked River NJ home, Tuesday, September 17, 2013. ( Steven M. Falk / Staff Photographer )
BARBARA LAKER, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
POSTED: Friday, October 4, 2013, 10:26 PM
MICKEY HIRSCH walked up to the counter at Home Depot as the store buzzed with do-it-yourselfers poring over tile, hardwoods, lights and faucets to spruce up their homes.
Hirsch asked a worker to saw slabs of pine. He had specific dimensions-four 25-by-78-inch sections, two 24-by-25-inch pieces."You making a cabinet?" the worker asked casually.
"No. I'm making my coffin," Hirsch replied.
The saw operator stared at Hirsch's sunken cheeks, hollow eyes and thin sprigs of fuzz hair. He looked uneasy, even horrified, as he took several steps back from Hirsch.
"Why would you do that?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't I? I'm a carpenter," said Hirsch, 61, a straight-talking fading fireball who has aged 20 years in two months from the cancer that is smothering his organs.
Other customers left the store excited about their next project.
Hirsch drove off, contemplating his last.
He took the wood to his neighbor's garage. His neighbor, Mike Tufano, helped him build a simple pine box. Then Hirsch's 17-year-old daughter, Erin, held the casket's handles (actually, garage-door handles) steady while Hirsch bolted them in tight. Perfect for pallbearers to grip.
It's unclear what Erin thinks of all this: She didn't return numerous phone calls from the Daily News. Hirsch's 26 year-old son, Matt, was taken aback.
"Only he would do that," Matt said. "He loves building and in his mind it gives him a little bit of closure.
"He's going above and beyond his call of duty," Matt added. "He's doing everything he can to help us."
Hirsch, who has lived in Northeast Philly most of his life, posted photos of his casket-in-the-making on Facebook, which made some friends uncomfortable. A few accused him of being morbid.
"So I asked them to send me some cards and I'd place them on top and I'd call it a hope chest," he said.
Hirsch received more than 900 cards, and his "hope chest" now sits in the living room of his modest 760-square-foot home in Forked River, N.J., like an eerie unfinished coffee table.
"In ways, it's heroic. In ways, it's kind of gross, but I give him a lot of credit," said longtime friend Penny Slakoff.
At a time when millions share triumphs, struggles and funny moments on social media, Hirsch is chronicling his life's end on Facebook, where he has almost 5,000 "friends" rooting for him. He claims to know or have met about 3,000 of them.
"Mickey likes to be the center of attention. He thrives on it," Slakoff said. "But if it makes the fight better for him, why not?"
Friends say he is inspiring those with failing health.
"He is 100 percent, no doubt in my mind, changing people's lives. His posts are real and raw," said Lisa Howser, who has known Hirsch for years and set up a GiveForward fundraising campaign for him.
"I'm terrified of death, but he taught me you face it with pride. Don't be ashamed. Don't hide. Get out there and live," she said.
Hirsch is sharing everything: The time he pulled his car over to the shoulder three times because he was so exhausted. His grueling chemo treatments, his weight loss, sleepless nights and scary temperature spikes.
"I do want to live. I do. But I'm making the most out of my death. I'm putting some meaning into it. I share these experiences so people are not scared to die," he said.
"I don't only accept my death. I embrace it," he added. "I have a psychotic lack of fear of death. Things are what they are. I won't let myself be nervous. What a useless emotion that is."
These days, Hirsch is unrecognizable to most friends who haven't seen him in awhile.
He says "hello," calling out their names, but they stare at him, mystified. If his voice doesn't tip them off, he has to tell them, "Yo. It's me - Mickey."
A year and a half ago, he packed 220 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame. He had a full head of brown hair and could pass for at least 15 years younger. He dieted and trimmed down to an athletic 190 last August. He looked the best he had in years.
He now guzzles protein drinks and scarfs down as much food as he can, but it's hard to keep weight on. A few weeks ago, he dropped to a frail 150.
"On June 15th, I was a 61-year-old man who was like a strong 40-year-old who worked construction his whole life. Four weeks later I'm a 90-year-old man. No exaggeration," he said.
Hirsch grew up in the Bells Corner section of Northeast Philly, where he was a mischievous "Dennis the Menace"-type of kid who climbed out his bedroom window to land on and dent the roof of his dad's new Ford Fairlane, and threw rocks onto train tracks, waiting to see what happened.
A 1969 graduate of Northeast High School, he spent his formative years watching laborers build and remodel houses.
At 11, he earned $150 a week slapping together bologna-and-cheese sandwiches for construction workers.
"I had the instinct in my DNA to be in construction," said Hirsch, who has had several remodeling/handyman businesses over the years, mostly in the Philadelphia metro area.
He had two sons, Kevin and Matt, before he and his wife divorced in 1989. He had his daughter, Erin, in 1995, but separated from Erin's mom the next year. Erin's mom died on Christmas Day 2008 at the age of 44.
He has not been spared life's worst heartbreaks.
Kevin, who had a developmental disorder that gave him a "never-ending childhood," was 26 when he died of swine flu in November 2009.
"When you lose a child, you stand on the edge of an abyss about to fall in," he said. "I rose above it."
Hirsch spearheaded a campaign to urge everyone to get flu shots and has shuttled people back and forth to drugstores to get them.
But Hirsch admits he's "no angel."
In the mid 2000s, he was charged with several counts of deceptive-business practices, theft by receiving stolen property and related charges, mostly for taking deposit money and not finishing the jobs he promised.
Hirsch told a reporter that he was in North Carolina and his partner failed to do the work.
Hirsch pleaded guilty, was placed on five years' probation and ordered to pay restitution.
"I'm not making excuses. I was negligent and had bad judgment, but I didn't have criminal intent," he said.
"I'm a good human being, but I'm not a perfect citizen . . . It's one major blemish in my life. I'm as sorry as I can be.
"Whatever transgressions I committed, I want the last chapter of my life to be about doing good. I want to pay it forward. I want to atone for my sins."
Hirsch went to a doctor in June because he felt a dull pain in his upper mid-section between his ribs.
The doctor immediately sent him for tests. Blood work seemed good. Chest X-ray showed nothing. Then came the CT scan.
"I thought maybe I had acid reflux," he said. "I never ever thought cancer even though everyone on my mother's side of the family died of cancer."
The solemn-faced doctor told him to come to her office.
"I knew that didn't sound good," he said.
The cancer, which started in his pancreas, had spread to his stomach, liver and lungs. Doctors can't predict how much longer he'll live, but 80 percent of people with pancreatic cancer don't live longer than a year.
He told his daughter, Erin, that they would make the most of the time he has left, but deal with death head-on. So when his hair started to fall out on his pillow, Erin gave him a close-cropped haircut.
"She's a thousand times stronger than me. She lost two grandfathers, a mother, a brother and a dog in one year," he said.
That's why he fights to live. He wants to see Erin graduate from high school next June.
He's undergoing chemo, which he calls "an ungodly out-of-body inhumane suffering beyond comprehension. . . . One day before chemo I was a 35-year-old man who could run. The next I'm an old man who has trouble going up one step."
After six chemo treatments, Hirsch recently learned the tumors in his liver and pancreas have shrunk to half the size they were. Maybe the chemo bought him time, he said.
He injects a blood thinner into his "love handles" every day to prevent clots that could kill him.
He had no health insurance but Cooper University Hospital agreed to cover his chemo and medical care until December. He just found out Wednesday that he was approved for Medicaid. "Best day ever," he said, "at least in the last four months."
Void of bitterness, Hirsch doesn't ask why he has to die.
"There's no mystery to it," said Hirsch, who never smoked or drank. "It's just science and biology. I had a defective cell and it multiplied."
Despite support from his Facebook friends, he feels alone and posted that he wants a girlfriend/partner.
"I envy anyone in my situation who has a husband or wife or significant other in their life at this time," he said.
Hirsch continues to take on remodeling jobs with his son, Matt, even the same day as his chemo treatments.
"My son does 90 percent of the work. I do 90 percent of the talking," he said.
"I prefer dying in someone's back yard with a handful of broken concrete rather than in my living room sitting on the couch with a remote in my hand," he said.
His friends have helped raise money for him. Since August, the GiveForward campaign established by Lisa Howser has raised $6,700 to help pay for Hirsch's funeral and finish the headstone for his son, Kevin.
"Dying sucks," Hirsch said. "But I'm a dying guy who feels special."
Howser also helped organize a Mickey's Beef & Beer, slated for Oct. 18 at Paddy Whacks Pub in the Northeast.
Until then, Hirsch has preparations to make.
He recently shuffled into the office at Montefiore Cemetery in Jenkintown that dates back to 1910. His parents and grandparents are among thousands buried there.
He sat gingerly as if every bone radiated pain. As he spoke with cemetery directors, each breath seemed labored; his skin, an ashen gray.
Hirsch placed two photos - one of himself and one of Kevin - on the table. Erin helped pick them out. He wants each image etched into their gray granite gravestones.
He then opened a binder filled with photos of headstones and prepared to write the words for his.
"Do you like devoted dad or dedicated dad?" he asked a reporter.
"Devoted," the reporter replied. "Dedicated sounds more work-related."
He settled on this:
Edmond "Mickey" Hirsch
Devoted Dad
Craftsman
And Friend to All
Feb. 6, 1952-
Father of Kevin, Matthew & Erin
He leaned forward in his chair, staring at the words on paper and smiled. He then walked across patches of rutted grass to Kevin's fresh-looking grave under an immense maple tree at the edge of the cemetery near a baseball field.
"Kevin loved baseball," he said. "I will be buried next to him."
The cemetery marketing director told him he's courageous.
"It's not courage," Hirsch said. "It's just the way you're supposed to do it."
Up to the end, Hirsch will face death his way.
He has squirreled away Ambien, a sedative used to treat insomnia.
"I have 30 of them. I have to make sure that's enough to kill me," he said.
"Whatever I have to take, I will. I don't want to end my life in diapers, helpless, unable to function.
"I want to have control over the end of my life. I want to be able to say goodbye."
Get-Well cards behind Mickey Hirsch, 61, is chronicling his dying days on facebook and has become a facebook sensation. He is termianlly ill with cancer. He is remodeler and has built his own casket (He calls it his hope chest) at his Forked River NJ home, Tuesday, September 17, 2013. ( Steven M. Falk / Staff Photographer )
BARBARA LAKER, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
POSTED: Friday, October 4, 2013, 10:26 PM
MICKEY HIRSCH walked up to the counter at Home Depot as the store buzzed with do-it-yourselfers poring over tile, hardwoods, lights and faucets to spruce up their homes.
Hirsch asked a worker to saw slabs of pine. He had specific dimensions-four 25-by-78-inch sections, two 24-by-25-inch pieces."You making a cabinet?" the worker asked casually.
"No. I'm making my coffin," Hirsch replied.
The saw operator stared at Hirsch's sunken cheeks, hollow eyes and thin sprigs of fuzz hair. He looked uneasy, even horrified, as he took several steps back from Hirsch.
"Why would you do that?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't I? I'm a carpenter," said Hirsch, 61, a straight-talking fading fireball who has aged 20 years in two months from the cancer that is smothering his organs.
Other customers left the store excited about their next project.
Hirsch drove off, contemplating his last.
He took the wood to his neighbor's garage. His neighbor, Mike Tufano, helped him build a simple pine box. Then Hirsch's 17-year-old daughter, Erin, held the casket's handles (actually, garage-door handles) steady while Hirsch bolted them in tight. Perfect for pallbearers to grip.
It's unclear what Erin thinks of all this: She didn't return numerous phone calls from the Daily News. Hirsch's 26 year-old son, Matt, was taken aback.
"Only he would do that," Matt said. "He loves building and in his mind it gives him a little bit of closure.
"He's going above and beyond his call of duty," Matt added. "He's doing everything he can to help us."
Hirsch, who has lived in Northeast Philly most of his life, posted photos of his casket-in-the-making on Facebook, which made some friends uncomfortable. A few accused him of being morbid.
"So I asked them to send me some cards and I'd place them on top and I'd call it a hope chest," he said.
Hirsch received more than 900 cards, and his "hope chest" now sits in the living room of his modest 760-square-foot home in Forked River, N.J., like an eerie unfinished coffee table.
"In ways, it's heroic. In ways, it's kind of gross, but I give him a lot of credit," said longtime friend Penny Slakoff.
At a time when millions share triumphs, struggles and funny moments on social media, Hirsch is chronicling his life's end on Facebook, where he has almost 5,000 "friends" rooting for him. He claims to know or have met about 3,000 of them.
"Mickey likes to be the center of attention. He thrives on it," Slakoff said. "But if it makes the fight better for him, why not?"
Friends say he is inspiring those with failing health.
"He is 100 percent, no doubt in my mind, changing people's lives. His posts are real and raw," said Lisa Howser, who has known Hirsch for years and set up a GiveForward fundraising campaign for him.
"I'm terrified of death, but he taught me you face it with pride. Don't be ashamed. Don't hide. Get out there and live," she said.
Hirsch is sharing everything: The time he pulled his car over to the shoulder three times because he was so exhausted. His grueling chemo treatments, his weight loss, sleepless nights and scary temperature spikes.
"I do want to live. I do. But I'm making the most out of my death. I'm putting some meaning into it. I share these experiences so people are not scared to die," he said.
"I don't only accept my death. I embrace it," he added. "I have a psychotic lack of fear of death. Things are what they are. I won't let myself be nervous. What a useless emotion that is."
These days, Hirsch is unrecognizable to most friends who haven't seen him in awhile.
He says "hello," calling out their names, but they stare at him, mystified. If his voice doesn't tip them off, he has to tell them, "Yo. It's me - Mickey."
A year and a half ago, he packed 220 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame. He had a full head of brown hair and could pass for at least 15 years younger. He dieted and trimmed down to an athletic 190 last August. He looked the best he had in years.
He now guzzles protein drinks and scarfs down as much food as he can, but it's hard to keep weight on. A few weeks ago, he dropped to a frail 150.
"On June 15th, I was a 61-year-old man who was like a strong 40-year-old who worked construction his whole life. Four weeks later I'm a 90-year-old man. No exaggeration," he said.
Hirsch grew up in the Bells Corner section of Northeast Philly, where he was a mischievous "Dennis the Menace"-type of kid who climbed out his bedroom window to land on and dent the roof of his dad's new Ford Fairlane, and threw rocks onto train tracks, waiting to see what happened.
A 1969 graduate of Northeast High School, he spent his formative years watching laborers build and remodel houses.
At 11, he earned $150 a week slapping together bologna-and-cheese sandwiches for construction workers.
"I had the instinct in my DNA to be in construction," said Hirsch, who has had several remodeling/handyman businesses over the years, mostly in the Philadelphia metro area.
He had two sons, Kevin and Matt, before he and his wife divorced in 1989. He had his daughter, Erin, in 1995, but separated from Erin's mom the next year. Erin's mom died on Christmas Day 2008 at the age of 44.
He has not been spared life's worst heartbreaks.
Kevin, who had a developmental disorder that gave him a "never-ending childhood," was 26 when he died of swine flu in November 2009.
"When you lose a child, you stand on the edge of an abyss about to fall in," he said. "I rose above it."
Hirsch spearheaded a campaign to urge everyone to get flu shots and has shuttled people back and forth to drugstores to get them.
But Hirsch admits he's "no angel."
In the mid 2000s, he was charged with several counts of deceptive-business practices, theft by receiving stolen property and related charges, mostly for taking deposit money and not finishing the jobs he promised.
Hirsch told a reporter that he was in North Carolina and his partner failed to do the work.
Hirsch pleaded guilty, was placed on five years' probation and ordered to pay restitution.
"I'm not making excuses. I was negligent and had bad judgment, but I didn't have criminal intent," he said.
"I'm a good human being, but I'm not a perfect citizen . . . It's one major blemish in my life. I'm as sorry as I can be.
"Whatever transgressions I committed, I want the last chapter of my life to be about doing good. I want to pay it forward. I want to atone for my sins."
Hirsch went to a doctor in June because he felt a dull pain in his upper mid-section between his ribs.
The doctor immediately sent him for tests. Blood work seemed good. Chest X-ray showed nothing. Then came the CT scan.
"I thought maybe I had acid reflux," he said. "I never ever thought cancer even though everyone on my mother's side of the family died of cancer."
The solemn-faced doctor told him to come to her office.
"I knew that didn't sound good," he said.
The cancer, which started in his pancreas, had spread to his stomach, liver and lungs. Doctors can't predict how much longer he'll live, but 80 percent of people with pancreatic cancer don't live longer than a year.
He told his daughter, Erin, that they would make the most of the time he has left, but deal with death head-on. So when his hair started to fall out on his pillow, Erin gave him a close-cropped haircut.
"She's a thousand times stronger than me. She lost two grandfathers, a mother, a brother and a dog in one year," he said.
That's why he fights to live. He wants to see Erin graduate from high school next June.
He's undergoing chemo, which he calls "an ungodly out-of-body inhumane suffering beyond comprehension. . . . One day before chemo I was a 35-year-old man who could run. The next I'm an old man who has trouble going up one step."
After six chemo treatments, Hirsch recently learned the tumors in his liver and pancreas have shrunk to half the size they were. Maybe the chemo bought him time, he said.
He injects a blood thinner into his "love handles" every day to prevent clots that could kill him.
He had no health insurance but Cooper University Hospital agreed to cover his chemo and medical care until December. He just found out Wednesday that he was approved for Medicaid. "Best day ever," he said, "at least in the last four months."
Void of bitterness, Hirsch doesn't ask why he has to die.
"There's no mystery to it," said Hirsch, who never smoked or drank. "It's just science and biology. I had a defective cell and it multiplied."
Despite support from his Facebook friends, he feels alone and posted that he wants a girlfriend/partner.
"I envy anyone in my situation who has a husband or wife or significant other in their life at this time," he said.
Hirsch continues to take on remodeling jobs with his son, Matt, even the same day as his chemo treatments.
"My son does 90 percent of the work. I do 90 percent of the talking," he said.
"I prefer dying in someone's back yard with a handful of broken concrete rather than in my living room sitting on the couch with a remote in my hand," he said.
His friends have helped raise money for him. Since August, the GiveForward campaign established by Lisa Howser has raised $6,700 to help pay for Hirsch's funeral and finish the headstone for his son, Kevin.
"Dying sucks," Hirsch said. "But I'm a dying guy who feels special."
Howser also helped organize a Mickey's Beef & Beer, slated for Oct. 18 at Paddy Whacks Pub in the Northeast.
Until then, Hirsch has preparations to make.
He recently shuffled into the office at Montefiore Cemetery in Jenkintown that dates back to 1910. His parents and grandparents are among thousands buried there.
He sat gingerly as if every bone radiated pain. As he spoke with cemetery directors, each breath seemed labored; his skin, an ashen gray.
Hirsch placed two photos - one of himself and one of Kevin - on the table. Erin helped pick them out. He wants each image etched into their gray granite gravestones.
He then opened a binder filled with photos of headstones and prepared to write the words for his.
"Do you like devoted dad or dedicated dad?" he asked a reporter.
"Devoted," the reporter replied. "Dedicated sounds more work-related."
He settled on this:
Edmond "Mickey" Hirsch
Devoted Dad
Craftsman
And Friend to All
Feb. 6, 1952-
Father of Kevin, Matthew & Erin
He leaned forward in his chair, staring at the words on paper and smiled. He then walked across patches of rutted grass to Kevin's fresh-looking grave under an immense maple tree at the edge of the cemetery near a baseball field.
"Kevin loved baseball," he said. "I will be buried next to him."
The cemetery marketing director told him he's courageous.
"It's not courage," Hirsch said. "It's just the way you're supposed to do it."
Up to the end, Hirsch will face death his way.
He has squirreled away Ambien, a sedative used to treat insomnia.
"I have 30 of them. I have to make sure that's enough to kill me," he said.
"Whatever I have to take, I will. I don't want to end my life in diapers, helpless, unable to function.
"I want to have control over the end of my life. I want to be able to say goodbye."
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