It's not directly related to end-of-life issues ... but two painkillers, Percocet and Vicodin, do include acetaminophen, and they are sometimes used in palliative care. And, one of the recommendations made to the FDA was to ban Percocet and Vidodin.
I'm posting the link because it's an excellent hour of radio and an important issue for everyone to stay informed on.
If for no other reason than who hasn't taken two tylenol or two Excedrin when they had a headache? And an interesting tidbit from these recommendations: two pills at once may be too much acetaminophen for your liver to healthfully process.
Those expectations were that DOMA would be overturned once Obama was elected. Instead, the Justice Department filed a brief earlier this month defending DOMA.
Why does all this matter? Among other things, marriage rights allow a partner full survivor benefits, the right to decide on issues of care in the hospital, and the simple right to be there at the bedside when their partner is dying. Even power of attorney is often not enough to guarantee visitation or decision-making ability in the hospital for gay and lesbian partners.
As he usually does, Savage laid it out like it just makes sense, and you'd have to be an idiot not to agree with him. He pulls off that angle like nobody else can.
Atul Gawande has written about the high cost of health care in the border town of McAllen, Texas. And the article is getting attention in circles as influential as the White House.
McAllen has one of the lowest average household incomes in the nation but also one of the highest average household costs for healthcare. Gawande investigates why and comes up with some pretty ethically shocking conclusions.
There are some interesting discussions about end-of-life care peppered throughout the show. And it's just a fascinating listen for anyone who follows debates about the future of the medical industry.
As the obit points out, Schneidman believed suicidal tendencies could often begin to be untangled by asking two simple questions: "Where do you hurt?" and "How may I help you?"
Schneidman lived to 91. In this audio piece, he shares a quote in which he describes showing up to the ER at the age of 90, disappointed to still be alive. Realize he hadn't died, he sobbed, because he was ready for death.
He also often wrote about enriching life by contemplating death and dying and was a proponent of open dialogue on both topics, arguing that people should be unafraid of death.
This week's episode of This American Lifetells the story of a cryonics advocate, Bob, and his attempts to help himself and others cheat death. But the technology isn't quite there to reanimate the deceased, Bob's storage facilities are subpar, and funding proves to be a problem.
The ugliness of the situation snowballs into a complete nightmare and a predictable legal battle.
When you listen to the story, if you think Bob's ethics are a little shaky at the beginning, just wait until you hear some of the stuff he's saying at the end of the piece.
For me, this tale is the ultimate in death avoidance. From beginning to end, everyone involved with Bob and his brand of cryonics shows an amazing inability to accept death. They all seem to think the frozen bodies in Bob's cryogenic chambers are in some sort of half-dead state, and it's as though, they don't really have to let go of their loved ones, or accept their own impending deaths, if they have cryonics to fall back on.
As always with This American Life, it's a fascinating tale, and it's full of lots of murky ethical issues.
... will be hosted right here, on Wednesday April 1.
If you have tips or ideas for things for me to add—stories, radio programs, articles, blog entries, whatever—on death, dying, end-of-life care, palliative care, anything like that, please forward them along.
You can email them to me at jessica.knapp@gmail.com. Or just drop them into the comments section of any blog entry for this month, and I'll probably get the message that way, too.
Self-aggrandizing, super-wordy titled aside, it sounds like a very practical, down-to-earth write-up of some of the small details many of us are not prepared to deal with. She focuses on both what the dying person and the loved ones of the dying person should do. Things like a living will, of course, but also assigning a health-care proxy, someone to advocate for you and your wishes.
She also advocates bringing death back into the regular conversation of life and not separating it out into something that strictly happens in a hospital, removed from everything else. And you all know I'm in favor of that.
Brown was convicted of aggravated first-degree murder in 1993 for carjacking a 22-year-old woman, holding her hostage in a hotel for 34 hours, and then raping, torturing, and murdering her.
This would be a different execution from the one that was scheduled for last December and was postponed due to a stay in the court system.
That execution, of Darold Stenson, was scheduled to take place on December 3rd and was dramatically stopped on December 2, to be delayed for at least 90 days. (The stay had something to do with the state changing processes for lethal injection without properly informing Stenson and his lawyers.) If rescheduled, it could conceivably put the execution around early March.
Stetson's execution was to be the first in Washington state since 2001. So, after not having a state-sponsored killing for more than seven years, our state could potentially have two within the same month.
If this does indeed transpire, it will no doubt prove an occasion for activists on both sides to stand up and shout.
Also, I'd like to repoint you to an excellent radio series our local NPR affiliate, KUOW, did on the way execution works in Washington state (both the logistics of it and how the systems in place function).
Whisper House follows a young boy during WWII whose father has been shot down by a Japanese pilot. The boy is sent to live with his spinster aunt in a haunted lighthouse in Maine.
Throughout the musical, ghosts sing to the "living" characters and the audience and function as a sort of Greek chorus, according to Sheik. In Greek theater, the chorus would often help narrate the play, but also speak the feelings and thoughts that the characters themselves were afraid to name. Making ghosts into the chorus seems to fit the Western idea that ghosts are more connected to the spiritual and somehow more know about emotions and about the unfolding of events than the rest of us do.
The video for one of the songs, "Earthbound Starlight," is at this link (embedding is disabled.) It's a pretty cool video.
And here's a bad-quality video of another song, "It's Better To Be Dead":
In San Francisco's Chinatown, they follow behind funeral processions and play songs like "Amazing Grace" and "Onward Christian Soldiers" on tuba and trumpet. The specific purpose to Chinese funerals is spiritual: The music helps keep the spirit close to the body until it can be buried.
But the band also draws the attention of the entire community to the funeral. It announces the death.
When I first heard this piece, I thought the concept was too bizarre to be of much value, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. I'm a big fan of public grieving. I think too much of our grief is dealt with behind closed doors, singularly or within a single family. This pulls it out into the open ... but in a beautiful way.
One of the band members, Cindy Collins, says in the piece, "Even though it comes from a sad moment, it's this triumphant moment for the person who's going on and we're sharing that with the community. What gets better than that?"
I caught a fascinating segment on the radio as I was driving home last night.
Two years ago, Seattle was hit by terrible December storms—wind and rain followed by a week of frigid cold and ice. For some local residents (including my parents), power was out for over a week. One of the most jarring stories to come out of that whole situation was the death Kate Fleming. The incident was so sudden, so unfair, so unpredictable that it shook to the core people's faith in the comfort of every day.
Fleming was a voice-over actress who lived in Seattle's Madison Valley. When flash flooding hit her home, threatening recording equipment she kept in her basement, Fleming went into the basement to rescue the equipment before she evacuated. Fleming became trapped in the basement and trapped in rising water. 911 had difficulty locating her correct address. As a result, rescue workers could not help her in time. By the time Fleming's partner, Charlene Strong, and neighbors could attempt a rescue, it was too late.
Charlene Strong is now using this situation as a catalyst to activism. While in the hospital with Fleming, as doctors made last efforts to try to revive her, and while funeral planning, Strong realized she had no rights because she was a gay partner. Strong is fighting for equal rights for gays and lesbians so that other partners will not be put in the same situation she was—faced with losing a loved one and then having to fight to get their voice heard.
Strong had to call Fleming's sister in Virginia to be allowed into her hospital room. Fleming's mother was the one who was allowed to sign paperwork at the funeral home, even though Strong paid for the services.
A new documentary depicts Charlene Strong's activism. I remember vividly how upset I was when I read about Fleming's death over two years ago. I can't tell you how hopeful I am to read about something so positive coming out of such a terrible situation. This woman is an inspiration.
(Last year, our state passed a domestic partner bill, and this clip from the documentary seems to infer that Strong was intimately involved with the passage. I do know for a fact that she testified in the State House. That's all I have been able to verify.)
NPR has posted an audio link to a 1993 piano jazz session with Eartha Kitt—the woman Orson Welles once called the most exciting woman in the world.
If you don't know Kitt apart from her role as catwoman on the old Batman TV show, you should check out the clip. She is graceful, classy, vivacious and full of life.
And, of course, it doesn't hurt that she was sexy as hell and approached life with great humor.
I'm reading a new novel by Jonathan Carroll called The Ghost in Love that deals with the aftermath of a man not dying when he should, in a fantastical way. A representative of the angel of death is left in limbo, hanging out on Earth, waiting for him to die. In the meantime, this ghost in limbo falls in love with the man's ex-girlfriend, hence the title of the book. I've just started the novel, but so far, it is full of humor and the most beautiful, non-saccharine sentimentality.
Here's an excerpt that I particularly like: "She fell in love easily but walked away just as easily from a relationship when it went bad. Some men—and there had been many of them—thought this showed she was coldhearted, but they were wrong. German Landis simply didn't understand people who moped. Life was too interesting to choose suffering. Although she got a big kick out of him, she thought her brother Guy, was goofy for spending his life writing songs only about things that either stank or sucked. In response, he drew a pictue of what her gravestone would look like if he designed it: a big yellow smiley face on it and the words I LIKE BEING DEAD! Little did either of them know that she would like it when her time came to die, years later. German Landis would move into death as she'd moved into new schoos, relationships, or phases of her life: full speed ahead, hopes ahoy, heart filled like a sail with reasonalbe optimism and belief that the gods were fundamentally benevolent, no mater where she was."
I love the notion that Carroll is presenting here that personality and attitude in life can carry over in to the way a person moves into death. It makes for a fun, life-affirming—and death-affirming for that matter—narrative.
Fair warning, this piece is highly informative but not always easy to listen to due to its graphic nature.
In Washington state, there are two options: hanging and lethal injection. Fascinatingly, reporter Patricia Murphy draws out some of the ethical issues involved.
The state divides the tasks into as many parts as possible so no one worker feels responsible for the execution. Also, in the case of lethal injection, three shots are given: The second is a paralytic; this makes the execution aesthetically peaceful for those watching, but from blood work done in autopsy, there is evidence that those executed feel pain even though they cannot move or communicate it in any way.
Like I said, not an easy listen, but full of good information if you're up for it.
Part two of KUOW's series on the death penalty in Washington state examines the legal complications of Washington's "volunteer" death penalty—meaning instead of certain crimes requiring mandatory pursuit of death penalty, it is up to the discretion of each individual elected prosecutor in the county in which a crime was committed.
With 39 counties in the state and 39 individual county prosecutors, the situation leads to all sorts of comparisons and questions about the arbitrary nature of the death penalty. For example, why is Darold Stenson likely to be executed while Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, will serve life in prison. (One explanation: Ridgeway bargained for life by giving information about the location of the bodies of his victims who had not yet been found.)
If yesterday's piece was noteworthy for its compassion, today's piece is an equally adept look at the fallability of a system that must necessarily be administered by a collection of individual people.
The first part in KUOW's special series on execution in Washington state is finally up on their website today.
Two things: 1) I guess they postponed the series until December 3rd from the original air date of December 1st because of the stay of execution. I did not hear this postponement advertised, if it was. 2) Even though they advertised it as being part of Morning Edition, it is actually produced by the local NPR affiliate KUOW. Sorry for any confusion I caused by passing on their misleading information.
Logistical snafus aside, it's a good piece on the stress families of victims go through when a death penalty case comes up in the courts.
A question explored by the opening story on this week's episode of This American Life. (I think it's a repeat, but nonetheless worth listening to if you haven't heard it yet.)
The story explores what happens to people who live alone and then die alone.
We follow one woman as LA county tries to track down her relatives, friends, whoever knew her, in order that they might take care of her remains and inherit her property. At the end of the story, there is audio from a mass burial in LA county for who have died alone, which the story reports many major cities have one of each year.
The reporter declares that being mourned is a privilege, meant for those who endear themselves in life. But the mass burial seems to suggest otherwise. The chaplain performing the service says: "Honored guests, on this day, we are gathered here for the annual mass burial, committing to this earthly resting place 1,918 brothers and sisters of human kind." Would the chaplain use language like "honored guests," and "brothers and sisters of human kind" if there wasn't some attempt to memorialize and sentimentalize the existence of these people?
I understand the reporter's point. Not everyone has a big funeral with a casket, flowers, crying relatives. It doesn't always happen. But he seems to miss that even when we don't know the person, we want ceremony for death. There may not be grief, but we see to feel compelled to mourn and mark the occasion at least in some way.
Last weekend's This American Life covered the theme "Life After Death." It's all about how people recover from their involvement in the deaths of others.
From the program's website: "One day at church camp, David Maxon challenged the devil to show himself. Just then, a huge thunderstorm started, and David felt sure the devil was behind it. So when the thunderstorm led to two campers getting killed, David couldn't help but blame himself. Twenty years later, host Ira Glass talks to David about being innocent but feeling guilty."
If you like radio, I don't know how you could avoid listening to that story. Here's the link.
