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Doonesbury

by Garry Trudeau

Gocomics

October 16, 2011

Portrait by David Mansell

The final curtain

The undertaker Martyn Ginder

has dealt with the realities of death for decades

- so why is he convinced he'll live forever?

Leo Benedictus finds out.

The Guardian Work p. 2

Saturday May 26, 2007
http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,2088251,00.html

life
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/old-age-life-goes-on-and-on.html

life expectancy gap between rich and poor people in England
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/02/poor-in-uk-dying-10-years-earlier-than-rich

final hours
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-final-hours

last hours

be given the last rites / be read the last rites

die
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/opinion/looking-for-a-place-to-die.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/29/death-cancer-maggie-gee

die at 55

the right to die
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1773462,00.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/05/12/choice_words.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1693775,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,7890,1693767,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1773203,00.html

euthanasia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/01/terry-pratchett-euthanasia-tribunals
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/11/law
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,7890,1693775,00.html

voluntary euthanasia USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07douthat.html

Why Do Americans Balk at Euthanasia Laws? USA 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/10/why-do-americans-balk-at-euthanasia-laws/

cost of dying 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/business-dying-funeral

cost of dying 2006
http://money.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1867625,00.html

pass

pass away
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2500540,00.html

passing

departure

demise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/01/jane-austen-tuberculosis-death

loss
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jul/11/jemma-redgrave-corin-redgrave-interview
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/fashion/22Melissa.html

death
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/06/steve-jobs-pancreas-cancer
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/happy-ending/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1686169,00.html

brutal death
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/nyregion/woman-set-ablaze-in-elevator-is-fondly-remembered.html

mortality
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/books/christopher-hitchens-on-writing-mortality-and-cancer.html

Mortality statistics:
every cause of death in England and Wales in 2009

How do we die?
Are you more likely to get knocked down by a car,
bitten by a dog or fall down the stairs?
Find out with the latest mortality statistics
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2011/01/14/Factfile_deaths_v2_2011.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/14/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2009

the dying
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

sudden death
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/09/david-cameron-tribute-amazing-father

Comforting a death in prison USA
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/18/health/20091018-hospice-audioss/index.html#
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/health/18hospice.html

Death on TV: assisted suicide to be screened December 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/10/assisted-suicide-television

death toll
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-war-toll_x.htm

dead
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/03/long-lost-brother-sister-reunited

be pronounced dead at the scene
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/12/us/AP-US-Children-Struck.html

the dead

the deceased

the faithful departed
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/holydays/allsaints_2.shtml

lost loved ones
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/nyregion/families-touch-the-names-of-911-victims.html

last journey
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/health/09sisters.html

All Saints' Day

All Saints' Day (also known as All Hallows' Day or Hallowmas)
is the day after All Hallows' Eve (Hallowe'en).
It is a feast day celebrated on November 1st by Anglicans and Roman Catholics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/holydays/allsaints_1.shtml

All Souls' Day

All Souls' Day
is marked on 2nd November (or the 3rd if the 2nd is a Sunday),
directly following All Saints' Day,
and is an opportunity for Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholic churches
to commemorate the faithful departed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/holydays/allsaints_2.shtml

predecease

body

remains
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/nyregion/as-remains-from-9-11-are-identified-no-end-to-grieving.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2006-10-19-wtc-remains_x.htm

autopsy
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE55O6AK20090627

postmortem

be survived by...

sorrow

mortality
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1401660,00.html

wake

at the wake

at Redden’s Funeral Home

candle

attend a wake for...

send a message of condolence to...

sign condolence books

widow
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/15/jimmy-mubenga-wife-devoted-father
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/18/afghanistan-war-widows-love-loss
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2540331,00.html

widower
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/18/sex-after-bereavement-widower-relationships

orphan

will
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/business/07finances.html

make a will
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Death/Preparation/DG_10029800

living wills USA 2005

the documents that let people specify
what medical measures they want or do not want at the end of life
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/health/17will.html

solicitor
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Death/Preparation/DG_10029800

inheritance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/19/blew-million-dollar-inheritance

assets
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Death/Preparation/DG_10029800

estate
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Death/Preparation/DG_10029800

estate USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/business/07finances.html

last wish

mourn
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/with-a-shield-a-readiness-to-mourn-a-comrade/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/nyregion/mourners-remember-a-fallen-officer.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/us-apple-jobs-idUSTRE79472K20111006
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/nyregion/thousands-mourn-boy-killed-in-brooklyn.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19staff.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/opinion/13thu1.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-16-shooting_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-04-amish-shooting_x.htm

mourn a relative

mourner
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/09/mark-duggan-funeral-community-unites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/06/raoul-moat-chris-brown-funeral
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-19-iowa-mourners_x.htm

mourning
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/nyregion/mourning-family-reflects-on-its-past-after-accident.html

national day of mourning

grief
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/nyregion/as-remains-from-9-11-are-identified-no-end-to-grieving.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/technology/jobss-death-prompts-grief-and-tributes.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/opinion/04klitzman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/us/14funeral.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/18/sex-after-bereavement-widower-relationships
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jul/11/jemma-redgrave-corin-redgrave-interview
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-05-amish-funerals_x.htm
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_473197.html

unbearable grief
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/nyregion/unbearable-grief-as-three-sisters-killed-in-christmas-day-fire-are-mourned.html

grief stricken
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/
the-grievances-and-grudges-that-drove-derrick-bird-over-the-edge-1991093.html

grieve for...

grieving

outpouring of grief

bereavement
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/bereavement
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jul/18/working-with-death

bereaved
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/15/plight-of-uk-war-widows
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/
leslie-carricksmith-community-spirit-will-be-invaluable-for-those-coping-with-the-shooting-trauma-1991098.html

tear

cry

sympathy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/18/sex-after-bereavement-widower-relationships

Bill Day

Tennessee

Cagle

16 August 2011

body

the body parts market
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2413169,00.html

corpse

remains
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-22-wwi-remains_x.htm

embalmer
http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1867782,00.html

the deceased

Her husband predeceased her in 1990.
She is survived by two daughters and one son.

mortuary
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/28/children.health

be cremated

ashes

sprinkle

casket
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-29-ford-funeral_x.htm

coffin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/30/henry-allingham-funeral-war-veteran
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21funeral.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/
at-last-a-coffin-you-might-actually-want-to-be-seen-dead-in-866490.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2391524,00.html

bier

undertaker
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2412747,00.html
http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1867782,00.html

honorary pallbearers

headstone
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/26/fitting-headstone-tony-wilson-grave
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/us/25granite.html

caretaker

grave
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

graveyard

gravedigger
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/28/tanya-gold-gravedigger

potter's field
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12froggy.html

churchyard

church

church bells

ring

toll

cathedral

ceremony

service
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

dignified

congregation

minister

read passages from the Bible

mausoleum
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

crypt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

cemetery
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn USA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/sep/08/newyork.culturaltrips

Cemeteries - London's Magnificent Seven
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/yourlondon/unitedcolours/cemeteries/index.shtml

necropolis
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09cemetery.html

Glasgow necropolis
http://www.glasgownecropolis.org/
http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/Residents/Parks_Outdoors/HeritageTrails/GlasgowNecropolis/

burial
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

home burial
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21funeral.html

indigent burials
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11burial.html

cremation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-19-urns_x.htm

farewell
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/pinters-perfectly-scripted-farewell-1220043.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2391524,00.html

final farewell
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/nyregion/05funeral.html

procession

hearse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/06/raoul-moat-chris-brown-funeral

flag-draped casket

black-draped stand

dressed in black

read the 23rd Psalm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_23

hymn
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2391524,00.html

funeral
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/nyregion/unbearable-grief-as-three-sisters-killed-in-christmas-day-fire-are-mourned.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/nyregion/funeral-for-girls-killed-in-connecticut-fire-poses-challenges.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/30/henry-allingham-funeral-war-veteran
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/23/jade-goody-funeral
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-09-mall-services_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2169435,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-01-ny-shooting_x.htm

funeral director

at the funeral of...

jazz funeral
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-29-katrina-bells_x.htm

state funeral
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1233026,00.html

live Web-streaming funerals
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/fashion/25death.html

astro funeral
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/
FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373602675&p=1012571727092

funeral cortege
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/09/mark-duggan-funeral-community-unites

funeral procession

high pomp and ritual

call for a moment of silence

at the funeral service

at the service for

attend the service

pastor

funeral rites

lie in state

lie in repose

on a catafalque

tribute

pay tribute to + N
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/06/raoul-moat-chris-brown-funeral

pay last respects to + N

say goodbye to + N

write in a condolence book

the late president

eulogize
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/excerpts-from-kennedys-speeches/

eulogy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/opinion/l27kennedy.html

visitation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-07-miners-farewell_x.htm

funeral

bereaved
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-03-bereaved_N.htm

bereavement
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/18/sex-after-bereavement-widower-relationships

farewell

bid farewell to
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-07-miners-farewell_x.htm

be laid to rest
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/30/henry-allingham-funeral-war-veteran
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

send-off
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-final-hours

tomb

tombstone

entomb
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

entombment
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

churchyard

Rest In Peace RIP

resting place
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

remembrance

commemoration

immortality
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1489635,00.html

afterlife
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/how-to-make-it-in-the-afterlife/

closure

memorial

memorial websites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2009/oct/07/memorial-websites-online-tributes

memorial service
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/09/cumbria-shootings-memorial-services
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/21/sir-bobby-robson-memorial-service2

draped with black cloth
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-27-ford-funerals_x.htm

posthumous
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/30/michael-jackson-posthumous-sales

General Register Office
Official information on births, marriages and deaths
http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/

cryonics
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html

Randy Bish

The Tribune-Review

Pittsburgh, PA

Cagle

2 July 2011

Related

Dr. Jack Kevorkian 1928-2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04kevorkian.html

suicide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/joaquin-luna-immigration-texas-suicide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/23/suicide-chronic-illness-study
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/06/troubled-lives-girls-bridge-death
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/05/suicide-leap-teenage-girls
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/us/21blanding.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/24/nicholas-hughes-suicide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/20/wales
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3399813.ece
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/
task-force-considers-the-werther-effect-784401.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1560878.ece
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1560877.ece
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-08-police-suicides_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-24-chancellors-death_x.htm
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1694236,00.html

take his / her own life
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/nov/27/gary-speed

chemical suicide
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/19chemical.html

Suicide and Suicidal Behavior USA
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/suicide-and-suicidal-behavior/overview.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/health/research/15suicide.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04suicide.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03schwartz.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01suicide.html

assisted suicide / right to die
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/assisted-suicide

assisted dying
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/14/terry-pratchett-choosing-to-die-assisted-dying-critics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/07/terry-pratchett-bbc-assisted-dying

assisted dying campaigners
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/03/assisted-dying-nan-maitland-dignitas-arthritis

Dr. Jack Kevorkian 1928-2011

Dr. Jack Kevorkian became known as "Dr. Death''
for participating in a string of physician-assisted suicides
that set off a fierce debate over the right to die
but ultimately landed him in prison after a conviction for murder.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/k/jack_kevorkian/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04kevorkian.html

cartoons > Cagle > Dr Kevorkian USA June 2011
http://www.cagle.com/news/Kevorkian11/main.asp

commit suicide
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-01-05-nikki-bacharach-obit_x.htm

suicide pact
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/22/suicide-pact-couple-met-hours-earlier

Suicide Act 1961
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/31/assisted-suicide-law-debbie-purdy
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6418450.ece

pro-life group
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/30/assisted-suicide-debbie-purdy-case

human rights
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/30/debbie-purdy-human-rights

obituary / obituaries
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/obituaries

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/series/otherlives
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/mainsection/obituaries
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/

Illustration: Marion Duchars

Essay

Modern death

People are killing themselves and their children and no one seems to notice

Stephen Armstrong The Guardian p. 23

Saturday January 14, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1686169,00.html

Unbearable Grief

as Three Sisters Killed in Fire Are Remembered

January 5, 2012
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Mourners gathered at the august Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue on Thursday, to remember the three girls killed in the Christmas morning fire that ravaged the waterfront home in Stamford, Conn., of their mother, Madonna Badger.

As funeral staff carried flowers and other adornments into the church, attendees were handed programs with a picture of the girls — each with a wide smile — and the dates of their births and deaths. Lilian Elizabeth Badger: August 29, 2002 - December 25, 2011. Sarah Hudson Badger and Grace McCarthy Badger, twin sisters: October 15, 2004 - December 25, 2011.

Family and friends embraced one another on the church steps, saying little. Some wore sunglasses to conceal tears; some wore fur coats. When mourners walked into the sanctuary, attendees were greeted with holiday wreaths along the church walls. The church was filled to capacity well before the service began.

The program said that three songs would be performed to honor the three sisters: “Amazing Grace,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Over the Rainbow.”

Members of Stamford’s fire rescue team arrived around 9:45 a.m. Ms. Badger and the girls’ father, Matthew Badger, and other family members were expected to arrive shortly before the service was to begin.

The girls were killed, along with their grandparents, during a Christmas morning fire that engulfed Ms. Badger’s waterfront home in Stamford, Conn. Ms. Badger and a family friend, Michael Borcina, escaped the blaze, but the family and firefighters could not rescue the three sisters.

Mr. Borcina told fire officials he had tried to flee with two of the girls, but perhaps amid the chaos of the smoke and flames, the girls apparently panicked and turned around, according to the Stamford fire chief, Antonio J. Conte.

The third child was found sitting atop a stack of books near a window of the home, Chief Conte said. It is believed that the girls’ grandfather, Lomer Johnson, may have placed them there to help his granddaughter escape.

The fire began, officials said, after Mr. Borcina removed embers from the fireplace about two hours before the fire erupted and put them in a bag, which he then placed in either the house’s mudroom or an adjacent trash enclosure.

Family and close friends attended a private wake on Wednesday at the Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel, the Upper East Side home that has handled the funeral services.

Thursday’s memorial was to be followed by a private service at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

    Unbearable Grief as Three Sisters Killed in Fire Are Remembered, NYT, 5.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/nyregion/unbearable-grief-
    as-three-sisters-killed-in-christmas-day-fire-are-mourned.html

Texas Prisoner Burials

Are a Gentle Touch in a Punitive System

January 4, 2012
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Kenneth Wayne Davis died at 54 as not so much a man but a number: Inmate No. 327320.

Mr. Davis was charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated for capital murder by the State of Texas after taking someone’s life on Nov. 19, 1977. But when he died in November 2011, Texas seemed his only friend. His family failed to claim his body, so the state paid for his burial.

On a cold morning in this East Texas town, a group of inmates bowed their heads as a prison chaplain led a prayer for Mr. Davis, his silver-handled black metal coffin resting on wooden planks above the grave the prisoners had dug for him. Wearing sunglasses, work boots and dirt-smeared white uniforms, they might have resembled painters were they not so solemn, holding their caps and gloves in their folded hands.

They were Mr. Davis’s gravediggers but also his mourners. No one who knew Mr. Davis bothered to attend his funeral, so it was left up to Damon Gibson, serving 14 years for theft, and the rest of the prison crew to stand in silence over the grave of a man they had never met. Then Mr. Gibson and the others put their gloves on and lowered the coffin into the ground using long straps, providing him eternal rest in the one place in Texas where murderers and other convicts whose bodies are unclaimed can be interred, remembered and, if but for a few moments, honored.

On this day, Mr. Davis’s funeral was one of seven at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, the largest prison graveyard in the country, 22 acres where thousands of inmates who were executed or died while incarcerated are buried. All of them went unclaimed by their relatives after they died, but the cemetery is not a ramshackle potter’s field. It is a quiet green oasis on a wide hill near the campus of Sam Houston State University, with rows of small crosses and headstones, at the center of which stand a decorative brick well and a white-painted altar bearing a cross. The last years of these inmates’ lives were spent under armed guard behind bars and barbed wire, but there is no fence along Bowers Boulevard here, and no one keeps watch.

Walking along the hill beneath the pine trees, stepping between the rows of hundreds of identical white crosses and tablet headstones, you think of Arlington National Cemetery. But if Arlington is for heroes, the Byrd cemetery is for villains.

The concrete cross marking the grave of Duane Howk lists his name, inmate number and date of death in June 2010 but says nothing of the offense for which he was serving a life sentence, aggravated sexual assault of a child. The serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff, executed in 1998 for strangling a 22-year-old pregnant mother of two with a rope, had gained notoriety for being the only inmate in United States history who was freed from death row and returned years later after killing again, but he lies beneath a nameless cross reading 999055.

The state’s prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, has been the steward of the cemetery since the first inmates were buried there in the mid-1800s, maintaining and operating it in recent decades as carefully and respectfully as any religious institution might.

An inmate crew from the nearby Walls Unit prison cleans the grounds, mows the grass and trims trees four days per week. The inmates dig the graves with a backhoe and shovels, serve as pallbearers and chisel the names on the headstones by hand using metal stencils and black paint. The cemetery was named for an assistant warden at the Walls Unit who helped clean and restore the graveyard in the 1960s, and even today, the warden or one of his deputies attends every burial.

“It’s important, because they’re people still,” said the warden, James Jones. “Of course they committed a crime and they have to do their time, and unfortunately they end up dying while they’re in prison, but they’re still human beings.”

In a state known for being tough on criminals, where officials recently eliminated last-meal requests on death row, the Byrd cemetery has been a little-known counterpoint to the mythology of the Texas penal system. One mile from the Walls Unit, which houses the state’s execution chamber, about 100 inmates are buried each year in ceremonies for which the state spends considerable time and money. Each burial costs Texas about $2,000. Often, as in Mr. Davis’s case, none of the deceased’s relatives attend, and the only people present are prison officials and the inmate workers.

Though all of those buried here were unclaimed by relatives, many family members fail to claim the bodies because they cannot afford burial expenses and want the prison agency to pay the costs instead. The same relatives who declined to claim the body will then travel to Huntsville to attend the state-paid services at the cemetery.

“I think everyone assumes if you’re in a prison cemetery you’re somehow the worst of the worst,” said Franklin T. Wilson, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana State University who is writing a book about the cemetery. “But it’s more of a reflection of your socioeconomic status. This is more of a case of if you’re buried there, you’re poor.”

Prison officials have verified 2,100 inmates who are buried at the cemetery, but they say there may be additional graves. Professor Wilson recently photographed every headstone and estimated that there were more than 3,000 graves.

In some ways, the cemetery and the funerals held there lack precision and formality. Coffins are transported from the altar at the center of the cemetery to the gravesite on a trailer hitched to the back of a green John Deere tractor. Names and words are misspelled on a few headstones and markers. Relatives have brought portable stereos to play music during the funerals, blaring rap songs and AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells.” Most days, after the inmate crew has returned to the prison, the cemetery is a deserted, lonesome place. Of the thousands of graves, only a handful have flowers on them.

“You’ve got guys here who died in prison and were buried out here, and they could have made a difference someplace, even if it was only in a small community somewhere,” said Jim Willett, director of the nearby Texas Prison Museum and a retired Walls Unit warden who attended nearly 200 graveside services. “These guys didn’t just mess up their lives. There’s their family and other families that got messed up because of some screwup that they did, and then they wind up like this.”

On the day of Mr. Davis’s interment, three burials had family members present, and four did not. Vandals had entered the cemetery and set a large brush pile on fire, filling the morning air with smoke. Neither Mr. Gibson nor the inmate workers knew any of the men they were burying. “It has made me a better person,” said Mr. Gibson, 38, a father of two from Houston. “It has made me reflect on the things I’ve done. I don’t want this to be me.”

Two of the seven inmates who were buried, including Mr. Davis, were serving life sentences for murder, and the others had been imprisoned for drunken driving, theft, assault, sexual assault of a child or burglary when they died. Mr. Davis spent nearly 34 of his 54 years behind bars. In the ground in Huntsville, he was finally free of his prison uniform. The funeral home that handles inmates’ burials put him in dark pants, a white shirt and a tie.

    Texas Prisoner Burials Are a Gentle Touch in a Punitive System, NYT, 4.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/
    texas-prisoner-burials-are-a-gentle-touch-in-a-punitive-system.html

Looking for a Place to Die

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By THERESA BROWN

Pittsburgh

THE patient was a fairly young woman and she’d had cancer for as long as her youngest child had been alive. That child was now walking and talking and her mother’s cancer had spread throughout her body to the point where there were no more curative options. Aggressive growth of the disease in her brain had stripped her of her personality and her memories.

She had another child, too, a few years older, and a husband whose drawn eyes and tense frame bore the strain of trying to keep it all together. Extended family lived far away and couldn’t be brought closer. The husband and kids lived more than an hour’s drive from the hospital.

No one could say for sure how long she would live, but continued hospital care was clearly pointless. Nor could she go home: she needed more attention than her family could provide. Everyone — her physician, the husband, the palliative care team, we nurses — agreed she needed inpatient hospice care, and that it should be provided close to home.

The problem was, she had no place to go. There was a hospice facility near her house, but it would accept her only if she would die within six days.

I’ve run up against these kinds of time limits before in my work as an oncology nurse. There’s a certain logic to it: hospice insurance benefits are ideally used to cover the costs of end-of-life care in patients’ homes, for up to six months, while periods of inpatient care are for the “short term.” And although patients do die in inpatient hospices, part of the mission of hospice is allowing patients to remain at home instead of in a hospital; hence the turn away from inpatient care, which is costly and often intrusive.

But that leaves people like this patient — more than a few days away from death, unable to be adequately cared for at home and unable to afford to pay out-of-pocket for a facility — struggling to find a place to die.

Dying at home was neither safe nor compassionate for this patient. She needed constant supervision: she would struggle to sit up and moan in frustration, or lurch dangerously over the side of the bed. Her speech was more sounds than words, and she had no control over her bowels or bladder.

Her husband looked as if he might fold in on himself at any minute, and he’d already borne the burden of care for a long time. Though I didn’t know for sure, it’s likely that his insurance couldn’t guarantee continuous nursing care in the home as a covered expense. And the patient’s children had already lost so much of their mother; she no longer even recognized them. Did they need to witness her final deterioration up close at home?

Home was not the only option. She could have stayed in the hospital and pursued aggressive care. Indeed, if her physician or a family member had said “do everything,” meaning keep her alive as long as possible through intravenous medications and hydration and, ultimately, sending her to the intensive care unit on a ventilator, it would have cost thousands of dollars but, paradoxically, most insurance companies would have considered it a legitimate care option.

Doing everything possible to extend her life wouldn’t have benefited her or her family, though. Roughly a third of family members of I.C.U. patients show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to research by the French intensive-care expert Elie Azoulay and his collaborators. If a loved one dies in intensive care after discussions about advance directives and patient wishes — that is, after the family has been made fully aware of the finality of the situation — the psychological fallout is even greater, approaching 80 percent. We do not always aid the living by inflicting high-tech ministrations on the almost-dead.

In other words, inpatient hospice care made sense medically, financially and psychologically for this patient, but the system simply wouldn’t allow it.

The only option, then, was for me to convince the hospice staff that she would die within six days. I spoke with the inpatient coordinator, the administrator and the hospice admissions nurse, who came to the hospital floor to assess the patient.

My explanations were precise: “She’s on an antibiotic now, but that’ll stop in hospice so she could go septic. Her kidney function is already diminished; kidney failure is only a matter of time. She has periods of difficulty breathing, and hospice won’t have the respiratory support she’ll need, but you can give her morphine to stop the air hunger.”

All of us will at some point come to this pass; we will all need a place to die. It’s not easy to think about, but it is true. We can turn away from that hard fact, try to stall death, even bend it to our will for a little while in the I.C.U. Or we can face that most difficult of life’s trials and ask ourselves how to make it easier.

With this patient I ended up being persuasive enough, and she got her inpatient admission. Was she dead in six days? Probably; I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that her sad husband and two young children, who would never really know their mother, had a chance to grieve and say goodbye in the most humane way possible for them.

Theresa Brown, an oncology nurse, is a contributor to The New York

Times’s Well blog and the author of

“Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death,

Life and Everything in Between.”

Looking for a Place to Die, NYT, 21.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/opinion/looking-for-a-place-to-die.html

A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality

October 9, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES McGRATH

HOUSTON — Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor, he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed. “I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do,” he explained, adding: “I’m not sure we need to be honored. We don’t need positive reinforcement. On the other hand, we do need to stick up for ourselves, especially in a place like Texas, where they have laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff.”

Mr. Hitchens, a prolific essayist and the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” discovered in June 2010 that he had Stage 4 esophageal cancer. He has lately curtailed his once busy schedule of public appearances, but he made an exception for the Atheist Alliance — or “the Triple A,” as he called it — partly because the occasion coincided almost to the day with his move 30 years ago from his native England to the United States. He was already in Houston, as it happened, because he had come here for treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has turned his 12th-floor room into a temporary library and headquarters.

Mr. Hitchens is gaunt these days, no longer barrel-chested. His voice is softer than it used to be, and for the second time since he began treatment, he has lost most of his hair. Once such an enthusiastic smoker that he would light up in the shower, he gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago. Even more inconceivable to many of his friends, Mr. Hitchens, who used to thrive on whiskey the way a bee thrives on nectar, hasn’t had a drink since July, when a feeding tube was installed in his stomach. “That’s the most depressing aspect,” he said. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can get used to.”

But in most other respects Mr. Hitchens is undiminished, preferring to see himself as living with cancer, not dying from it. He still holds forth in dazzlingly clever and erudite paragraphs, pausing only to catch a breath or let a punch line resonate, and though he says his legendary productivity has fallen off a little since his illness, he still writes faster than most people talk. Last week he stayed up until 1 in the morning to finish an article for Vanity Fair, working on a laptop on his bedside table.

Writing seems to come almost as naturally as speech does to Mr. Hitchens, and he consciously associates the two. “If you can talk, you can write,” he said. “You have to be careful to keep your speech as immaculate as possible. That’s what I’m most afraid of. I’m terrified of losing my voice.” He added: “Writing is something I do for a living, all right — it’s my livelihood. But it’s also my life. I couldn’t live without it.”

Mr. Hitchens’s newest book, published last month, is “Arguably,” a paving-stone-sized volume consisting mostly of essays finished since his last big collection, “Love, Poverty and War,” which came out in 2004. The range of subjects is typically Hitchensian. There are essays — miniature pamphlets, almost — on political subjects and especially on the danger posed to the West by Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism, a subject that has preoccupied Mr. Hitchens since 2001. But there are just as many on literary figures; there’s a paean to oral sex, and there are little rants about unruly wine waiters, clichés and the misuse of “fuel” as a verb. The book’s epigraph is from Henry James’s novel “The Ambassadors”: “Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” And in an introduction Mr. Hitchens writes: “Some of these articles were written with the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.”

In his hospital room he suggested that an awareness of mortality was useful for a writer but ideally it should remain latent. “I try not to dwell on it,” he said, “except that once in a while I say, O.K., I’m not going to make that joke, I’m not going to go for that chortle. Or if I have to choose between two subjects, I won’t choose the boring one.”

He added, talking about an essay on Philip Larkin that made it into “Arguably”: “I knew the collection was going to come out even if I did not, and I was very pleased when I finished that one, because of the way it ends: ‘Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.’ I remember thinking, if that’s the last piece I write, that will do me.” After a moment he went on: “The influence of Larkin is much greater than I thought. He’s perfect for people who are thinking about death. You’ve got that old-line Calvinist pessimism and modern, acid cynicism — a very good combo. He’s not liking what he sees, and not pretending to.”

His main regret at the moment, Mr. Hitchens said, was that while he was keeping up with his many deadlines — for Slate, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair — he didn’t have the energy to also work on a book. He had recently come up with some new ideas about his hero, George Orwell, for example — among them that Orwell might have had Asperger’s — and he said he ought to include them in a revised edition of his 2002 book, “Why Orwell Matters.” He had also thought of writing a book about dying. “It could be called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting,’ ” he said, laughing.

Turning serious, he said, “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.” He added: “I don’t know why I got so sick. Maybe it was the smokes, or maybe it’s genes. My father died of the same thing. It’s pointless getting into remorse.”

On balance, he reflected, the past year has been a pretty good one. He won a National Magazine Award, published “Arguably,” debated Tony Blair in front of a huge audience and added two states to the list of those he has visited. “I lack only the Dakotas and Nebraska,” he said, “though I may not get there unless someone comes up with some ethanol-based cancer treatment in Omaha.”

Mr. Hitchens has an extensive support network that includes his wife, Carol Blue, and his great friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Mr. Amis is known for being cool and acerbic, but as he kissed and embraced Mr. Hitchens last week, visiting on the way to a literary festival in Mexico, his affection for his friend was unmistakable. “Hitch’s buoyancy is amazing,” he said later. “He has this great love of life, which I rather envy, because I think I may be deficient in that respect. It’s an odd thing to say, but he’s almost like a Tibetan monk. It’s as if he’d become religious.”

A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality, NBYT, 9.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/books/christopher-hitchens-on-writing-mortality-and-cancer.html

Thousands Mourn Boy Killed in Brooklyn

July 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and JULIET LINDERMAN

With shock and grief clutching Borough Park in Brooklyn, thousands of mourners and residents poured into a neighborhood courtyard Wednesday evening for the funeral of an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was abducted and killed this week as he walked home from camp.

The funeral for the boy, which was held entirely in Yiddish, swelled to capacity before its scheduled start time at 8:30, prompting many of the thousands who could not get in to gather behind police barricades, crowding neighborhood streets as they waited to pay their respects to the young boy, Leiby Kletzky, whose remains were discovered earlier in the day. Throngs of police officers and members of a local security patrol group, the shomrim, kept order as a steady stream of visitors poured into the courtyard, adjacent to a school between 16th and 17th Avenues, within two blocks of where the boy lived. One shomrim volunteer estimated that close to 8,000 people were in attendance.

“We need to separate like the Red Sea so the family can get through,” one officer announced.

Inside, a large gathering of mourners in Orthodox and traditional modest dress — men and women separated as per custom — clutched leather-bound prayer books and chanted, some in tears, others stoic. Two elderly women known for their charity work passed around tins for donations, or tzedakah. Bottles of water and boxes of tissues were passed through the audience. Upfront, the women in Leiby’s family sat together, their heads covered in scarves and their faces etched with grief.

The service began shortly before 10 p.m., and was marked by a speech from the boy’s father, whose voice shook as he stood before the crowd and addressed his dead son, saying in Yiddish that he was lucky to have had him, if only for nine years.

“Thank God we had him,” he said, according to a translator.

And then, overcome by emotion, he went silent. A moment later the principal of Leiby’s school spoke.

“He got lost, he got lost,” he said, according to the translator. “There’s nothing to say, he got lost. God wanted it.” Several rabbis also spoke in Yiddish through intermittent tears, repeatedly breaking down. They extolled the boy’s good qualities, and reminded the community to be careful, urging the adults to protect their children. At one point the rabbi of the synagogue that Leiby attended recalled the boy’s devotion to his studies.

“He was such a good learner,” the rabbi said, according to a translation. “He used to pray all day. It was a pleasure to have him in the class. We’re not the boss. Everything is as God wanted it.”

The funeral came only hours after the family learned the news that their search for Leiby, who disappeared on Monday, had come to a devastating end. According to investigators, the boy — who would have turned 9 this month — was on his way to meet his parents after leaving the Nechmod Day Camp, at the Yeshiva Boyan at 1205 44th Street, on Monday afternoon when he got lost and asked for directions. His parents reported him missing, and surveillance footage later showed him in the company of a man the police identified as Levi Aron, 35, a local supply store clerk. The police said Mr. Aron took Leiby to his home, killed him, and cut up his body, parts of which were found in a refrigerator-freezer in Mr. Aron’s tiny attic apartment, less than two miles from the Kletzky home. He was charged Wednesday night with second degree murder. The news devastated the tight-knit community of Borough Park, where residents had raised reward money for Leiby’s return and formed search parties, scouring the streets in the days he was missing.

“We feel like we lost one of our own,” said Leah Rosenberg, a resident who showed up at the funeral. “He was everybody’s child. There was a pregnant woman dismembered in this neighborhood about 20 years ago. This brings it all back. It’s like ripping open an old wound. It’s a new pain and an old pain.

“Our hearts convey our condolences,” she added, before bursting into tears.

Some of those in attendance said they had viewed their community as relatively safe, and noted that a certain level of trust that had been implicit had suddenly been destroyed.

“I don’t even know the family, but I feel like it’s a community tragedy,” said Claire Wercberger, 54, a nursery school teacher who attended the funeral. “I’m devastated, horrified. There are no words. To say it’s a nightmare is an understatement. Everybody is heartbroken. It’s an unbelievable situation. It makes me much more on guard as a teacher and as a community member.”

Adriane Quinlan and Liz Robbins contributed reporting.

Thousands Mourn Boy Killed in Brooklyn, NYT, 13.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/nyregion/thousands-mourn-boy-killed-in-brooklyn.html

Relaxing, Touching the Memory,

Music Helps With the Final Transition

July 3, 2011
The New York Times
By SUZANNE DeCHILLO

Every week, three music therapists from MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care crisscross the city and suburbs to sing songs to the dying. With guitars strapped to their backs, a flute or tambourine and a songbook jammed in their backpacks, they play music for more than 100 patients, in housing projects, in nursing homes and even in a lavish waterfront home. The time for chemotherapy and radiation is over.

The music begins: a song to hold death at bay, a song to embrace death, or to praise God. A Vietnam veteran asks for a song in Vietnamese. One man asked only for songs with death in the lyrics, to force his family to talk to him about the future. He was ready to talk about it. They weren’t. So the therapist sang Queen’s version of “Another One Bites the Dust.” “Amazing Grace” and other spiritual songs are most often requested just before death.

James D. Williams, 85, of Brooklyn, who is dying of cancer, says, “Right now I am on borrowed time.” A therapist, Charla Burton, visits to sing hymns with Mr. Williams and his wife of 61 years, Daphne, 79. “The Lord has kept me and I am very grateful,” Mr. Williams says. “With the backup of my wife. She holds on to me.” Both were born in Belize, and their songs, part of their spiritual practice, have a joyful Caribbean lilt.

In Oceanside, N.Y., Merle Gross, 73, is dying of breast cancer. Sitting beside an ocean inlet, she and Ms. Burton make selections for a songbook she wants to leave behind. If there is time enough, it will include songs for every member of her family, all the people she loved and her dog, Shayna.

And in a Manhattan housing project, a mother cradles her 6-month-old daughter, Cecilia, and Meredith Traver plays a lullaby on her guitar, softly singing the words, “Papa is going to buy you a mockingbird.”

One of the youngest patients in the program, Cecilia Havre, has a genetic defect, Trisomy 18; half those born with this disorder do not survive beyond the first week of life. The baby smiles at her mother, Chantel Vazquez, and her father, Eddie Havre. Cecilia is deaf, but the music soothes her parents. Cecilia is thriving in hospice — or end-of-life — care and may be moved to palliative care, where treatment may be incorporated.

Rose Vuolo, 86, an Alzheimer’s patient on Long Island, has had visits from Ms. Burton for four months.

Rose rarely speaks. “She has gotten progressively worse,” says her grandson, Paul Motisi. “It’s become constant confusion.” Except sometimes when Ms. Burton visits.

Ms. Burton plays the Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine” — the lyrics of which even Cole Porter said he could not remember without the sheet music. Yet on a good day, Rose sings along, with perfect pitch and range. It was the song she and her husband danced to at their wedding.

Millicent Wilson, 94, who is dying of colon cancer in the Bronx, stopped singing after her husband died and she got sick, says her son, Mark V. Wilson, who stopped working to take care of her. But because of her music therapist, Yelena Zatulovsky, his mother is singing again.

At the end of a song, she asks him, “Mark, why don’t you dance anymore?”

Relaxing, Touching the Memory, Music Helps With the Final Transition, NYT, 3.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/nyregion/music-therapy-helps-the-dying.html

The costly business of dying

Prices are rising because of increased regulation, the industry says.
But in the hard-sell funeral game, the truth is less savoury

Guardian.co.uk
Monday 28 March 2011
14.02 BST
his article was published on guardian.co.uk
at 14.02 BST on Monday 28 March 2011.
It was last modified at 14.29 BST on Monday 28 March 2011.

In Germany, Radio Galaxy recently ran a morbid competition: win, and receive a cheque to cover your funeral costs. The €3,000 (£2,578) prize money would actually be applied to funeral insurance, not funeral costs directly – which is probably a good thing, since it's at the low end of the scale when it comes to paying for a German funeral. The average cost comes in between €2,000 and €5,000.

For those who have never had the displeasure of planning a funeral, the shock at the price tag can be significant. In the last six years, funeral costs in the UK have risen by 50%. The US National Funeral Directors Association says a funeral costs, on average, about $8,000 (£5,000). There are a lot of funerals that go into quintuple digits; a coffin alone can cost upwards of $10,000 (£6,200), with a myriad of padding and hidden costs thrown in. Refrigeration. Embalming. Casketing. Preparation of the body. Viewing. Compensation for religious officiants. Flowers. Vaults. Grave liners. Gaskets and seals. Grave markers. Opening the grave. Closing the grave. Opening the vault. Closing the vault. The grave, or cremation. Transport. Administrative fees. Facility rental. Honorariums.

Funeral directors suggest this is the result of increased regulation, causing higher consumer costs as funeral homes pass on their operating expenses. The truth is much less savory.

In 1963, Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, an exposé of US funeral practices. Funeral directors were outraged by the book, which covered the seamy side of the industry with attentive detail. She covered exploitative sales techniques used by funeral directors, such as the meticulous arrangement of coffins to exploit the most from consumers. Funeral directors, Mitford informed readers, would manipulate low-income clients by arranging coffins of mediocre quality at a roughly affordable price, with a few nicer specimens. Shocked by the cost, consumers would ask to see less expensive options, and would be shown to an array of cardboard boxes. "Oh, OK," they would say, taking the expensive coffin. Because you'd be ashamed to bury a family member in a cardboard box, wouldn't you?

Mitford didn't stop there, pointing out that funeral directors would look up benefits due to survivors and carefully pitch the price of the funeral, leaving survivors penniless after covering the expenses while assuring them that they were getting a special deal. Mitford also noted the push towards open casket funerals and other associated expenses, and warned British readers that far from being a series of curious practices across the pond, the American funeral industry was working on exporting itself to Britain. Funeral trends tend to cross from the US to Britain, and those trends can add significantly to the price at the same time that people come to expect them, and feel like a funeral is incomplete without them.

Mitford's exposé resulted in radical reforms for the funeral industry in the US, perhaps most exemplified by the Federal Trade Commission's funeral rule, which specifically bars many of the practices detailed in her book, which elevated consumer awareness about the pitfalls of pre-need funeral sales, a growth area in the worldwide funeral industry.

The industry surrounding death, they say, is structured to provide support and assistance to people in their time of need so they feel less isolated and alone, so they can focus on the details of the memorial and grieving rather than having to handle administrative errata. It's a selfless service, providing care to the bereaved ...

But of course, it's also a for-profit enterprise. Workers do not do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and the industry is heavily dominated by a handful of very large corporations interested in bottom lines with vertical monopolies to make sure they get it – a problem that hasn't gone away in the wake of Mitford's exposé, as indicated by comments filed by the Funeral Consumer's Alliance in 1997. You may go through a home, cemetery or crematorium, florist and so forth, all owned by the same company, all billing at rates that company likes, with little recourse for you unless you want to care for your own dead, which a lot of people do not or cannot do, depending on regional laws.

As funeral costs continue to rise, poor communities are hit the hardest. Funeral homes claim to provide funerals to everyone who needs them at prices they can afford, but "afford" is a nebulous term, and what people can literally bear may not necessarily be what they can "afford". Life insurance settlements and pensions are quickly eaten through by funeral costs, and people end up in the same position they were in before the funeral. In many communities, deaths, particularly of young people, are followed by community fundraisers to cover funeral costs – because their families would be bankrupted by the expense.

People want to do the right thing by the people they lose, want to care for their dead, want them to go out in style, and of course they are going to be susceptible to suggestion; sure, you could use that cheap casket. If you wanted. I'm sure it would be fine for your mother. She wasn't picky about her surroundings, right?

The costly business of dying, G, 28.3.2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/business-dying-funeral

For the Funeral Too Distant,

Mourners Gather on the Web

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON

In an age of commemorating birthdays, weddings and anniversaries on Facebook and Twitter, it was perhaps inevitable that live Web-streaming funerals for friends and loved ones would be next.

It is no surprise that the deaths of celebrities, like Michael Jackson, or honored political figures, like the United States diplomat Richard Holbrooke, are promoted as international Web events. So, too, was the memorial service for the six people killed Jan. 8 in Tucson, which had thousands of viewers on the Web.

But now the once-private funerals and memorials of less-noted citizens are also going online.

Several software companies have created easy-to-use programs to help funeral homes cater to bereaved families. FuneralOne a one-stop shop for online memorials that is based in St. Clair, Mich., has seen the number of funeral homes offering Webcasts increase to 1,053 in 2010, from 126 in 2008 (it also sells digital tribute DVDs).

During that same period, Event by Wire, a competitor in Half Moon Bay, Calif., watched the number of funeral homes live-streaming services jump to 300 from 80. And this month, the Service Corporation International in Houston, which owns 2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries, including the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said it was conducting a pilot Webcasting program at 16 of its funeral homes.

Traveling to funerals was once an important family rite, but with greater secularity and a mobile population increasingly disconnected from original hometowns, watching a funeral online can seem better than not going to a funeral at all. Social media, too, have redrawn the communal barriers of what is acceptable when relating to parents, siblings, friends and acquaintances.

“We are in a YouTube society now,” said H. Joseph Joachim IV, founder of FuneralOne. “People are living more than ever online, and this reflects that.”

Some of the Web-streamed funerals reflect the large followings gathered by individuals. On Jan. 11, more than 7,000 people watched the Santa Ana, Calif., funeral of Debbie Friedman, an iconic singer whose music combined Jewish text with folk rhythm. It was seen on Ustream, a Web video service, with more than 20,000 viewing it on-demand in the days that followed.

“We intended to watch a few minutes, but ended up watching almost the whole thing,” said Noa Kushner, a rabbi in San Anselmo, Calif., and a fan of Ms. Friedman’s music, who watched the service with a friend at his office. “I was so moved.”

After Stefanie Spielman, a breast cancer activist and the wife of the popular National Football League player Chris Spielman, died in 2009, the Spielmans wanted a private ceremony attended by 900 friends and family members, said Lajos Szabo, the chief strategy officer at Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service in Columbus, Ohio, which arranged the funeral. But they also hoped to accommodate members of the public, who wanted to support the family in its grief. Streamed live and posted online, Ms. Spielman’s funeral has been viewed 4,663 times by 2,989 visitors since November 2009, according to FuneralOne.

Other Webcasts are more obscure, but no less appreciated. Two weeks ago, a friend of Ronald Rich, a volunteer firefighter in Wallace, N.C., died unexpectedly. When Mr. Rich called the mother of his friend to say he could not make the eight-hour drive to the funeral because a snowstorm threatened to close roads, he said the mother offered to send an e-mail invitation so he could watch the service online. Mr. Rich said he watched the funeral: first by himself and a second time with his girlfriend.

“It was comforting to me,” he said, adding that he planned to watch it again with fellow firefighters.

The technology to put funerals online has been around for a decade but was slow to catch on with an industry understandably sensitive to questions of etiquette. Some funeral directors eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one, said John Reed, a past president of the National Funeral Directors Association. Other funeral directors worry that if the quality of the video is poor, it will reflect badly on the funeral home.

And the conversation about whether to stream a funeral online can be awkward, particularly if a grief-stricken family is wary of technology. Funeral directors are conservative, Mr. Reed said; privacy, even for the Facebook generation, is paramount. “We don’t jump on the first thing that comes along,” he said.

Still, some funeral directors offer the service for free (Mr. Reed is one of them) while others charge $100 to $300. If a family wants to keep the online service private, those invited get a password that allows access. (Mr. Joachim said 94 percent of the funerals his company Webcast were not password-protected.)

Not all real-life funeral attendees want their images captured online. Irene Dahl, an owner of Dahl Funeral Chapel in Bozeman, Mont., said a young man went to a funeral last year dressed as a woman and asked not to be filmed. “He did not want his mother to know,” Ms. Dahl said. “So we did not face the camera in his direction.”

Ms. Dahl said that nearly one-third of the ceremonies arranged by her funeral home last year — about 60 — were streamed live, at no extra charge. She became interested in this option after Dan Grumley, the chief executive of Event by Wire, visited her in 2008 and showed her how it worked.

“Being a funeral director is about helping people with their grief,” she said.

Russell Witek, the 14-year-old son of Karen Witek of Geneva, Ill., died of a brain tumor in 2009. The Conley Funeral Home in Elburn, Ill., offered to stream the funeral live to friends and family members. “We said, ‘Why not?’ ” Ms. Witek said. Her brother-in-law was working in the Middle East and could not attend. Russell’s home health nurse was out of town. “It was spring break,” Ms. Witek said.

She had met a number of friends on social media sites, including a patient-care support group and another for parents who home-schooled their children, and they could not attend, either. “I wanted them to experience it,” Ms. Witek said.

According to Conley Funeral Home, 186 people watched the funeral live on April 3, 2009, with an additional 511 watching it on-demand through Jan. 15.

Ms. Witek said her husband had watched the funeral more than once, “because he wanted to hear what was said that day,” but said she couldn’t bring herself to view it, except in parts. “After a child dies, you go into a fog.”

But for William Uzenski, the father of Nicholas Uzenski, a Marine serving in Afghanistan who was killed on Jan. 11, 2010, live Web-streaming has provided much comfort. Mr. Uzenski’s body was transported to his home, Bozeman, 10 days later. William Uzenski, himself a former Marine, said he wanted Nicholas’s military colleagues in Afghanistan to be able to watch the funeral. So Ms. Dahl arranged it through a military liaison who was assisting the family.

Ms. Dahl said that, unlike many streamed funerals, Nicholas Uzenski’s had three separate Webcasts and was invitation-only. The Webcasts included the arrival of his coffin at a local airport, the funeral and a graveside ceremony that his family said included a 21-gun salute. Ms. Dahl tracked virtual attendees. The funeral and the graveside ceremony were watched by 124 and 39 people, respectively, with the funeral viewed in 80 cities and 4 countries, including Afghanistan.

“Some e-mailed me,” Mr. Uzenski said. “Friends thanked us for sharing it with them. I do watch it again sometimes. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s healing.”

For the Funeral Too Distant, Mourners Gather on the Web, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/fashion/25death.html

Tucson Pauses in Grief for the Youngest Victim

January 13, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK and MARC LACEY

TUCSON — The first funeral in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting rampage might turn out to be the most heart-wrenching.

Christina-Taylor Green, age 9, was wheeled from church in a child-size coffin to the mournful strain of bagpipes on Thursday, having become the focus for much of the grief that has enveloped this community — and the nation — since the shootings that left 6 dead and 14 injured.

Christina’s clear-eyed gaze, her enthusiasm — baseball, dance and student council were all passions — and the randomness in which she was killed made her death particularly devastating, for grown-ups, President Obama among them, and for her contemporaries.

As the president noted, she was attending the event at which she was shot because of a blossoming interest in politics and American democracy. “I want us to live up to her expectations,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the victims Wednesday evening at the University of Arizona. “I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”

Christina’s Little League baseball team, the Pirates, will wear patches on its uniforms honoring Christina. The league is trying to get players across the country, from T-ball to the major leagues, to consider doing the same. Teams in California, Colorado and Florida have already bought patches.

Oro Valley, a Tucson suburb, is considering naming a baseball field where she played after her, city officials said.

The raw emotion was on display inside St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Roman Catholic Church on Thursday, where more than 1,500 mourners of all ages were packed in tight; and outside, where there were more mourners; and down the winding road, where hundreds more waited and watched; and across the city. Some dressed in white, others in baseball uniforms. Some wore angel wings. Others carried teddy bears or bouquets of flowers.

The funeral felt almost like a state affair, with rows of politicians, officers in dress uniforms and the bagpipes. It was the biggest service anyone in Tucson could remember.

Toward the end, her father, John Green, rose to speak. He looked out at the crowd. He swallowed. And then, in a scratchy, baritone voice he said her name, slowly: “Christina-Taylor Green.”

He described a girl who picked blackberries in the summer and went sledding in the winter. Most times, she was the one directing the other kids in their adventures. He told of her and her mother, Roxanna, dressing up “to the nines” and dancing around the house.

At one of the roadside memorials that have popped up around Tucson for Christina and the other victims, a somber Mary Palma and her two grandchildren, Isaac and Eva, stopped to pay their respects, and to grapple with the recent events. “It’s hard for kids to understand that something like this could happen, and it’s hard for me,” said Ms. Palma. “They didn’t know Christina, but they know her now. Everyone knows her.”

Christina was born on Sept. 11, 2001. A flag from the World Trade Center, brought to Tucson by representatives of the New York City Fire Department, flew outside the church for the funeral.

Mr. Green said his daughter’s birthday had given her an understanding of tragedy, and it sparked an interest in civic affairs that brought her to meet Representative Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday.

She had a younger brother, Dallas, and she loved to swim. She was the hero of Mailey Moser, the 5-year-old little sister of one of her baseball teammates. Mailey would wriggle from her mother’s grasp to sneak into the dugout and sit next to Christina.

At Christina’s school, Mesa Verde Elementary, where students have been holding difficult discussions about death this week, it was quieter than usual as many students, teachers and administrators left to spend the day at the funeral. Out front was a memorial with messages to Christina. There was a photograph of her hugging her friend Serenity, who wrote, “Christina remember this photo, it was our first sleepover.”

During lunch this week, Kayley Clark, 9, called her mother at home to say that she did not want to eat the school meal of turkey tacos. She has never done that before, her mother said. Getting dressed in the morning, she has been unusually picky about what colors to wear, as if the decision might be her last.

“You know that could have been your kid there outside the supermarket standing right where Christina was standing, when the shooting broke out,” said Leah Simmers, 30, a mother of three. “This hit close to home for every mother I know.”

And for every child, including her son, Dillon, 8, a second grader. “A girl like that should not be shot,” he said, noting that she was just a year older than he was.

Suzi Hileman, the neighbor who brought Christina to meet Ms. Giffords, is still at the hospital recovering from her gunshot wounds and struggling with feelings of guilt. As soon as Mrs. Hileman’s ventilator was removed for the first time Saturday night, she turned to her husband, Bill, and asked, “What about Christina?” In her foggy morphine haze, Mr. Hileman said, she has screamed out, “Christina! Christina!”

Baseball was in Christina’s blood. Her father is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers and her grandfather, Dallas Green, managed the 1980 World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies.

She was the only girl on the Pirates, the only one with shoulder-length hair peeking from the green and yellow cap. She brought a mix of playfulness and grit to the team. She spent a week negotiating the terms of a race in the outfield between the players and the coach: kids run forward, coach runs backward, winner gets ice cream. The kids won.

She climbed mesquite trees after practice. While playing second base during warm-ups on a hot desert day, she sang a pop song to herself, and quickly brought in the first baseman and right fielder into her chorus.

But she was a tough player, too. Once, with the bases loaded, she drove a hard line drive up the middle, bringing in two runs.

Another time, after a dispute at second base on whether the runner was out, she stepped in and settled things. And then there was the time when, after getting hit by a pitch, she had the option of taking the base or staying at bat. She stayed to hit — and she did, on the very next pitch.

During his eulogy, Mr. Green delivered a message, inspired by Christina’s life, to everyone who had been touched by her.

“Everybody’s going to be O.K.,” he said. “She would want that.”

Carli Brousseau, Jennifer Medina and Anissa Tanweer contributed reporting.

Tucson Pauses in Grief for the Youngest Victim, NYT, 13.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/us/14funeral.html

As We Mourn

January 12, 2011
The New York Times

It is a president’s responsibility to salve a national wound. President Obama did that on Wednesday evening at the memorial service in Tucson for the six people who died in last weekend’s terrible shooting. It was one of his most powerful and uplifting speeches.

Mr. Obama called on ideological campaigners to stop vilifying their opponents. The only way to move forward after such a tragedy, he said, is to cast aside “point-scoring and pettiness.” He rightly focused primarily on the lives of those who died and the heroism of those who tried to stop the shooter and save the victims. He urged prayers for the 14 wounded, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the target of the rampage. Their stories needed to be told, their lives celebrated and mourned.

It was important that Mr. Obama transcend the debate about whose partisanship has been excessive and whose words have sown the most division and dread. This page and many others have identified those voices and called on them to stop demonizing their political opponents. The president’s role in Tucson was to comfort and honor, and instill hope.

This horrific event, he said, should be a turning point for everyone — “not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation.”

He also said that after a senseless tragedy it is natural to try to impose some meaning. Wisely, he did not try. But he was right to warn that any proposals to reduce this kind of bloodshed will remain out of reach if political discourse remains deeply polarized. Two of those essential proposals, we believe, are gun safety laws and improvement to the mental health system, and it was heartening to hear the president bring them up.

Mr. Obama noted that several of Saturday’s victims were struck down as they performed public service. Ms. Giffords was engaging in the most fundamental act of a representative: meeting with her constituents to hear their concerns. Gabriel Zimmerman, her murdered aide, had set up the “Congress on Your Corner” event. John Roll, the murdered federal judge who lived nearby, came into the line of fire while thanking Ms. Giffords for helping to ease his court’s crowded legal calendar.

Many of the other victims were performing one of citizenship’s most basic duties: listening to and questioning one of their political representatives. Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old student council president who was killed, was brought there by a neighbor because of her interest in politics.

The president’s words were an important contrast to the ugliness that continues to swirl in some parts of the country. The accusation by Sarah Palin that “journalists and pundits” had committed a “blood libel” when they raised questions about overheated rhetoric was especially disturbing, given the grave meaning of that phrase in the history of the Jewish people.

Earlier in the day, the speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, issued their own, very welcome, calls to rise above partisanship. It is in that arena where Wednesday’s high-minded pledges will be tested most.

Mr. Obama said that it must be possible for Americans to question each other’s ideas without questioning their love of country. We hope all of America’s leaders, and all Americans, will take that to heart.

As We Mourn, NYT, 12.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/opinion/13thu1.html

Dealing in Death, and Trying to Make a Living

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Body bags go for $20. Yellow crime scene tape is $6. Toe tags are normally $5, but they were sold out this month. The merchandise comes in a white plastic shopping bag that says “Los Angeles County Department of Coroner.”

Tucked in the corner of a squat brick building that houses a huge depository of the dead is the strangest of gift shops. For years, the county coroner has run the shop, aptly named Skeletons in the Closet, selling knickknacks playing off the rather morbid humor that the department’s business arouses in many people.

But it turns out that the shop’s slogan — “We’re dying for your business!” — is all too accurate. The shop was once supposed to make enough money to pay for an anti-drunken-driving course for teenagers that includes a visit to the morgue.

But a recent report from county auditors shows that it has not made a profit for years and is actually subsidized by the very program it was meant to finance.

So the shop needs county money to order more of the “undertaker” boxer shorts and the business-card holders shaped like skulls.

But all that kitsch does not necessarily translate into a return on investment.

“It’s certainly a problem for us from a financial sense,” said Craig Harvey, the director of operations for the coroner. “We’re not necessarily a place that has a lot of experience in business, so this is simply a kind of wake-up call to see if we can do better at selling what we have.”

Still, Mr. Harvey said, the store is quite a draw for a “certain segment of people.” It has particular cachet among foreign tour guides. During the summer, busloads of Asian and European tourists come to the out-of-the-way office a few miles east of downtown. The most popular item is the $30 beach towel with a life-size body outline.

But for the most part, the shop’s only marketing has been word of mouth and free publicity in the news media. The store has a rudimentary Web site and is only now starting to explore ways to use the Internet to drive sales through Amazon, eBay and Facebook. There, it hopes to find a larger market for sweatshirts, notepads and pens bearing the same logo that department officials display in the field.

At its peak, in 2003, Skeletons in the Closet pulled in $280,000. Last year, it made $151,000.

The store was created almost by accident nearly 20 years ago by a secretary who noticed how popular mugs and T-shirts with the coroner’s logo were at the forensic conferences the department held each year. So she began ordering more and selling them from her desk. Eventually, there was enough business that the merchandise moved to a small closet (the name came not long after that).

Now the shop fills a small room just off the department’s only public entrance. A sign reminds visitors of the real purpose of a coroner, pleading with potentially overeager shoppers to “Please be considerate of our families here on business.”

“Everyone who comes in here is kind of weird,” said Edna Pereyda, who handles the shop’s day-to-day operations. “Why else would you come here?”

The occasional celebrity stops in if he or she is filming nearby; local detectives and police officers are typically the most loyal customers.

“I advise if you like something you should get it now,” Ms. Pereyda told Officer Robert Alvarado of the Los Angeles Police Department, who stopped by one recent morning. “You never know when it will be gone.”

Officer Alvarado, who was there with his girlfriend, said he frequently wore his favorite purchase — a barbecue apron emblazoned “L.A. County Coroner Has ♥” in the center and two pockets labeled “spare ribs” and “spare hands.”

As they looked around the small wood-paneled shop, a large couch resembling the inside of a coffin caught the eye of his girlfriend, Monica Rodriguez. It was not for sale, but Ms. Pereyda said she could order a custom version from a company that advertised at the store, promising “eternal comfort” for $3,000.

Ms. Rodriguez’s 10-year-old son stood by, looking rather confused.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the outlined image on a T-shirt that read “Our Bodies of Work Speak for Themselves.”

Officer Alvarado smiled before answering. “Back in the old days, they traced dead bodies with chalk,” he said. “They don’t do that anymore. Now they just leave you there on the ground.”

A few minutes later, they left without buying anything.

Ms. Pereyda said that much of the merchandise in the store had been the same for years, leaving many regular customers eager for more. So she is brainstorming new ideas and is particularly excited about a shipment of water bottles that is supposed to arrive next month.

The containers will be labeled “bodily fluids.”

Dealing in Death, and Trying to Make a Living, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26coroner.html

Until Cryonics Do Us Part

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By KERRY HOWLEY

There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.

“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”

The provenance of this disagreement remains somewhat hazy, as neither Peggy nor her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen. It would have been decades ago, before the two were married and before the births of their two teenage sons. With the benefit of hindsight, Robin, who is 50 and an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, will acknowledge that he should have foreseen at least some initial discomfort on the part of his girlfriend, whom he met when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago. “I was surprised by her response,” he recalls, “but that’s because I am a nerd and not good at predicting these things.”

Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence” (on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of magnitude” higher than we’ve currently got), “Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization” (on what behaviors we can expect from extraterrestrials) and “Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics” (it’s very complicated). His enthusiasm is evident in the way he talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream. If he is in a chair, the chair is moving with him.

“I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype. “Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. It’s also living quite a bit delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.

Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist history, starting with the prime mover. Robert Ettinger is the father of cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. “This is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than200 patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife. Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?”

The air of hurt confusion stems, in part, from the intuition among believers that cryonics is a harmless attempt at preserving data, little different from stowing a box of photos. Of the nonreligious white males who predominate in the ranks of cryonicists, many are software engineers, a calling that puts great faith in the primacy of information. “If you have a hard drive on a computer with a lot of information that is important to you, you save it,” says J.S., a 39-year-old cryonicist and software engineer who lives in Oregon and who will not allow his full name to be used out of fear that his wife would divorce him. “You wouldn’t just throw it into a fire. It’s clear to me that memories are stored as molecular arrangements. I’m just trying to preserve the memories.”

A small amount of time spent trying to avoid certain death would seem to be well within the capacity of a healthy marriage to absorb. The checkered marital history of cryonics suggests instead that a violation beyond nonconformity is at stake, that something intrinsic to the loner’s quest for a second life agitates against harmony in the first.

Back when Peggy and Robin were two broke Californians shivering in the Chicago cold, the university’s law school used to play old movies for $1. They’d go watch a Cary Grant film and end up back at the dorms for a board game. He taught her to play backgammon; they spent chilly nights playing cards. “Robin is very romantic,” Peggy says. “He used to leave notes in my dorm mailbox all the time, little poems and things, pictures he liked. I still have those.”

Peggy was thinking about those notes because some siblings at the hospice where she works had just happened upon a cache of love letters written by their father before World War II, and read them aloud to their ailing mother. During my visit to the hospice earlier this year, families were gathered in their rooms and in the large common area, where the TV was on and a box of toys had been pushed aside to make space for a Christmas tree. Pets are allowed; so is liquor. Guests might spend some time chatting with a social worker like Peggy, but probably not much time, because the average stay is seven days.

Peggy describes herself as not religious and “definitely not a Christian,” though she lacks Robin’s surety that nothing lives on when the body dies. Her line of work has left her focused on managing the last days of life, partly by encouraging her charges to stop fixating on medicine. Families come from hospital to hospice obsessed with numbers: blood count, blood pressure, heart rate. “Look at his face,” she counsels. “Does he look comfortable? It’s very common-sensical, but it takes a lot of work to get people to let go of the hospital stuff.”

A tour guide to the dying process, Peggy tells families what they will see and how best to reduce discomfort. Feet and hands will turn cold. Senses will fade, but hearing may remain sharp until the very end; telling secrets within earshot of an otherwise-unresponsive guest is ill advised. The muscles required to swallow will go limp in the throat, and the resulting sound will register as a rattle. In the interest of a smooth transition, families are asked to sign a form that says “do not resuscitate.” Very rarely, one doesn’t, though to fail to do so is to violate certain philosophical leanings of a place very much oriented toward acceptance. “The paramedics come in and they pound on the chest,” Peggy says. “It breaks bones, causes pain, it’s serious trauma. That always feels like a failure. I didn’t get through to this poor family.”

The United States is not necessarily an easy place to take up the banner of letting go; we’re likely to call it “giving up,” and there is of course no purer expression of this attitude than the pursuit of cryonics. Heads and bodies stored in steel tanks, awaiting the moment when medicine advances to the point where tissue can be repaired and bodies revived, are pointedly referred to not as remains or cadavers but as “patients.” A stopped heart is seen as no good reason to stop fighting for your life. And so Peggy expends a certain amount of psychic energy trying to ignore Robin’s cryonics arrangements. Separate bank accounts prevent her from having to see the money spent on annual dues, and the two manage to avoid bringing up the subject at home. When he dies (“which he will,” Peggy adds), it will fall to someone else to call Alcor and explain Robin’s wishes to the hospital staff. “My husband has said, on numerous occasions, ‘Choose life at any cost,’ ” Peggy says. “But I’ve seen people in pain. It’s not worth it.”

Shortly after they met, Peggy and Robin decided to read each other’s favorite works of literature. Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’ ” Robin, less one for telling stories, describes their early days more succinctly. “There was,” he says not without tenderness, “a personality-type convergence.”

As an economist with an interest in political institutions, Robin came up with the concept of futarchy, a form of government in which prediction markets would be used to determine the viability of various policies. He would like to live in a futarchy, and an effective cryonic preservation would improve his chances of seeing one. He also talks about what it means to be the kind of person willing to do what it takes to survive. “Our ancestors came across the oceans,” he says, “went across the continent. Many people, most, didn’t do those things. But I think of myself as the kind of person who is willing to suffer quite a bit of change in lifestyle, culture and context if it’s a matter of that or extermination.”

Robin’s expertise extends to the economics of health care, a domain in which enormous amounts of money are spent on experimental procedures with only a small chance of extending life. Like many cryonicists, he says he thinks of bodily preservation as experimental end-of-life medical care, and it is within a medical context that he typically introduces the subject of cryonics to his health economics class at George Mason. His students rarely accept this framing. “We spend most of the semester talking about how people are obsessed with taking any small chance at living longer,” Robin says. “And then when we get to cryonics, it’s: Well, who needs to live longer? What’s the point of living anyway? Why can’t we solve global hunger?”

In other words, while his wife says that medical technology has an unfortunate stranglehold on the way we die, Robin longs to claim the mantle of medical science for his attempt to avoid death altogether. But here he doesn’t expect to succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions, he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future — a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway — is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.”

Whether or not the human race subconsciously equates attempts to defeat death with treachery, it’s true that a general air of menace hangs over the quest for immortality in Western literature. Think Gilgamesh or Voldemort. “There is a lot of ancient cultural stereotyping about the motives and moral character of people who pursue life extension,” says James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit organization enamored of life extension. Hughes has chosen not to participate in what he considers a worthy experiment. “Although it’s a rather marginal bet for a potentially huge payoff,” he says, “I value my relationship with my wife.”

If cryonic preservation does indeed signal betrayal, it does so while asking much from those who would be betrayed. Alcor’s Patient Care Bay, filled as it is with 10-foot steel canisters packed with human bodies and connected to monitors, may appear self-regulating but in fact requires a very human vigilance against entropy. There is a man charged with topping off the liquid nitrogen. There is a man who mops the floors. Those in charge of the Patient Care Bay are only the last in a long chain of people called upon to assist “deanimated” members. Someone must perform the perfusion, for example, whereby blood is replaced with an antifreeze-like solution that will harden like glass rather than freeze like water. Someone must accompany the body from the site of death to the cryonics facility. Someone must deal with flight schedules, local coroners and byzantine hospital bureaucracies generally unfriendly to those who would march into the hospital and whisk away the freshly dead. This is all vastly more likely to succeed if the legal guardian of the remains is willing to help. “If you don’t tell your wife you’re involved with cryonics, you don’t really love her,” says S.B., a cryonicist from Indianapolis who reports that his marriage is suffering and that two of his previous relationships failed because of cryonics. “And when I die, I want my wife to call Alcor.”

It has not escaped the members of the often sappily life-affirming cryonics community that their practice, so often thought to be the province of either misfit loners or rugged individualists, involves great faith in the competent benevolence of other people. Nor is Robin Hanson blind to the extent to which he depends on his tribe. Marriage, despite its lack of clean edges and predictable outcomes, is one of the few institutions he seems to have no interest in reforming. Peggy describes their conflict as akin to a deep religious difference, bridgeable by some core shared belief. “Robin and I have been together for 28 years,” Peggy says. “We’ve always loved spending time together. He is an excellent father. He devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to family life. And that has to be there.”

Robin and Peggy remain silent on the issue of how, exactly, death will part them, but earlier this year a stray bit of chatter glanced past the conversational barricade. Sitting at their kitchen table, Peggy told Robin about a funeral tradition she’d heard about: after a cremation, the ashes of the dead are separated among family members. The children and surviving spouse each get a handful, to save or dispose of as they see fit.

“You’re not getting any part of me,” Robin said. “I’m being frozen.”

“No.” Peggy said. “Your head is being frozen. I get the rest of you.”

Kerry Howley is an arts fellow in the University of Iowa’s literary nonfiction program. This is her first article for the magazine.

Until Cryonics Do Us Part, NYT, 5.7.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html

Robert Butler, Aging Expert, Is Dead at 83

July 6, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Dr. Robert N. Butler, a psychiatrist whose painful youthful realization that death is inevitable prompted him to challenge and ultimately reform the treatment of the elderly through research, public policy and a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 83 and had worked until three days before his death.

The cause was acute leukemia, his daughter Christine Butler said.

Dr. Butler’s influence was apparent in the widely used word he coined to describe discrimination against the elderly: “ageism.” He defended as healthy the way many old people slip into old memories — even giving it a name, “life review.”

In speech after speech, he pounded home the message that longevity in the United States had increased by 30 years in the 20th century — greater than the gain during the preceding 5,000 years of human history — and that this had led to profound changes in every aspect of society, employment and politics among them.

Dr. Christine Cassel, president of the American Board of Internal Medicine, said in an interview that Dr. Butler had in effect “created an entire field of medicine.” She said he had helped change attitudes so that aging could be perceived “a positive thing.”

Dr. Butler was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and advocated for the aging before Congress and the United Nations. He helped start and led the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, the Alzheimer’s Disease Association and the International Longevity Center. President Bill Clinton named him chairman of the 1995 White House Conference on Aging.

“He really put geriatrics on the map,” Dr. David B. Reuben, chief of the division of geriatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an interview.

Dr. Butler challenged long-held conceptions about aging, calling it “the neglected stepchild of the human life cycle.” He helped establish, for example, that senility is not inevitable with aging. When the Heinz Family Foundation presented him with an award in 2003, it called him “a prophetic visionary.”

The most noted exposition of his vision was the 1975 book that earned him his Pulitzer, “Why Survive? Being Old in America.” It went from a bleak explication of the elderly’s condition to prescriptions to improve it.

“Human beings need the freedom to live with change, to invent and reinvent themselves a number of times through their lives,” Dr. Butler wrote.

Dr. Butler’s mission emerged from his childhood, he wrote in his book. His parents had scarcely named him Robert Neil Butler before splitting up 11 months after his birth on Jan. 21, 1927, in Manhattan. He went to live with his maternal grandparents on a chicken farm in Vineland, N.J.

He came to revere his grandfather, with whom he cared for sick chickens in the “hospital” at one end of the chicken house. He loved the old man’s stories. But the grandfather disappeared when Robert was 7, and nobody would tell him why. He finally learned that he had died.

Robert found solace in his friendship with a physician he identified only as Dr. Rose. Dr. Rose had helped him through scarlet fever and took him on his rounds by horse and carriage. The boy decided he could have helped his grandfather survive had he been a doctor. He also concluded that he would have preferred that people had been honest with him about death.

From his grandmother, he learned about the strength and endurance of the elderly, he wrote. After losing the farm in the Depression, she and her grandson lived on government-surplus foods and lived in a cheap hotel. Robert sold newspapers. Then the hotel burned down, with all their possessions.

“What I remember even more than the hardships of those years was my grandmother’s triumphant spirit and determination,” he wrote. “Experiencing at first hand an older person’s struggle to survive, I was myself helped to survive as well.”

Dr. Butler served in the United States Maritime Service before entering Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees. During his internship in psychiatry at St. Luke’s Hospital, he had many elderly patients and realized how little he had been taught about treating them. He began reading about the biology of aging.

After his residency at the University of California, San Francisco, he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health as a research psychiatrist. He studied the central nervous system in elderly people, work that became part of a large study of aging. He also helped Ralph Nader investigate problems in nursing homes.

The book that emerged from his experiences proposed many specific reforms to help old people, including a national service corps that would enlist the elderly as community volunteers.

In 1975 he succeeded in creating a National Institute on Aging and was its head for six years.

“Nobody thought research on aging was a legitimate field until Bob came along and convinced them to create a separate institute,” Dr. Cassel said.

In 1982, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan asked Dr. Butler’s advice on whom to hire for a new geriatrics chair. He proposed instead that the school create a department devoted solely to gerontology. It did, and was one of the first to do so.

He wrote numerous articles and several books, including the bestseller “Sex after Sixty,” which he wrote with his second wife, Dr. Myrna I. Lewis, in 1976.

Dr. Butler’s first marriage, to Diane McLaughlin, ended in divorce. Dr. Lewis died in 2005. Besides his daughter Christine, he is survived by three other daughters, Carole Butler Hall, Cynthia Butler and Alexandra Butler; and six grandchildren.

Dr. Butler acknowledged in an interview two years ago with The Saturday Evening Post that his views on his own aging had changed: he feared death less.

“I feel less threatened by the end of life than I perhaps did when I was 35,” he said.

Robert Butler, Aging Expert, Is Dead at 83, NYT, 6.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/health/research/07butler.html

Indigent Burials Are on the Rise

October 11, 2009
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, with states, counties and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot.

The increase comes as governments short on cash are cutting other social service programs, with some municipalities dipping into emergency and reserve funds to help cover the costs of burials or cremations.

Oregon, for example, has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of unclaimed bodies over the past few years, the majority left by families who say they cannot afford services. “There are more people in our cooler for a longer period of time,” said Dr. Karen Gunson, the state’s medical examiner. “It’s not that we’re not finding families, but that the families are having a harder time coming up with funds to cover burial or cremation costs.”

About a dozen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, including Illinois, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the state programs provide disposition services to people on Medicaid, a cost that has grown along with Medicaid rolls.

Financing in Oregon comes from fees paid to register the deaths with the state. The state legislature in June voted to raise the filing fee for death certificates to $20 from $7, to help offset the increased costs of state cremations, which cost $450.

“I’ve been here for 24 years, and I can’t remember something like this happening before,” Dr. Gunson said.

Already in 2009, Wisconsin has paid for 15 percent more cremations than it did last year, as the number of Medicaid recipients grew by more than 95,000 people since the end of January, said Stephanie Smiley, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn tried to end the state’s indigent burial program this year, shifting the financing to counties and funeral homes, but the state eventually found $12 million to continue the program when funeral directors balked.

The majority of burials and cremations, however, are handled on the city, county, town or township level, an added economic stress as many places face down wide budget gaps.

Boone County, Mo., hit its $3,000 burial budget cap last month, and took $1,500 out of a reserve fund to cover the rest of the year. While the sum is relatively low, it comes as the county is facing a $2 million budget shortfall, tax collections are down 5 percent and the number of residents needing help is expected to grow.

“We’ve had a significant increase in unemployment, wages are dropping, industrial manufacturing jobs go away and companies scaled back or even closed their doors,” said Skip Elkin, the county commissioner. “But we feel an obligation to help families who don’t have any assets.”

The medical examiner of Wayne County, Mich., Dr. Carl Schmidt, bought a refrigerated truck after the morgue ran out of space. The truck, which holds 35 bodies, is currently full, Dr. Schmidt said. “We’ll buy another truck if we have to,” he said.

Many places are turning to cremation, which averages a third to half the price of a burial. However, they will accommodate families’ requests for burial.

Clyde Gibbs, the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the office typically averaged 25 to 30 unclaimed bodies each year. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year there were at least 60, Dr. Gibbs said. The office cremates about three-quarters of the remains, and scatters the ashes at sea every few years.

In Tennessee, medical examiner and coroners’ offices donate unclaimed remains to the Forensic Anthropological Research Center, known as the “Body Farm,” where students study decomposition at the University of Tennessee. The facility had to briefly halt donations because it had received so many this year, said its spokesman, Jay Mayfield.

The increase in indigent burials and cremations is also taking a toll on funeral homes, which are losing money as more people choose cremation over burial. In 2003, 29.5 percent of remains were cremated; by 2008 the number had grown to 36 percent, according to the Cremation Association of North America, and it is expected to soar to 46 percent by 2015, according to the association’s projection of current trends.

Don Catchen, owner of Don Catchen & Son Funeral Homes in Elsmere, Ky., who handles cremations of the poor in Kenton County, said the $831 county reimbursement for cremations was “just enough to cover the cost of what I do — I donate my time.”

In Florida, where counties switched to cremation a few years ago to save on costs, Prudencio Vallejo, general manager of the Unclaimed Bodies Unit of the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office, said cremations were $425, compared with $1,500 for a burial. They have risen about 10 percent this year, Mr. Vallejo said.

“Most people, the first thing that they say is ‘We wouldn’t be coming to you if we could afford to do it ourselves,’ ” he said.

Broward County, Fla., paid for the cremation of Renata Richardson’s daughter, Jazmyn Rose, who was born stillborn on Sept. 25, 2008. Ms. Richardson, 26, lost her job at an advertising agency in July and could not afford to pay.

The county spent about $1,000 on a cremation and pink urn, engraved with the baby’s birth and death date, and a Bible passage. It now sits in the bassinette where she was to sleep.

“I was strapped for cash, I was in mourning, and I didn’t know what they were going to do with her,” Ms. Richardson, of Davie, Fla., said. “I was honored that they went that far to help me.”

Indigent Burials Are on the Rise, NYT, 11.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11burial.html

After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away

September 29, 2009
TH e New York Times
By FRAN SCHUMER

Each of the 2.5 million annual deaths in the United States directly affects four other people, on average. For most of these people, the suffering is finite — painful and lasting, of course, but not so disabling that 2 or 20 years later the person can barely get out of bed in the morning.

For some people, however — an estimated 15 percent of the bereaved population, or more than a million people a year — grieving becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function. “It takes a person away from humanity,” she said of their suffering, “and has no redemptive value.”

This extreme form of grieving, called complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder, has attracted so much attention in recent years that it is one of only a handful of disorders under consideration for being added to the DSM-V, the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook for diagnosing mental disorders, due out in 2012.

Some experts argue that complicated grief should not be considered a separate condition, merely an aspect of existing disorders, like depression or post-traumatic stress. But others say the evidence is convincing.

“Of all the disorders I’ve heard proposed, they have better data for this than almost any of the other possible topics,” said Dr. Michael B. First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an editor of the current manual, DSM-IV. “It would be crazy of them not to take it seriously.”

There is no formal definition of complicated grief, but researchers describe it as an acute form persisting more than six months, at least six months after a death. Its chief symptom is a yearning for the loved one so intense that it strips a person of other desires. Life has no meaning; joy is out of bounds. Other symptoms include intrusive thoughts about death; uncontrollable bouts of sadness, guilt and other negative emotions; and a preoccupation with, or avoidance of, anything associated with the loss. Complicated grief has been linked to higher incidences of drinking, cancer and suicide attempts.

“Simply put,” Dr. Shear said, “complicated grief can wreck a person’s life.”

In 2004, Stephanie Muldberg of Short Hills, N.J., lost her son Eric, 13, to Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer. Four years after Eric’s death, Ms. Muldberg, now 48, walked around like a zombie. “I felt guilty all the time, guilty about living,” she said. “I couldn’t walk into the deli because Eric couldn’t go there any longer. I couldn’t play golf because Eric couldn’t play golf. My life was a mess.

“And I couldn’t talk to my friends about it, because after a while they didn’t want to hear about it. ‘Stephanie, you need to get your life back,’ they’d say. But how could I? On birthdays, I’d shut the door and take the phone off the hook. Eric couldn’t have any more birthdays; why should I?”

Hours of therapy and support groups later, Ms. Muldberg was referred to a clinical trial at Columbia. After 16 weeks of a treatment developed by Dr. Shear, she was able to resume a more normal life. She learned to play bridge, went on a family vacation and read a book about something other than dying.

A crucial phase of the treatment, borrowed from the cognitive behavioral therapy used to treat victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, requires the patient to recall the death in detail while the therapist records the session. The patient must replay the tape at home, daily. The goal is to show that grief, like the tape, can be picked up or put away.

“I’d never been able to do that before, to put it away,” Ms. Muldberg said. “I was afraid I’d lose the memories, lose Eric.”

For some, the recounting is the hardest part of recovering. “That was just brutal and I had to relive it,” said Virginia Eskridge, 66, who began treatment 20 years after the death of her husband, Fred Adelman, a college professor in Pittsburgh. “I nearly dropped out, but I knew this was my last hope of getting any kind of functional life back.”

At the same time patients learn to handle their grief, they are encouraged to set new goals. For Ms. Eskridge, a retired law school librarian, that meant returning to the campus where her husband had taught.

“Everywhere I went there were reminders of him, because we had been everywhere,” she said. “It was like I was getting stabbed in the heart every time I went somewhere.”

That feeling finally went away, and Ms. Eskridge was even able to visit her husband’s old office. “It really gave me my life back,” she said of the treatment. “It sounds extreme, but it’s true.”

In a 2005 study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Shear presented evidence that the treatment was twice as effective as the traditional interpersonal therapy used to treat depression or bereavement, and that it worked faster. The study supported earlier suggestions that complicated grief might actually be different not only from normal grief but also from other disorders like post-traumatic stress and major depression.

Then, in 2008, NeuroImage published a study of the brain activity of people with complicated grief. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Mary-Frances O’Connor, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that when patients with complicated grief looked at pictures of their loved ones, the nucleus accumbens — the part of the brain associated with rewards or longing — lighted up. It showed significantly less activity in people who experienced more normal patterns of grieving.

“It’s as if the brain were saying, ‘Yes I’m anticipating seeing this person’ and yet ‘I am not getting to see this person,’ ” Dr. O’Connor said. “The mismatch is very painful.”

The nucleus accumbens is associated with other kinds of longing — for alcohol and drugs — and is more dense in the neurotransmitter dopamine than in serotonin. That raises two interesting questions: Could memories of a loved one have addictive qualities in some people? And might there be a more effective treatment for this kind of suffering than the usual antidepressants, whose target is serotonin?

Experts who question whether complicated grief is a distinct disorder argue that more research is needed. “You can safely say that complicated grief is a disorder, a collection of symptoms that causes distress, which is the beginning of the definition of a disease,” said Dr. Paula J. Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “However, other validators are needed: family history and studies that follow the course of a disorder. For example, once it’s cured, does it go away or show up years later as something else, like depression?”

George A. Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia known for his work on resilience (the reaction of the 85 percent of the population that does adapt to loss), was skeptical at first. But, Dr. Bonanno said, “I ran those tests and, lo and behold, extra grief symptoms were very important in predicting what was going on with these people, over and above depression and P.T.S.D.”

Regardless of how complicated grief is classified, the discussion highlights a larger issue: the need for a more nuanced look at bereavement. The DSM-IV devotes only one paragraph to the topic.

Studies suggest that therapy for bereavement in general is not very effective. But Dr. Bonanno called the published data “embarrassingly bad” and noted they tended to lump in results from “a lot of people who don’t need treatment” but sought it at the insistence of “loved ones or misguided professionals.”

Even if clinicians did identify people with complicated grief, there would not be enough therapists to treat them. Despite Dr. Shear’s “terrific research” on the therapy she pioneered, said Dr. Sidney Zisook, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, “there aren’t a lot of people out there who are trained to do it, and there aren’t a lot of patients with complicated grief who are benefiting from this treatment breakthrough.”

The issue is pressing given the links between complicated grief and a higher incidence of suicide, social problems and serious illness. “Do the symptoms of prolonged grief predict suicidality, a higher level of substance abuse, cigarette and alcohol consumption?” said Holly G. Prigerson, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Yes, yes and yes, over and above depression; they’re better predictors of those things.”

In an age when activities like compulsive shopping are viewed as disorders, the subject of grief is especially sensitive. Deeply bereaved people are often reluctant to talk about their sorrow, and when they do, they are insulted by the use of terms like disorder or addiction. Grief, after all, is noble — emblematic of the deep love between parents and children, spouses and even friends. Our sorrows, the poets tell us, make us human; would proper therapy have denied us Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”?

Diagnosing a deeper form of grief, however, is not about taking away anyone’s sorrow. “We don’t get rid of suffering in our treatment,” Dr. Shear said. “We just help people come to terms with it more quickly.”

“Personally, if it were me,” she added, “I would want that help.”

After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away, NYT, 29.9.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/health/29grief.html

In a Private Service, Last Goodbyes for Jackson

September 4, 2009
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

GLENDALE, Calif. — More than two months after he died, and following a steady trickle of gossip over how and where he would be laid to rest, family members and friends gathered Thursday night for a private entombment of Michael Jackson at a highly guarded mausoleum in a Los Angeles suburb.

With closed streets, nervous guards and restricted airspace over the grounds, the proceedings were taking on the feel of a presidential visit at the cemetery, Forest Lawn Glendale, where guests began arriving for an evening service.

Only a smattering of fans of Mr. Jackson, one the biggest-selling entertainers of all time, gathered at blockaded streets around the cemetery, with one group unfurling a large white banner that read in part “Gone too Soon.”

Members of the news media — 460 people from the around the world received credentials — far outnumbered the fans, and they greeted every car turning into the gated grounds with a bouquet of camera flashes and quizzical looks. Was that Elizabeth Taylor? Joe Jackson?

The police had the streets and airspace around Forest Lawn virtually locked down, in keeping with the family’s wishes that the service be invitation only.

A memorial service attended by several thousand fans, family members and friends had already been held for Mr. Jackson, 50, who died June 25. The memorial, on July 7 at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, took place in the arena where he had been rehearsing for a series of London concerts expected to revive his career.

But the family never announced burial plans, and news station helicopters lost track of the hearse carrying his gleaming gold coffin after it left the arena.

Representatives of Mr. Jackson inquired about a burial at the Neverland Ranch he lived in for several years until after his acquittal on child molesting charges in 2005, but that proposal would entail months of red tape, local and state officials said.

A couple of weeks ago, his family announced he would be entombed at Forest Lawn Glendale, joining Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, W. C. Fields and many other famed Hollywood figures.

The cemetery, about eight miles north of downtown Los Angeles, covers 300 verdant acres and includes the statue-studded, castle-like Great Mausoleum that was chosen as Mr. Jackson’s final resting place.

The cemetery prides itself on a high level of security, with guards shooing away loiterers and restricting mausoleum visits largely to people authorized by the family of the deceased.

Mark Masek, who maintains cemeteryguide.com, which tracks entertainers’ graves, said that a couple of weeks ago guards stopped him from taking pictures outside the mausoleum and forced him to delete the images.

“They are not kidding,” he said, predicting fans would have trouble finding and documenting Mr. Jackson’s crypt.

“If they wanted to restrict access and keep people out, they could not have picked a better place,” he said.

William Martin, a spokesman for the cemetery, declined to discuss security arrangements for Mr. Jackson’s crypt or what steps might be taken to keep out unwanted visitors.

“We are very cognizant of what may happen in the near future, and we are taking the necessary steps,” he said.

The Glendale police have said the family will pay for the costs of security for the event. The police asked for and received a restriction on the airspace to safeguard helicopter patrols, a police spokesman said.

A judge Wednesday approved Mr. Jackson’s estate paying the costs, with the total described in court papers as “extraordinary,” but the actual amount blacked out. A Glendale police spokesman, Tom Lorenz, said police costs would be no more than $150,000.

The family bought a bloc of 12 spaces in the mausoleum as a single unit.

“Mrs. Jackson and her family wish to honor her son by a funeral that seeks to offer solace to his multitude of fans and by which the family also may be comforted,” Burt Levitch, a lawyer for the singer’s mother, Katherine Jackson, wrote in a court declaration.

The investigation into Mr. Jackson’s death continues. The coroner has ruled he died from a mix of the anesthetic propofol and another sedative, injected by somebody.

Mr. Jackson’s personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, has told investigators he gave Mr. Jackson a mix of drugs, including propofol, to help him sleep, but it is unclear whether he will face criminal charges. Dr. Murray’s lawyer has said he did not cause Mr. Jackson’s death.

In a Private Service, Last Goodbyes for Jackson, NYT, 4.0.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04jackson.html

Discarded Burial Vaults Found at Ill. Cemetery

July 31, 2009
Filed at 9:54 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ALSIP, Ill. (AP) -- Authorities say they've found discarded burial vaults in a heavily wooded part of a historic black Chicago-area cemetery where workers allegedly dug up bodies and dumped them in a scheme to resell plots.

Cook County Sheriff's office spokesman Steve Patterson says about 10 to 12 cement vaults were found in the same area where hundreds of remains were discovered this month.

Patterson said Friday that officials didn't know how many bodies were buried in the vaults at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, but he says it looks as if cemetery workers were purposely trying to hide them.

Four workers were charged in the alleged scheme at the cemetery where civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till is buried.

Discarded Burial Vaults Found at Ill. Cemetery, NYT, 31.7.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/31/us/AP-US-Cemetery-Desecration.html

Debbie Purdy: 'We've got our lives back'

Campaigner triumphant after Lords victory to clarify law on right to die

Friday, 31 July 2009
The Independent
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor

Debbie Purdy, who has dedicated her living days to winning the right to plan her death, made legal history yesterday when five law lords backed her landmark appeal to have the law on assisted suicide clarified.

The 46-year-old campaigner, who has multiple sclerosis, was "ecstatic" after the peers unanimously supported her call for the Director of Public Prosecutions to spell out the circumstances in which her husband or someone in a similar position might face prosecution for helping a loved one end their life abroad.

Having lost twice in the High Court and Court of Appeal, yesterday's decision brought huge relief. Flanked by her husband, the Cuban violinist Omar Puente, and to cheers from her supporters, Mrs Purdy said after the ruling: "I'm ecstatic. I am eagerly awaiting the DPP's policy publication so that we can make sure what we do does not risk prosecution. I think people are beginning to realise now that this is not about a right to die; it is about a right to live.

"It feels like everything else doesn't matter and now I can just be a normal person. It's terrific. It gives me my life back. We can live our lives. We don't have to plan my death."

Responding to the ruling, the DPP Keir Starmer, QC, said prosecutors would start work immediately to produce an interim policy by September, followed by a public consultation before the final policy is published next spring. "This is a difficult and sensitive subject and a complex area of the law," he said. "However, I fully accept the judgment of the House of Lords. The Crown Prosecution Service has great sympathy for the personal circumstances of Mrs Purdy and her family."

The decision will bring relief to scores of people facing similar dilemmas. More than 100 UK citizens with terminal illness or facing intolerable suffering have travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland with friends or relatives to end their lives. No one has been prosecuted but the risk is always there. Under the present law, anyone who helps facilitate a suicide faces up to 14 years in jail.

Giving judgment in Mrs Purdy's case yesterday, the law lords said the DPP should be required to set out an "offence-specific policy", identifying the facts and circumstances that he would take into account in deciding whether it was in the public interest to prosecute under the Suicide Act.

Experts said the ruling meant it was no longer acceptable for the DPP to decide what was a crime on a case by case basis and that after he had set out the principles that would exclude prosecutions for compassionate assistance, the law would effectively have been changed. But the law lords said the ruling did not decriminalise assisted suicide, which was rejected after a highly charged debate this month by peers in the House of Lords sitting as the second chamber of Parliament and not as a court.

Mrs Purdy suffers from progressive multiple sclerosis which could mean she faces an undignified and distressing death. That might be avoided if she were able to travel to Dignitas to end her life peacefully.

Her dilemma was that unless the law was clarified she might be forced to end her life sooner than she planned, while she was still able to travel to Switzerland independently, to avoid the risk of her husband being prosecuted for assisting her. If the risk of prosecution was sufficiently low, she could wait until the very last minute before travelling with her husband's assistance.

The law lords said: "Everyone has the right to respect for their private life and the way that Mrs Purdy determines to spend the closing moments of her life is part of the act of living. Mrs Purdy wishes to avoid an undignified and distressing end to her life. She is entitled to ask that this too must be respected."

Campaigners hailed the victory as bringing an end to the "legal muddle" over assisted suicide. Pressure for a change in the law has grown. The Royal College of Nursing declared this month it was dropping its opposition to assisted suicide and adopting a neutral stance.

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, said: "This historic judgment ensures the law keeps up with changes in society and, crucially, provides a more rational deterrent to abuse than a blanket ban which is never enforced."

Debbie Purdy: 'We've got our lives back', I, 31.7.2009,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/debbie-purdy-weve-got-our-lives-back-1765339.html

Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative

July 21, 2009
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. — When Nathaniel Roe, 92, died at his 18th-century farmhouse here the morning of June 6, his family did not call a funeral home to handle the arrangements.

Instead, Mr. Roe’s children, like a growing number of people nationwide, decided to care for their father in death as they had in the last months of his life. They washed Mr. Roe’s body, dressed him in his favorite Harrods tweed jacket and red Brooks Brothers tie and laid him on a bed so family members could privately say their last goodbyes.

The next day, Mr. Roe was placed in a pine coffin made by his son, along with a tuft of wool from the sheep he once kept. He was buried on his farm in a grove off a walking path he traversed each day.

“It just seemed like the natural, loving way to do things,” said Jennifer Roe-Ward, Mr. Roe’s granddaughter. “It let him have his dignity.”

Advocates say the number of home funerals, where everything from caring for the dead to the visiting hours to the building of the coffin is done at home, has soared in the last five years, putting the funerals “where home births were 30 years ago,” according to Chuck Lakin, a home funeral proponent and coffin builder in Waterville, Me.

The cost savings can be substantial, all the more important in an economic downturn. The average American funeral costs about $6,000 for the services of a funeral home, in addition to the costs of cremation or burial. A home funeral can be as inexpensive as the cost of pine for a coffin (for a backyard burial) or a few hundred dollars for cremation or several hundred dollars for cemetery costs.

The Roes spent $250.

More people are inquiring about the lower-cost options, said Joshua Slocum, director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Home funerals aren’t for everybody, but if there’s not enough money to pay the mortgage, there certainly isn’t enough money to pay for a funeral,” Mr. Slocum said.

Baby boomers who are handling arrangements for the first time are particularly looking for a more intimate experience.

“It’s organic and informal, and it’s on our terms,” said Nancy Manahan of Minneapolis, who helped care for her sister-in-law, Diane Manahan, after she died of cancer in 2001, and was a co-author of a book, “Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully,” about the experience. “It’s not having strangers intruding into the privacy of the family. It’s not outsourcing the dying process to professionals.”

While only a tiny portion of the nation’s dead are cared for at home, the number is growing. There are at least 45 organizations or individuals nationwide that help families with the process, compared with only two in 2002, Mr. Slocum said.

The cost of a death midwife, as some of the coaches call themselves, varies from about $200 for an initial consultation to $3,000 if the midwife needs to travel.

In Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and New York, laws require that a funeral director handle human remains at some point in the process. In the 44 other states and the District of Columbia, loved ones can be responsible for the body themselves.

Families are typically required to obtain the death certificate and a burial transit permit so the body can be moved from a hospital to a cemetery, or, more typically, a crematory.

But even in states where a funeral director is required, home funerals are far less expensive.

“I think with our economy being the way that it currently is, and it’s getting worse, that many people who may not have chosen to do these types of things may be forced to because of the finances,” said Verlene McLemore, of Detroit, who held a home funeral for her son, Dean, in 2007. She spent about $1,300 for a funeral director’s services.

Some families, like the Roes, choose burial on private land, with a town permit. In most states, those rules are an issue of local control. “Can Grandma be buried in the backyard? Yes, for the most part if the backyard is rural or semirural,” said Mr. Slocum.

(Some members of Michael Jackson’s family have spoken of making Neverland Ranch near Santa Barbara the singer’s final resting place, but officials say no one has submitted an application to the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, which would have to approve the home burial.)

Recently, some states, with the backing of the funeral industry, have considered restricting the practice of home funerals. Oregon legislators last month passed a bill that would require death midwives to be licensed, something no state currently does.

Many death midwives are like Jerrigrace Lyons, who was asked to participate in the home funeral of a close friend, a 54-year-old woman who died unexpectedly in 1994. Ms. Lyons was initially frightened at the prospect of handling the body, but she participated anyway.

The experience was life changing, she said, and inspired her to help others plan home funerals. She opened Final Passages in Sebastopol, Calif., in 1995 and said she had helped more than 300 families with funerals. Weekend workshops for those interested in home funerals have a waiting list.

Ms. Lyons educates the bereaved about the realities of after-death care: placing dry ice underneath the body to keep it cool, tying the jaw shut so it does not open.

Mr. Lakin, a woodworker, makes coffins specifically for home funerals. Ranging in price from $480 to $1,200, they double as bookcases, entertainment centers and coffee tables until they need to be used.

He became interested in home funerals after his father died 30 years ago and he felt there was a “disconnect” during the funeral process. Mr. Lakin is now a resource for funeral directors in central Maine and a local hospice.

His coffins are sold to people like Ginny Landry, 77, who wants a home funeral one day but is content to use her coffin to showcase the quilts she makes. It once stood in her bedroom, but her husband, Rudolph, made her move it to a guest room because he pictured her in the coffin every time he laid eyes on it.

“It’s very comforting to me, knowing I have it there so my children won’t have to make a decision as to where I’m going to go,” Ms. Landry said.

During her battle with cancer, Diane Manahan also requested a home funeral, and the family did not know then how much it would help them with their grief.

“There’s something about touching, watching, sitting with a body that lets you know the person is no longer there,” Nancy Manahan said. “We didn’t even realize how emotionally meaningful those rituals are, doing it ourselves, until we did it.”

Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative, NYT, 21.7.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21funeral.html

Months to Live

Sisters Face Death With Dignity and Reverence

July 9, 2009
The New York Times
By JANE GROSS

PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Gravely ill with heart disease, tethered to an oxygen tank, her feet swollen and her appetite gone, Sister Dorothy Quinn, 87, readied herself to die in the nursing wing of the Sisters of St. Joseph convent where she has been a member since she was a teenager.

She was surrounded by friends and colleagues of nearly seven decades. Some had been with her in college, others fellow teachers in Alabama at the time of the Selma march, more from her years as a home health aide and spiritual counselor to elderly shut-ins.

As she lay dying, Sister Dorothy declined most of her 23 medications not essential for her heart condition, prescribed by specialists but winnowed by a geriatrician who knows that elderly people are often overmedicated. She decided against a mammogram to learn the nature of a lump in her one remaining breast, understanding that she would not survive treatment.

There were goodbyes and decisions about giving away her quilting supplies and the jigsaw puzzle collection that inspired the patterns of her one-of-a-kind pieces. She consoled her biological sister, who pleaded with her to do whatever it took to stay alive.

Even as her prognosis gradually improved from hours to weeks and even months, Sister Dorothy’s goal was not immortality; it was getting back to quilting, as she has. She spread her latest on her bed: Autumnal sunflowers. “I’m not afraid of death,” she said. “Even when I was dying, I wasn’t afraid of it. You just get a feeling within yourself at a certain point. You know when to let it be.”

A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.

For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.

“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”

Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”

Dr. McCann’s long relationship with the sisters gives him the time and opportunity, impossible in the hurly-burly of an intensive-care unit, to clarify goals of care long before a crisis: Whether feeding tubes or ventilators make sense. If pain control is more important than alertness. That studies show that CPR is rarely effective and often dangerous in the elderly.

“It is much easier to guide people to better choices here than in a hospital,” he said, “and you don’t get a lot of pushback when you suggest that more treatment is not better treatment.”

But that is not to say the sisters are denied aggressive treatment. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell, 65, chose radical surgery and radiation for a grave form of brain cancer. She now lives on the Alzheimer’s unit, unable to speak and squeezing shut her lips when aides try to feed her.

Then there is Sister Marie Albert Alderman, 84 and blind in one eye from a stroke. She sees a kidney specialist, who, she says, “is trying to keep me off the machine by staying on top of things.” By that she means dialysis, which she would not refuse. “If they want to try it, fine,” she said. “But I don’t want it to go on and on and on.”

But Sister Mary Jane and Sister Marie Albert are exceptions here. Few sisters opt for major surgery, high-tech diagnostic tests or life-sustaining machinery. And nobody can remember the last time anyone died in a hospital, which was one of the goals in selling the old Mother House, with its tumbledown infirmary — a “Bells of St. Mary” kind of place — and using the money to finance a new facility appropriate for end-of-life care.

“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”

In the old Mother House, the infirmary was a place apart. Here, everyone mixes. Of the 150 residents, nearly half live in the west wing, designated for independent living, in apartments with raised toilets, grab bars and the like. These are the sisters who have given up paying jobs and shared apartments in the community because of encroaching infirmity.

Forty sisters live in assisted-living studios, and another 40 in the nursing home and Alzheimer’s unit, all in the east wing, with the chapel, dining rooms and library at the central intersection. Closed-circuit television allows those confined to their rooms to watch daily religious services.

Remaining money from the sale of the Mother House went into a shared retirement fund covering the women’s lodging and medical care, along with Social Security payments of the retired and salaries of those still working — one is a surgeon, another a chief executive, and several are college professors. Dr. McCann bills Medicare for home visits, although most of the care he delivers is not covered by the government and goes without reimbursement.

Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.

On recent rounds, Dr. McCann saw Sister Beverly Jones, 86, a former music teacher losing her eyesight to macular degeneration. Upbeat, Sister Beverly told the doctor about the latest book she was reading using a magnifying device — “Beethoven’s Hair” by Russell Martin, about the composer’s DNA.

He also saw Sister Jamesine Riley, 75, once the president of the congregation, who barely survived a car accident that left her with a brain injury, dozens of broken bones and pneumonia. “You’re not giving up, are you?” Dr. McCann asked her.

“No, I’m discouraged, but I’m not giving up,” Sister Jamesine replied in a strong voice.

He told her he worried that she now found herself with so little control. She nodded in stoic assent.

Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”

Laura L. Carstensen, the director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University, says the convent setting calms the tendency for public policy discussion about end-of-life treatment “to devolve into a debate about euthanasia or rationing health care based on age.”

“Every time I speak to a group about the need to improve the dying process, somebody raises their hand and says, ‘You’re talking about killing old people,’ ” Dr. Carstensen said. “But nobody would accuse Roman Catholic sisters of that. They could be a beacon in talking about this without it turning into that American black-and-white way of thinking: Either we have to throw everything we’ve got at keeping people alive or leave them on the sidewalk to die.”

Often the Roman Catholic position on end-of-life issues is misconstrued as “do anything and everything necessary” but nothing in Catholic theology demands extraordinary intervention, experts say, nor do the sisters here, or their resident chaplain, Msgr. William H. Shannon, 91, advocate euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.

“Killing somebody who is very, very old, with a pill or something, that isn’t right,” Sister Dorothy said. “But everybody has their own slant on life and death. It’s legitimate to say no to extraordinary means. And dying people, you can tell when they don’t want to eat or drink. That’s a natural thing.”

Barbara Cocilova, the nurse practitioner here, sees differences in the health of these sisters compared with elderly patients in other settings. None have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (perhaps because they do not smoke) and only three have diabetes (often caused by obesity). Among those with Alzheimer’s, Ms. Cocilova said, diagnostic tests tend to produce better-than-expected results among those who are further along in the disease process, a possible result of mental stimulation.

Dr. McCann and others say that the sisters benefit from advanced education, and new ventures in retirement that keep them active. Sister Jamesine was a lawyer who founded a legal clinic for Rochester’s working poor. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell was the first female chaplain in a federal penitentiary.

Sister Bernadine Frieda, 91, spry and sharp, spends her days visiting the infirm with Sister Marie Kellner, 77, both of them onetime science teachers. Sister Marie, who left the classroom because of multiple sclerosis, reminds an astounded sister with Alzheimer’s that she was once a high school principal (“I was?!”) and sings “Peace Is Like a River” to the dying.

“We don’t let anyone go alone on the last journey,” Sister Marie said.

Seven priests moved here in old age, paying their own way, as does Father Shannon, who presides over funerals that are more about the celebratory “alleluia” than the glum “De Profundis.” But he has been with the sisters since he entered the priesthood, first as a professor at Nazareth College, founded by the order, and now as their chaplain. He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.

“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”

Sisters Face Death With Dignity and Reverence, NYT, 9.7.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/health/09sisters.html

A Final Farewell for a Slain Police Officer

June 5, 2009
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

The men and women in blue scuffed their feet and chatted quietly, spread out in spidery tangles. There were police officers everywhere, outside Al’s Food Market and One Mary Nails and El Pancho Grocery.

The officers had not yet tugged on their white dress gloves, and many of them had tucked them under their shoulder straps. One of the men brushed a wrinkle from his jacket.

Rain dripped from the skies. No one wanted to be here. Everyone wanted to be here.

The elegant Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic Church on Throop Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was where thousands of officers converged on Thursday morning for the funeral of Officer Omar J. Edwards. He was only 25, a man who had been one of them for not even two years and whose life was ended by police bullets. If there was no expectation of meaningful understanding in one two-hour service, there was at least hope of catharsis.

Some of the thousands of officers had come off shifts that had wound up only hours before, and were rubbing sleep out of tired eyes. They slid into muffled, random conversations. Some had come a long distance, because of the limitless bond of a profession. Officer Brian Glover stood alone, because he knew no one. He had driven up the night before from Washington, where he works. Originally from Brooklyn, he stayed overnight with his parents.

“I had to be here,” he said. “We all wear a similar uniform. We do the same job.”

Few of the New York officers knew the man they came to mourn either, and his résumé was slim. That was not the point. You wanted to be here.

These sorts of funerals are always echoes, the recurring full police ceremony known as the inspector’s funeral. It is how the Police Department buries officers who die in the line of duty.

But every funeral is also its own, belonging to a single officer who led his own life. This was the funeral of N.Y.P.D. Shield No. 12734.

He died while doing a job that does not always bestow second chances, and in the worst way possible. On Thursday night last week, according to the police, he was in plain clothes, gun drawn, chasing a man in Harlem who had broken into his car. Mistaken for a criminal himself, he was shot three times by a fellow officer, Andrew P. Dunton. It was the first time Officer Dunton had fired his gun.

Fraternal shootings are extremely rare, and some think they should never happen. But those were the circumstances that this was about.

It was also about this: Officer Edwards was black; Officer Dunton is white. Did race matter? That combustible question was an inescapable undercurrent of the funeral and remains lingering for the formal investigation. For now it had unknown importance, and emotions about it, while evident on Throop Avenue, were largely muted, conclusions hesitant to be drawn.

“You hope to never come to these things,” said Detective Robert Hood, who works in the Bronx. “Today we just talked about how sad the situation was. You wouldn’t have your deeper conversations at a funeral.”

The rows of officers, outfitted in their meticulous navy blue uniforms, swiveled their heads, looking for what they knew had to come.

Led by pipers and drummers beating black-draped drums, the hearse crawled past the long blue line, and with gripping sadness they all saluted.

Six officers carried the coffin inside. A piper played “Amazing Grace.”

The majority could not nearly squeeze into the sanctuary, and so they remained huddled outside, listening with damp eyes to the proceedings over loudspeakers.

The officer’s wife, Danielle, sat weeping up front, with their two sleeping young sons, Xavier, 1 ½, and Keanu, 7 months. Some mourners wore T-shirts with Officer Edwards’s picture emblazoned on them.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told of how Officer Edwards had wanted to be on the police force since he was 5, and how his allegiance to the New York Giants was so intense that when the team lost, “he refused to take phone calls for the rest of the day, especially from William, his father-in-law, who for some reason roots for the Dallas Cowboys.”

Officer Edwards was still a rookie, his probation not scheduled to be up until next month. But the mayor announced his posthumous promotion to detective, retroactive for a year, allowing more generous death benefits for his family.

“He protected our city,” the mayor said, “and he built a better city.”

The Rev. Paul W. Jervis, the church’s pastor, was the only eulogizer who mentioned Officer Dunton, saying that he “now lives to regret the fatal results from what he did in the line of duty.” He added: “He too needs compassion. Officer Dunton needs our prayers.”

Officer Dunton did not attend, according to a person familiar with his plans, because he did not want to be a distraction. While the funeral was going on, both he and members of the 25th Precinct anticrime team attended a church service near his home in Suffolk County.

Father Jervis said, “Officer Omar Edwards would not have died in vain if the circumstances of his death could teach our policemen and women of all races to avoid similar experiences in the future.”

In his eulogy, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly drew laughter when he said, “I’ve heard that after Omar graduated from the academy he was so proud of his police shield that he wore it around the apartment.”

When his locker was opened, Mr. Kelly said, they found a photo of his sons inside his police cap.

Of his death, he said: “We owe Omar’s family our deepest sympathy, our everlasting loyalty and a total accounting of the facts. We owe it to Omar to learn from this tragic event and to remember him as he was in life.”

The coffin, covered with the green-and-white police flag, was hoisted into the hearse a final time. A bugler played taps. Police helicopters thundered overhead in missing-man formation. The hearse was to carry the coffin containing the dead police officer to St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, on Long Island, where it would go into the ground.

The silent officers watched it gently accelerate into the lengthening distance, and the exodus began. The weather had turned better, and the skies had cleared.

A Final Farewell for a Slain Police Officer, NYT, 5.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/nyregion/05funeral.html

TV Actor Chalks Up Dramatic Demise No. 7

June 3, 2009
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Tuck this tidbit away somewhere: It is easier to die with your eyes open. Eyes closed — much harder.

“There’s nothing worse than sitting there holding your breath and concentrating on not moving your eyelids,” said Mike Doyle, an actor with a quick grin and a knife sticking out of his chest on the set of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” last month.

It was May 7, a day Mr. Doyle spent mostly playing dead for the season finale on Tuesday on NBC. Mr. Doyle played Ryan O’Halloran, a forensics expert who first appeared in 2003. More than 50 appearances later, revealing little about himself other than occasional impatience with his fellow officers and a drive to solve crimes, O’Halloran ran afoul of a co-worker, Dale Stuckey, who has snapped and gone on a killing rampage.

Dying on screen is nothing new for Mr. Doyle. At 36, he has been killed off in so many made-for-television movies and shows that if there were a gold statue on his mantel at home, it would be lying flat on its back with a chalk outline around it.

“This will be No. 7,” he said. “I’ve been shot with a shotgun, shot with a machine gun. I’ve been blown up in a boat. I’ve been burned in a submarine fire. I’ve been strangled and today, stabbed.”

He paused, counting on his fingers.

“Oh — and I was electrocuted on a fence. After being gang-raped.” Later, after further reflection, he realized that he had not, in fact, been shot by a machine gun, but was the one firing it. Furthermore, that particular shooting and the boat explosion happened to the same character on “Smith,” a canceled CBS show that starred Ray Liotta. For the record, Mr. Doyle’s character was shot, then the body blown up. But the total number still stands at seven, as Mr. Doyle counts a quiet death off-camera on the CBS movie “Bella Mafia.”

“They didn’t show how I died,” he said. “It’s a mystery. James Marsden meets me at a roadside stop, and the next scene, he’s wearing my clothes.”

Mr. Doyle, it should be noted, has survived several roles as well, most recently on HBO’s therapy drama “In Treatment,” in which he had a brief cameo as Bennett Ryan, the boss and lover of the character Mia, played by Hope Davis. Later in the season she described in graphic detail his shortcomings in the bedroom, but she doesn’t kill him. He also had small roles in the films “Rules of Attraction” and “P.S. I Love You,” and has a supporting role in the forthcoming film “Rabbit Hole.”

After a small role in the “ABC Afterschool Specials,” his first big acting job also included his first death on screen. “It was a movie-of-the-week called ‘Loss of Innocence,’ ” he said, a 1996 drama set in 1920s Utah about a Mormon community. Mr. Doyle’s character goes hunting with his brother, who happens to be having an affair with his wife. There is an “accident,” and then there is one fewer brother.

In 1997 Mr. Doyle had the bit part in “Bella Mafia.” In 2002 he appeared in a four-episode arc on the HBO prison drama “Oz” that was particularly grim even by that show’s standards. He played Adam Guenzel, a rich kid convicted of rape who is in turn transformed into a lipstick-wearing sex slave behind bars. It was on this HBO show that he met Christopher Meloni, who also played a prisoner and went on to star in “Special Victims Unit.”

“I took one look at that face,” Mr. Meloni recalled in his dressing room, “and said, ‘Bye-bye.’ Pretty boys don’t last long on ‘Oz.’ ” Mr. Doyle’s character was raped by Aryans, then killed in an attempt to escape, last seen hanging — eyes open — over the top of a prison fence.

“It looked so cool,” Mr. Doyle said. “The makeup was phenomenal.”

Next he will be strangled in a flashback scene of a horror movie called “Sibling: Marcus Miller the Orphan Killer.” We take him at his word for this as the film has not been released.

The role of O’Halloran on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” was Mr. Doyle’s longest job. Only a couple of weeks before filming, he learned of his character’s demise from Neal Baer, a producer, in a telephone call to his apartment in the East Village, where he has lived most of the last 12 years.

Mr. Meloni, his old co-star from “Oz,” searched for a bright side: “He said, ‘At least you’re not getting gang-raped,’ ” Mr. Doyle said.

The staging of the death was fairly elaborate. Strapped to Mr. Doyle’s chest was a metal plate with a center slot holding the retractable blade of a fake knife. He walked onto the set in a warehouse in North Bergen, N.J., on May 7, and somebody shouted, “Dead man walking!”

He lay on his designated spot on the floor of the crime lab, and no fewer than 18 people hovered over him, dabbing fake blood on his shirt and hands and angling the knife just so. “Mike, bring your left leg in that way,” said George Pattison, a camera operator. “Go for comfort. You know that.”

Between takes, his co-stars shared their own past death scenes. The actor Noel Fisher, who plays Stuckey the killer, recalled his suicide scene on “Huff,” in which he shot himself in the mouth, and fake blood and cottage cheese blasted out of the back of his head. Mr. Meloni was hanged in one movie and made a deadly swan dive in “Oz.”

There is one person who will never get used to seeing Mr. Doyle die on screen, no matter how many times it happens: his mother, who picks up the phone in Northern California every time.

“She’ll call me and say, ‘I know it’s not real, but I just want to make sure you’re O.K.,’ ” he said. “Not that many mothers have seen their son die over and over.”

TV Actor Chalks Up Dramatic Demise No. 7, NYT, 3.6.2009, http://nytimes.com/2009/06/03/arts/television/03doyl.html

First Death for Washington Assisted-Suicide Law

May 23, 2009
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — A woman with pancreatic cancer has become the first person to die under a law passed last year allowing doctor-assisted suicide in Washington, according to an advocacy group that pushed for the law.

The woman, Linda Fleming, 66, of Sequim, Wash., died Thursday evening after taking lethal medication prescribed by a doctor under the law, according to a news release by the group, Compassion and Choices of Washington. The release said Ms. Fleming received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month ago, and “she was told she was actively dying.”

Ms. Fleming was quoted in the release as saying: “I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death.”

In November, voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, 58 percent to 42 percent, making Washington the second state — after Oregon — to allow assisted suicide. The laws in both states have been deeply controversial, particularly among religious groups. Washington passed its law after the United States Supreme Court in 2006 rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block Oregon’s law, which took effect in 1998.

In Montana, a state judge ruled in December that doctor-assisted suicide was legal under the state’s Constitution, but the state is appealing that decision.

Steve Hopcraft, a spokesman for Compassion and Choices, said the group was “not leading a campaign in any other state right now.”

The Washington and Oregon laws allow terminally ill patients who are at least 18 and have been found mentally competent to self-administer lethal drugs under the prescription of a doctor.

In Oregon, 401 people used the law through 2008. Since the law took effect in Washington in March, six prescriptions for lethal medication have been dispensed, but a spokesman for the State Department of Health, Donn Moyer, said it had not received any forms saying a patient had used the medication. Under the law, doctors who write such a prescription have 30 days to report that it had been used.

Mr. Moyer, saying privacy laws prevented the state from providing information about a specific death, said he could not confirm Ms. Fleming’s death.

In Oregon, not everyone who received a prescription has taken the drugs.

Some critics fear that physician-assisted suicide will pressure people with terminal illnesses who have low incomes or are disabled to end their lives to avoid becoming a financial burden to loved ones. Supporters cite studies that they say have refuted that idea.

Ms. Fleming, who was divorced, filed for bankruptcy in 2007 with $5,800 in credit card debt, according to court records and a lawyer who had represented her, Hugh Haffner.

Mr. Haffner said that when she filed for bankruptcy, Ms. Fleming, a former social worker, had been unable to work because of a disability and lived in subsidized housing on $643 in monthly disability checks.

Virginia Peterhansen, who said she had befriended Ms. Fleming about six months ago through a book group, said Ms. Fleming bought a 1982 Oldsmobile station wagon days before she was told she had cancer and that she had hoped to learn to contra dance.

Robb Miller, the executive director of Compassion and Choices of Washington, said that he had spoken to Ms. Fleming and that, although he was unaware of her bankruptcy filing, her situation presented “none of the red flags” that might have given his group pause in supporting her. He said Ms. Fleming’s two children and her former husband “were involved and supported her choice.”

The family could not be reached for comment.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

First Death for Washington Assisted-Suicide Law, NYT, 23.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/23suicide.html

Obituaries in the News

May 6, 2009
Filed at 7:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Dom DeLuise

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Dom DeLuise, the portly entertainer and chef whose affable nature made him a popular character actor for decades with movie and TV audiences as well as directors and fellow actors, has died. He was 75.

DeLuise died Monday evening at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said his agent, Robert Malcolm. The family did not release the cause of death.

DeLuise appeared in scores of movies and TV shows, in Broadway plays and voicing characters for numerous cartoons. Writer-director-actor Mel Brooks particularly admired DeLuise's talent for offbeat comedy and cast him in several films, including ''The Twelve Chairs,'' ''Blazing Saddles,'' ''Silent Movie,'' ''History of the World Part I'' and ''Robin Hood: Men in Tights.''

His TV credits included appearances on such shows as ''The Munsters,'' ''The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.,'' ''Burke's Law,'' ''Sabrina the Teenage Witch'' and ''Diagnosis Murder.'' On Broadway, DeLuise appeared in Neil Simon's ''Last of the Red Hot Lovers'' and other plays.

In part because of his passion for food, the actor battled obesity, reaching as much as 325 pounds and for years resisting family members and doctors who tried to put him on various diets. He finally agreed in 1993 when his doctor refused to perform hip replacement surgery until he lost 100 pounds (he lost enough weight for the surgery, though gained some of it back).

His love of food also resulted in two successful cookbooks, 1988's ''Eat This -- It Will Make You Feel Better!'' and 1997's ''Eat This Too! It'll Also Make You Feel Good.''

------

Marilyn French

NEW YORK (AP) -- Marilyn French, the writer and feminist whose novel ''The Women's Room'' sold more than 20 million copies and transformed her into a leading figure in the women's movement, has died. She was 79.

French died Saturday of heart failure at a Manhattan hospital, said Carol Jenkins, a friend and president of New York's Women's Media Center.

French was an academic in 1977 when ''The Women's Room,'' her first novel, was published.

The landmark novel, which was translated into 20 languages, details the journey to independence of a 1950s housewife who gets divorced and goes to graduate school. The book mirrored aspects of French's own life experiences, including the rape of her daughter.

She was called anti-male after a character in the novel says: ''All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.''

The male subjugation of women is the main theme of French's novels, essays, literary criticism and her four-volume, nonfictional ''From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women.''

A Brooklyn native, French graduated from Long Island's Hofstra University with a master's degree, studying philosophy and English literature. She taught there in the 1960s. After her divorce, she earned a doctorate from Harvard and was an English professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

Her last novel is to be published this fall, and she also was working on a memoir.

------

Martha Mason

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Martha Mason, who spent nearly 61 years living in an iron lung after being stricken with polio but graduated at the top of her college class and wrote an autobiography, has died. She was 71.

Mason died Monday at her home in Lattimore, said Mary Dalton, an associate communications professor at Wake Forest University who produced a documentary about Mason's life in 2005.

Mason was paralyzed from the neck down at age 11 during the polio epidemic in 1948. She was home-schooled and graduated in 1960 from Wake Forest, where she studied English. She was well-versed in politics and literature, but it wasn't until 1994 that a voice-recognition computer allowed her to write about her life.

Her book, ''Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung,'' was published in 2003.

Mason spent most of her life confined to an 800-pound, 7-foot airtight yellow tube that enabled her to breathe, though she could leave the machine for about an hour a few times a day when she was young. She was able to be helped across the stage during her graduation, Dalton said. But several bouts of pneumonia in her 20s further weakened her already frail body.

With the help of her mother's hand, Mason was able to record her thoughts and wrote some pieces for the local newspaper. After her father suffered a heart attack, her mother's caregiving time was divided and the writing diminished.

------

Hal Perry

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Hal Perry, who teamed with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones on San Francisco's back-to-back NCAA champions in the 1950s, has died. He was 75.

The school said Tuesday that Perry died last Thursday in the East Bay after a long illness.

Perry was a starter on Dons team that dominated college basketball in the mid-1950s, winning the title in 1955 and '56. San Francisco went 57-1 in his two years as a starter, including a 29-0 mark in 1956.

Perry averaged 6.9 points and 1.9 rebounds per game as a junior. The following year he increased his output to 9.1 points and stayed at 1.9 rebounds per game.

He was a member of the all-tournament team in 1956, scoring 28 points in his two Final Four games.

Obituaries in the News, NYT, 6.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/06/us/AP-Deaths.html

Arrests Draw New Attention to Assisted Suicide

March 11, 2009
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — An undercover state investigator told a right-to-die network that he wanted to kill himself. In response, he later testified, officials of the network planned to have him asphyxiate himself with a helium-filled face mask while holding down his arms.

After an investigation, four officials of the group, known as the Final Exit Network, were arrested last month on charges of racketeering and assisted suicide.

The arrests raised questions about whether the group, which has helped some 200 people commit suicide since 2004, merely watched people take the leap into death, or pushed them over the edge.

Officials with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation say the network, which says it has 3,000 dues-paying members in the United States, actively takes part in suicides, an act that is illegal in every state except Oregon and Washington. “The law is clear, and they violated it,” said John Bankhead, a spokesman for the Georgia bureau.

The arrests followed an inquiry in which an investigator posed as a cancer patient and persuaded network members to help him prepare to commit suicide.

According to the agent’s affidavit, network members instructed him to buy a helium tank and a plastic “exit mask.”

Thomas E. Goodwin, who was the network president at the time, and Claire Blehr, a member, planned to hold down the agent’s hands while helium flowed into the mask, the affidavit says.

The agent would lose consciousness within seconds and die within minutes, and the guides would remove evidence from the scene.

“They went through a dry run just to let the agent know what would happen,” Mr. Bankhead said. “Mr. Goodwin got on top of the agent and held down both of his hands,” which investigators say would have prevented him from removing the mask if he had changed his mind during a real suicide.

Georgia authorities arrested Mr. Goodwin and Ms. Blehr, and Maryland officials arrested the group’s medical director, Dr. Lawrence D. Egbert, and a regional coordinator, Nicholas Alec Sheridan, for authorizing member suicides.

The network, based in Marietta, Ga., says it provides only lawful instruction and emotional support, and only to patients with incurable diseases or tremendous suffering.

“Assisted suicide is Jack Kevorkian putting a needle in someone with a deadly substance,” said Jerry Dincin, who became the network president after the arrests. “We provide information that we think is protected under the First Amendment.”

A 1994 Georgia law defines assisted suicide as “direct and physical involvement, intervention or participation” in a deliberate suicide and carries a five-year prison sentence.

The arrests have thrust the little-known organization into the national spotlight. Since its founding in 2004, the network has neither shunned public attention nor received much of it.

A registered nonprofit organization, the group runs a Web site, promotes a suicide manual by Derek Humphry, the chairman of the network’s advisory board, and belongs to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.

Network literature says members receive services including “counseling, support and even guidance” on suicide, in exchange for an annual $50 fee.

The group also sends trained “exit guides” to provide comfort and instruction during a suicide but is adamant that members buy their own materials and conduct the suicide themselves.

While political and educational groups like the Death With Dignity National Center and Compassion and Choices work with lawmakers to advance physician-assisted suicide, the Final Exit Network ministers directly to the suicidal.

Other groups are concerned that the network will portray the movement negatively.

“People don’t want to do this underground or covertly, with hushed tones, with great risks to themselves and their loved ones,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, the president of Compassion and Choices, which supports end-of-life decisions. “They want to have their physician involved. They want hospice care involved. They want their family there without shame or risk.”

If brought to trial, legal experts say, the case against the network could clarify the distinctions between the lawful act of witnessing a suicide and the illegal act of assisting one.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that states can set their own laws on suicide assistance. But experts say the term “assistance” can be difficult to define.

“You have some in our society saying this action is a crime,” said William H. Colby, a lawyer and fellow of the Center for Practical Bioethics. “You have others saying this is such an important right that it rises to the level of our Constitution.”

Mr. Humphry said the network’s protocols were deliberately written to avoid illegality. “The person does everything themselves,” he said. “They don the hood. They tie it around their neck. They reach forward. They turn on the gas.”

Guides often hold a dying person’s hands, he said, but for support, not restraint.

Supporters are concerned that the network arrests will set back the right-to-die movement. Mr. Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who served eight years in prison for second-degree murder for assisting a suicide, issued a statement on Tuesday through his lawyer supporting the right to physician-assisted suicide but condemning its practice by “ordinary citizens” in the network.

Opponents of assisted suicide were harsher.

“These are people who instead of pulling you back from the ledge, they shove you off,” said Stephen Drake, a research analyst for Not Dead Yet, an advocacy group for the disabled that opposes assisted suicide. “Legally, we may not know what this means. But in a personal sense, it can mean the difference between life and death.”

The investigation began after relatives of a Georgia man, John Celmer, who committed suicide in June, told the police they believed that the network had taken part in Mr. Celmer’s death.

Mr. Celmer’s mother said her son had long suffered from mouth and throat cancer, but Georgia investigators said he had overcome the disease by the time he killed himself and was instead embarrassed about a facial disfigurement.

His wife, Susan, issued a statement of gratitude to the law enforcement officials who “pursued this matter vigorously.”

Mr. Dincin, the network president, said Mr. Celmer deserved the right to end his suffering.

“There are millions of people who think what we do is just awful,” Mr. Dincin said. “They think we shouldn’t touch a person’s natural course from living to dying, but I think people have a right to decide for themselves.”

Arrests Draw New Attention to Assisted Suicide, NYT, 11.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/us/11suicide.html

Springfield Journal

A Funeral Museum at Death’s Door

March 9, 2009
The New York Times
By DIRK JOHNSON

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — A week or so ago, Duane Marsh noticed an elderly couple from Iowa standing hesitantly at the door of the Museum of Funeral Customs, a shrine here to embalming tools, coffins and other artifacts of the rites of death.

“This is his idea, not mine,” Mr. Marsh recalled the woman saying, as she pointed at her husband. “I’m not sure I want to go in.”

Mr. Marsh, the executive director of the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, which operates the museum, was able to convince the woman that it was really not such a ghoulish place, and then led the couple on a tour.

A stone’s throw from Lincoln’s tomb, this unusual cultural repository is an unmistakable reminder that everyone’s days are numbered. Now it seems the same might be true of the museum itself.

Unable to attract enough visitors — the Iowa woman is apparently not the only one who gets the creeps about this place — the museum is struggling to stay alive. The curator position has been eliminated, and the museum’s hours have been cut to appointments only.

These have been difficult days in Springfield, the Illinois capital, as the economy has nose-dived and many people have lost their jobs. Not even funeral parlors are immune, Mr. Marsh said, as survivors sometimes choose thriftier ways to pay respects.

The association of funeral directors has had other problems, too. A trust it once managed — focused on “pre-need” funeral planning — declined sharply in value, prompting a handful of civil lawsuits alleging financial mismanagement. Although the museum used no money from the trust, Mr. Marsh said, the association’s budget took a hit.

But the museum’s problems are more basic: Since its founding in 1999, it has failed to become a destination. In recent years, the museum has attracted about 8,000 customers annually; tickets for adults are $4 and those for children are $2. It has not been nearly enough to cover expenses.

“The original idea was that we’d get enough spillover from people visiting the Lincoln sites,” Mr. Marsh said. “But for whatever reason, that just hasn’t happened. When a business isn’t paying its way, as everyone knows, you have trouble.”

Smack in the center of Illinois, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, this city is mostly known for colorful politicians (prosecutors have used the word corrupt) and tourism ventures that almost invariably make some tie to Honest Abe.

The funeral museum has a replica of the coffin that carried Lincoln from Washington to Springfield in 1865. It also features embalming equipment, a horse-drawn hearse from the 1920s, a long black Cadillac that carried the dead in the 1970s and black mourning clothes worn in the Victorian era. The museum explores the differences among religions and cultures in marking death, pointing out that slaves held funerals deep into the night because many plantation owners refused to give them a break from work during the day.

Plenty of people in Springfield say they would lament the passing of the funeral museum. Sarah Vaughn, an assistant manager at the Feed Store, a restaurant across from the Old State Capitol, said that it had been several years since she had visited the museum, but that she would never forget it.

“It’s really quite a cool place,” Ms. Vaughn said. “I know that sounds macabre to say. But it’s very interesting. I remember learning about Native American burials when I went there. It’ll be sad for Springfield if it closes.”

Mr. Marsh, a second-generation mortician who lived in a funeral home until he was 6, said the museum helped “demystify” notions about what happens to the body after death. He recalled some difficult moments when he worked as a funeral director, especially the times he had to prepare the body of a child. “I remember one time I got so tearful,” he said, “that I just had to get up and walk away for a while.”

But he said a wake can be a heartening experience, too, a chance for people to tell stories and laugh and share their fondness for a lost loved one. “I’m telling you,” he said, “there were times when you couldn’t tell if it was a funeral or a wedding.”

A gift shop at the funeral museum includes key chains and paper weights that look like little coffins, and books on funeral customs like “Do It Yourself Tombstone.” There are coffin-shaped chocolates and even T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Everybody’s Gotta Go Sometime.”

Mr. Marsh said he was working on a plan to keep the museum from closing, but he would not disclose details. He said a decision would be made soon.

“This is valuable history,” he said. “Can we save the museum? I’m determined to find a way to make it work.”

A Funeral Museum at Death’s Door, NYT, 9.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/us/09funeral.html

And at the End, All the Comforts of the Carlyle

October 22, 2008
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.

She stayed there whenever she was in New York, and adored the regular entertainers like Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt at the Café Carlyle, and the pianist Loston Harris in the lively Bemelmans Bar. She loved the uniformed elevator men and bellmen and the family of longtime staff. She loved that Central Park was only a short block away.

So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.

“The family came to me and said, ‘We want to check her in till the very end,’ ” said Alexandra E. Tscherne, director of residences at the Carlyle. “It was a unique request, one I’ve never had previously. They wanted her set up in one of her favorite places, and they didn’t know how long it would last.”

It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.

Mrs. McDill was youthful and full of energy at 71 and spent her days outdoors gardening and painting, so it was shocking to her three children when she learned at the beginning of August that she had a fast-spreading cancer.

“It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time,” said her son Thomas Gardner.

The family hired 24-hour hospice care, but Mrs. McDill, at least until the very end, was in sufficient mental and physical shape to enjoy her final stay at the Carlyle. The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one of New York’s most luxurious, with a long list of celebrities, presidents and royalty who have stayed or lived there.

Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.

The family hired Mr. Harris to play Mrs. McDill’s favorite songs at her memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue on Saturday. It was a sophisticated, poignant and kick-up-your-heels affair, almost like something out of a Cole Porter song. Mr. Harris played “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Month-to-month suites at the Carlyle are always expensive, but less so during the summer months, when they cost about $17,000 a month.

“It wasn’t a search for extravagance, but a search for comfort. It wasn’t the inexpensive option, but it was the greatest comfort we could afford, so of course we would do that for her,” said Mr. Gardner, chief executive of the Motley Fool, a financial information company he founded with his brother, David Gardner.

Staffers helped her with chores related to her impending death, said Ms. Tscherne, who agreed to sign as a witness to Mrs. McDill’s will and even ran across the street to get a notary public.

The family hired two attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill: Rose Marie Moore and her sister Shirley Innis. In the evenings, Ms. Moore would sing spirituals for Mrs. McDill.

“She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She’d say, ‘Give me the long version, Rose,’ ” said Ms. Moore, who took the subway from East New York to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill.

“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess, and treated me like one.”

Ms. Moore sang “Swing Low” again at the memorial service on Saturday, and family members recalled Mrs. McDill as hardly the demure society type, but more like a Katharine Hepburn character.

After graduating from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, she dreamed of art school, but wound up going to Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., obeying the wishes of her father, H. Gabriel Murphy, part-owner of the Washington Senators baseball team, which later moved to Minnesota and became the Twins.

Mrs. McDill’s first husband was Paul Gardner Jr., a lawyer. After a divorce, she married Jonathan McDill, formerly in charge of cataloging for the Dartmouth libraries. He died in 1998. As a gardener, she took design cues from formal French and Italian gardens and added her own resourceful touches.

She loved the paintings of Henri Matisse and the writing of Mark Twain and Robert Frost. She sold a few paintings but gave away many more. She rarely bothered with computers or cooking.

“It was not that she could not cook, but that she did not,” David Gardner said.

After the memorial service, some of her friends said they were rethinking their own send-offs.

“People came up to me and said, ‘We’re changing our plans for our funeral — we want it to be fun,” Thomas Gardner said. “The only sad thing was that Mom wanted to keep living.”

And at the End, All the Comforts of the Carlyle, NYT, 22.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/nyregion/22carlyle.html

Awaiting a Burial, This Time an Actual One

October 9, 2008
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

In section 37 of the Cemetery of the Resurrection, a Roman Catholic graveyard on the southern shore of Staten Island, there is an empty grave. Its epitaph is touching: “We love you beyond the moon.” Its dates suggest a much-too-early passing: June 6, 1949, to May 26, 1999.

The headstone shows an angel with its wings outspread and its left hand reaching toward an image of the man who, presumably, will soon be buried there. According to the carving, he is Bill Cutolo: “cherished husband, dad and poppy.”

Of course, for a time, William Cutolo Sr. was something else, the authorities say: the underboss of the Colombo crime family. Known on the streets as Wild Bill, he was a violent hit man and labor racketeer who, on a midspring day nine years ago, suddenly and mysteriously disappeared..

Then, on Monday, following a tip from an informant, federal agents found his body — wrapped in a tarp and wearing Italian loafers — beneath the grass outside a Long Island flooring company. After nearly a decade, the body, as they say, had been produced. The question is: What next?

Funerals are difficult even under ideal circumstances, and those confronting the Cutolos are anything but ideal. There is the nagging fact that a service was already held several years ago, attended by the family, though without the body present. Complicating matters is that Mr. Cutolo’s wife and son are now guests of the federal witness protection program and move about only under high security.

“I remember I attended the Mass at a church,” said James LaRossa, Mr. Cutolo’s former lawyer. “I don’t remember which church, and I guess it was a funeral. Whatever you want to call it, it was a strange situation.”

James M. Margolin, a spokesman for the New York office of the F.B.I., said that Mr. Cutolo’s family had been notified of the discovery on Tuesday night, immediately after the Suffolk County medical examiner identified the remains. Citing security reasons, Mr. Margolin declined to name which members of the family had been called. He also said the bureau, even if it learned of any funeral arrangements, would remain “discreet” — again for security reasons, he explained.

During his life, Mr. Cutolo was a dapper, powerful man known for dressing up as Santa Claus at the annual Christmas party he often sponsored for the National Leukemia Research Association. He had professional interests in restaurants, nightclubs and local extortion rackets, and was a leading gunman in the so-called Colombo Family War, which erupted in the early 1990s when Victor J. Orena, the family’s acting boss, sought to depose the reigning Persico regime.

Mr. Cutolo disappeared on May 26, 1999, and, at a federal trial last year, his wife, Penelope, testified that he was on his way to meet Alphonse (Allie Boy) Persico, then the boss of the Colombo family. Mr. Persico was convicted of Mr. Cutolo’s murder last December, though the prosecution argued at the trial that the body had been dumped at sea, a theory flatly contradicted by the discovery of his remains outside the All County Flooring Supply store in Farmingdale, N.Y.

Mr. Persico’s lawyer, Sarita Kedia, said she planned to ask for a new trial, given the contradiction. In the meantime, federal agents continue to excavate the area around the store for two other bodies: those of Richard Greaves, a gangster who disappeared in 1995; and Carmine Gargano, a student at Pace University who disappeared in 1994.

The cemetery where Mr. Cutolo’s headstone lies is, coincidentally or not, the final resting place of another famed gangster, Anthony Spero, a onetime acting boss of the Bonanno family, who was buried there on Saturday, following his death at 79. The cemetery manager, when reached by phone on Wednesday afternoon, refused to discuss any arrangements the Cutolo family had, or had not, made.

It was much the same when a call was placed to a prominent Staten Island funeral home, where a man who picked up the phone said he could not “confirm anything yet” in regard to Mr. Cutolo’s funeral.

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.

Awaiting a Burial, This Time an Actual One, NYT, 9.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/nyregion/09cutolo.html?hp

At last...

a coffin you might actually want to be seen dead in

Sunday, 13 July 2008
The New York Times
By Paul Bignell

Increasing numbers of people are choosing coffins that reflect their idea of a beautiful final resting place. From Rolls-Royce cars and ballet shoes to environmentally friendly wicker casks, people are spending more time planning for their time six feet under.

The latest company to join the market is Guernsey-based Creative Coffins, which has turned to biodegradable cardboard to provide a green alternative to wooden coffins. The firm, originally a design agency, also saw a market for printing on coffins.

"As far as we're concerned, it's just packaging," said Geed Kelly, co-founder of Creative Coffins.

The company began producing coffins in May, and its website has been inundated with requests. "We get hundreds of enquiries every week," said Mr Kelly. "We've had interest from Hollywood to Australia, and South Africa to Indonesia. We've had very positive feedback from funeral directors."

Creative Coffins started after a simple request from a friend who was planning his funeral but couldn't find an environmentally friendly coffin. It is now producing caskets that range from £295 off-the-shelf to £1,250 bespoke. Designs vary from garden sheds with the words "gone to seed" to wine-bottle motifs.

Other companies have likewise seen an increase in sales of alternative funeral supplies. Mary Tomes, founder of Colourful Coffins, said: "Since we started about five years ago, it's really begun gaining in popularity.

"We've sold over 2,500 coffins since we started and we're trebling the number we sell each year. We've just done one with a painted aquarium on it with the gentleman's favourite fish."

Dr Bill Webster, a bereavement counsellor, said: "It's a symbolic act to have this personalised colourful coffin. They are saying their loved one was special."

Dr Webster, whose wife died in 1983, says people do not talk about death enough, or their plans for when it happens: "We avoid it as much as we can. When death happens, we wonder: 'What would they want?' I believe a good funeral is the beginning of a healthy grief process."

However, Adam Heath, spokesman for the National Association of Funeral Directors, warns that the business of selecting coffins needs to be taken seriously: "I'm slightly reserved about some of the more wacky ones – you don't want people regretting the choice of design years later."

At last... a coffin you might actually want to be seen dead in, IoS, 13.7.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/at-last-a-coffin-you-might-actually-want-to-be-seen-dead-in-866490.html

US Cancer Deaths Rose by 5, 400 in 2005

February 20, 2008
Filed at 3:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- U.S. cancer deaths rose by more than 5,000 in 2005, a somewhat disappointing reversal of a two-year downward trend, the American Cancer Society said in a report issued Wednesday.

The group counted 559,312 people who died from cancer.

The cancer death rate among the overall population continued to fall, but only slightly, after a couple of years of more dramatic decline.

In 2005, there were just under 184 cancer deaths per 100,000 people, down from nearly 186 the previous year. Experts said it wasn't surprising that the rate would stabilize.

The cancer death rate has been dropping since the early 1990s, and early in this decade was declining by about 1 percent a year. The actual number of cancer deaths kept rising, however, because of the growing population.

So it was big news when the rate dropped by 2 percent in both 2003 and 2004, enough to cause the total number of cancer deaths to fall for the first time since 1930.

President Bush and others hailed that as a sign that federally funded research was making strides against the disease.

But now the death rate decline is back to 1 percent. And the 2005 numbers show annual cancer deaths are no longer falling, but are up more than 5,400 since 2004.

''The declining rate was no longer great enough to overcome the increase in population,'' said Elizabeth Ward, a co-author of the cancer society report

Officials with the organization say they don't know why the decline in the death rate eased.

It may be that cancer screenings are not having as big an effect as they were a few years ago, said Dr. Peter Ravdin, a research professor in biostatistics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

One possible example: In 2004, the largest drop in deaths among the major cancers was in colorectal cancer. Experts gave much of the credit to colonoscopy screenings that detect polyps and allow doctors to remove them before they turn cancerous. They also mentioned ''the Katie Couric effect'' -- a jump in colonoscopy rates after the ''Today'' show host had the exam on national television in 2000.

In the new report, the colorectal cancer death rate decreased by about 3 percent from 2004 to 2005, after plunging 6 percent from 2003 to 2004.

Colorectal cancer screening rates through 2003 did not show a decline. But it's possible they have fallen since then, Ravdin said.

Cancer society officials have also voiced concern that cancer deaths may increase as Americans lose health insurance coverage and get fewer screenings.

The good news is the cancer death rate is still declining, and that since the early 1990s is down more than 18 percent for men and more than 10 percent for women. Those reductions translate to more than half a million cancer deaths avoided, according to the cancer society.

Experts attribute the success to declines in smoking and to earlier detection and more effective treatment of tumors.

------

On the Net:

American Cancer Society report: www.cancer.org/statistics

US Cancer Deaths Rose by 5, 400 in 2005, NYT, 20.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cancer-Deaths.html

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers

February 19, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICIA COHEN

Shannon Neal can instantly tell you the best night of her life: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, the Hinsdale Academy debutante ball. Her father, Steven Neal, a 54-year-old political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, was in his tux, white gloves and tie. “My dad walked me down and took a little bow,” she said, and then the two of them goofed it up on the dance floor as they laughed and laughed.

A few weeks later, Mr. Neal parked his car in his garage, turned on the motor and waited until carbon monoxide filled the enclosed space and took his breath, and his life, away.

Later, his wife, Susan, would recall that he had just finished a new book, his seventh, and that “it took a lot out of him.” His medication was also taking a toll, putting him in the hospital overnight with worries about his heart.

Still, those who knew him were blindsided. “If I had just 30 seconds with him now,” Ms. Neal said of her father, “I would want all these answers.”

Mr. Neal is part of an unusually large increase in suicides among middle-aged Americans in recent years. Just why thousands of men and women have crossed the line between enduring life’s burdens and surrendering to them is a painful question for their loved ones. But for officials, it is a surprising and baffling public health mystery.

A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.)

For women 45 to 54, the rate leapt 31 percent. “That is certainly a break from trends of the past,” said Ann Haas, the research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

By contrast, the suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased less than 2 percent during that five-year period — and decreased among people 65 and older.

The question is why. What happened in 1999 that caused the suicide rate to suddenly rise primarily for those in midlife? For health experts, it is like discovering the wreckage of a plane crash without finding the black box that recorded flight data just before the aircraft went down.

Experts say that the poignancy of a young death and higher suicide rates among the very old in the past have drawn the vast majority of news attention and prevention resources. For example, $82 million was devoted to youth suicide prevention programs in 2004, after the 21-year-old son of Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, killed himself. Suicide in middle age, by comparison, is often seen as coming at the end of a long downhill slide, a problem of alcoholics and addicts, society’s losers.

“There’s a social-bias issue here,” said Dr. Eric C. Caine, co-director at the Center for the Study of Prevention of Suicide at the University of Rochester Medical Center, explaining why suicide in the middle years of life had not been extensively studied before.

There is a “national support system for those under 19, and those 65 and older,” Dr. Caine added, but not for people in between, even though “the bulk of the burden from suicide is in the middle years of life.”

Of the more than 32,000 people who committed suicide in 2004, 14,607 were 40 to 64 years old (6,906 of those were 45 to 54); 5,198 were over 65; 2,434 were under 21 years old.

Complicating any analysis is the nature of suicide itself. It cannot be diagnosed through a simple X-ray or blood test. Official statistics include the method of suicide — a gun, for instance, or a drug overdose — but they do not say whether the victim was an addict or a first-time drug user. And although an unusual event might cause the suicide rate to spike, like in Thailand after Asia’s economic collapse in 1997, suicide much more frequently punctuates a long series of troubles — mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, failed romances.

Without a “psychological autopsy” into someone’s mental health, Dr. Caine said, “we’re kind of in the dark.”

The lack of concrete research has given rise to all kinds of theories, including a sudden drop in the use of hormone-replacement therapy by menopausal women after health warnings in 2002, higher rates of depression among baby boomers or a simple statistical fluke.

At the moment, the prime suspect is the skyrocketing use — and abuse — of prescription drugs. During the same five-year period included in the study, there was a staggering increase in the total number of drug overdoses, both intentional and accidental, like the one that recently killed the 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger. Illicit drugs also increase risky behaviors, C.D.C. officials point out, noting that users’ rates of suicide can be 15 to 25 times as great as the general population.

Jeffrey Smith, a vigorous fisherman and hunter, began ordering prescription drugs like Ambien and Viagra over the Internet when he was in his late 40s and the prospect of growing older began to gnaw at him, said his daughter, Michelle Ray Smith, who appears on the television soap “Guiding Light.” Five days before his 50th birthday, he sat in his S.U.V. in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., letting carbon monoxide fill his car.

Linda Cronin was 43 and working in a gym when she gulped down a lethal dose of prescription drugs in her Denver apartment in 2006, after battling eating disorders and depression for years.

Looking at the puzzling 28.8 percent rise in the suicide rate among women ages 50 to 54, Andrew C. Leon, a professor of biostatistics in psychiatry at Cornell, suggested that a drop in the use of hormone replacement therapy after 2002 might be implicated. It may be that without the therapy, more women fell into depression, Dr. Leon said, but he cautioned this was just speculation.

Despite the sharp rise in suicide among middle-aged women, the total number who died is still relatively small: 834 in the 50-to-54-year-old category in 2004. Over all, four of five people who commit suicide are men. (For men 45 to 54, the five-year rate increase was 15.6 percent.)

Veterans are another vulnerable group. Some surveys show they account for one in five suicides, said Dr. Ira Katz, who oversees mental health programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs. That is why the agency joined the national toll-free suicide hot line last August.

In the last five years, Dr. Katz said, the agency has noticed that the highest suicide rates have been among middle-aged men and women. Those most affected are not returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, he said, but those who served in Vietnam or right after, when the draft ended and the all-volunteer force began. “The current generation of older people seems to be at lesser risk for depression throughout their lifetimes” than the middle-aged, he said.

That observation seems to match what Myrna M. Weissman, the chief of the department in Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology at New York State Psychiatric Institute, concluded was a susceptibility to depression among the affluent and healthy baby boom generation two decades ago, in a 1989 study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. One possible reason she offered was the growing pressures of modern life, like the changing shape of families and more frequent moves away from friends and relatives that have frayed social support networks.

More recently, reports of a study that spanned 80 countries found that around the world, middle-aged people were unhappier than those in any other age group, but that conclusion has been challenged by other research, which found that among Americans, middle age is the happiest time of life.

Indeed, statistics can sometimes be as confusing as they are enlightening. Shifts in how deaths are tallied make it difficult to compare rates before and after 1999, C.D.C. officials said. Epidemiologists also emphasize that at least another five years of data on suicide are needed before any firm conclusions can be reached about a trend.

The confusion over the evidence reflects the confusion and mystery at the heart of suicide itself.

Ms. Cronin explained in a note that she had struggled with an inexplicable gloom that would leave her cowering tearfully in a closet as early as age 9. After attempting suicide before, she had checked into a residential treatment program not long before she died, but after a month, her insurance ran out. Her parents had offered to continue the payments, but her sister, Kelly Gifford, said Ms. Cronin did not want to burden them.

Ms. Gifford added, “I think she just got sick of trying to get better.”

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers, NYT, 19.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/19suicide.html?hp

One of last U.S. WWI veterans dies

21 December 2007
USA Today

NORTH BALTIMORE, Ohio (AP) — J. Russell Coffey, the oldest known surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, has died. The retired teacher, one of only three U.S. veterans from the "war to end all wars," was 109.

Coffey died Thursday at the Briar Hill Health Campus in North Baltimore, where he had lived for the past four or five years, said Gaye Boggs, nursing director at the nursing home. No cause of death has been determined, she said Friday. His health began failing in October.

More than 4.7 million Americans joined the military from 1917-1918. Coffey never saw combat because he was still in basic training when the war ended.

The two remaining U.S. veterans are Frank Buckles, 106, of Charles Town, W.Va.; and Harry Richard Landis, 108, of Sun City Center, Fla., according to the Veterans Affairs Department. In addition, John Babcock, 107, of Spokane, Wash., served in the Canadian army and is the last known Canadian veteran of the war.

Coffey once confided to his daughter, Betty Jo Larsen, that he wished people would remember his contributions rather than his old age. "He told me 'even a prune can get old,"' she said last spring. She died in September.

Coffey had enlisted in the Army while he was a student at Ohio State University in October 1918, a month before the Allied powers and Germany signed a cease-fire agreement. He was discharged a month after the war ended.

His two older brothers fought overseas, and he was disappointed at the time that the war ended before he shipped out. But he told The Associated Press in April 2007: "I think I was good to get out of it."

Born Sept. 1, 1898, Coffey played semipro baseball in Akron, earned a doctorate in education from New York University, taught in high school and college and raised a family.

He delivered newspapers as a youngster and would read the paper to immigrants, his daughter said. "That was the beginning of him being a teacher," she said.

Coffey returned to Ohio State University after he left the Army and received two degrees there.

He said he loved teaching. "I could see results," he said. "I could see improvement."

He taught junior high and high school in Phelps, Ky., and Findlay. He then taught physical education at Bowling Green State University from 1948 until 1969.

He had a remarkable memory and was independent, his daughter said. He drove his car until he was 104, and lived in his own home until a year later. He was a swimmer and credited healthy eating and exercise for his longevity.

His wife, Bernice, whom he married in 1921, died in 1993.

One of last U.S. WWI veterans dies, UT, 21.12.2007,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-21-wwi-veteran-dies_N.htm

CDC: Suicides Among Middle - Aged Spikes

December 13, 2007
Filed at 10:56 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA (AP) -- The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has reached its highest point in at least 25 years, a new government report said Thursday.

The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S. residents ages 45 through 54 -- far outpacing increases among younger adults, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in that age group. That's the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982.

Experts said they don't know why the suicide rates are rising so dramatically in that age group, but believe it is an unrecognized tragedy.

The general public and government prevention programs tend to focus on suicide among teenagers, and many suicide researchers concentrate on the elderly, said Mark Kaplan, a suicide researcher at Portland State University.

''The middle-aged are often overlooked. These statistics should serve as a wake-up call,'' Kaplan said.

Roughly 32,000 suicides occur each year -- a figure that's been holding relatively steady, according to the Suicide Prevention Action Network, an advocacy group.

Experts believe suicides are under-reported. But reported rates tend to be highest among those who are in their 40s and 50s and among those 85 and older, according to CDC data.

The female suicide rates are highest in middle age. The rate for males -- who account for the majority of suicides -- peak after retirement, said Dr. Alex Crosby, a CDC epidemiologist.

Researchers looked at death certificate information for 1999 through 2004. Overall, they found a 5.5 percent increase during that time in deaths from homicides, suicides, traffic collisions and other injury incidents.

The largest increases occurred in the 45 to 54 age group. A large portion of the jump in deaths in that group was attributed to unintentional drug overdoses and poisonings -- a problem the CDC reported previously.

But suicides were another major factor, accounting for a quarter of the injury deaths in that age group. The suicide count jumped from 5,081 to 6,906 in that time.

In contrast, the suicide rate for people in their 20s -- the other age group with the most dramatic increase in injury deaths -- rose only 1 percent.

------

On the Net:

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr

CDC: Suicides Among Middle - Aged Spikes, NYT, 13.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Suicide-Middle-Aged.html

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed

December 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

For the last years of her life, Christina Copeman kept to herself.

She stopped answering the door shortly after her estranged husband died in 1990. She turned away from her friends and neighbors in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, ignoring their hellos.

So when Ms. Copeman dropped out of sight altogether, people were not immediately suspicious. Perhaps she had gone back to Trinidad for a vacation, they said. Maybe she had gotten sick there, or decided to stay.

That was nearly two years ago.

Outside Ms. Copeman’s brick row house on East 92nd Street, the days grew longer and shorter again. Mail piled up in the vestibule behind the glass front door. Neighbors collected trash from her porch so she would not get summonses.

Ms. Copeman was upstairs, dead, curled in a fetal position in the hallway, where the police found her skeletal remains on Monday morning, said Peter Bishop, her nephew. She was dressed to go out, in a coat and a beret, Mr. Bishop said.

“Winter clothes on,” he said yesterday, “so I guess she died in the winter.”

Ms. Copeman had died of heart disease, the medical examiner said yesterday. The police said she had been dead between a year and 18 months.

It seems impossible for a person to fall through the cracks like that, to die in her own home and go undiscovered. New York is a big city, but it is impersonal only at a distance. People have neighbors. They have relatives.

But Christina Copeman, who would be 70 if she were alive today, managed to slip away almost by sheer force of will.

“It’s a shame,” said her next-door neighbor Ruby Fulmer, 92, a retired nursing professor who said she had been calling 311 for more than a year trying to figure out how to solve the mystery of Ms. Copeman. “But I think it’s also part of the way she lived the last few years of her life.”

Althea Bishop, Ms. Copeman’s sister-in-law, said she could not figure out how to get help for her.

“What am I going to do, call the cops and say there’s a lady inside who doesn’t want to talk?” she said. “If she couldn’t walk or see or hear, it would be one thing. But she was fine. She just didn’t want to deal with us.”

Another neighbor, Dolores Harvey, said that she had called the local precinct, the 67th, in summer 2006 after smelling an intermittent foul odor from Ms. Copeman’s house, but that two officers who went to the house the next day told her they smelled nothing amiss. “They said that if she had passed away in the house, we would have smelled it,” said Ms. Harvey, 49. “They said there was nothing to do; they couldn’t break down the door.”

The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said yesterday that the police had reviewed the last 20 months of records and found no calls to Ms. Copeman’s address until Saturday, when the police checked on her at Mr. Bishop’s request but did not break down the door. When Mr. Bishop accompanied the police to the house on Monday, they forced their way in and found her body, Mr. Browne said.

Ms. Copeman, who immigrated from Trinidad as a teenager and worked for years at a bank in Manhattan, was a quiet woman to begin with, her relatives and neighbors said.

“She just liked to work, and come home, didn’t have too many friends coming over,” said Mr. Bishop, 50, who lived with the Copemans in the 1970s. “Maybe watch a little TV. She read love stories.”

After her husband, Joseph Copeman, left her in the 1980s, she grew more withdrawn and depressed, Ms. Fulmer said. Then Mr. Copeman and Ms. Copeman’s father died in quick succession.

Soon, Ms. Fulmer said, “she stopped talking to everybody. I’d see her right on the front step and say ‘Hello, Christine’ and she’d turn her head. If you saw her coming halfway down the block and said ‘Hey Christine, wait up,’ she’d roll her eyes and turn the other way.”

Ms. Bishop said she last spoke to Ms. Copeman in about 1991. “She stood behind the curtain and she talked through the door. ‘I’m fine, you all could leave now,’” Ms. Bishop recalled her saying. Subsequent visits from the Bishops were greeted with either silence or a call to the police, Ms. Bishop said.

Ms. Fulmer said she last saw Ms. Copeman alive sometime in 2005. “She was wearing a coat, kind of sweeping around her front porch,” Ms. Fulmer said. “She didn’t talk to me then, either.”

Another neighbor, Lester Watson, said he ran into Ms. Copeman on the street around the fall of 2005. “She told me she was going away for a little while,” he said.

Months passed. Bills came and went unpaid. Con Edison officials said that they canceled Ms. Copeman’s account last year but left her power on, and that there had been no power use at the home for more than a year. The pile of unclaimed mail grew, puzzling neighbors. A spokeswoman for the Postal Service, Patricia McGovern, said that while mail carriers often take it upon themselves to notify the authorities when a customer does not seem to be collecting the mail, there is no requirement that they do so.

In 2006, Ms. Copeman’s roof began leaking, affecting Ms. Fulmer’s house. Ms. Fulmer called 311. The Department of Buildings sent an inspector, who documented the house’s condition in impressive detail. “Large holes in roofing paper at various locations on roof,” the report said. “Flashing at sides broken. Large holes observed. Fascia board rotten at front of building.”

The department issued Ms. Copeman a violation in April 2007.

It said, “Remedy: Make safe immediate repair.”

The yellow violation notice fluttered in the cold breeze yesterday on Ms. Copeman’s front porch, half-buried beneath phone books and business cards and fliers for furniture sales long past.

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/nyregion/05dead.html

Brooke Astor, 105, Aristocrat of the People, Dies

August 14, 2007
The New York Times
By MARILYN BERGER

Brooke Astor, who by night reigned over New York society with a decided disdain for pretension and by day devoted her time and considerable resources to New York’s unfortunate, died yesterday afternoon at her weekend estate, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. She was 105.

Her death was confirmed by Kenneth E. Warner, a lawyer for Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony D. Marshall. The attending physician listed the cause of death as pneumonia, Mr. Warner said.

Mrs. Astor’s image as a benevolent society matron was overshadowed last year by that of a victimized dowager at the center of a very public family battle over her care and fortune. Yet for decades she had been known as the city’s unofficial first lady, one who moved effortlessly from the sumptuous apartments of Fifth Avenue to the ragged barrios of East Harlem, deploying her inherited millions to help the poor help themselves.

Among the rich of New York, she was perhaps the last bridge to the Gilded Age, when “society” was a closed world of old-money families, the so-called Four Hundred, who were ruled over by a grandmother of Mrs. Astor’s by marriage, Mrs. William Backhouse Astor.

But it was a changing social order that Brooke Astor oversaw. Hers was a society defined more by balance sheets than bloodline. It opened its doors to entrepreneurs and Wall Street movers and shakers who had bought entree with so many millions that in the 1980s Mrs. Astor declared herself “nouveau pauvre.”

Although aristocratic in upbringing, style and social milieu, she never sought to be the arbiter of society that the Astor name might have entitled her to be. She never wanted to rule over a world that she was among the first to recognize was no more.

And in her advanced age, her own world seemed to collapse as well. In a startling episode that played out in court and on the front pages of the city’s newspapers last year, one of her grandsons, Philip Marshall, filed a lawsuit accusing Anthony Marshall, her only son, of neglecting her care and exploiting her to enrich himself and his wife.

Although her son denied the accusations, the public was suddenly given a picture of Mrs. Astor as a mistreated centenarian. By the grandson’s account, she had been stripped of her dignity and some of her favorite art, denied medicine and the company of her dogs, Boysie and Girlsie, and forced to sleep in misery on a couch smelling of urine.

The dispute stretched over months, its every wrinkle making headlines. Then, last Oct. 13, the parties announced a settlement, avoiding what could have been a costly and sensational trial. Her close friends said her declining physical condition left her unaware of the tumult; doctors were later said to have diagnosed dementia. But it was a bitter and unlikely last chapter for a woman who had defined high society and made philanthropy her career for almost four decades.

She took up that vocation after her third husband, Vincent Astor, heir to the fur and real estate fortune of John Jacob Astor, died and left about $60 million to her personally and an equal amount for a foundation “for the alleviation of human suffering.” Her husband had told her, “You’ll have fun, Pookie.”

In fact, she said she had a great deal of fun giving money away as it grew over time into the hundreds of millions. With a wink and a sly smile, she liked to quote Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” saying, “Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”

It was Mrs. Astor who decided that because most of the Astor fortune had been made in New York real estate, it should be spent in New York, for New Yorkers. Grants supported the city’s museums and libraries, its boys’ and girls’ clubs, homes for the elderly and other institutions and programs.

She made it her duty to evaluate for herself every organization or group that sought help from the Vincent Astor Foundation. In her chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz, she traveled all over New York to visit the tenements and churches and neighborhood programs she was considering for foundation grants. Many times a welcoming lunch awaited her on paper plates and plastic folding tables set up for the occasion. She would exclaim over what she called the “delicious sauces”: deli mustard and pickle relish.

A New York Presence

At night — almost every night, even into her 90s — she could be found surrounded by crystal and caviar, done up in her designer dresses and jewels, seated to the right of the host. (She was always seated to the right of the host.)

If she nurtured a playful and sometimes wicked eye for the manners of high society (she once said that “unlike Queen Victoria, we are amused — we are always amused”), she made a point of showing her appreciation for people who worked to help the needy. She always “made an effort,” to use a phrase of the upper class.

For her forays around the city, she dressed as she did when she joined the ladies who lunch at East Side bistros: a finely tailored suit or a designer dress, a hat in any weather, a cashmere coat when it was cool and, in her last years, an elegant cane, her one apparent concession to age. “If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I’m talking down to them,” she said. “People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

She could talk to anyone as she made her rounds, offering encouragement to a child working at a library computer, counseling a mother about the importance of reading. To a janitor at a branch library — and she tried to visit every branch — she might give a word of thanks “for keeping this place so clean.” She was thrilled when the Bronx Zoo named a baby elephant in her honor.

When the Astor Foundation closed its doors in December 1997, Mrs. Astor had overseen the disbursement of almost $195 million, almost all within New York City. Although the foundation was not large compared with powerhouses like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie, its contributions often served as seed money: others followed, knowing that if Mrs. Astor had given her seal of approval to a cause, it was worthy of support.

As she neared 99, she said she was glad she had not lived in the kind of indolence that her fortune would have allowed. If she regretted anything, she said, it was that she had not visited friends in Europe often enough and that she had not been able to read, and write, all the books she would have wished.

She was slight of build, somewhat frail and very thin in her last years, but her hair remained honey-colored, and she liked to boast, although it was widely doubted, that she had never had a face-lift. She kept fit well into her advanced years by swimming 1,000 strokes each weekend day and nearly every day in summer, even in the chilly waters that surrounded her house in Northeast Harbor, Me. Every year she liked to march behind the fire engine in Northeast Harbor’s Memorial Day parade, waving a little American flag.

Even into her 90s, she loved to go out, especially to places where there would be dancing. “When that music starts,” she said, “it enters my blood like a fever.” When she stayed home, she would have people in. An invitation to one of her luncheons or dinners — especially if it was for a first lady, like her friend Nancy Reagan — was a sign of having arrived at the highest level of society.

When Mrs. Astor slowed down, it was often at Holly Hill, her 68-acre weekend estate. “It’s like backing up to the Esso and getting refueled,” she once said.

In her 98th year, she was still writing articles for Vanity Fair magazine, noting with regret, for example, that gentlemen no longer wore hats and that women no longer flirted, something she said she herself never failed to do.

If she had any weakness, it was for her dogs. She always had several and called them her “lovey babes.”

Mrs. Astor spent a good deal of her time in the boardrooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, Rockefeller University and other prestigious cultural centers. A trustee of each, she worked with curators and other staff members. She finally devoted herself almost exclusively to the New York Public Library, where she remained honorary chairwoman until her death.

Vartan Gregorian, who was president of the library when Mrs. Astor took it as her main cause, observed then that she stood apart from her class. “She is of them, but not part of them,” said Mr. Gregorian, who is now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “She’s not dominated by the same considerations many socialites are.

“Hers is not a socialite’s attitude,” he went on. “She is genuinely concerned. There’s a lot of effort and mental discipline. She’s one of the few who have read so much. She’s a teacher; she teaches by example, by analogy. If you spend an evening with Brooke Astor and come away empty, there’s something wrong with your antennae.”

The Early Years

Brooke Russell was born in Portsmouth, N.H., on March 30, 1902. She remembered a childhood that was secure and happy, if often solitary. She had no siblings and spent much of that time in foreign lands. One of her earliest memories was of standing on her bed saluting as a marine bugler outside played during a flag-raising at the American legation in Beijing, where her father, Maj. Gen. John H. Russell, was commander of the guard. (She remembered that the bugler’s name was Johnny Malone, and that she had loved him.)

Her father, who later became commandant of the Marine Corps, also took the family along when he was assigned to Hawaii and Panama. She remembered her mother, Mabel Howard, as beautiful and flirtatious.

Mrs. Astor kept the diaries, letters and drawings from her childhood travels squirreled away in Briarcliff Manor in a closet that she called her “archive room.” Some of her early drawings, poems and plays were reproduced in an illustrated edition of “Patchwork Child: Early Memories,” published in 1993.

Her writing came to include many magazine articles, two published volumes of autobiography — a 1962 edition of “Patchwork Child” and “Footprints” (1980) — and two novels, “The Bluebird Is at Home” (1965) and “The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree: A Period Piece” (1986).

What she remembered as an idyllic childhood ended abruptly, she said, when, at age 16, she was invited to the senior prom at Princeton to fill in for a girl who had fallen ill. There she met J. Dryden Kuser. Her mother, she said, was “dazzled” by Mr. Kuser’s substantial fortune. After a brief courtship, he asked Brooke to marry him, and though she felt unprepared for marriage, she said, she reluctantly agreed.

“Dryden promised me my own house, all the dogs I wanted, and a car as soon as I was old enough to have a driver’s license,” she said.

They married in 1919, and for 11 years they lived in great luxury and considerable misery. Her merry nature gradually darkened as the marriage headed for disaster in every respect except for the birth of her son, Anthony. She and Mr. Kuser divorced in 1930.

Her second marriage, two years later, to Charles Marshall, known to everyone as Buddie, brought her 20 years of happiness. Mr. Marshall, she said, was the love of her life. She wrote that her son admired him so much that he adopted his last name as his own.

Charles Marshall died suddenly in 1952, leaving Mrs. Astor without an inheritance. She took a job at House & Garden, a Condé Nast magazine.

Not long afterward, still in mourning, she met Vincent Astor at a dinner. A month later, he proposed. She described the scene in “Footprints”: “I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But you hardly know me,’ I said. ‘We really don’t know each other at all.’

“ ‘I know a lot about you,’ Vincent answered. ‘And I can swear on the Bible that if you marry me I will do everything I possibly can to take care of you and make you happy — and earn your love.’ Well, such suddenness would have thrilled me and elated me at 20, but in my late 40s, I was frightened by it.”

Within months, however, she became his third wife, in 1953. She had, perhaps, been right to hesitate. Vincent Astor, she said, was a suspicious man who thought everyone wanted something from him. As a result, the couple were often alone. She said she lost contact with friends. He asked her not to chat on the telephone when he was at home.

The marriage was brief. In five and a half years, Mr. Astor was dead, leaving his millions for her and for the foundation. “After Vincent died, I recreated myself,” Mrs. Astor said, referring to her decades of philanthropy at the Vincent Astor Foundation. In one of many meetings and interviews since the 1980s, she remarked, “Now I feel I’ve become a public monument.”

A Living Landmark

She was, in fact, named a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which said in 1996 that “a list of the city monuments is incomplete without her name alongside.” The Astor Foundation’s annual reports had become a Baedeker to the city, showing contributions to what she called New York’s “crown jewels”: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as Cornell University Medical College, Rockefeller University, the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), the South Street Seaport and others.

In 1977, when Mrs. Astor made the New York Public Library her primary cause, the Astor Foundation offered a $5 million matching grant if the library could raise $10 million. She then went out to help raise the $10 million. The main entrance of the research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was named Astor Hall in her honor. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she took a particular interest in the construction of the Chinese courtyard and scholar’s room, which was named Astor Court.

Foundation money often went for necessities the public never knew anything about. There was no Astor name affixed to things like air-conditioning or a staff lunch room at an institution.

Astor money went to provide new windows for a nursing home on Riverside Drive, fire escapes for a homeless residence in the Bronx, a boiler for a youth center in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and vest-pocket parks around the city. The foundation was among the first to support neighborhood and community-based development projects as well as jobs programs. Grants, to name a few, also went to institutions then known as the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Academy of Design and Columbia College as well as Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, Ellis Island and the Animal Medical Center, to care for the pets of the elderly poor.

“Old people have old pets,” she said. “It’s a wonderful place. When I’m sick, that’s where I want them to take me.”

Mrs. Astor remained at her Park Avenue duplex apartment as age and infirmity overtook her. Though she made occasional social appearances in her last years — the banker David Rockefeller gave her a 100th birthday party at the Rockefeller family’s Pocantico Hills estate in 2002 — she had become all but a recluse toward the end.

In July 2006 came the astonishing news that Philip Marshall had sued his father, accusing him of stripping Mrs. Astor’s apartment of artwork to enrich himself and neglecting her in ways that threatened her health and safety.

Philip Marshall enlisted the affidavits of Annette de la Renta, Mrs. Astor’s friend of more than 45 years, as well as Mr. Rockefeller, Henry A. Kissinger and others as he sought to wrest control of Mrs. Astor’s affairs from his father. Anthony Marshall, 83, a Broadway producer and former diplomat, said the accusations were “completely untrue.”

Under the settlement, he and his wife, Charlene, admitted no wrongdoing, but both were required to give up their roles as co-executors of Mrs. Astor’s estate, and Mr. Marshall agreed to cease being steward of his mother’s health care and financial affairs. They were also required to rescind the transfer of Mrs. Astor’s Maine estate to themselves.

The settlement stipulated that JPMorgan Chase & Company and Mrs. de la Renta would be her permanent guardians. Mrs. de la Renta quickly moved her from New York to Mrs. Astor’s estate in Briarcliff Manor. The bank, which had overseen Mrs. Astor’s finances since the court filing in July 2006, agreed not to pursue litigation to recover millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that it believed Mr. Marshall might have improperly obtained.

Besides her son, Anthony, of New York, and her grandson Philip, of South Dartmouth, Mass., Mrs. Astor is survived by another grandson, Philip’s twin brother, Alec, of Ossining, N.Y., and three great-grandchildren.

A widow for 48 years, Mrs. Astor had a number of suitors in that time but did not want to marry again. “I just don’t want anyone tugging at my sleeve at 10 o’clock telling me it’s time to go home,” she once told her friend Marietta Tree.

She joked easily about her romantic life. A former dinner companion recalled saying to her one evening, “Mrs. Astor, you’re such a beautiful woman, you must have had many lovers.” She responded, “When I can’t fall asleep at night, I sometimes start counting them, but I’m asleep long before I get to the end of the list.”

She remained open to new friends. She used to say that each year she took on one new friend to replace an old one who had died. While Mrs. Astor lost track of some friends over the years, she regretted the misunderstandings that arose from time to time. When she was 98, she recalled with satisfaction that she had telephoned a man who had once made her so angry that she had stopped talking to him. The call was to compliment him on an article he had written. “I want to be at peace with all of my friends when I die,” she said.

Brooke Astor, 105, Aristocrat of the People, Dies, NYT, 14.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/obituaries/14astor.html?ref=nyregion

Virtual Graveyard Holds Dead of MySpace

July 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:48 p.m. ET
The New York Times

Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts.

They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.

Allison Bauer left rainbows: Reds, yellows and blues, festooned across her MySpace profile in a collage of color. Before her corpse was pulled from the depths of an Oregon gorge on May 9, where police say she leapt to her death, she unwittingly wrote her own epitaph.

''I love color, Pure Color in rainbow form, And I love My friends,'' the 20-year-old wrote under ''Interests'' on her profile. ''And I love to Love, I care about everyone so much you have no idea.''

Now her page fills a plot on www.MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members.

Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers' lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.

The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It's also a place where the living -- those who knew the deceased and those who didn't -- discuss this world and the next.

There's a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There's a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive -- frozen in time, for all the world to see.

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Scrolling down a dead person's MySpace profile wall is like journeying into the past. The pages were abandoned hastily, without warning. Most telling is the date of each person's last log-in.

For 16-year-old Stephanie Wagner, it was Sept. 29, 2006 -- a month before she was strangled and stabbed on Halloween night. Her frivolous teenage profile pales against the terrible facts of her murder.

''This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness,'' says Bob Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. ''We see those kinds of things that we try not to think about, which is how we are all dancing on the edge -- how quickly mortality can come in and claim us.''

The human bits scattered carelessly across each profile form a vivid clip of life in motion. It's a final resting place for the various ''selves'' people project online: the ironic self, the joyful self, the bitter self, the courageous self.

''I do not fear what the future holds for me,'' Navy Hospitalman Geovani Padilla-Aleman, 20, blogged months before he was killed in Iraq. ''I will stand and fight. I am not afraid to die.''

Weeks before she stood in the path of a commuter train, Cheryl Lynn Duca pondered mortality in a poem: ''over my life i've watched people die in front of me. wondering why this happens.''

Many families of the deceased leave the profiles up as memorials. Each profile ''wall'' -- a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to each other -- becomes a conduit for one-way communications with the departed. Days are marked by post-mortem birthday wishes or life updates.

''I made that B in Statistics. and I certainly missed you sittin next to me during the final,'' a friend wrote to Casey Hastings, 19, a cheerleader who was killed in a traffic accident.

Some profiles are used as digital billboards to publicize a little-known atrocity. One profile is dedicated to a 3-year-old murder victim.

MyDeathSpace grew out of one person's morbid curiosity in December 2005, when two teenage daughters were slain by their father. Mike Patterson, 26, a paralegal from San Francisco, tracked down their MySpace pages one day when he was bored. His voyeurism grew into a live journal that later became MyDeathSpace.

''I'd come across these stories where teens would be ending up dead or killing themselves, or killing others,'' he says. ''And more often than not, when I looked them up on MySpace, they had profiles.''

Permission to use the profiles is not requested from MySpace, which is not affiliated with the site and did not respond to requests for comment on it. MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a ''case-by-case basis'' and does not ''allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile.'' Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members.

MyDeathSpace matter-of-factly catalogs each death in headline format: ''Belford Ramirez (19) died after being stabbed in the neck outside of a Burger King.'' Click on the link and you'll find a detailed description of the fatal attack -- an element usually pulled from a news article or blog -- his photograph, and a link to his MySpace profile.

The site even charts death geographically on a digital ''death map'' of the continental U.S., using black skulls to signify victims.

In a digital twist on vigilante justice, MyDeathSpace also posts the profiles of homicide victims alongside those of their alleged killers, whose faces loom on the screen like wanted posters.

A 23-year-old accused of pushing a homeless woman into a river appears as a muscular young man in a sleeveless gray shirt, staring coldly into the camera. A 16-year-old girl charged in the shooting death of a 9-year-old shows up striking a sexy bikini-clad pose in her MySpace photo.

Patterson says the alleged killers generate the most discussion threads on the site. ''If they're accused, we'll put accused,'' he says. ''We're not gonna label somebody a murderer who isn't one.''

But some death submissions slip through the cracks.

There was the case of Christine Hutchinson, a woman from Pittsburgh who was accused of hiding her miscarried fetus in her freezer. She happened to bear the same name as a high school student from Philadelphia -- and the latter's MySpace profile was mistakenly attached to the creepy news story on MyDeathSpace.

Ugly names began filling her inbox: Baby killer, they called her. Murderer. Then death threats.

''They were telling me they hope I die and get stuffed in a freezer, rot in jail, stuff like that,'' says the misidentified Hutchinson.

Patterson removed her profile when he was notified of the case of mistaken identity hours later.

But the damage was done. Hutchinson's face was already out there. She has no plans to sue Patterson, but says she rarely leaves her house alone now, afraid of being attacked.

''It's got legal liability written all over it, this type of a Web site,'' says Internet lawyer John Dozier. Patterson says he has a team to slog through the entries, but he did not elaborate on the process used to verify deaths.

He also refused to disclose profit figures. Ads pop up as you move through the site, and there are fees for certain extras, such as creating personal image galleries in the site's discussion forums.

In those, paying tribute to the deceased sometimes falls by the wayside, as self-described ''death hags'' swap whodunit theories, speculate on how victims' families might feel and muse about the mechanics of violence.

''I've never shot a shotgun before, so I don't understand the physics of it,'' writes a user named ''wickedly--curious'' about a teenage murder-suicide. ''Anyone with any insight tell me if it would be possible for 2 people to shoot each other in the heads at the same time?''

MyDeathSpace veers into the dark underbelly of memorializing, says Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, author of ''Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death.''

''Some people rejoice in steamy details,'' Cullen says. ''The unpleasant thing is that it's not fictional, it's not like watching CSI. These aren't concocted by some scriptwriters in Hollywood who wanted to get a thrill of seeing prostitutes get murdered on the strip.''

For some users, death is just a starting point for discussions of their own lives.

''I just enjoy talking with other members,'' Brittany Oliver, 18, of Tucson, Ariz., writes in an e-mail. ''I occasionally still read about the deaths, but more so, I enjoy chatting with fellow MDSers about life.''

A subset of newspaper readers who turn first to the obituary page has long existed, explains Thompson, but sites like MyDeathSpace allow such people to interact with each other.

The Internet hosts a garden of other morbid online families. On www.FindADeath.com, users can pore over the latest celebrities who've met their Maker. The mortality-conscious can calculate when they might die -- based on age and body fat -- thanks to www.deathclock.com.

As the traditionally private rites of death and grieving go public, what do families of the dead on sites like MyDeathSpace think?

Army Cpl. Matthew Creed was killed in Baghdad Oct. 22. His MySpace profile keeps watch without him, counting down the time -- days, hours, minutes -- until he would've returned home.

His father, Rick, visits the page from time to time, but he was unaware that it had been archived on MyDeathSpace.

''What MyDeathSpace is doing seems respectful, though at this time I'm not sure what I think about it,'' he wrote in an e-mail. What's most important, he believes, is that the link between his son and this world be preserved.

''We all say, you're never gone as long as you're remembered,'' Creed says. ''And he's still remembered by everybody.''

Virtual Graveyard Holds Dead of MySpace, NYT, 29.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Dying-on-the-Web.html

Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients' Deaths

July 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

''He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,'' said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

''Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one,'' said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. ''This is not a cat that's friendly to people,'' he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill they probably don't know he's there, so patients aren't aware he's a harbinger of death. Most families are grateful for the advanced warning, although one wanted Oscar out of the room while a family member died. When Oscar is put outside, he paces and meows his displeasure.

No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.

If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.

Nursing home staffers aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying.

Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his ''compassionate hospice care.''

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Science writer Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/

Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients' Deaths, NYT, 26.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Death-Cat.html

Cemeteries Seek Breathing Clientele

May 25, 2007
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — The dinner was first-class, with butlers serving hors d’oeuvres and the strains of “Blue Danube” tastefully muffling the festive din. This nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard an ill-fated ocean liner was the culmination of Titanic Day at Laurel Hill Cemetery, one of a growing number of historic cemeteries to rebrand themselves as destination necropolises for weekend tourists.

Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar.

Laurel Hill, the resting place of six Titanic victims, promotes itself as an “underground museum.” The sold-out Titanic dinner, including a tour of mausoleums, joined the “Dead White Republicans” tour (“the city’s power brokers, in all their glory and in all their shame”), the “Birding Among the Buried” tour, and “Sinners, Scandals and Suicides,” including a visit to the grave of “a South Philly gangster who got whacked when he tried to infiltrate the Schuylkill County numbers racket.”

As Americans choose cremation in record numbers, Victorian cemeteries like Laurel Hill and Green-Wood in Brooklyn are repositioning themselves for the afterlife: their own. Repositories of architectural and sculptural treasures, like Tiffany windows and weeping marble maidens atop tombs, the cemeteries face dwindling endowments, years of vandalism and neglect, shrinking space for new arrivals and a society that, until recently, collectively distanced itself from their meandering byways.

Although their individual circumstances vary — Green-Wood in Brooklyn, a newly crowned National Historic Landmark, has space for two more years of in-ground burial, while Laurel Hill is virtually full — what they share is a daunting number of tombs in need of repair. Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the final home of Whitneys, a Woolworth, Jay Gould and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, has 95,000 grave sites.

Only 9,000 have endowments, said Susan Olsen, the executive director of the Friends of Woodlawn. “You’re a conservator,” Ms. Olsen said. “You can’t have someone up there with a bottle of Windex cleaning a Tiffany window.”

The new cemetery tourism — a subterranean version of the History Channel — is also a means of developing brand loyalty in the wake of what Joseph Dispenza, president of the historic Forest Lawn in Buffalo, calls a “diminishing customer base.”

Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, Calif., a columbarium designed by Julia Morgan, architect of San Simeon, recently started “Jazz at the Chimes” concerts to reach culture enthusiasts who might be potential customers.

Some cemeteries are betting on infotainment. At Heritage Day last weekend at the 200-year-old Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a 70-piece marching band serenaded the grave of John Philip Sousa, and dog owners held a parade for dogs dressed as historical cemetery personages, including a Union soldier.

A decade ago, prostitutes and packs of wild dogs populated the city’s oldest burial ground, which has monuments designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, designer of the Capitol. Then the preservation association began courting dog owners. Today, the 33-acre cemetery serves as a historical dog park where dogs run in Elysian fields, free to commune with the headstones. Owners pay $125 a year for the privilege, plus $40 a dog — bringing in $80,000 so far. In many ways, it is a throwback to the days of old, when then-rural cemeteries like Green-Wood and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass. (1831), rivaled Niagara Falls as romantic tourist destinations. These “gardens of graves” were settings for Sunday picnics and a precursor to Central Park and other great public spaces.

Like many vintage cemeteries, Laurel Hill languished for years in a struggling urban neighborhood, as potential customers drifted to the suburbs. Though the cemetery has a $17 million endowment, most of that is earmarked for specific family tombs and falls woefully short of what is needed for maintenance. “After 170 years, people lose track” of their loved ones, said Ross L. Mitchell, the executive director.

And with only 1 percent of its 78 acres available for new burial, cemetery officials are trying to think of creative ways to mine its distinctive personality. The Titanic tour was the brainchild of J. Joseph Edgette, a professor at nearby Widener University who is tracking the graves of Titanic victims and plans to document all 2,200. “We’re rebranding ourselves as a heritage tourism destination,” Mr. Mitchell said.

For Jason Crabtree, a 33-year-old software writer, and his wife, Melissa, 29, this storied rural resting place, established in 1836, offered “a cross-section of humanity you don’t usually see,” said Mr. Crabtree, explaining the couple’s predilection for weekend cemetery visits.

At a daffodil brunch in April at the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y., omelet chefs whisked eggs amid Siena marble walls and soaring Tiffany windows, in the Gardner Earl Memorial Chapel and Crematorium. The 1848 cemetery has burial space for the next 200 years and an annual operating deficit of more than $100,000, according to Theresa Page, president of the board of trustees.

Its preservation issues are dire: volunteers have been clearing brush that made about 10,000 graves invisible. The grave site of Samuel Wilson, the man behind “Uncle Sam,” America’s national symbol, has been inaccessible for years, since 125-year-old water pipes burst beneath the roads. The cemetery has asked Congress for $1.7 million for reconstruction.

To raise its profile and money, Oakwood will stage a Renaissance fair this summer, with jousting matches among knights in shining armor. It was inspired by a medieval-style wedding there, for which the groom made his own armor.

“We want them to think, ‘Wow, I think I’d like to spend my eternity here,’ ” Ms. Page said of efforts to lure visitors. “It’s a way of saying, ‘We would love you to stay with us permanently.’ ”

Certain cemeteries, like Père-Lachaise in Paris, Arlington National Cemetery in Washington and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, have always had celebrity cachet. But the past decade has seen a deliberate marketing of cultural status. At the 175-year-old Mount Auburn, it has meant lectures on the warbler migration by the Massachusetts Audubon Society; at Spring Grove in Cincinnati, tourists in electric trams ride past the grave of Salmon P. Chase, the founder of the Internal Revenue Service (they usually boo).

Forest Lawn in Buffalo spent $1.2 million to erect the Blue Sky mausoleum, a spare design by Frank Lloyd Wright, with 24 crypts from $125,000 to $300,000. Each crypt-owner will receive a Steuben glass sculpture of their eternal home-in-waiting. “It’s about exclusivity,” Mr. Dispenza of Forest Lawn said. “It’s about being one of the 24.”

Gary Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University and the author of “Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in the 20th Century” (Oxford University Press, 2003), says there is “a sense in which, like sex, death sells.” But he also sees cemetery tourism as a chance for civic engagement. The mobility of society and the growth of the death care industry have served to isolate these historically significant places from the mainstream, Mr. Laderman said.

That attitude may be shifting. Laurel Hill, for example, was awarded a $97,000 grant to provide grief counseling for inner-city children grappling with the effects of gun violence.

Of course, some think that cemeteries are sacred spaces, and that Halloween flashlight tours and historical re-enactors jumping out from behind tombs crosses the line in taste.

A 2005 fund-raising calendar for Oakwood Cemetery in Troy — inspired by the movie “Calendar Girls” and featuring socialites who appeared to be naked — was a tad too risqué to repeat, some thought. After objections, Green-Wood scuttled plans to show horror films.

“The cemetery doesn’t have an obligation to entertain,” said Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and writer in Michigan.

Preservationists say desperate times require desperate measures. And “Birding Among the Buried” brings people in, if only for a look.

“The people who built Laurel Hill wanted these monuments to be seen,” said Mr. Mitchell of Laurel Hill. “If we do nothing, isn’t that the ultimate disrespect?”

Cemeteries Seek Breathing Clientele, NYT, 25.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/us/25cemetery.html

Hawaii Projects Run Into Graves

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:27 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HONOLULU (AP) -- With Hawaii undergoing a building boom, big corporations such as Wal-Mart and Whole Foods Market are running into an obstacle almost as formidable as the environmentalists and the protectors of the islands' laid-back charm: the dead.

Construction projects keep unearthing graves 100 years old or more, leading to legal battles, costly delays and redesigns, reburials, and hurt feelings among some Native Hawaiians, who say the dead should be allowed to rest in peace.

''What if they built a Wal-Mart at Arlington? How would people feel?'' Native Hawaiian activist William Aila asked. ''Those individuals were buried there with the thought that they would be undisturbed for the rest of the eternity.''

From remote sand dunes on Maui to bustling Waikiki, hundreds of sets of Hawaiian remains, or ''iwi,'' are discovered every year. The graves -- unmarked and undocumented -- are considered sacred to the native people.

Companies say they are being culturally sensitive and abiding by state law while exercising their right to build on land they own.

Hawaii has a stringent state law protecting graves. The 1990 law prohibits removing, destroying or altering any burial sites except as permitted by the state and local burial councils. If a construction project encounters bones, the work must stop in the immediate area and authorities must be notified.

The latest dispute involves Texas-based Whole Foods, the nation's largest natural-foods grocer. Whole Foods has marketed itself as a socially responsible company that uses ''sustainable and ethical business practices.'' Among other things, it refuses for humane reasons to sell live lobsters and crabs.

At least 50 sets of bones have been unearthed in urban Honolulu where Hawaii's first Whole Foods is being built along with an apartment house and small shops.

Construction on a small section of the Whole Foods venture has been prohibited since last summer, and mall developer General Growth Properties Inc. faces additional costs because of lawsuits and could be forced to redesign the $150 million project.

Dwight Yoshimura, General Growth's senior vice president, said ''every letter of the law'' has been followed. The Chicago-based company said many of the remains were discovered during an archaeological survey that it voluntarily commissioned at its own expense, even though it had already obtained all necessary building permits.

''We went ahead and tried to do the right thing,'' Yoshimura said.

The company wants the remains moved to three locations at the site. Some Native Hawaiians want the bones put back where they were.

The Oahu Island Burial Council decided last year that the first 11 sets of remains should be reburied elsewhere on the property. The fate of the 40 or so other sets of bones, which were discovered separately in recent months, will be determined by the State Historical Preservation Division.

Melanie Chinen, administrator of the division, said that when a dispute involves large concentrations of bones, the agency's preference is to leave them in place and require the project to be redesigned. The division has been involved in the reburial of about 3,000 sets of remains since 1991.

A Whole Foods spokeswoman did not return calls for comment.

The dispute follows an emotional confrontation on Wal-Mart's 10-acre property less than a half-mile away, where 64 sets of remains were found. After three years, they sit locked up in a trailer under a parking ramp, awaiting reburial.

The remains, some believed to belong to victims of an 1853 smallpox epidemic, were unearthed during construction of a Sam's Club and Wal-Mart superstore. The superstore opened in 2004, with protesters waving signs accusing the world's largest retailer of destroying graves.

Paulette Kaleikini, a descendant of the deceased at both the Wal-Mart and Whole Foods sites, said: ''Why should they be removed to accommodate development? They were there first. If these burials were of Western people, would they move them?''

Aila, a member of an organization whose Hawaiian name translates to Group Caring for the Ancestors of Hawaii, said Wal-Mart could have redesigned the store and chose not to, which was a ''demonstration of disrespect.''

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Tiffany Moffatt said the company ''took the necessary steps and incurred the necessary costs'' to ''ensure the remains were treated in accordance with state law in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner.''

Among other things, construction was suspended briefly in some spots, and Wal-Mart hired a consultant to work with the descendants. The company also faced legal battles, including a lawsuit to prevent the remains from being moved. A judge rejected the request.

After the bones were discovered during construction, Wal-Mart stopped work and brought in archaeologists, as required under law. The remains are in storage because they are evidence in the state's case against the archaeologists, who are challenging a $210,000 fine over allegations of desecration and failure to immediately notify authorities.

A hearing in the case against the archaeologists is set for next month. Wal-Mart said it is not involved in the case and is awaiting state approval to rebury the remains.

Hawaii's building boom is transforming Honolulu's skyline and turning barren, ink-black lava fields on the Big Island into luxury neighborhoods. Construction spending is projected to reach nearly $7 billion this year, the eighth straight year of growth.

Some developers have redesigned their projects to preserve native graves.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Maui, where 1,000 graves dating to the year 850 were unearthed during excavation in the late 1980s, was completely redesigned at a cost of millions and moved inland. The remains were preserved in a spot now registered as a state historic place, with signs informing visitors about its cultural significance.

More recently, Fifield Cos. agreed to relocate the parking garage and make other changes in a $300 million Waikiki condo project now under construction.

Hawaii Projects Run Into Graves, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hawaiian-Remains.html

Mentally ill die 25 years earlier, on average

3.5.2007
USA TODAY
By Marilyn Elias

Adults with serious mental illness treated in public systems die about 25 years earlier than Americans overall, a gap that's widened since the early '90s when major mental disorders cut life spans by 10 to 15 years, according to a report due Monday.

"We're going in the wrong direction and have to change course," says Joseph Parks, director of psychiatric services for the Missouri Department of Mental Health. He's lead author of the report from eight states — Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Utah and Arizona — that will be released at a meeting of state hospital directors in Bethesda, Md.

About 60% of the 10.3 million people with serious mental illness get care in public facilities, 90% as outpatients, Parks says. They have illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. Although the mentally ill have high accident and suicide rates, about 3 out of 5 die from mostly preventable diseases, he says.

Obesity is a serious problem. These patients often get little exercise, and many take a newer type of anti-psychotic, on the market for 18 years, that can cause drastic weight gains, promoting diabetes and heart disease, Parks says. He thinks these drugs are contributing to deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Recent studies question the advantage of the newer drugs. "Many could be switched to safer medicines," Parks says. Schizophrenics are thought to have a higher risk for diabetes already, he says.

Mentally ill adults also are more likely than others to have alcohol and drug-abuse problems, and to smoke.

Because of their mental disorder, patients often aren't good health advocates for themselves, says Andrew Leuchter of the UCLA School of Medicine. When patients do seek help, "I hear of great difficulty getting appointments even for simple problems like high blood pressure. … The public health system is underfunded, and it's gotten worse over the years."

Medical needs of the mentally ill are least likely to fall through the cracks when psychiatrists and primary care doctors practice in the same facility, according to a 2003 report from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. But integrated clinics are "quite rare," says Bazelon policy director Chris Koyanagi.

Sometimes internists disregard medical symptoms of the mentally ill, chalking them up to the patient's disorder, says Kenneth Duckworth of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And needed treatment may be harder to get. He points to a study showing that after the mentally ill suffer heart attacks, they're less likely than other patients to get state-of-the-art care.

Parks thinks agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should track the health of adults with mental illness, just as they do other vulnerable groups, to identify problems and solutions. "Many struggle for decades to overcome mental illness," he says, "and after all that struggle, it's particularly cruel to think that you would die young."

Mentally ill die 25 years earlier, on average, UT, 3.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-05-03-mental-illness_N.htm

Star Trek's Scotty beamed up in final space voyage

Sun Apr 29, 2007
1:48AM EDT
Reuters
By Steve Shoup

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, New Mexico (Reuters) - Actor James Doohan, who played the starship Enterprise's chief engineer Scotty on "Star Trek," finally made it to space on Saturday as a rocket with some of his ashes was launched in New Mexico.

Remains of the Canadian-born actor, who died two years ago at the age of 85, hurtled to the edge of space aboard a telephone pole-size rocket that blasted off from a desert launching grounds near Truth or Consequences.

Doohan inspired the legendary catch phrase "Beam me up, Scotty" -- even though it was never actually uttered on the popular television show.

Hundreds of spectators clapped, cheered and cried as his ashes roared aloft along with the remains of some 200 other people, including astronaut Gordon Cooper, who first went into space in 1963. Cooper died in 2004 at age 77.

"It was great, it was fun and we want to go again," said Doohan's widow, Wende Doohan, who pressed the launch button with Cooper's widow, Susan Cooper.

The flight was arranged by Houston-based company Space Services Inc. The company charges $495 to send a portion of a person's ashes into suborbital space.

The firm had originally planned to blast Doohan's remains into space two years ago. But the flight was delayed by tests, then by a misfire during a practice launch last year.

During a 15-minute flight, the rocket separated into two parts and returned to Earth on parachutes with the capsules holding the remains. The maximum height reached was 384,000 feet or 72 miles.

Capsules containing the ashes are retrieved, mounted on plaques and given back to relatives.

In 1997, the company blasted the remains of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry into space.

Crystal Warren saw the remains of her space enthusiast brother-in-law take flight. "He's going home. He's there now. He has wanted to be up there forever," said Warren.

The brief flight by the Spaceloft XL rocket was the first commercial launch from Spaceport America, the world's first commercial spaceport, a $225 million project developed with support from the New Mexico state government.

British tycoon Richard Branson said last year he would use the site as a base for his space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, which plans to blast tourists into space by the end of the decade.

Star Trek's Scotty beamed up in final space voyage, R, 29.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2835204220070429

Obituaries in the News

March 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times

Paul Joseph Cohen

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) -- Paul Joseph Cohen, a mathematician who won several of the world's most prestigious math awards, has died. He was 72.

Cohen died Friday of a rare lung disease, according to Stanford University, where he taught for four decades.

In 1964, he won the American Mathematical Society's Bocher Prize for analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal -- the math world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize -- for logic. Cohen won the 1967 National Medal of Science for his work in logic, and he was an honorary foreign member of the London Mathematical Society.

Cohen's passion was studying extremely difficult, long-standing mathematical problems, such as the Continuum Hypothesis, which is considered central to set theory -- the idea that sets of items are the fundamental objects defining all ideas in mathematics.

Cohen shocked the math establishment by proving that the Continuum Hypothesis could not be decided. The notion that conventional mathematics couldn't prove or disprove concrete and well known assertions caused an uproar among academics.

Cohen was born April 2, 1934, in Long Branch, N.J., the fourth and youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His sister, Sylvia, checked out a library book on calculus for him when he was 9.

------

Bill Fisk Sr.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Bill Fisk Sr., an end on Southern California's 1939 national championship team who later played seven seasons in the NFL, has died, athletic department spokesman Tim Tessalone said Wednesday. Fisk was 90.

He played in two Rose Bowl games when USC defeated previously unbeaten and unscored-upon teams: Duke in 1939 and Tennessee in 1940.

Fisk was honored as the Trojans' most inspirational player in 1939.

A third-round draft pick by Detroit in 1940, he played four years for the Lions, two for the San Francisco 49ers, and his final season for the Los Angeles Dons.

He was a USC assistant coach from 1949-56 and later worked in the aerospace industry.

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Ransom Myers

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (AP) -- Ransom Myers, a Canadian scientist renowned for his groundbreaking research and blunt warnings about the extinction of marine species, has died. He was 54.

Myers died Tuesday in Halifax after an illness linked to an inoperable brain tumor, according to colleagues at Dalhousie University.

Myers, a marine biologist who was a vocal critic of Ottawa's management of Canadian fisheries, was admitted to the hospital last November after being diagnosed with brain cancer.

In a study published in 2003, he found that global industrial fishing had cut populations of large fish, such as tuna, swordfish and marlin, to a mere 10 percent of 1950 levels.

At the time, Myers said bluntly that the world was in ''massive denial'' and was spending its energy fighting over the few fish left instead of cutting catch limits before it was too late.

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Marshall Rogers

FREMONT, Calif. (AP) -- Marshall Rogers, a comic book artist remembered for bringing a film noir feel and an architect's eye to Batman comics in the 1970s, has died. He was 57.

Rogers died unexpectedly in his home either Friday night or Saturday morning, according to his sister. Autopsy results showing the cause and time of his death were pending.

Rogers took over work on Batman for Detective Comics in 1977, creating editions that were prized by collectors.

Born Jan. 22, 1950, in Flushing, N.Y., and raised in Ardsley, N.Y., Rogers studied architecture at Kent State University in Ohio. His training showed in his realistic, detailed renditions of Gotham City, collaborators said.

Together, writer Steve Englehart and Rogers produced only six issues, but the works became a reference for future comic artists, and favorites with Batman fans.

Rogers also drew other characters, including the Silver Surfer, Mister Miracle, Dr. Strange, Iron Fist and G.I. Joe. He created two characters, Cap'n Quick and A Foozle.

After a stint with the video game industry in the 1990s, Rogers turned back to comics. A Batman project with Englehart and artist Terry Austin was in the works when Rogers died.

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Bill Scott

SEATTLE (AP) -- Bill Scott, who entertained Seattle sports crowds as ''Bill the Beerman'' and later worked as a professional cheerleader and superfan across the country, has died. He was 58.

Scott died Sunday after battling colon cancer for more than five years, wife Katherine Olason said.

He became a Seattle sports fixture in the days when the drab Kingdome hosted the deafening crowds of fans supporting the NFL's Seahawks.

As a beer vendor, Scott's booming voice would both coax customers and encourage fans to cheer. ''Freeze your teeth, and give your tongue a sleigh ride,'' was among his memorable sales pitches.

In the 1980s, Scott dropped the beer tray and took up cheerleading for a living, although he had a different name for the job: ''synergy facilitation.''

Scott was later imported to work the crowd for the NBA's Portland Trailblazers, and the Boise Hawks, a minor-league baseball franchise.

He eventually branched out, working across the country for the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, the Continental Basketball Association and other minor-league baseball parks.

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Charlotte Winters

BOONSBORO, Md. (AP) -- Charlotte Winters, the last known surviving American female World War I veteran and a refined Civil War buff who met face-to-face with the secretary of the Navy to fight for women in the military, has died. She was 109.

Winters died Tuesday at a nursing home near Boonsboro in northwest Maryland, the U.S. Naval District in Washington said in a statement. Her death leaves just five known surviving American World War I veterans.

In 1916, Winters met with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to persuade him to allow women in the service, said Kelly Auber, who grew up on South Mountain, where Winters and her husband, John Winters, settled.

When the Navy opened support roles to women, Winters and her sister, Sophie, joined immediately in 1917, Auber said. By December 1918, the Naval District said more than 11,000 women had enlisted and were serving in support positions.

Winters served as a secretary and retired in 1953 with the rank of yeoman in the Naval Reserve.

Obituaries in the News, NYT, 29.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Deaths.html

Obituaries in the News

March 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times

Robert E. Petersen

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Robert E. Petersen, the publishing magnate whose Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines helped shape America's car culture and who gave millions to a museum dedicated to his passion, has died. He was 80.

Petersen died Friday of complications from neuroendocrine cancer at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said Dick Messer, director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

''Mr. Petersen helped create and feed the American obsession with the automobile, delivering gasoline-powered dreams to the mailboxes of millions,'' Messer said.

Petersen, the son of an auto mechanic, founded Hot Rod magazine in 1948 while trying to promote the custom-designed car show at the Los Angeles Armory. The following year, he launched Motor Trend for automobile enthusiasts.

A dozen other specialty consumer magazines followed, including Guns & Ammo, Sport, Motorcyclist, Hunting, Mountain Biker, Photographic, Teen and Sassy.

By the time his publishing empire was sold in 1996, Petersen Publishing's annual revenue was about $275 million. He later donated $25 million to pay off the debt of the Peterson Automotive Museum he opened in 1994.

------

Herman Stein

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Herman Stein, a composer whose music for ''It Came From Outer Space,'' ''Creature from the Black Lagoon,'' and ''The Incredible Shrinking Man'' helped define the dramatic soundtrack of 1950s science fiction and horror movies, has died. He was 91.

Stein died of congestive heart failure at his Los Angeles home on March 15, his record producer, David Schecter, said Friday.

As a staff composer at Universal Studios, Stein collaborated with Henry Mancini and others to create music for nearly 200 movies and shorts, though he didn't get credit for all of his work because of the studio's tendency to give solo credit to a project's music supervisor.

''It was an unwritten rule at Universal that if he wrote less than 80 percent of the score, then his name would not be credited in the picture,'' Schecter said. ''Herman had few credits to his name.''

Nonetheless, Stein has been recognized for writing or co-writing music for an array of movies, from Westerns to comedies to dramas. They include Roger Corman's civil rights drama ''The Intruder'' and Douglas Sirk's comedy ''Has Anybody Seen My Gal?'' His other notable horror film compositions include ''Tarantula'' and ''King Kong vs. Godzilla.''

He also composed music for such television shows as ''Gunsmoke,'' ''Lost in Space,'' and ''Daniel Boone.''

------

Richard Conway Casey

NEW YORK (AP) -- Richard Conway Casey, who was the nation's first blind federal trial judge and presided over high-profile cases including an abortion-law challenge and the Peter Gotti trial, died Thursday. He was 74.

Casey's death was confirmed by his office. The cause was an apparent heart attack.

Casey was nominated for federal judgeship by President Clinton in 1997, 10 years after he became blind from an inherited degenerative eye disease.

He was a fixture in U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, arriving each morning with his guide dog, Barney.

Casey sat over several trials that attracted public interest. In addition to the constitutional challenge of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, he presided over the prosecution of Gotti, the Gambino crime family boss.

Born in Ithaca, Casey played football at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center, he worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 1960-1963, winning convictions of three Russian spies.

Some questioned whether a blind judge could accurately assess the credibility of a witness he could not see. Casey said truth could be found by following the facts to see if they string together in a coherent, logical way. He did occasionally swap a trademark case with a colleague because it depended on visual observation.

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Carol Richards

VERO BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Singer Carol Richards, who was known for recording ''Silver Bells'' with Bing Crosby, has died, her family said Friday. She was 84.

Richards died of kidney failure March 16 at the Indian River Memorial Hospital in Vero Beach, her husband Edward Swiedler said.

Richards was born as Carol June Vosburgh on June 6, 1922, in Harvard, Ill. She was one of four children of George and Martha Vosburgh.

Richards dubbed the singing voice of actresses in movie musicals including Cyd Charisse with Gene Kelly in ''Brigadoon,'' Swiedler said.

She married Swiedler in 1966 after she moved to the Boston area, he said.

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Walter Turnbull

NEW YORK (AP) -- Walter Turnbull, who founded the Boys Choir of Harlem and led the organization to international acclaim and performances at the White House and Vatican, died Friday. He was 62.

Turnbull died in a New York City hospital, said his brother, Horace Turnbull. He said Turnbull had suffered a stroke months earlier.

Turnbull's death marked the latest in a sad string of events for the famed choir, which has been reeling from scandal since a choirboy accused a counselor six years ago of sexually abusing him. City investigators chided Turnbull for his handling of the allegations.

The chairman of the choir's board, former New York Mayor David N. Dinkin, said the board was dedicated to preserving the choir. The renowned institution has fallen into debt, and the 50-boy choir was evicted last year and now has a reduced, mostly volunteer staff.

Born in Greenville, Miss., Turnbull studied music at Tougaloo College and moved to New York to become an opera singer, eventually performing with the New York Philharmonic.

He founded the choir at the Ephesus Church in 1968 and built the after-school program into the 600-student Choir Academy of Harlem, which opened in 1993. The choir has released albums and been heard on the soundtracks of films such as ''Jungle Fever,'' ''Malcolm X'' and ''Glory.''

Beyond its musical training, the choir provides educational and personal counseling each year to hundreds of inner-city children ages 9 to 19.

Obituaries in the News, NYT, 24.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Deaths.html

Suicides leave Indiana county

mourning and mystified

16.3.2007
USA TODAY
By Jessie Halladay

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — Julie Amos never heard a gunshot, but she did hear her husband's labored breathing as she came up the stairs. He was dying in their bathroom.

Jeffrey Amos, 50, shot himself in the head Feb. 11. The father of two, who had lost his job, became one of a number of suicides in Vanderburgh County that has left families grieving and county officials searching for answers.

"I didn't see it coming," Julie Amos said. "I knew he was sad."

Suicides in the southwestern Indiana county of 173,000 usually don't exceed 30 a year. There have been 15 since Jan. 1 — nearly triple what Vanderburgh County had experienced at this point in 2006.

If the pace continues, Vanderburgh County's annual rate per 100,000 people would be 43. That's about three times Vanderburgh County's usual rate and four times the state rate. The national rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is 11.1.

Two other deaths are under investigation and are likely to be ruled suicides, said Donald Erk, Vanderburgh County coroner. At one point a few weeks ago, Erk said, his office was responding to a suicide about every 95 hours.

"These are not statistics that you're proud of," said Annie Groves, chief deputy coroner.

No one has come up with a pattern that would link the suicides, Erk and Groves said. There have been no large-scale layoffs, no natural disaster, no pressure from a countywide catastrophe that, when coupled with life's normal problems, might make living seem unbearable for some people.

The suicides include a 24-year-old man who hanged himself from a high school flagpole, a 76-year-old man who shot himself in his front yard and a 42-year-old woman who overdosed on drugs.

Suicide clusters occur, said Alex Crosby, a CDC epidemiologist, but they are "relatively rare." He said research has shown that less than 5% of suicides happen in clusters and often in those situations there is no one cause.

Erk said relationship issues played a role in seven of the deaths and health was a factor in three.

The Vanderburgh County suicides follow some national patterns:

•All but three victims were men, and males are four times more likely to die from suicide, according to the CDC.

•Guns were used in six of the deaths, and CDC statistics show that nearly 52% of suicides are committed with a gun. Two of Vanderburgh County's suicides were done by hanging and seven with drugs.

•The suicide rate nationally also has increased, from 10.8 per 100,000 people in 2003 to 11.1 in 2004, said Gail Hayes, a spokeswoman for the CDC's Injury Center. The CDC does not have more recent statistics.

The Vanderburgh County coroner's office has begun testing each victim to see whether drugs or alcohol are present. All have tested positive, Groves said.

Lanny Berman, head of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington, said drugs and alcohol are often involved in suicides — either as a long-term addiction or a method to get courage.

While Vanderburgh County officials focus on a reason for the spike, others focus on prevention.

"It's a great concern," said Janie Chappell, head of the Southwestern Indiana Suicide Prevention Coalition. "We need to look at what we can do with our limited resources."

In April, coalition members — representatives from mental health agencies, public schools, higher education and the coroner's office — will be trained in how to talk about suicide. They will then meet with community and business groups to educate them.

Maryann Joyce, executive director of Mental Health America in Evansville, said the training will help expand the coalition's reach.

"Suicide has a devastating effect on families and communities," Joyce said. She said it's vital for survivors to talk about the effects, which is often difficult to do because of the stigma attached to mental illness and suicide. "It's a more complicated grief," she said.

Although the cause of the increase remains a mystery, Erk does not want to rely on chance to bring it to an end. He wants to understand why his morgue has been so busy. "That's your goal. By simply understanding what's going on, you'll be able to come up with a solution that's viable," he said. "The goal is to obviously touch on some things and prevent some of this."

Halladay reports daily for The (Louisville) Courier-Journal

Suicides leave Indiana county mourning and mystified, UT, 16.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-15-indiana-suicides_N.htm

Delp Suicide Note: 'I Am a Lonely Soul'

March 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:50 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATKINSON, N.H. (AP) -- Brad Delp, the lead singer for the band Boston who killed himself last week, left behind a note in which he called himself ''a lonely soul,'' according to police reports released Thursday.

The note was paper-clipped to the neck of Delp's shirt when police found his body at his Atkinson home, on the bathroom floor, his head on a pillow. He had sealed himself inside with two charcoal grills; toxicology tests showed he had committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

''Mr. Brad Delp. J'ai une ame solitaire. I am a lonely soul,'' the note read.

Delp joined Boston in the mid-1970s and sang two of its biggest hits, ''More than a Feeling'' and ''Long Time.'' He was cremated Wednesday, after a private funeral earlier in the week.

His fiancee, Pamela Sullivan, called police March 9 after noticing a dryer vent tube connected to the exhaust pipe of Delp's car. In the garage, police found a note taped to the door leading into the house.

''To whoever finds this I have hopefully committed suicide. Plan B was to asphyxiate myself in my car.''

In another note on a door at the top of the stairs, Delp cautioned that there was carbon monoxide inside.

''I take complete and sole responsibility for my present situation. I have lost my desire to live,'' he wrote. The note also included instructions on how to contact his fiancee: ''Unfortunately she is totally unaware of what I have done.''

Police later found four sealed letters in an office addressed to Sullivan, his children, their mother, Micki Delp, and another couple whose identity was not disclosed. Police Lt. William Baldwin said police gave the letters to family members without reading them.

Sullivan told police that Delp ''had been depressed for some time, feeling emotional (and) bad about himself,'' according to the reports.

He had planned to marry Sullivan this summer during a break in a tour with Boston. A lifelong Beatles fan, Delp also played with the tribute band Beatle Juice.

Delp Suicide Note: 'I Am a Lonely Soul', NYT, 16.3.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Delp-Death.html

In a Funeral Parlor in East Harlem,

Nine Coffins Point Toward Mecca

March 12, 2007
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

Francisco’s Funeraria in East Harlem is not a large operation; when someone calls about a body in the middle of the night, the phone rings at the home of Elefterios Filipoussis, the funeral director.

Since early Thursday, Mr. Filipoussis has barely slept. Four days of near incessant work was evident in the dark circles under his eyes. It also was evident in the meticulous display prepared yesterday in a bare-walled viewing room inside.

Nine unvarnished boxes were aligned at the far end of the room, the heads of each pointed east, toward Mecca. On the lids were the names of the dead scrawled in thick black ink, in English and in Arabic.

Some of the boxes lay on gurneys; others rested on dark pedestals, including the one that held the 7-month-old twins. The smallest, just under 3 feet long, for a 1-year-old boy, was propped on two foldout chairs.

The room held a faint scent of pine, the wood of which the boxes were made. The boxes bore nine children and one adult who perished in an unforgiving fire on Wednesday in the narrow house they shared in the Bronx, a household of immigrants from Mali and their American-born children.

“We had never cared for so many people from the same family at the same time,” Mr. Filipoussis said.

Funeral homes frequently cater to a specific population, whether based on the color of their skin, the country of their birth or the name of their God. But in a city of intertwined cultures, overlapping religions and blurred ethnicities, such divisions are not easy to maintain.

So it was that the Magassas and the Soumares were taken to a funeral home in a Hispanic neighborhood run by the son of Greek immigrants and owned by a man with an Irish name.

From a nondescript storefront on First Avenue, between a florist and a nail salon, the funeral home has made it its business to serve whoever needs it, Mr. Filipoussis said — the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who make up the bulk of East Harlem’s Hispanic residents, the area’s dwindling Italian population, the Irish and blacks from adjoining neighborhoods. But Francisco’s also has a reputation as a preferred mortuary for sub-Saharan immigrants from New York City and beyond.

“We don’t differentiate,” a weary Mr. Filipoussis said yesterday from behind the front desk. “We never turn away a family.”

Just after noon on Thursday, he said, the bodies of the five Magassa children began to arrive: Bilaly, 1; Djama, 3; Abudubary, 5; Mahamadou, 8; and Bandiougou, 11. Then, on Friday, came the Soumares: the twins, Harouma and Sisi; Djibril, 3; and their mother, Fatoumata, 42.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, Mr. Filipoussis received the blaze’s latest fatality, Hassing Soumare, 6. She died on Friday night, about 48 hours after the first firefighters arrived at her home on Woodycrest Avenue in the Bronx.

Mr. Filipoussis said African Muslims had come from as far as Virginia to seek his services. And the family of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who died in a barrage of police bullets in 1999, also sought the funeral home’s services.

The funeral parlor has always been a mirror of its neighborhood; in the 1950s it was called the Ralph Giordano Funeral Chapel and in the 1970s the D. Grimaldi Funeral Home. Mr. Filipoussis, 32, stocky and with a goatee, said he was not quite sure how the funeral home came to attract so many Muslim families from Africa; the owner, Timothy O’Brien, was away yesterday and unavailable to elaborate.

But among Muslims, Francisco’s Funeraria has become known for its attention to the painstaking rituals of Islamic burial.

Behind a thick door in Chapel A, where the pine boxes holding the Magassas and the Soumares sat yesterday, is a tiled room with pale Formica cabinets along the side walls. In the center is a steel bed where the bodies were laid one after the other and washed with oils, warm water and clean cloths, Mr. Filipoussis explained. The bed — shiny, cold to the touch — is slightly angled toward a sink that collects the runoff.

Once the bodies were cleaned, they were wrapped in cotton shrouds and placed in the boxes. “They’re ready to rest,” Mr. Filipoussis said.

The boxes will leave the funeral home today in eight hearses, bound for the Islamic Cultural Center on East 166th Street in the Bronx, where services are scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., after the noon prayers. If the weather allows, the boxes will be carried outside and each will be assigned an imam, who will recite the burial prayers over the coffins.

At the Islamic center yesterday, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Mali’s minister of foreign affairs, Moctar Ouane, joined the grieving fathers, Moussa Magassa and Mamadou Soumare, pledging to aid them however necessary. Inside the mosque, Muslim men wept when Mr. Soumare recited in Arabic a verse from the Koran. “Guide us to the straight way,” he said. “The way of those on whom you have bestowed your grace, not the way of those who earn your anger nor those who went astray.”

Women and children listened from a back room, where they had met with Governor Spitzer moments earlier. “It is one thing to read about it; it is another to see in the eyes of children the loss that they have suffered,” the governor said afterward. “It is very, very difficult.”

At a house across the street from the home that burned, Manthia Magassa, the mother of five of the fire victims, sat on the edge of a bed on the first floor, hugging visitors who came by to show their respects, while a group of women cooked fish with spiced rice. Upstairs, children chased one another in a game of tag.

Two of Mr. Magassa’s children and another wife remained hospitalized yesterday. The condition of one of the children, a 7-year-old girl, was upgraded from critical to stable, according to Hannah Nelson, a spokeswoman for Jacobi Medical Center. The other child and the wife, Aisse, who are at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, were in fair condition and showing signs of improvement, said Jill Brooker, a spokeswoman at the hospital.

Donations for the families continued to come in, including a $21,000 check from the office of the Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., and 30 boxes of clothing from a synagogue. On Friday, the New York Yankees offered to pay for funeral expenses in the United States. A Long Island contractor said he would rebuild the home ravaged by the fire, which is owned by Mr. Magassa. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is providing the families with four buses to take mourners to Jersey State Memorial Park, a Muslim cemetery in Millstone Township, in Monmouth County, N.J., where the Magassas will be buried this afternoon.

The Soumares are to be buried in Mali, although it remained unclear whether Mr. Soumare would have trouble returning to the United States afterward. City officials said he was denied asylum in 1998 after immigration officials said he failed to file the proper paperwork and missed a court appearance.

Francisco’s Funeraria plans to take his wife’s and children’s coffins to the airport tomorrow; Air France will fly them free.

Mr. Filipoussis joined Francisco’s Funeraria when he was 24, drawn by the idea of helping families in mourning, much as his own family received help after his father died of skin cancer 16 years ago and was buried in the Greek island of Tinos, where he grew up.

“I remember how distraught we were and how the funeral home made it easier for us by being there for us, by not having us have to think about what we had to do to bring my father home,” Mr. Filipoussis said. “That’s what I hope to do for these two families who have lost so much.”

Just then, a white woman with green eyes and short gray hair walked in. He shook her hand, offered his condolences and led her into his office.

Sewell Chan, Kate Hammer and Trymaine Lee contributed reporting.

In a Funeral Parlor in East Harlem, Nine Coffins Point Toward Mecca, NYT, 12.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/nyregion/12fire.html

Autopsy Begins on Anna Nicole Smith

February 9, 2007
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:58 a.m. ET

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (AP) -- A medical examiner began an autopsy Friday on Anna Nicole Smith, whose mother blamed drugs for the former Playboy playmate's sudden death that ended an extraordinary tabloid life at just 39.

''I think she had too many drugs, just like Danny (Smith's late son),'' her mother, Vergie Arthur, told ABC's ''Good Morning America'' on Friday. ''I tried to warn her about drugs and the people that she hung around with. She didn't listen.''

''She was too drugged up,'' Arthur said. ''By the last interview I saw of her, she was so wasted.''

Smith's attorney, Ron Rale, said the one-time reality TV star had been ill for several days with a fever and was still depressed over the death five months ago of her 20-year-old son from what a private medical examiner determined was a combination of methadone and two antidepressants.

On Thursday, authorities say, a private nurse found Smith unconscious in her room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and called 911. A bodyguard performed CPR, Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger said, but Smith was declared dead at a hospital.

Late Thursday, sheriff's deputies carried out at least eight brown paper bags sealed with red evidence tape from Smith's hotel room.

Several detectives are reviewing the hotel surveillance tapes to see if they might provide a clue to what happened, Deputy Police Chief Michael Browne said Friday. He said they had interviewed everyone connected to the death and no one was under suspicion.

''Nothing about this death seems suspicious. We're not treating it that way,'' Browne said. ''We're being very thorough. We're going to look at everything.''

Edwina Johnson, chief investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office, said an autopsy was under way Friday morning to try to determine the cause of death.

If Smith died of natural causes, the findings will likely be announced quickly, but definitive results could take weeks, said Dr. Joshua Perper, who was performing the autopsy.

''I am not a prophet, and I cannot tell you before the autopsy what I am going to find,'' he said.

Smith's son's death in the Bahamas on Sept. 10 came just a few days after she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, whose custody remains in dispute.

The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, Smith's most recent companion, who Rale said was with Smith at the hotel and was too choked up to talk when he called Rale with the news. Smith's ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.

A hearing was scheduled in Los Angeles on Friday at which lawyers were expected to discuss an emergency motion filed by Birkhead's attorney seeking DNA from Smith's body, her attorney Rale said. The reasons for the motion were not immediately clear, but an attorney for Stern, James T. Neavitt, was frustrated.

''There's no question about her being the mother,'' he said. ''So what's the purpose of the DNA testing? Why do they need her DNA?''

Debra Opri, the attorney who filed Birkhead's paternity suit, said only that doctors told her to get a DNA sample, declining to elaborate.

She said Birkhead was devastated. ''He is inconsolable, and we are taking steps now to protect the DNA testing of the child. The child is our No. 1 priority,'' she said.

The baby was being cared for in the Bahamas by the mother of Shane Gibson, the Bahamian immigration minister who is a close friend of Smith's, People magazine reported on its Web site, citing unidentified sources.

A visibly shaken Gibson declined comment as he was leaving his office Thursday night, and he has not responded to several message left by The Associated Press seeking comment.

Through the '90s and into the 21st century, Smith was famous for being famous, a pop-culture punchline because of her up-and-down weight, her Marilyn Monroe looks, her exaggerated curves, her little-girl voice, her ditzy-blonde persona and her over-the-top revealing outfits.

Recently, she lost a reported 69 pounds and became a spokeswoman for TrimSpa, a weight-loss supplement. In recent TV appearances, her speech was often slurred and she seemed out of it. Some critics said she seemed drugged-out.

''Undoubtedly it will be found at the end of the day that drugs featured in her death as they did in the death of poor Daniel,'' said Michael Scott, a former attorney for Smith in the Bahamas.

Rale said he had talked to her on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she had flu symptoms and a fever and was still grieving over her son. He dismissed claims her death was related to drugs as ''a bunch of nonsense.''

''Poor Anna Nicole,'' he said. ''She's been the underdog. She's been besieged ... and she's been trying her best and nobody should have to endure what she's endured.''

The Texas-born Smith was a topless dancer at a strip club before she made the cover of Playboy magazine in 1992. She became Playboy's playmate of the year in 1993. She was also signed to a contract with Guess jeans, appearing in TV commercials, billboards and magazine ads.

In 1994, she married 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, owner of Great Northern Oil Co. After his death the following year, she engaged in a protracted legal fight with her former stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, over whether she had a right to the estate.

A federal court in California awarded Smith $474 million. That was later overturned. But in May, the U.S. Supreme Court revived her case, ruling that she deserved another day in court.

The stepson died June 20 at age 67, but the family said the court fight would continue.

Smith starred in her own reality TV series, ''The Anna Nicole Show,'' in 2002-04. She also appeared in movies, performing a bit part in ''The Hudsucker Proxy'' in 1994.

Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on Nov. 28, 1967, in Houston, one of six children. Her parents split up when she was a toddler, and she was raised by her mother, a deputy sheriff.

She dropped out after 11th grade after she was expelled for fighting, and worked as a waitress and then a cook at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant in Mexia, Texas.

She married 16-year-old fry cook Bill Smith in 1985, giving birth to Daniel before divorcing two years later.

AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch in Los Angeles and AP Writers Curt Anderson in Davie, Fla., Sarah Larimer in Hollywood, Fla., and Ana Beatriz Cholo in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Autopsy Begins on Anna Nicole Smith, NYT, 9.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Anna-Nicole-Smith.html

Sad end to a troubled life

Updated 2/8/2007
11:08 PM ET
USA Today
By Ann Oldenburg

She came from nothing, but she lived bigger than most.

A small-town girl who was determined to make something of herself, Anna Nicole Smith had the quintessential train-wreck life: intriguing, eye-popping, tragic.

The high school dropout-turned-dazzler, who died Thursday at 39 in a hospital in Hollywood, Fla., was fascinating to celebrity watchers — not because she was an A-list star but because she was an unpredictable blond bombshell who was always in the middle of controversy.

She married a billionaire 60 years her senior and then battled his heirs over the estate, ending with a victory at the Supreme Court.

The world watched as she battled her weight, gaining, losing, then gaining again.

She became a TV star, riding the reality show mania, in a series that offered a candid look at how a celebrity lived.

In a span of days, she gave birth to a daughter, and her 20-year-old son was found dead in her recovery room. Now Dannielynn, 5 months, is without a mother, and her father's identity is uncertain.

Smith's former lawyer Lenard Leeds told TMZ.com it's no secret that Smith "had a very troubled life" and added that she had "so many, many problems."

Still, she flirted and laughed her way through life.

"She was light and fluffy," Tom O'Neill of In Touch Weekly said on CNN late Thursday.

Said Rob Chilton, features director of OK! magazine: "She was a great pop icon, almost like a cartoon character."

Shots of her on red carpets vamping like her childhood idol Marilyn Monroe ran on cable news channels for hours after the news broke Thursday, proof that Smith had achieved her goal of finding a place in the spotlight.

Smith made everyone laugh along with her — and at her — until it just wasn't funny anymore.

At 17, she met Billy Smith, a co-worker at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken, and they had baby Daniel. Two years later, they divorced. She began working at topless bars in Houston to pay the bills.

Her nickname was "Sweet Cheeks." Though her body was voluptuous, her breasts weren't, and she was allowed to work only the afternoon shift.

Still, she believed she was destined for greater things.

The first order of business: breast implants. In 1991, at 24, she entered a Playboy contest and won. In 1992, she listed her "turn-ons" as "Men who wear braces, cowboys! I also get off on scary movies." In 1993, she was Playmate of the Year. (Founder Hugh Hefner issued a statement Thursday saying he was "saddened" by the news of Smith's death.)

After that, she was offered a modeling job for Guess? jeans.

"I didn't know what Guess? jeans were," she told People magazine in an interview at the time. "I just shopped at Wal-Mart and Kmart and stuff like that."

In 1994 she made her big-screen debut in Naked Gun 331/3: The Final Insult.

Anyone who didn't happen to see that movie had probably heard of her anyway: It was the same time she married oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, who was in a wheelchair and more than 60 years her senior. They had met years earlier when she was an exotic dancer.

Though branded a gold digger, she seemed to have found happiness with her husband.

When she was defending her marriage to Marshall, she told In Touch: "Nobody has ever respected me or done things for me. So when Howard came along, it was a blessing."

But the blessing was short-lived. His death less than two years later, in 1995, left behind a fortune estimated at $1.6 billion. She was still fighting for a share of the money when she died.

Smith battled her weight and struggled with other addictions. She acknowledged that she had a problem with prescription drugs.

Her wild behavior was on display on The Anna Nicole Show, her often-bawdy reality series that aired on E! from 2002 to 2003. But it also showed her softer side.

Children and dogs — she had a toy poodle named Sugar Pie — were her true loves. Her son, Daniel, whom she raised as a single mother, was often by her side.

"I don't have any good memories from Christmas when I was a girl," Smith told People in 2004. "So I tried to make them special for Daniel. We never missed a trip to the mall to see Santa to take pictures."

Gabriel Rotello, who directed a 2003 Showtime documentary about Smith, said in People: "Even her most vehement detractors reluctantly admitted that she was a good mother. Daniel was just a really well-adjusted, smart kid."

She was devastated by his death Sept. 10. The cause, as determined by a medical examiner, was an accidental interaction of methadone and two antidepressants.

Last November in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Smith said: "I'll never accept that (Daniel is) gone. I don't understand why God took him and didn't take me."

Since then, Smith's troubles seemed to double.

She was hospitalized for pneumonia for a week in November. She was sued, along with diet-supplement company TrimSpa — for which she has been a spokeswoman and a model client — in a class-action lawsuit that claimed the company's marketing of a weight-loss pill was false or misleading.

Dannielynn is the subject of a DNA test battle with Smith's former boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, who says he is the father of the child. Smith's longtime friend and lawyer, Howard K. Stern — with whom Smith shared a commitment ceremony on Sept. 28 in the Bahamas — also says he is the girl's father.

Considering her difficult life — and especially her recent past — few were surprised at Thursday's news.

"I am very, very sad, but I am not shocked," Smith's former publicist, David Granoff, told MSNBC. He had seen Smith on television Wednesday, "and she had no spark any more."

But Smith's star tale is far from over.

"This is a massive story," OK! magazine's Chilton says. "We'll now see all the stories about how she died and loads of conspiracy stories and loads of rumors about was it drink or drugs?"

And, he says, her memory will be that of someone who was a larger-than-life celebrity.

"She really was a celebrity. That sums her up perfectly. She had loads of charisma, and she was always doing something crazy. There was always an Anna Nicole Smith story floating around."

Contributing: Karen Thomas

Sad end to a troubled life, UT, 8.2.2007,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-02-08-anna-nicole-collapse_x.htm#go

World's oldest person dies in U.S. at 114

Mon Jan 29, 2007
9:01 AM ET
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Connecticut woman who just last week set a record as the world's oldest person has died, her great-nephew said on Monday. She was 114.

Emma Faust Tillman died Sunday night in the Hartford, Connecticut nursing home where she had lived for the last four years, said John Stewart Jr.

Tillman was born on November 22, 1892, near Greensboro, North Carolina. The child of former slaves, she was one of 23 children in a long-lived family. Three of her sisters and a brother lived past 100.

But Tillman's longevity topped them all. She lived independently until the age of 110. In the nursing home, she spent much of her time caring for an ailing roommate who was more than 20 years her junior.

"Her comment is always, 'If you want to know about longevity and why I lived so long, ask the man upstairs,'" Stewart said in an interview last week after Guinness World Records confirmed Tillman was the world's oldest person.

Tillman never smoked, drank or wore eyeglasses, Stewart said. For a time, Tillman worked as a servant for American actress Katharine Hepburn, he noted.

She is survived by an 80-year-old daughter, Marjorie, and a large number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Stewart said.

According to the International Committee on Supercentenarians, the world's next oldest person is Yone Minagama, 114, of Japan.

Guinness World Records by Monday had not verified that claim, according to spokeswoman Amarilis Espinoza.

World's oldest person dies in U.S. at 114, R, 29.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-29T140021Z_01_N29493180_RTRUKOC_0_US-OLDEST.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

In full - Captain Scott's final letter to his wife

January 10, 2007
Times Online

Captain Robert Scott's final letter to his wife, Kathleen, written as the explorer prepared for death, will go on display at Cambridge University in January, 95 years after he and his team reached the South Pole.

Here it is published in full, for the first time:

"To my widow

"Dearest Darling - we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through - In our short lunch hours I take advantage of a very small measure of warmth to write letters preparatory to a possible end - the first is naturally to you on whom my thought mostly dwell waking or sleeping - if anything happens to me I shall like you to know how much you have meant to me and that pleasant recollections are with me as I depart - I should like you to take what comfort you can from these facts also - I shall not have suffered any pain but leave the world fresh from harness and full of good health and vigour - this is dictated already, when provisions come to an end we simply stop where we are within easy distance of another depot. Therefore you must not imagine a great tragedy - we are very anxious of course and have been for weeks but on splendid physical condition and our appetites compensate for all discomfort. The cold is biting and sometimes angering but here again the hot food which drives it forth is so wonderfully enjoyable that we would scarcely be without it.

"We have gone down hill a good deal since I wrote the above. Poor Titus Oates has gone - he was in a bad state - the rest of us keep going and imagine we have a chance to get through but the cold weather doesn't let up at all - we are now only 20 miles from a depot but we have very little food or fuel.

"Well dear heart I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly as I am sure you will - the boy will be your comfort I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up but it is a satisfaction to feel that he is safe with you. I think both he and you ought to be specially looked after by the country for which after all we have given our lives with something of spirit which makes for example - I am writing letters on this point in the end of this book after this. Will you send them to their various destinations?

"I must write a little letter for the boy if time can be found to be read when he grows up - dearest that you know cherish no sentimental rubbish about re marriage - when the right man comes to help you in life you ought to be your happy self again - I hope I shall be a good memory certainly the end is nothing for you to be ashamed of and I like to think that the boy will have a good start in parentage of which he may be proud.

"Dear it is not easy to write because of the cold - 70 degrees below zero and nothing but the shelter of our tent - you know I have loved you, you know my thoughts must have constantly dwelt on you and oh dear me you must know that quite the worst aspect of this situation is the thought that I shall not see you again - The inevitable must be faced - you urged me to be leader of this party and I know you felt it would be dangerous - I've taken my place throughout, haven't I?

"God bless you my own darling I shall try and write more later - I go on across the back pages.

"Since writing the above we have got to within 11 miles of our depot with one hot meal and two days cold food and we should have got through but have been held for four days by a frightful storm - I think the best chance has gone we have decided not to kill ourselves but to fight it to the last for that depot but in the fighting there is a painless end so don't worry. I have written letters on odd pages of this book - will you manage to get them sent? You see I am anxious for you and the boy's future - make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games - they encourage it at some schools - I know you will keep him out in the open air - try and make him believe in a God, it is comforting.

"Oh my dear my dear what dreams I have had of his future and yet oh my girl I know you will face it stoically - your portrait and the boy's will be found in my breast and the one in the little red Morocco case given by Lady Baxter - There is a piece of the Union flag I put up at the South Pole in my private kit bag together with Amundsen's black flag and other trifles - give a small piece of the Union flag to the King and a small piece to Queen Alexandra and keep the rest a poor trophy for you! - What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in comfort at home - what tales you would have for the boy but oh what a price to pay - to forfeit the sight of your dear dear face - Dear you will be good to the old mother. I write her a little line in this book. Also keep in with Ettie and the others- oh but you'll put on a strong face for the world - only don't be too proud to accept help for the boys sake - he ought to have a fine career and do something in the world. I haven't time to write to Sir Clements - tell him I thought much of him and never regretted him putting me in command of the Discovery."

In full - Captain Scott's final letter to his wife, Ts, 10.1.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2540331,00.html

Bacharach daughter committs suicide

Posted 1/5/2007
11:15 PM ET
AP
USA Today

BEVERLY HILLS (AP) — Nikki Bacharach, daughter of Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson, committed suicide, the songwriter and actress said in a statement Friday.

Nikki Bacharach, 40, suffered from Asperger's Disorder, a form of autism. She killed herself Thursday night at her condo, said Linda Dozoretz, a spokeswoman for the family.

"She quietly and peacefully committed suicide to escape the ravages to her brain brought on by Asperger's," the statement said.

Nikki Bacharach died of suffocation using a plastic bag and helium, said Mike Feiler of the Ventura County coroner's office.

Born prematurely in 1966, Lea Nikki Bacharach studied geology at Cal Lutheran University, but could not pursue a career in the field because of poor eyesight.

"She loved kitties, and earthquakes, glacial calving, meteor showers, science, blue skies and sunsets, and Tahiti," the statement said.

Nikki Bacharach was the only child of Burt Bacharach, 77, and Dickinson, 75, who were married from 1965 to 1981.

It was the second marriage for both Bacharach, the Oscar-winning composer of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, and What the World Needs Now is Love, and Dickinson, star of the film Dress to Kill and the TV show Police Woman.

Bacharach has three children from other marriages.

Bacharach daughter committs suicide, UT, 5.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-01-05-nikki-bacharach-obit_x.htm

Oldest person dies aged 116

Tuesday December 12, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Associated Press

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognised as the world's oldest person, has died. She was 116.

Born on August 15, 1890, according to the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles organisation that tracks the ages of the world's oldest people, she died yesterday in a nursing home.

Family members said this year that Ms Bolden had 40 grandchildren, 75 great-grandchildren, 150 great-great-grandchildren, 220 great-great-great grandchildren and 75 great-great-great-great grandchildren.

Guinness World Records recognised her as the oldest person in the world in August after the death of Maria Esther de Capovilla of Ecuador, who also was 116.

She died at a nursing home where she had been living for several years. Ms Bolden had suffered a stroke in 2004, and her family said she spoke little after that and slept much of the time.

Emiliano Mercado del Toro, 115, of Puerto Rico is now expected assume the title of world's oldest person, said Robert Young, a Guinness researcher. The Gerontology Research Group lists Mr Toro's date of birth as Aug. 21, 1891.

Oldest person dies aged 116, G, 12.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1970532,00.html

Colma, Calif.,

Is a Town of 2.2 Square Miles, Most of It 6 Feet Deep

December 9, 2006
The New York Times
By CAROL POGASH

COLMA, Calif., Dec. 3 — Years ago this tiny city’s 18-hole golf course was sliced in half. Last spring the nine-hole course became a shorter nine. Next to feel the squeeze was the pet cemetery, which sacrificed half its two acres.

Where did all the land go? To feed the major local growth industry: human burial grounds.

Such is Colma, Calif., land of the dead for three-quarters of a century, and becoming more so all the time.

“We have 1,500 aboveground residents,” Mayor Helen Fisicaro said, “and 1.5 million underground.”

Colma was founded as a necropolis by cemetery operators in 1924, to protect graveyards from capricious acts of government. The businesses of many of those operators had been disrupted a decade earlier when the city of San Francisco, 10 miles to the north, evicted all but a couple of the 26 cemeteries there, along with the thousands of bodies they held. The city’s politicians had argued that cemeteries spread disease, but the true reason for the eviction was the rising value of real estate, said San Francisco’s archivist emeritus, Gladys Hansen.

For the first few decades, Colma’s residents were mainly gravediggers, flower growers and monument makers. But by the 1980s, other types of people and businesses were settling in next to the dead. Today the little city has many thriving businesses, including car dealerships, two Home Depots, shopping centers and a game room.

Still, 73 percent of Colma’s 2.2 square miles is zoned for cemeteries — or “memorial parks,” as the operators call them. There are 17 such parks, including those that cater to Italians, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Japanese and Serbs.

Colma, where the two major property owners are a land holding company and the Roman Catholic Church, is in a sense a place where an evolution has come full circle.

“Most Americans used to live near a graveyard in the 18th century,” said David C. Sloane, author of “The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History.” “That changed in the 19th century, when big cemeteries were on the edge of the cities and became destinations,” the precursors to civic parks. But by the 20th century, Dr. Sloane said, an aversion to dealing with death had made cemeteries places that people “went out of their way not to go to.”

Given that environment, clusters of cemeteries in outlying areas may seem only natural. Still, though one occasionally finds several cemeteries grouped together these days, 17 in “a single place is very, very unusual,” Dr. Sloane said.

Here, hearses far outnumber hot rods. Colma’s museum has a cemetery room, of course. Instead of the metal signs that customarily mark boundaries between towns, new ones made of somber granite have been ordered by town officials. Everyone knows that it is against the law to cross a funeral procession. Wedding parties spill out of stretch limousines to be photographed at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park’s duck pond, and weddings themselves are held at the cemetery’s small chapel, next to its crematorium.

Colma’s motto is “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma!” And residents say they are comfortable being alive among the mausoleums, the marble obelisks and the tombstones. They express appreciation for the tranquillity of their hometown, where a serene, occasionally whimsical attitude toward death prevails.

Having grown up with death, Owen Malloy says that “it doesn’t creep me out.” Mr. Malloy’s family owns the only bar in town, a mourners’ gathering place two or three times a week, and he fondly recalls playing hide-and-seek among the tombstones of various graveyards and sipping his first beer, at age 12, among marble angels and Ionic columns. He marvels at the view from the deck of his home, which overlooks Holy Cross Cemetery.

Living alongside the cemeteries “doesn’t matter” to Ashley Hurtubise, 16. “It’s just another part of town,” she said.

City Councilwoman Joanne del Rosario does not give her underground neighbors a second thought. “I’m more afraid of the living,” she said, “than I am of the dead.”

In the way New Jersey students know that Thomas Edison’s laboratory is in West Orange, the people of Colma know that Wyatt Earp’s ashes are buried at Hills of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery (he wasn’t; his wife was), and that Joe DiMaggio is at Holy Cross Cemetery, where visitors often lean bats against his gravestone.

Everybody knows that Tina Turner’s dog is wrapped in her fur coat at Pet’s Rest Cemetery, the final stop for 13,000 dogs, cats, rabbits, goldfish and cheetahs. Even after last summer’s downsizing, plots remain, though they are so expensive ($550 to $850 and up, depending on the size of the pet) that some families opt for cremation or for stacking their dead pets vertically. Pet’s Rest draws so many mourners that, says the owner, Phillip C’de Baca, some form carpools and occasionally fall in love and marry.

Dr. Sloane, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, says there is a growing demand for space at American cemeteries that is fueled in large part by immigrant families who insist on elaborate burials as a way to help establish their identity in a community. In Colma, so little undeveloped property remains that an acre sells for more than $2 million.

The cemeteries have two choices, said Steve Doukas, general manager of Greek Orthodox Memorial Park: build taller mausoleums or buy more land. Either way, added costs are naturally passed along.

“As expensive as it is to live in the Bay Area,” Mr. Doukas said, “it’s also expensive to be buried here.”

Cypress Lawn offers burial plots that cost as much as $20,000, or $250,000 for a family plot, said Ken Varner, its president.

And what does a cemetery ultimately provide for that kind of money? “Memory management,” Mr. Varner said.

“Cemeteries,” he said, “are really for the living.”

Colma, Calif., Is a Town of 2.2 Square Miles, Most of It 6 Feet Deep, NYT, 9.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09cemetery.html

Barre Journal

Headstones Too Go Global,

and One City Pays the Price

October 25, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BARRE, Vt. — This city of 9,000 bills itself as the “granite capital of the world,” its economic foundation built early in the last century with the light gray rock from nearby quarries.

But the title is starting to ring hollow. Granite manufacturers here, nearly all of which specialize in making headstones and memorials, find themselves battling to compete in a rapidly changing market, hurt not only by a rise in cremations but also by the lower prices of their foreign competitors.

“We have to find a way to compete,” said Charles Chatot, president of North Barre Granite. “This is Barre gray granite. It’s the top gray granite in the world.”

For decades, the granite industry made Barre, near Montpelier, a boomtown and Vermont’s biggest melting pot, drawing immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Poland and Canada. During their heyday, in the early-to-mid-20th century, the manufacturers here employed about 3,000 people.

Today the number is only 1,500, said John P. Castaldo, executive director of the Barre Granite Association, and most of those are in sales or administration. Roughly 300 actually make headstones and memorials, working with heavy machinery, and those who still hand-carve granite are no more than six or so.

The biggest problem during the last decade has been imported headstones, mostly from China and India, which cost about half as much as those made in Barre (pronounced BEAR-ee).

“The labor costs in China are significantly lower than they are here, and it’s taking its toll on the American manufacturers,” said Pennie Sabel, president of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, a trade group.

Barre’s manufacturers describe the quality of the imported stones as poor and say it shows, but to the typical customer the only difference is price. Further, Chinese companies are also producing black granite headstones, which are becoming more popular than gray ones.

Amid the tough times, there is one kind of granite business here for which the times are flush. Cochran’s Inc., for instance, is a headstone broker that works directly with Chinese headstone manufacturers. Peter Burke, a Cochran manager, said the ability to get intricately carved specialty headstones from the Chinese had doubled the company’s profit margin on such stones, which, like others, are transported directly from China to a Barre warehouse where the lettering and finishing work are done.

“If we weren’t doing this,” Mr. Burke said, “we wouldn’t be doing so good right now. Everyone’s saying, ‘China’s bad, it’s hurting us.’ It’s not.”

Imports aside, there is another factor putting pressure on Barre: while people joke that the monument business will never have a lack of customers, the popularity of cremations has certainly cut into the number of them.

“It hurts,” Ms. Sabel said. “People have a concept that if you cremate a body you don’t need a memorial,” although manufacturers here have recently started making headstones that open in the back, allowing families to place urns inside on a shelf.

Limited space at cemeteries, as well as rules they adopt to maintain their appearance, is also weakening manufacturers’ bottom line, since it means fewer chances to make large, elaborate headstones and mausoleums.

“Cemetery lots are smaller,” said Louis P. Monti Jr., a monument dealer from Marlborough, Mass., who attended a trade show here in August. “They want to make things as small and easy to maintain as possible.”

Elgio Zorzi, 87, who started working in quarries as a teenager, who later founded Adams Granite in Montpelier and who retired in 1985, no longer recognizes the industry, both for its mechanization and for its international reach. Nor did he ever think he would see what has become a commonplace: a vast departure of the city’s young men for occupations elsewhere, often with a stop first for college.

“They’re all going to Burlington and not coming back,” Mr. Zorzi said of teenagers flocking to the University of Vermont.

This is not the only place reeling from foreign granite competition. Elberton, Ga., is the South’s counterpart to Barre, with deep granite quarries that yield gray stone and a rich tradition of headstone manufacturing.

“What’s hurting us is the Chinese and the Indians,” said Tom Robinson, president of the Elberton Granite Association, which represents about 150 headstone and memorial plants. “We can’t really put a number on it, but there’s no question we’ve lost jobs because we don’t have the volume of sales we used to have.”

“I think we’re battling back with a focus on selling Elberton products, fast delivery and good quality while doing business with people you know,” Mr. Robinson said. “There are no surprises here.”

Like Elberton, Barre is trying to reposition itself. The industry is fighting back by pointing to its reputation and educating consumers about the difference between the cheaper imports and Barre’s granite and craftsmanship.

“You can almost smell the roses on this headstone,” Richard Tousignant, a salesman at Adams Granite, said of one local product. “This is the best craftsmanship in the world. It’s worth it. Would you want your grandparents’ monument to be something made in China?”

Headstones Too Go Global, and One City Pays the Price, NYT, 25.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/us/25granite.html

New creations personalize cremation

Updated 10/20/2006 12:55 AM ET
USA Today
By Wendy Koch

As more funerals are followed by cremation, the plain brass urn to hold ashes is being replaced by sculptures, picture frames, pendants, wind chimes, sundials and even teddy bears.

Ashes of a police officer can now be kept close in a .44-caliber Magnum silver-bullet keychain. Those of a biker can be cherished in an urn that looks like a born-to-ride motorcycle gas tank.

"Cremation gives people many more options to grieve," says Armand Chevrette, a board member of the Cremation Association of North America.

Ashes can be shot into space, compressed into "diamonds" for jewelry or mixed with concrete into balls that are placed in the ocean to create a coral reef.

A container for ashes is "the last gift people buy their loved one," says Susan Frazer of In the Light Urns, a Three Rivers, Calif., company selling such products. "They want to make sure it's the right thing." Her biggest seller: a $30 cobalt blue necklace pendant. It comes with a funnel to put the ashes inside and glue to seal the pendant.

Frazer's firm, which has seen monthly sales increase from $5,000 in 2001 to $30,000 today, has received requests for custom urns that reflect the deceased person's occupation or interest, including urns shaped like a fiddle, a clown and even a 1955 Chevy Impala.

Eternal Image in Farmington Hills, Mich., signed a licensing agreement in June with Major League Baseball to reproduce the names and logos of all 30 major league teams on a line of urns and caskets next year

Alexandra Lachini, owner of Hold Me Urns in Redding, Calif., says she began making teddy bears after her father died in 1998 and his ashes were stored in an "ugly plastic urn" in a closet. Each bear has a small compartment for a plastic-lined velvet bag of ashes. Sometimes they are made with fabric from clothing that was worn by the loved one. They cost about $80.

Karen Dalton, a nurse in Laureldale, Pa., bought her sister a teddy bear for Mother's Day to remind her of her son, also a nurse, who died of a drug overdose. The bear is made from his lab coat and Harley-Davidson jacket. "She keeps it on her bed all the time," Dalton says.

Frazer got into the urn business after her 14-year-old son, Ryan, died while swimming in 1995. "It was absolutely devastating," she says. She has three teddy bears inscribed with his name and dates of birth and death.

"Cremation of pets is also extremely popular," Frazer says. She says people want to carry mementos of their pets with them, even to their own graves.

Lisa Ernst, a probation officer in Limerick, Pa., bought a four-sided picture-frame urn after four family pets were killed in a fire in August. "We all needed some closure," she says. Her two sons miss their dogs and cats and "always want to look at the pictures," she says.

The cremation industry expects further growth. A 2005 survey by polling firm Wirthlin Worldwide found that 46% of Americans plan to be cremated, up from 39% in 1995 and 31% in 1990.

Some religions oppose cremation, including Islam and Orthodox Judaism. The Roman Catholic Church dropped its objection in 1963.

Sheryl Gafka, a massage therapist in Algonquin, Ill., says her father, suffering from a terminal illness, wants his ashes to be buried in Yellowstone National Park. This month, she bought a biodegradable urn in the shape of a heart. She says, "He's the only person in my life who has truly touched my heart."

New creations personalize cremation, UT, 20.10.2006,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-19-urns_x.htm

Obituaries in the News

October 6, 2006
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:04 a.m. ET

Gary Comer

CHICAGO (AP) -- Gary C. Comer, founder of the Lands' End casual clothing company, died Wednesday. He was 78.

Comer, who grew up on Chicago's South Side, died after a long battle with cancer, according to a statement from University of Chicago Hospitals.

Comer founded Lands' End in the early 1960s and stepped down as president in 1990. He remained chairman of the board and the majority stockholder until the company was sold to Sears, Roebuck & Co. in May 2002.

Only after 10 years as an advertising copywriter did a 33-year-old Comer decide to start his own company. In 1962, he launched a mail-order sailing equipment business. He and his partners incorporated Lands' End Yacht Stores a year later in Chicago.

Comer moved the company's warehouse and phone operations to Dodgeville, Wis., in 1978. In 1986, Lands' End went public.

Comer was known for his philanthropy.

He and his wife, Frances, made several donations over the past 10 years totaling more than $84 million. The gifts led to the creation and expansion of the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital.

------

Tamara Dobson

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Tamara Dobson, the tall, stunning model-turned-actress who portrayed a strong female role as Cleopatra Jones in two ''blaxploitation'' films, died Monday. She was 59.

Dobson died of complications from pneumonia and multiple sclerosis at the Keswick Multi-Care Center, where she had lived for the past two years, her publicist said.

At 6 feet 2, Dobson was striking as the kung-fu fighting government agent Cleopatra Jones in 1973. She reprised the role in 1975's ''Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold.''

Dobson also appeared in ''Come Back, Charleston Blue,'' ''Norman, Is That You?'' ''Murder at the World Series'' and ''Chained Heat.''

She had TV roles in the early 1980s in ''Jason of Star Command'' and ''Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.''

Dobson lived most of her adult life in New York, her family said. She was diagnosed six years ago with multiple sclerosis.

------

Sally Gray

LONDON (AP) -- Sally Gray, the spirited, husky-voiced British star of the 1930s and 40s who turned down a lucrative Hollywood contract, died Sept. 24, her family said. She was 90.

Gray, who became Lady Oranmore and Browne when she married into the aristocracy, died at her London home.

Gray's appearance in two RKO productions in Britain -- ''The Saint in London'' (1939) and ''The Saint's Vacation'' (1941) -- persuaded the Hollywood studio to offer her a contract.

But she turned it down, saying she preferred to stay in England.

Born Constance Vera Stevens in north London, Gray trained at the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art and was spotted by John Gliddon, the agent who discovered Vivien Leigh, at age 18 when she appeared in the chorus of a musical, ''Jill Darling,'' in 1934.

She was soon taking lead roles in musicals, appearing as Miss America in Olympic Honeymoon (1936), ''Lightning Conductor'' (1938) with Gordon Harker and with Lupino Lane in ''Lambeth Walk'' (1940).

One of her best-known roles was as the cheating wife of a psychiatrist in ''Obsession'' (1949).

------

George King

George King, the former NBA player who coached West Virginia and Purdue and had a long run as the Boilermakers' athletic director, died Thursday. He was 78.

King died in Naples, Fla., Purdue announced on its athletic Web site.

King was born in Charleston, attended Stonewall Jackson High and starred at Morris Harvey College. The 6-foot guard played six seasons with the NBA's Syracuse Nationals and Cincinnati Royals.

In Game 7 of the 1955 NBA Finals between Syracuse and Fort Wayne, King made the go-ahead free throw with 12 seconds left, then stole the ball to preserve the title, the first of the shot-clock era.

King was head coach at his alma mater for one season in 1956-57, became an assistant coach at West Virginia University the following year and took the head coaching job when Fred Schaus followed WVU standout Jerry West to the Los Angeles Lakers. King was credited with integrating WVU's basketball team. He compiled a 102-43 record in five seasons as WVU coach, earning two Southern Conference titles and three NCAA tournament bids.

The two-time state amateur athlete of the year was inducted into athletic halls of fame at Purdue and the University of Charleston, the successor to Morris Harvey College.

------

J. Patrick Lyons

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- J. Patrick Lyons, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress seven times and mounted legal challenges against opponents in those races, died Thursday. He was 62.

Lyons died at Middle Tennessee Medical Center, a representative of the Feldhaus Memorial Chapel said.

Lyons sought the Democratic nomination for the 4th District House seat in 1992 but was defeated in the primary by Rep. Jim Cooper.

He ran as an independent in 1994, 1996 and 2000 for the seat and as an independent in 2002 and 2004 in the 6th District. He ran in the 6th District Democratic primary this year and was defeated by U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon.

Lyons sued Van Hilleary, who served as 4th District congressman from 1995 to 2003, claiming that Hilleary's membership in the National Guard made him ineligible to hold a congressional seat.

Lyons also claimed in a lawsuit against Gordon that an incumbent congressman could not succeed himself. A hearing on the lawsuit was scheduled for Oct. 13.

Lyons, who was a veteran, was self-taught on legal issues but was not a lawyer.

------

Oskar Pastior

BERLIN (AP) -- Oskar Pastior, a Romanian-born German writer who was celebrated for his creative use of language, died Thursday, his publisher said. He was 78.

Pastior died in Frankfurt, where he was visiting the annual book fair, said Christine Knecht, a spokeswoman for the Carl Hanser Verlag publishing house.

Among Pastior's early works was ''Offne Worte'' published in 1964; he made his literary debut in Germany in 1969 with ''Vom Sichersten ins Tausendste,'' a collection of poems.

Pastior was born on Oct. 20, 1927 in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, where he lived as a member of the German-speaking minority.

After being interned in Soviet labor camps following World War II, he returned to communist Romania in 1949 and studied German at the University of Bucharest. He worked in radio before turning to writing.

Pastior fled to West Germany during a study trip to Vienna, Austria, in 1968 and settled in West Berlin. He had been working on a book about his time in Soviet labor camps at the time of his death.

Obituaries in the News, NYT, 6.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Deaths.html

Rodney Gordon, father of Army Sgt. David W. Gordon,

weeps after he was handed a flag from his son's casket on Friday in Oil City, Pa.

Gordon was killed Sept. 8 in Iraq

when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.

By Jerry Sowden, AP

War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11 UT 22.9.2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-war-toll_x.htm

War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11

Posted 9/22/2006 9:48 PM ET
AP
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.

The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration. It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon's report Friday night of the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad, brought the U.S. death toll in Iraq to 2,695. Combined with 278 U.S. deaths in and around Afghanistan, the 9/11 toll was reached.

Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed.

Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars, one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.

There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.

Now this.

"There's never a good war but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.

"A kind of numbness comes from that," he said. "We're not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn't a country that's used to ground wars anymore."

Almost 10 times more Americans have died in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have been remarkably light by any historical standard, although climbing in recent months in the face of a resurgent Taliban.

The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.

Altogether, 3,030 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.

Among the latest U.S. deaths identified by the armed forces:

•Army 2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, Fort Washington, Md., who died Sept. 12 in Kifl, Iraq, from an explosive device detonated near her vehicle. A former high school sprinter who sang in her West Point gospel choir, she was assigned to the 204th Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

•Marine Sgt. Christopher M. Zimmerman, 28, Stephenville, Texas, killed Wednesday in Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34% have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17% from the highest income level.

That's a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.

Eye-for-an-eye vengeance was not the sole motivator for what happened after the 2001 attacks any more than Pearl Harbor alone was responsible for all that followed. But Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. in the middle of mobilization, debate, rising tensions with looming enemies and a European war already in progress. Historians doubt anyone paid much attention to sad milestones once America threw itself into the fight.

In contrast, the United States had no imminent war intentions against anyone on Sept. 10, 2001. One bloody day later, it did.

War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11, UT, 22.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-war-toll_x.htm

American Album

Body Collector in Detroit Answers When Death Calls

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

DETROIT — With all the spectacular ways to die in this dying city, the fate of a man named Allan was almost pathetic. There he lay, in a weedy lot on the notorious East Side, next to a liquor bottle, his pockets turned out.

But as it goes with such things, one man’s misery is another man’s money. The body retrievalist for the county morgue had arrived on the scene. He was happy. He sang strange little ditties. Cracked odd little jokes. Said things like: “We got plenty of room in this here van, yes sir.”

Do not judge him. A happy attitude is necessary in his profession. It keeps the mind from shattering, salts one’s sanity. Call the job dirty. Call it 14 bucks the hard way — $14 a human body, $9 an animal. He said he made $14,000 last year. He made most of it at night.

His tax forms officially read “body technician.” Unofficially, Mike Thomas calls himself body snatcher, grim reaper, night stalker, bag man. Whatever you call it, it is one man’s life.

For Mr. Thomas, the demise of Allan was a cheerful occasion because, you see, work had been dead. There had been an odd lull in homicides, suicides and even natural passings here in one of the most violent American cities. It was the height of summer and people were supposed to be outside and killing each other, dropping dead from sunstroke, etc. Mr. Thomas wondered how he was going to feed his children the next week.

“I ain’t making nothing on these bodies,” he said on his porch, the screen door half gone. “I know that’s kind of weird to hear; I mean waiting around for somebody to die. Wishing for somebody to die. But that’s how it is. That’s how I feed my babies.”

He is happy to have the job, there are so few in Detroit. Unemployment hovers around 14 percent, more than twice the national average, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The slow death of the car industry has led to the slow death of the blue-collar Motor City and now the State of Michigan in general. About 300,000 jobs have disappeared from the state since 2000 and another 65,000 factory jobs are expected to be gone by next year. Mostly car-related jobs.

One of the few people working long hours most weeks, it seems, is Mr. Thomas.

There used to be money in Detroit. Known in the 50’s as the Paris of the Midwest, it had a population of 1.8 million, 83 percent white. It now has fewer than 900,000 and is 83 percent black. It is the poorest big city in the nation, with a third of the population living below the poverty line.

Detroit is an annual competitor for the ignominious title of Murder Capital. Last year there were 359 homicides. Halfway through this year, there were 220. There are about 10,000 unsolved homicides dating back to 1960.

Mr. Thomas, 34, subscribes to a simple theory: Unemployment leads to drugs. Drugs lead to misplaced passion. Misplaced passion leads to death. And that’s where he comes in.

“There’s 360 ways to die, and I done seen them all,” he said, dressed in black, waiting on a hot evening to be summoned to the latest body. “I seen an old lady standing dead at her stove, her purse hanging on her elbow. I done picked up the pieces of a man who stepped in front of a train. I done picked up people just around this corner, here, from my house.”

People he knew. People from his neighborhood, like Steve, who Mr. Thomas said should have known better than to rob a stripper. Like a prophet on the hill, Mr. Thomas explained the meaning not of life, but of death to guys from the neighborhood congregated on the porch, who robbed the beer truck in the afternoon and so came bearing gifts.

“You see,” he begins, “80 percent of people die naked and 70 percent die in the toilet. That means most people die naked in the toilet. I can’t explain it. It’s like Elvis. But as far as the afterlife goes, I believe through what I seen that those who commit horror and sin are doomed to repeat life, which is hell.”

He is a macabre observer of the economic times. Mr. Thomas and some of his workmates say they notice some disturbing trends. By midyear, 8,559 people had died in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, and more and more, technicians see bodies remaining in the cooler longer because family members don’t come to pick them up. They attribute this to the breakdown of family values as well as the lack of financial resources of people to bury their loved ones.

According to state statistics, the vast majority of homicides occur in the predominately black city, and the preponderance of suicides occur in the mostly white suburbs.

“My theory?” Mr. Thomas offered. “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die.”

“True, true,” shouted one young pilgrim, though no sighting of a white or Chinese man could be made within a 20-block radius of the porch.

Michael Thomas was born in rural Alabama in 1972 and moved with his family to Detroit a year later when Coleman A. Young was the city’s first black mayor. Like most people in the city — black, white or Arab — the Thomas family came for the factory jobs and achieved the middle-class life. Mr. Thomas grew up on the East Side, raised through his teenage years by a white stepfather, for whom he was always having to go to fists with the other black kids in the neighborhood. He is short and broad-shouldered.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Thomas was sent to prison at the age of 17 for carjacking. He served four years, kept to himself, got out safely and worked a string of hamburger jobs until his uncle connected him with the job at the morgue five years ago. He supports three children and has a fledgling rap career on the side. The autobiographical song “Transporters” is a neat little trick that can be found on the Web (www.myspace.com/gangstaclyde).

“One thing my stepfather taught me was the value of work,” Mr. Thomas said on his way to another scene. “A man who don’t have work don’t feel much like a man. A man without work, well, he takes the only way he can and that’s usually no good.”

A call came from the southwest side of town, with its Tudor style homes with brick and aluminum siding. A man had killed himself. He was white. Early 50’s. He had lost his job at the boat yard earlier that day, a detective said. He came home, drank himself into a depression and put a bullet in his head — the second white man to kill himself this day.

It was a sad, quiet scene on the street. The man’s family standing there silently stunned. Cans of cheap beer in their hands.

Mr. Thomas was sanguine. “We got plenty of room.”

Body Collector in Detroit Answers When Death Calls, NYT, 18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/18album.html

For Central Park Carriage Horse, Death Arrives Inelegantly

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

Juliet the carriage horse held forth for about two decades on the south end of Central Park taking tourists on slow romantic rides through the park. She was the cute white horse whose owner outfitted her head with the elegant white tassel that bobbed as she clip-clopped ahead of her carriage on loops from the Plaza Hotel to Tavern on the Green and other prominent spots.

But as elegant as Juliet was in life, she was undeniably inelegant in death on a rainy morning yesterday, lying flat on her back on the dungy concrete floor of a Hell’s Kitchen stable, her legs stiff in the air.

“I can’t believe this is my baby, Juliet,” said her owner, Antonio Provenzano, 47, of Brooklyn as he lifted a blue tarp off the horse. “For a million tourists, she was what they remember of Manhattan. Her picture is all over the world. And look at her now.”

She lay lifeless as the day shift of carriage drivers hitched up their horses and clopped out to work. Only Mr. Provenzano and a coterie of skinny cats seemed interested in her at the West Side Livery stable on West 38th Street near 11th Avenue. Never again would she come home to her third floor stall, with the window looking out on Midtown’s skyscrapers and high rises, and enjoy her hay and salt lick.

But Mr. Provenzano had more than his grief to deal with yesterday. Enforcement officers from the A.S.P.C.A. arrived at the stable and took Juliet’s body away for a necropsy and opened an investigation into her death based upon an incident Thursday night that attracted an angry crowd and the police.

Juliet collapsed in Central Park about 9:30 and Mr. Provenzano, who said he was acting on telephone orders from his veterinarian, began striking her repeatedly in the flank with his thin five-foot whip to get her to her feet again, prompting a crowd of onlookers to begin yelling at him.

“I’m trying to save my horse’s life and all of a sudden, everyone’s yelling, ‘Stop beating that horse; you’re going to kill it,’ ” he said. “Some big guy told me to stop or he would punch me. Then a cop showed up and said to stop or he’d arrest me. He was about to pull his gun out. All this while I have the vet on the phone telling me to keep hitting her to get her up.”

He said that Juliet probably had colic and he was told to get her to walk to rid herself of gas and waste.

“I’ve been around horses 30 years and I love my horse,” he said. “They think I want to hurt her?” When the veterinarian and officers from the mounted unit showed up at the park Thursday night, Mr. Provenzano was told he could resume the whipping.

Juliet climbed to her feet several times but promptly collapsed again. An employee from the Ritz Carlton nearby brought over a rug for the horse, and with great effort Juliet was placed on it, dragged into a police trailer and taken to the stable on 38th Street. After several hours of treatment by Mr. Provenzano and his veterinarian, Juliet died about 5 a.m. Her owner curled up in his carriage and tried to sleep.

Juliet was well-known among the carriage horses that are a staple of southern Central Park and are kept in stables in the area of westernmost Midtown that still has the feel of the old Hell’s Kitchen.

Part Percheron, part American draft, she was likely a former farm horse in her 20’s bought at auction in Pennsylvania and had begun pulling a carriage at least 17 years ago, Mr. Provenzano said. He said she quickly adapted to her urban environment, ignoring horns and sirens and avoiding potholes.

“She was called Juliet because everybody fell in love with her, like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” Mr. Provenzano said. “Think about all the people this horse gave rides to.’’

Mr. Provenzano said Juliet had had several owners over the years before he bought her last year for $1,700. He used her to work nights, pulling his green cab, six nights a week ever since.

“That horse was a member of my family,” he said. “I told my mother she died and my mom started crying.”

“I have no money to get another horse,” he said. “I have a wife and two sons to support. Two things I can do: make pizza and drive a horse.”

For Central Park Carriage Horse, Death Arrives Inelegantly, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/nyregion/16horse.html

Death in the family

The Cribbs have been undertakers for 125 years.

Mira Katbamna went to meet them

Saturday September 9, 2006
Guardian
Mira Katbamna

It is the end of the line in every sense. Among the large buildings with beautiful walled gardens across the road from Beckton station in London is Thomas Cribb and Sons, which was founded in 1881. Inside the high-ceilinged reception, only the boxes of tissues left discreetly on the tables and a black-and-white photograph of a horse-drawn hearse gives away the nature of the family business.

Becoming a funeral director is not an obvious upbeat career choice, but employees at this funeral parlour seem cheerful, not least the assured and polite great-great-great granddaughter of its founder. "To me it's completely normal, I've grown up with it," says Sarah Harris, 26, smartly dressed in a black skirt, white shirt and chic black ribbon belt. "It's a 24-hour service, so when my father and mother used to come home from the office they'd divert the phones and me or my sisters would have to pick it up."

The siblings would have to take the information down, finding out what the bereaved family wanted. "That's how it started," she adds. Yet, Harris never imagined she would have a career in her family's funeral parlour. "But when I worked here after A-levels I realised I really enjoyed it," she says. "And there's not too many jobs you can do where you are making a difference to people when they really need you."

Harris organises the funerals, sorting out everything from collecting the body from the hospital to booking the priest. It takes a special kind of person to do her job. "Confident is not quite the word, but you do almost have to be a figurehead - people need that, they need someone that they can literally lean on," she says. "They also deal with grief so very differently, and you just have to adapt the minute they walk in the door. And when so many people are at war with their family, there's always going to be friction."

The work can be emotionally taxing, especially when a child has died. "You feel so helpless," says Harris. "You'd do anything for the parents, but it can never be enough. But it's your job not to get upset - you simply have to be there for the family."

Harris's outlet is being a member of the Territorial Army. "I joined the TA because it's the only hobby where you don't have time to worry about all the things you have to do," she says.

Just as we are speaking, a middle-aged man and woman walk into reception, and Harris goes to meet them. They are obviously upset, but she takes it in her stride, settling them down on the sofa, offering them a cup of tea and then coming back with a book to start making the arrangements.

With Harris busy, it is left to her 78-year-old grandfather to give me a tour of the family business. Behind the reception area, Stan Cribb leads me past the freezer where they keep the bodies, through the coffin display room and into the coffin workshop, where one of the carpenters is working on a tiny coffin for a premature baby.

Cribb has seen the East End and the funeral business change dramatically since he first started working with the firm's horses just before the second world war. Then every family went to the same funeral director, with whom they had become well acquainted.

Today, the Cribbs are experts on the burial rites of numerous religions, organise repatriations and are to open a branch in Ghana. And his son (Harris's dad), John Cribb has an MA from Reading University in death and society.

"Someone once said to me that at least I would never be out of business," Stan Cribb says, "but with that attitude you'd be out of business in no time. Whoever it is, you treat their funeral like your first. It's all about dignity. It's the last thing you can do for them."

Fashions change and can come full circle, even in death. Demand has led to the revival of horse-drawn hearses. Thomas Cribb and Sons has responded and now has a stable of 14 horses that go all over the country.

A walk into the mortuary reminds me why working at an undertaker's may not appeal to all. The embalmer has a body laid out on her table. Being very squeamish, I was dreading seeing a dead body - but this is totally removed from the gore and high drama of CSI.

The embalmer is working on the body of an elderly black man, and Stan Cribb looks at me nervously to see if I am OK. But it does not feel like being in the presence of death. If anything, it feels like he is not there at all and I begin to realise that the really hard part of this job is dealing with the people who are left behind.

In fact, despite his calmness around dead bodies, Cribb says that he has never done the embalming himself. "Obviously I've seen it done, many times. I can tell you if it's a good embalming or not, and what needs to be done, but I've never wanted to do it and I've never wanted the family to do it. There's a place for everybody and everything."

By now we have toured the garage containing a magnificent fleet of vintage vehicles, and walked through the gardens. The horses, Stan Cribb's pride and joy, are stabled in Essex.

Back at reception, his granddaughter is in the office, sorting out the schedule for the cars so that they arrive on time - not too early and never too late. I ask her whether dealing with death every day has made her more aware of her own mortality.

"I was thinking about this the other day, and I suppose it has," says Harris. "I'm not worried about myself - but knowing what it's like when you lose someone you love scares the life out of me."

As for Stan Cribb, he is certainly not going to get a pre-paid plan. "I'm not going to pay for it, they can pay for it," he says. "I think I'll have the horses. My first wife was buried, but I prefer cremation. And I shall go from the old office in Rathbone Street."

Death in the family, G, 9.9.2006, http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1867782,00.html

A memorial sits in front of the home of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow in Chicago.

Lefkow's husband and mother were murdered in the home in February 2005.

The number of threats against judges in fiscal year 2005 increased 63% from 2003.

Getty Images, March 2005 UT 25.7.2006

Threats up against federal judges NYT 26.7.2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-judges-cover_x.htm

It’s My Funeral and I’ll Serve Ice Cream if I Want To

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

ROBERT TISCH, who ran the Loews Corporation, had a marching band at his memorial service and a packed house at Avery Fisher Hall, all orchestrated by one of New York’s most prominent party planners. Estée Lauder’s had waiters passing out chocolate-covered marshmallows on silver trays. At Nan Kempner’s memorial, at Christie’s auction house, guests received a CD of Mozart’s Requiem. Ms. Kempner had wanted a live performance of the Requiem, but the logistics — full orchestra, chorus and soloists — were too much.

At a time when Americans hire coaches to guide their careers and retirements, tutors for their children, personal shoppers for their wardrobes, trainers for their abs, whisperers for their pets and — oh, yes — wedding planners for their nuptials, it makes sense that some funerals are also starting to benefit from the personal touch. As members of the baby boom generation plan final services for their parents or themselves, they bring new consumer expectations and fewer attachments to churches, traditions or organ music — forcing funeral directors to be more like party planners, and inviting some party planners to test the farewell waters.

The planning for most funerals still falls to the nation’s 22,000 funeral homes, which bury more than 2 million Americans each year, at a price tag of $13 billion. But some families are beginning to think outside the box-provider, said Mark Duffey of Houston, who last year began what he calls the first nationwide funeral concierge service. For $995 or a monthly subscription fee, his company, Everest Funeral Package, has helped several hundred families plan their final rites, providing concierge services that range from writing obituaries to negotiating prices with undertakers.

“Baby boomers are all about being in control,” said Mr. Duffey, who started his company after running a chain of funeral homes. “This generation wants to control everything, from the food to the words to the order of the service. And this is one area where consumers feel out of control.”

What they want, he said, are services that reflect their lives and tastes. One family asked for a memorial service on the 18th green of their father’s favorite golf course, “because that’s where dad was instead of church on Sunday mornings, so why are we going to church,” Mr. Duffey said. “Line up his buddies, and hit balls.” Another wanted his friends to ride Harleys down his favorite road, scattering his ashes.

The biggest change, Mr. Duffey said, is that as more families choose cremation — close to 70 percent in some parts of the West — services have become less somber because there is not a dead body present. “The body’s a downer, especially for boomers,” Mr. Duffey said. “If the body doesn’t have to be there, it frees us up to do what we want. They may want to have it in a country club or bar or their favorite restaurant. That’s where consumers want to go.”

Mr. Duffey has a suggested time limit for speeches: five minutes. “We urge them, ‘Don’t ad-lib. Get up and read it. It’s O.K., people expect it.’ ”

Requests for unusual services, while still in the minority, have stretched the creativity of funeral directors, said Ron Hast, the publisher of the trade journals Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor. As funerals move away from traditional settings like churches or funeral homes, he said: “we’re heading in the direction of event planners. Forward-thinking funeral directors are bringing in hospitality like food.” This can pose a challenge, especially for businesses that have done things the same way for generations, he added. “In New York and New Jersey, it’s illegal to serve even coffee or any food in a funeral home,” Mr. Hast said. “So they don’t have the comfort foods that people expect.”

Funeral homes do not always appreciate competition from entrepreneurs, whom they may consider interlopers, said Bob Biggins, the president of the National Funeral Directors Association.

“It’s not like planning a wedding or helping out with a reception,” Mr. Biggins said. “Funeral directors respond to families’ needs at any hour of the day in a short period of time.”

Mr. Biggins said funeral homes can do anything that party planners can do. At his own funeral home in Rockland, Mass., Mr. Biggins arranged a service for Harry Ewell, a man who had been an ice cream vendor. Mr. Ewell’s old ice cream truck led the funeral procession and dispensed Popsicles at the end. “If you call that over the top, then I guess I’m guilty,” Mr. Biggins said. “But our business reflects society as a whole. Today’s consumer wants things personal, specific to their lifestyle, whether it’s highlighting a person’s passion for golf or celebrating someone’s deep devotion to knitting or needlepoint.”

In the two years since he designed his first service, David E. Monn said he has discovered the biggest threat to a well-orchestrated event: the long speech. Mr. Monn’s business is organizing high-end events like museum galas or society benefits, but recently he has planned eight or nine funerals at the request of friends, including those of Henry A. Grunwald, the former editor of Time magazine, and A. M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of The New York Times. Funerals, he said, require a firm hand.

“I have a pet peeve,” he said. “No more than three minutes. It doesn’t matter how much you loved someone, after you’ve heard someone drone on for five minutes you’re annoyed. It’s about poignant moments. Maudlin is not poignant.”

Mr. Monn said that another challenge with funerals is that attendance can be unpredictable, especially those open to the public. “You never know if it’s going to be 20 people or 2,000,” he said. “Last year I did a funeral for a very young man on July 4th. It was a guessing game, would anyone come? Lo and behold, close to 1,500 people showed up. The church was packed.”

The matter of seating arrangements can also be sticky, he said. “People feel their place in life means where they sit at someone’s funeral,” he said. “It’s staggering to me, actually.”

Lynn Isenberg, a writer and entrepreneur, had never heard of funeral planners or concierges when she attended funerals for her father and brother in 1998 and 1999. But the different experiences of the two funerals gave her an idea for a novel. She called it “The Funeral Planner,” and it was about a young woman who found a niche doing you know what.

Ms. Isenberg is now developing a television pilot based on the book for the Lifetime channel, she said, and is under contract to write two more novels using the funeral planner character.

The book, in turn, gave her another idea: to start her own business, Lights Out Enterprises, in Venice Beach, Calif., which helps people plan their own funerals, with emphasis on the tribute video, which she calls a “spiritual biography.”

“I’m not talking about doing away with the grieving process, but I do think, why not experience a funeral service where you get to really know a person?” she said.

Though most clients want simple services, she said, one asked her for “an all-out disco party on top of their favorite mountain, with 360-degree views,” in order to remind friends of a happy period in their lives together. “And they want everyone to come dressed up in disco outfits.” For a former auctioneer, she recommended printing select words from the eulogy on auction paddles, so people could hold them up during the service.

“I see the day where our mainstream celebrities would make appearances at funerals to enhance the service,” she said.

Joshua Slocum, the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (www.funerals.org), a nonprofit group, said that though people have more choices than ever, they often end up paying more than necessary for things they don’t want or could do themselves. “This isn’t rocket science,” he said. “It’s less expensive and more satisfying if you do it yourself rather than write a check to a third party.”

He added, “I’ve seen places advertise that they do Webcasts of the funeral. We get 10,000 calls a year from people, and no one’s ever said they wanted that.”

But for some, including Jack Susser, a real estate agent in Santa Monica, Calif., the sendoff can have benefits now. Mr. Susser, who is 57 and healthy, hired Ms. Isenberg to create a tribute video so that his future grandchildren and great-grandchildren could know his life in ways he’d never known his grandparents’. Ms. Isenberg developed a 20-minute video called “Jack the Mensch,” with an original script, professional actors, animation and a $75,000 budget. The lead characters are Mr. Susser and a talking fish.

“At first I felt the title made me out to be too good,” Mr. Susser said. But creating the video helped him appreciate his life, he said. And as a former actor, he saw a surprising upside to the death business.

“I’m going to use it not only for my passing, but at my 60th birthday party,” he said. “I may even send it to agents, because I think there’s good work on it. This is professionally done.”

Christopher Mason contributed reporting for this article.

It’s My Funeral and I’ll Serve Ice Cream if I Want To, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/fashion/20funeral.html

Husband Aided Wife's Suicide in Cliff Plunge,

Police Say

June 17, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

It looked like an ordinary family outing. A minivan stopped at a scenic overlook, a strip of blacktopped pavement that is little more than a wide spot on a one-lane road along the edge of a cliff. In the distance is the Hudson River. A hundred feet below is a forest as thick as when the Harriman family owned it a century ago.

The police say three things happened next. A man stepped out of the minivan, maybe to take a picture. His wife, inside with their two young daughters, put the transmission in gear. And the minivan drove off the cliff.

The woman, Hejin Han, 35, was killed on Wednesday as the minivan bounced down the rocky hillside in Bear Mountain State Park, about 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and slammed into a tree. The two daughters, strapped into their car seats in the back, were not seriously injured.

Yesterday, the man who climbed out of the van before its plunge — Victor K. Han, 35, an architect from Staten Island — was charged with promoting a suicide attempt. The police maintain that Mr. Han knew that his wife was suicidal and "afforded her an opportunity" to kill herself.

But the police also said that there was another twist in the already complicated case. Court papers referred to a female co-worker of Mr. Han's and said the two had a romantic relationship.

That disclosure was at odds with the way the Hans' neighbors on Staten Island described them — a stable family, happy and religious, with a father who had done design work for neighbors who wanted decks built on their houses.

"They'd wait outside for him to come at night, and they would all embrace," Pamela Cropley, who lives near the Hans on Elvin Street in Castleton Corners, said about Mrs. Han and the girls, ages 5 and 3.

Ms. Cropley, who said the couple moved into their half of a two-family house five or six years ago, said she never saw anything to suggest that Mrs. Han was troubled — let alone so troubled that she would take her own life. "She was smiling every time I saw her," Ms. Cropley said. "She would see you, and her face would light up."

Promoting a suicide attempt is an unusual charge, law professors and prosecutors said yesterday.

"As a prosecutor for a lot of years in the Manhattan D.A.'s office and now over 10 years here, I've never seen it charged," said Louis E. Valvo, the chief assistant district attorney for Rockland County, whose office is handling the case.

But it was not the only charge that Mr. Han faced when he appeared before Justice William Franks in Stony Point Town Court yesterday. He was also charged with two counts of reckless endangerment of a child, one count for each daughter, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child.

Like the suicide-attempt charge, the reckless endangerment charges are felonies. The reckless endangerment charges carry tougher penalties than the suicide-attempt charge. Mr. Valvo said that if convicted, Mr. Han could be sentenced to as much as 14 years in prison.

Justice Franks set bail at $75,000 and scheduled another hearing for Tuesday. Mr. Han was being held at the Rockland County jail.

In court, he was represented by the Rockland public defender, James D. Licata, who said he had no comment on the case. As for what Mr. Han had told the police that would have led to the suicide-attempt charge, Mr. Licata said: "I'm not privy to the statements he made. They haven't been supplied to us."

Mr. Han was arrested early yesterday after spending much of Thursday being questioned. The park police said Mr. Han was aware that his wife "had earlier threatened to harm herself and their two children."

But a one-page statement from the park police outlining the charges provided few details about Wednesday's events, about why the Hans made the afternoon drive or Mr. Han's explanation of what transpired. Calls to the park police at Bear Mountain were referred to a spokeswoman in Albany, who did not make police officials available to the news media.

The overlook where the Hans parked has a view of the river and the Bear Mountain Bridge. At the edge, in place of a guardrail, are boulders set about 10 feet apart — just far enough, it turned out, for the Hans' Honda Odyssey to drive through.

The park police said that two hikers who had heard the minivan clatter down the hillside and smash into a tree helped officers find the vehicle. The park police also said that when they got there, Mr. Han had gone down the hillside despite the steep drop, and was standing by the van. By early yesterday, the park police were accusing Mr. Han of abetting his wife's suicide, and some legal experts were saying that it would be hard to make the charge stick.

Michael T. Cahill, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, said the provision appeared to have been part of the state penal code that was enacted in the mid-1960's.

"The language of the provision is that you have to cause or aid another person's suicide attempt," he said, "and I wouldn't think that just leaving the car would amount to aiding another person's suicide attempt."

Ann Farmer and Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.

Husband Aided Wife's Suicide in Cliff Plunge, Police Say, NYT, 17.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/nyregion/17suicide.html

Daughters of Dominggus Pasalbessy with Henry Fersko-Weiss,

who helped guide them as Mr. Pasalbessy neared death.

James Estrin/The New York Times May 20, 2006

For the Families of the Dying, Coaching as the Hours Wane

NYT

20.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20vigil.html

Mr. Fersko-Weiss, a hospice executive,

joined the Pasalbessy daughters for a "closure session" at the apartment of one.

James Estrin/The New York Times

May 20, 2006

For the Families of the Dying, Coaching as the Hours Wane

NYT

20.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20vigil.html

For the Families of the Dying,

Coaching as the Hours Wane

May 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JANE GROSS

Greg Torso's death announced itself with a long exhale and then silence, as the breath literally left his body. His mother had been told to expect this, so she was not scared.

Ms. Torso had worried that an undertaker would barge in moments after her 42-year-old son died, before she had had time to say goodbye. She had been assured she could spend as much time with the body as she wanted.

Could she bathe and dress him? Save a lock of his hair? Commemorate his passing with wine and reminiscence at the bedside? All of that was fine, she had been told, setting the stage for a death that she later said had left her "on the edge of euphoria."

Ms. Torso was coached and consoled through the final days and hours of her son's life, a rarity even under the umbrella of hospice, which for three decades has promised Americans a good death, pain-free, peaceful and shared with loved ones at home.

But there is a growing realization that hospice has its limitations. Doctors, nurses, social workers, clerics and volunteers are rarely there for the final hours, known as active dying, when a family may need their comforts the most.

Now those final moments are a focus of new attention as hospices broaden their range of services, inspired by a growing body of research on the very end of life. More are encouraging the calming properties of music, meditation, aromatherapy and massage for both patients and families. Some are increasing the training for so-called 11th-hour companions who families can request be with them.

Holding a dying person's hand may be frightening for a loved one alone at the bedside. Relatives and friends may not know that hearing is the last sense to go, and neglect to soothe the patient with a steady, reassuring murmur. Leaving the room briefly may mean missing the moment of passing and always carrying that regret.

"These final moments matter, but often, when families and patients need us most — to explain the process, calm the situation, take away the negative energy and allow them to be more present — we aren't there," said Henry Fersko-Weiss, vice president for counseling services at Continuum Hospice Care in New York City, which has a new program that has been keeping vigil with the dying and their families.

The American hospice movement has grown from one program in 1974 to 3,650 in 2004, serving eight million Americans, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. And more people are expected to choose hospice care as it extends its reach into hospitals and nursing homes, where palliative care is not routinely available. At the same time, those who seek aggressive treatment up to the end are welcome at hospice programs that once turned them away but that are now "open access."

Despite all these changes, most people, in fear or denial, wait until the last minute to enroll. That robs them of the preparation that was so vital to Greg Torso's mother, Carol, and that hospice leaders, like Andy Duncan of the national organization, say should be routine.

"Actually coaching and counseling people through the time of active dying," Mr. Duncan said, "is something we hope to convince every hospice in the nation to do."

Preparing

The Torsos were the first to use Continuum's vigil program, which has coached and consoled a dozen families in its first year.

Greg had survived 15 years with AIDS and related cancers. When his doctor said further treatment would be useless, Mr. Torso enrolled in hospice, and welcomed extra help from Mr. Fersko-Weiss and 29 specially trained volunteers who call themselves doulas.

That is a Greek term for women who serve, more commonly at home births to assist both midwife and mother. But the guiding philosophy is the same and borrows from Eastern religions: to honor the end of life as well as the beginning.

Mr. Fersko-Weiss is a gentle man who insinuates himself slowly. When he first described the dying process to Ms. Torso, she found it hard to listen. So they shifted gears, talking about Greg's life and looking at photos of him in better days.

On a subsequent visit, Ms. Torso sought reassurance that she would not "just fall apart." On another, Mr. Fersko-Weiss told her there might come a moment when she would have to give her son explicit permission to die. She did — "You can go, Greggy. You can go whenever you want" — toward the end of what would be a 68-hour vigil, involving 10 doulas (pronounced DOO-lehs).

Gwen Lee's needs were different as she prepared for the passing of her eldest sister, Vivienne, who died at 60 after a 10-year battle with brain cancer.

Years of pretending that all was fine had given way, for both of them, flight attendants from Ireland, to acceptance. As Gwen put it, "We were prepared for the end of her life, but no one else was." Some friends and relatives began second-guessing the decisions, arguing at Viv's bedside, arriving uninvited and creating a "soap opera," Gwen said, "where we were left trying to keep them happy."

It is not uncommon, hospice workers say, for those not involved in day-to-day care to bring their own fears and conflict to the deathbed and inadvertently become a burden. Into the tumult came Mr. Fersko-Weiss, a Buddhist whose religion says that "what happens to the soul is partly determined by how it leaves this life." The scene of death, he said, is a "sacred space," and the doula's job is to protect it.

To that end, he and Gwen, 51, considered moving Vivienne, and her two beloved cats, to an in-patient hospice where they could control who visited. Just knowing there was a fallback position reassured them.

"It made all the difference," Gwen said. "Henry pulled me out of the chaos and kept my head on the goal."

The Vigil

Chloe Tartaglia, a pre-med student, yoga teacher and former birth doula, had never seen anyone die when she volunteered for the vigil program.

She learned the signs of imminent death in her 16-hour training program, how to match her breathing to the patient's and use visualization and aromatherapy to calm everyone in the room. On the subway, headed to her first case, Ms. Tartaglia, whose father was a hospice physician, concentrated on her goal: to be "like water and flow to the place where there's need."

She found herself in a shabby apartment near New York University. A tiny woman lay in bed, wasting away from "failure to thrive," Ms. Tartaglia had been told. The woman's husband was terrified, venturing into the room only to give her morphine, as he had been instructed by hospice nurses.

The woman's daughter, none too fond of her stepfather, was at work, having left behind a phone number. Ms. Tartaglia pulled a chair to the bedside.

For five hours, Ms. Tartaglia said, she sat beside the woman and held her hand "with intention," as she had been taught, enclosing it between her own. She had no sense of time passing until her shift was about to end.

"I told her I'd be leaving soon but that someone else was coming and she wouldn't be alone," Ms. Tartaglia said.

Five minutes later the woman died.

Ms. Tartaglia called the daughter, who arrived calm and efficient, ready for the logistics that follow death. "I can't deal with him," she told Ms. Tartaglia as the old man keened.

Ms. Tartaglia guided him into the kitchen and fixed tea. "You deal with yourself and your mom," she told the daughter. Ms. Tartaglia followed her heart and suggested a deathbed ritual. As she slipped from the apartment, the daughter was combing her mother's hair.

There would be more vigils for Ms. Tartaglia. One of the most memorable, she said, included the chance to hear Gwen Lee take her sister on whispered journeys to places Vivienne had most loved in the days when being a stewardess was glamorous.

With one of Vivienne's cats at her head and the other draped over her legs, Gwen would set the scene: An overnight flight to Africa. Glaring sun as the cabin doors open. Days between flights to romp at the beach with captain and crew.

While Gwen soothed her sister, Ms. Tartaglia lighted candles. She massaged Gwen's feet, helped choose the music for Vivienne's grand exit, Sarah Brightman singing "Time to Say Goodbye."

Ms. Tartaglia's shift ended three hours before Vivienne died. As she left, Ms. Tartaglia removed the oxygen mask that was intended to make Vivienne more comfortable but was chafing her face.

The Aftermath

A month to the day after Dominggus Pasalbessy died, Mr. Fersko-Weiss visited the three daughters who had cared for him. This was a formal opportunity for Pat Jolly, 62, Helen Santiago, 58, and Anita Pasalbessy, 55, to review their experience. After a death, Mr. Fersko-Weiss told them, "something said or not said, something you wish you had done differently, can stick inside you like a splinter."

The lights were low in Ms. Pasalbessy's Riverside Drive apartment, and Mr. Fersko-Weiss suggested a CD their father had loved, music from the South Moluccan islands, now part of Indonesia, the native land he had left as a teenager on a tramp steamer. The sisters sat for a brief meditation, letting the bustle of their day be replaced with images of their father, who died of lung cancer in the same bed where his wife had died a dozen years earlier.

All three described feeling peaceful and reverent at the time of his passing. It was like being "inside a cocoon," Ms. Pasalbessy said, "just me and my sisters, and Daddy, all together, in a place where nothing bad could touch us."

Only when pressed did each recall her particular moment of distress.

Ms. Pasalbessy agonized that she had compromised the independence of a man who "never wanted to be fussed over." Mr. Fersko-Weiss reminded her that eventually her father had stopped resisting his daughters' ministrations and had told them, "You're good girls, such good girls."

Ms. Jolly's concern was whether they had adequately medicated him. But her father's mantra had been "mind over matter." Perhaps, Mr. Fersko-Weiss suggested, he chose a measure of pain, rather than unawareness, as an assertion of strength.

Ms. Santiago had trouble forgetting the sisters' squabbling as they tried to dress him, three strong-willed women each with her own idea of how to get his arm through a pajama sleeve. "He had to have felt our tension, our nervousness," she said. "But that's when you guys walked in and everything fell into place."

Three doulas were with the family, in shifts, from dusk on April 9 until late afternoon on April 11. At 3:10 p.m., after a telltale rattling in his chest, Mr. Pasalbessy let out a breath. Then another, as two tears trickled down his cheek.

"It was like we could hear you talking to us," Ms. Jolly told Mr. Fersko-Weiss. " 'You'll see this. You'll hear a certain breathing pattern.' This dying was such a wonderful experience, if death can be that. And it's because there was no fear of the unknown."

For the Families of the Dying, Coaching as the Hours Wane, NYT, 20.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20vigil.html

The Horrid Death of Milton Rocano,

Unseen and Unnoticed

April 27, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Few saw Milton Rocano during the short time he lived in this city, and no one saw him die, a death horrible in its circumstances and its sheer isolation, its invisibility.

Mr. Rocano, an employee at a privately owned recycling-transfer station in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, climbed into the rear of an empty open-top tractor-trailer on Saturday morning and was buried alive in an avalanche of debris dumped by a co-worker who did not know he was there, the police said. The truck later dumped the debris, and Mr. Rocano's body, in a landfill in Suffolk County, where it was found three days later, after the company and the police had tracked it there.

Even by the standards of New York City, where anonymous people often die in extraordinary ways, this death stands out for all the little things that did not happen: the worker who killed Mr. Rocano by all accounts never knew it. If Mr. Rocano did shout, no one heard him in the din. At the company's offices on Anthony Street, a large window looks straight down into the area where the truck had been. But no one was looking through it on Saturday morning.

A camera recorded the accident, but the images were not seen until two days later. Mr. Rocano, 20, was not missed as the shift changed. No one noticed that he had not used his time card to punch out in a dusty, harried corner of Brooklyn, rumbling with Brooklyn-Queens Expressway traffic from above and big trucks that come and go all day, a place where it is as hard to breathe as it is to hear.

"It's part of the city that people don't see," said Paul D. Casowitz, a lawyer for the recycling center, City Recycling Corporation. "The gritty part. Everyone sees the trucks. No one wonders where they go."

Mr. Rocano's sister Maria Rocano said as much herself yesterday, but her words were packed with fury: "It's like he was a dog that was just finished off."

Mr. Rocano was the fifth of six siblings born and raised in Ecuador, and the third to move to New York City to earn some money, arriving six months ago. He shared an apartment with roommates in Sunnyside, Queens, and spent most of his free time with his sisters, Maria and Ana Rocano, who live in Brooklyn. When he was not with them, they said, he was probably in church, a man so faithful that he was known to write letters to God.

"He always included God in everything," said Ana Rocano.

One of his roommates was Miguel Coronel, 34, a livery-cab driver from Ecuador. "Oh, what a nice guy," Mr. Coronel said in an interview at his apartment yesterday. "He never drinks, he never goes outside. A quiet, nice guy."

Mr. Rocano quickly found work at City Recycling, just across Newtown Creek from his home in Queens. It is a bustling transfer station, where debris — mostly from construction sites — is dropped, sorted and trucked out again. No garbage or chemicals are dumped at the site, and nothing stays for long.

Tractor-trailers wait in line to back into one of the company's two loading and unloading areas, where a device called a grapple snatches debris from the full trucks and drops it into a pile. On clear days, workers spray the piles with water to keep the dust down. Truck drivers waiting their turn eat quiet lunches behind the wheel.

When a truck is emptied, workers in bright orange vests and hardhats climb up the sides and drop inside to clean up the scraps. That was Mr. Rocano's job. His first impressions of the place were not good and did not improve.

"It was tiring and he was exhausted, and he spoke of that," said a friend, Luis Amon, 24. "It was dirty work he did not want to do forever."

As he did on every day that he worked, he left his apartment at 5 a.m. on Saturday. He died about six hours later, Mr. Casowitz said, basing his estimate on a time stamp on one of the company's several surveillance cameras, which read 11:07 a.m. Mr. Casowitz said he had seen the recording, and he described it as follows:

Mr. Rocano, for reasons Mr. Casowitz said were unknown, climbed into an empty truck, which is not standard procedure. No one saw him enter the truck.

A large front-end loader approached. "The loading commences, and he's struck with debris," Mr. Casowitz said. "You see him in there, and the debris. He's covered in debris." The loader operator, who could not have seen inside the truck, dropped two more loads, and the truck left. The company did not identify the loader operator, but he is "understandably very upset," Mr. Casowitz said.

When Mr. Rocano did not come home, his worried sisters visited the company on Monday, they said. Ana Rocano said a manager told her: " 'Just wait. Wait. He's out drinking or with a girlfriend somewhere and he'll show up.' " Mr. Casowitz said that he could not confirm or deny the statement, but said that the manager clearly did not know that there had been an accident.

The sisters called the police to report Mr. Rocano missing, and investigators visited the site on Monday morning. An office manager at the company later reviewed the video, and when it became clear what had happened, called the police back to the site, Mr. Casowitz said. The truck and its load were tracked to a landfill on Spagnoli Road in Melville, N.Y., where the body was found shortly after noon on Tuesday.

No criminal charges have been filed, and the company does not expect any, Mr. Casowitz said. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating, a spokesman said. Work at the station continued yesterday.

Mr. Rocano's family plans to return his body to Ecuador for burial. Mr. Casowitz said the company would like to help defray the cost of the funeral. But, he said, no one at the company knew how to reach Mr. Rocano's sister.

Mick Meenan contributed reporting for this article.

The Horrid Death of Milton Rocano, Unseen and Unnoticed, NYT, 27.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/nyregion/27garbage.html

For a Price,

Final Resting Places That Even Tut Could Appreciate

April 17, 2006
The New York Times
By GUY TREBAY

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Ed Peck is in no hurry to get there, but when the time comes for him to go to eternity, he wants his last earthly stop to be consistent with his social station.

So Mr. Peck, a real estate developer who made his fortune in Florida condominiums in the 1970's, not long ago joined a small but growing number of Americans who have erected that most pharaonic of monuments to life-in-death, the private family mausoleum.

A Greek-pillared neo-Classical style structure of white granite, Mr. Peck's mausoleum has a granite patio, a meditation room, doors of hand-cast bronze and a chandelier. The family name is carved and gilded above a lintel that in the original sales model carried the legend "Your Name."

Developed just over two years ago to accommodate a growing demand for mausoleums like the one Mr. Peck bought, which including its lot has a retail cost of $400,000, the Private Estate Section at the century-old Daytona Memorial Park here has 15 lake-view lots. Six have been sold.

"The mausoleum says, 'I'm really significant in this world, I think I'm really significant to my family,' and this is one way to communicate that to the community," said Nancy Lohman, an owner along with her husband, Lowell, of this and several dozen other Florida cemeteries and funeral homes.

Mr. Peck, 87, an Atlanta native with a sonorous voice and a laconic manner, framed a similar thought more modestly. "It began to occur to me that I did not want to be in the ground covered with weeds and whatnot and totally forgotten," he said. "I don't like the idea of dirt being dumped on me."

Six feet up and not six feet under is increasingly the direction in which people want their remains stored when they die, representatives of the funeral industry say. In addition to custom single-family mausoleums, community mausoleums for both coffins and cremated remains are also gaining popularity; in classical or contemporary styles, these often have room to hold hundreds of niches for coffins or urns.

The Cold Spring Granite Company, among the country's largest makers of cemetery monuments, sold 2,000 private mausoleums last year, up from about 65 during a good year in the 1980's. Prices range from $250,000 to "well into the millions," said Michael T. Baklarz, a vice president of the company.

The development is perhaps logically to be expected of those at the leading edge of the baby boom generation, which forms the bulk of the market. The progression seems natural for the folks who gave the world blocklong, gas-hogging sport utility vehicles and lot-hogging 40,000-square-foot suburban homes.

"It's in keeping with the McMansion mentality of boomers," said Thomas Lynch, an author and funeral director in Michigan. "Real estate is an extension of personhood."

The market for the custom structures is greatest on the coasts, although exclusive estate sections have recently been set aside for private mausoleums at cemeteries in Atlanta, Cleveland and Minneapolis.

Some mausoleums echo the temple of the goddess Fortuna Virilis in Rome. Some are hefty, rusticated stone barns. Some have more square footage than a good-size Manhattan studio apartment, their interiors fitted out with hand-knotted carpets, upholstered benches and nooks for the display of memorabilia. In late 2004, a Southern California family ordered a mausoleum with room for 12 coffins, 20 cremation niches and a patterned marble vestibule.

Commonplace in the 19th century, when both newly prosperous immigrants and robber barons vied to stake claims on American soil by investing in the only real estate that is "permanently valuable," as Mark Twain famously remarked, the mausoleum seemed to have lost favor in recent years.

More people were choosing to be cremated — industry experts say that more than a quarter of the 2.3 million people who died in 2004 were cremated — and some opted for new forms of interment like the "green burials" that flickered onto the cultural radar after a character from the HBO series "Six Feet Under" was buried unembalmed and without a coffin, in an unmarked grave protected by a nature preserve.

Yet the brief buzz about eco-burial, executives from America's nearly $15 billion funeral industry say, may obscure the larger reality that, as in seemingly every other facet of contemporary life, the taste for personalization has touched the funeral industry in time to provide an otherwise static business with an opportunity for growth.

"Nobody wants a cookie-cutter burial anymore," said Robert M. Fells, the external operating officer of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, the industry's leading trade group. At the group's annual convention in March in Las Vegas, the resurgent interest in building private mausoleums was striking, Mr. Fells said.

"The private family mausoleum used to be considered a high-ticket, upscale item that only the wealthy could afford," Mr. Fells said, and there is no reason to amend that impression given that $250,000 is the average base price to build a private family tomb. "The pendulum is swinging back to people being willing to spend money for things that are meaningful to them," he said.

The need to create "new concepts in the death care industry," said Christine Toson Hentges, vice president of a company that owns three cemeteries in Wisconsin, has helped increase the appeal of private estate sections.

"We've reversed the traditional way of selling," Ms. Hentges added. Traditionally, funeral directors or cemetery owners began their post-mortem pitch to families by quoting the most affordable options. "But now we're going top-down and starting with private buildings," she said, "because there is this influx of people who are financially successful and who are thinking about these issues and how to have a structure that tells the story of their lives."

At the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a spokesman said that there had been no marked increase in private mausoleums lately, but last year the cemetery completed a five-story, $16 million crypt mausoleum for 2,500, replete with skylights and waterfalls.

"All of this is recent," said Herbert B. Klapper, president of Cedar Park Cemetery, a 300-acre site in Paramus, N.J., that offers burials in mausoleums where crypt space is priced the way urban real estate often is, by neighborhood and floor. (From the ground or "prayer" level, crypt prices ascend to the "heart" level and then to "eye" and are reduced again for the harder-to-reach berths at a tier called "touch.")

Yet the most grandiose niche in Paramus is humble compared with the granite extravaganza erected at Daytona Memorial Park to house the mortal remains of L. Gale Lemerand, a Florida philanthropist who founded a residential insulation company that he sold in 1995 for an estimated $150 million.

Two $4,000 Medjool date palms shade Mr. Lemerand's red granite mausoleum, which cost $650,000 and has ample space, as the cemetery co-owner Lowell Lohman explained, to accommodate Mr. Lemerand, 71, along with his family.

A granite balustrade flanks the doorway and from it one can stand and gaze across a palm-fringed lake, where two swans named Ed and Hilda glide, adding to the pastoral landscape an almost inevitable touch of Evelyn Waugh. On the far shore is Ed Peck's family tomb.

"People who are going to be buried here can well afford it, so money is obviously not an issue," Mr. Peck said on an afternoon of blustery winds that propelled an armada of fleecy postcard clouds across the Florida sky. "It's a very pleasant place to be. As pleasant as it could be, considering."

For a Price, Final Resting Places That Even Tut Could Appreciate, NYT, 17.4.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/us/17mausoleum.html

Life, Hope and Healing

Are Focus of Service for Miners

January 16, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY GATELY

BUCKHANNON, W.Va., Jan. 15 - On the horrific morning when their hope turned to heartbreak, miners' families came to this town to identify bodies and to seek solace in the Georgian-style chapel on the campus of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

The families returned on Sunday, along with 2,300 other mourners, to say goodbye to the 12 men who were killed Jan. 2 at the Sago Mine, seven miles south of here, and to give thanks for the men they knew and loved.

Mourners began filing into the sanctuary more than 90 minutes before the service, and the crowd spilled into a gymnasium, where 500 people watched the service on a video screen and heard it through speakers. Outside the chapel, a miner's helmet sat atop a wooden cross, boots beneath it. Those at the service wore white ribbons that said "Sago 2006."

Family members lighted white candles on the altar, one for each of the 12 miners, while Anna McCloy, the wife of the sole survivor, Randal McCloy Jr., lighted a red candle in his honor.

The last time some family members had been on the quiet campus was to identify the fallen miners at a makeshift morgue in an old school building owned by the college. Many of them then went to Wesley Chapel to grieve, remember and pray.

But Sunday's service focused less on the deaths and more on the lives of the miners. They were praised as men who had a work ethic that would not quit, who hunted and fished and followed Nascar races when they were not in the hollow of a mountain, who laughed and loved to tell stories, who had unshakable faith.

Homer H. Hickam Jr., an author, recalled the words of his father, a miner: "There's no men in this world like miners; they're good men, strong men, the best there is. No matter where you go, you will never know such good and strong men." Mr. Hickam - whose memoir, "Rocket Boys," chronicled his upbringing in the town of Coalwood, W.Va., and was later turned into the movie "October Sky" - traveled from his new home in Alabama to attend the service.

The Rev. Wease Day, pastor of Sago Baptist Church, recalled two miners he knew well, James A. Bennett, 61, of Philippi, and George Hamner, 54, of Gladyfork, who was known as Junior.

"I'm sure there was a prayer meeting going on in that coal mine the other day like we've never heard before," Mr. Day said. "I can hear Jim Bennett hollering, 'Boys, you need the Lord in your life.' Then I can hear Junior Hamner saying, 'Anybody got any cards? Let's play a round.' "

Everybody laughed.

As others spoke of hope, healing and honor, photos of the miners flashed on a huge screen behind the altar, and some sobbed at the sight. But the Rev. Mark Flynn, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Buckhannon, urged mourners to believe the miners were in a better place.

Gov. Joe Manchin III recalled a drawing in a newspaper that showed St. Peter on top of the clouds and one of the Sago miners reaching toward him amid brilliant sunshine at the gates to heaven.

"It looks like we're still in West Virginia," the miner said.

Mr. Manchin spoke of the long night at Sago Baptist Church, where family members and friends had gathered to await word and where there was a brief moment of elation with the news - later proved heart-wrenchingly in error - that 12 miners had been found alive. "During those difficult hours that we were together," he said, "we grew stronger."

The governor also renewed his promise that a thorough investigation would determine why the accident happened and find ways to prevent a repeat.

"We cannot know the purpose of this tragedy, but I pledge to you we will determine the cause," Mr. Manchin said. "Your loved ones did not die in vain."

At the end of the service, thousands of white balloons were released into the blue sky.

Outside, in a white memory tent, easels held photographs of the miners and a big board where people could leave notes. Many mourners left prayers and good wishes.

A note to one miner, Jerry Groves said, "Enjoy heaven until we get there," and was signed Wanda. Another, to Jack Weaver, read, "Love heals."

A single red rose for each miner, each with a white ribbon and a picture of one of the 12, had been placed in the tent.

On David Lewis's rose, a note read, "From almost heaven West Virginia to the pearly gates."

And a note to Jesse Jones said, "God definitely has 12 more angels. God bless you all."

Life, Hope and Healing Are Focus of Service for Miners, NYT, 16.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/national/16miners.html

Hundreds Express Grief and Faith

as 6 Miners Are Buried

January 9, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY GATELY

BUCKHANNON, W.Va., Jan. 8 - West Virginians began burying their fallen miners on Sunday, mourning their losses but celebrating the lives and legacies of men who prided themselves on making a living by harvesting coal from deep within the earth.

In the mountain hamlets surrounding the Sago Mine, hundreds of mourners turned out for the funerals of 6 of the 12 men who died there last week. But the grief, sympathy and prayers extended well beyond the funerals, most of them private services from which reporters were banned.

White ribbons and bows adorned utility poles in Buckhannon, and dozens of roadside signs conveyed the somber mood. "Healing hurts," one sign said outside a doughnut shop here. One just north of town read, "God just got 12 new angels."

At the service for Jesse L. Jones, a 44-year-old miner from Pickens, the Rev. Donald Butcher, pastor of Sand Run Baptist Church, spoke the names of each of the 12 men killed at the mine and spoke of their way of making a living and making a life.

"You see, coal miners are a different breed of men; they don't have any fear," Mr. Butcher said to about 200 mourners at a funeral chapel just north of the mine. Miners, he said, give us electricity for lights as well as powerful lessons on working tirelessly, no matter the circumstances.

"God gives us people who are heroes, and we don't even realize it," he said. "We got lots of coal miners here with us today. America is great because of this profession and because of men like Jesse, who put their lives on the line."

The pastor spoke of one of Mr. Jones's grandfathers, who was killed in a mine explosion, and of members of his own family, one of whom lost his sight and others who lost their fingers mining.

The other miners buried Sunday were Alva Martin Bennett, 51; Jerry Groves, 56; David Lewis, 28; Martin Toler, 51; and Jack Weaver, 52.

At Sago Baptist Church, where inaccurate first reports of the survival of 12 miners brought euphoria that later turned to grief, the Rev. Wease Day stood in front of a huge picture of the Last Supper during regular Sunday morning services and tried to make sense of it all.

Wearing a blue tie with the face of Jesus on it, Mr. Day told the congregation, "The other night when we received what we all believed to be good news, we all shouted and rejoiced, but you know when the other news came it broke our hearts as well."

But, he said, God would never forsake his people and was with them throughout the heartbreaking ordeal even if they could not understand or answer the unanswerable questions.

"Many times people think, 'Well, it was God's fault,' " Mr. Day said, "but God has a master plan, and everything comes together in that master plan. He was in control every minute.

"We were in this building the other night and it came to mind that the spirit was so great here and it was so great outside and God had just covered these old hilltops with his holy spirit, his holy power."

After the service, the church bells rang 12 times, echoing through the mountains. Just down the road near the entrance to the Sago Mine, 12 black ribbons hung from a fence.

Even as the towns mourned their dead, people kept praying for the recovery of the sole survivor of the mine disaster, Randal McCloy Jr., 26. Doctors at West Virginia University Hospitals, where Mr. McCloy is being treated, said that he remained in critical condition Sunday night but that his heart, lung and muscle functions had improved.

Mr. McCloy was breathing on his own, and doctors had stopped sedating him.

At First United Methodist Church, the pastor, the Rev. Mark Flynn, told congregants that he had been with the families of the miners almost nonstop for three days.

"I went to Sago to minister to those families, and they ministered to me," Mr. Flynn said. "I was touched by the strength, the love and the wisdom. In those dark days and nights at the Sago Baptist Church, I saw some light. I saw light in the faith and love of the family members with whom I talked.

"Their faith was not just a vague notion that somehow everything would turn out as they wished. These people believe that they and their loved ones were in the hands of God, no matter what happened in that mine."

Hundreds Express Grief and Faith as 6 Miners Are Buried, NYT, 9.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/national/09miners.html

Here, a Dec. 31 Not of Revelry but of Remembering

January 1, 2006
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

There is one New York for the living, another for the dead. Fourteen miles from the New Year's Eve preparations at Times Square, on some of the city's rare green hills, is a place where the two often meet: Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Thomas Soukas, 66, went there yesterday morning to light a candle for his father. The day held no particular significance for Mr. Soukas. He visits his father's grave every five days or so, replacing the old candle with a new one. His father died in 2001, and still Mr. Soukas visits regularly, bearing new light.

Christopher Soukas was 86 years old when he died of cancer. He left behind three sons, eight grandchildren and his wife, Alexandra. He had worked as a furrier in Manhattan; his wife - they had been married 62 years - still has the mink coat he made for her years ago.

Snowflakes dusted the grave and the flowers and the headstone as Mr. Soukas bent down to lift open the silver lid of the red-tinted candleholder.

"I'm not sure who's better off," said Mr. Soukas, a retired banker. "The ones that don't come at all, or the ones that come regularly like me. Time heals, to a certain extent. You just do less crying, that's all."

This was how New Year's Eve was marked at Woodlawn yesterday - as a quiet kind of afterthought amid personal mourning. There were no crowds. There were only two burials, of Stephen Bartko and Johnny Morris, and three cremations, of Vincent Grayman, Marvin Grimes and Barbara Shuler.

There was a man who stood at his mother's grave on a hill, sipping a cup of coffee in the cold. It was her birthday.

"To me, it's a place for the living, not a place for the dead," said Steven G. Sloane, vice president of the nonsectarian cemetery. "Everybody should have a spot where you can be remembered."

The last day of the year feels a lot like any other at Woodlawn. It is a timeless place, far enough removed from the bustle of the city that each crunchy step on the leaves and twigs seems to echo, yet not isolated enough to shut out completely the sounds of the outside world - police sirens, the low hum of traffic on East 233rd Street, jets overhead.

Woodlawn is a kind of melancholy city-within-a-city, permanent population 303,400, with its own lake, street signs, curvy avenues and neighborhood clusters with names like Evergreen, Crown Grove and Rose Hill. Elaborate and expensive monuments and mausoleums rise high above the ground like stone skyscrapers, some as tall as three-story buildings. Yesterday morning, the snow coated them all, from giant obelisks that tower like miniature Washington Monuments to small, simple headstones.

Thin white lines formed along the carving of a ship in front of a mausoleum for Isidor and Ida Straus, who drowned together on the Titanic in April 1912. "Many waters," an inscription reads, "cannot quench love - neither can the floods drown it."

Two victims of another historic disaster are also at Woodlawn, side by side: Firefighters Manuel Del Valle Jr. and Gerard Baptiste, who both died on Sept. 11, 2001.

The cemetery, like the city itself, is home to both fame and obscurity.

Not long after its first burial in 1865, Woodlawn became known as the resting place for some of New York's legendary figures. Buried here are Fiorello H. La Guardia, the celebrated mayor; Robert Moses, the master power broker; and Herman Melville, the author of "Moby-Dick," whose gravestone, decorated with a blank scroll, has a collection of small rocks recent visitors placed on top.

But the icons of old New York share these 400 acres with everyday New Yorkers. Here are Nellie Bly, the reporter, and Frank Woolworth, the discount store king. Then there is Thomas N. Demakakos, a retired electrician with Local 3.

Mr. Demakakos died at the age of 75, two days before Christmas. He was a Korean War veteran, and he is buried alongside his comrades in the 9th Regiment of the New York Guard.

He earned the nickname Uncle Tom, because even strangers would think of him as family and seek out his advice, his relatives said.

"That's what we're all going to miss - the long conversations," said his daughter, Paulette Kouroupakis, who visited her father's grave yesterday with her brother, sister, mother and other family members. "He was always there by the phone, waiting for our calls."

Mr. Soukas, who brought a candle for his father, waved to a groundskeeper who passed by. He finds a kind of peace here, and sorrow, too. There, on the barren patch of earth where he stood, next to his father's headstone, is the spot where he himself will be buried one day.

Here, a Dec. 31 Not of Revelry but of Remembering, NYT, 1.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/nyregion/01woodlawn.html

A living message

from the valley of the shadow of death

23 July 2005
The Daily Telegraph
By Charles Moore

There has been a great deal of death in the news, so I apologise to readers for what might look like an entire column on the subject. In fact, though, it is about life.

In 1949, a Jew from the Warsaw ghetto, called David Tasma, lay dying of cancer in London. He had no family, but he was comforted by a tall, shy, young woman almoner (hospital social worker), who was more than half in love with him. He left her everything he had, which was £500, and told her that this would make "a window in your home".

In 1967, that home took the form of St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham. There are now more than 200 hospices based on its model in Britain, and the hospice movement is active in more than 120 countries. The woman almoner was called Cicely Saunders.

She died last week, of a cancer from which she had suffered for several years, in the home that Tasma's bequest inspired. Dame Cicely has attracted admiring obituaries, of course, but I am not sure that people have quite noticed the scale of her achievement.

To the dying Tasma, Cicely recited the 23rd Psalm, the favourite for funerals. It says, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Almost all of us, when our time comes to take that walk, fear evil very much indeed. She observed this, and worked out how to minister to that fear.

Jas

The Daily Telegraph

23.7.2005

A living message from the valley of the shadow of death

Dame Cicely's gift was to unite the physical with the spiritual. She started as a nurse and had to give that up because of back trouble and become an almoner. Then, in her thirties, she returned to school to become a doctor.

She was therefore an entire professional health care team in one. When she was a nurse during the war, she was horrified by how patients had to "earn their morphine" by exhibiting unmanageable levels of pain. Doctors shunned it, because of fear of addiction and because they thought it did not work by mouth.

In research which she began in the late 1950s, Cicely Saunders discovered that pain could be managed by oral drugs, and that if, in terminal cases, people were given strong analgesia before the onset of pain, they could be relieved with relatively small doses, and without addiction.

This was a purely medical discovery. But with it, she developed the concept of "total pain". She saw that people's suffering as they approached death might involve everything about their lives - their fear of extinction or punishment, their anxiety for the family they were leaving, their remorse, their sense of meaninglessness.

This was real pain, which heightened the physical agony, just as the physical agony heightened the other fears. Her answer was to listen to the dying, on the grounds that each death, like each life, was unique: "You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life."

Common sense, you might say, common humanity. Yet it went against the prevailing medical view. When he set up the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan declared that he would "rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of sympathy in a small one".

That coldness was seen by many as a virtue in itself. Death was a form of inefficiency and, for a doctor, a sort of failure, since it could never be "cured". Dying was not part of the vision of the NHS. Recent evidence about what happens to old people in so many hospitals today (see Panorama's programme this week) suggests that it still isn't. This is a great moral, human disaster.

Dame Cicely understood that the "gush of sympathy" or, rather, the calm, steady flow of the stuff was just as much a part of the ministry of health (as opposed to the Ministry of Health) as was technical expertise. She sought "the match between heart and mind - research, training, understanding, had to be matched with the vulnerable friendship of the heart".

Almost as bad as sheer neglect of the dying was the belief - convenient for professionals, and also for those families who didn't want the difficult conversations - that the approach of death, particularly in the form of cancer, should be concealed from the patient because it was unbearable.

It wasn't the kindest thing to jolly people along, Dame Cicely thought: it was a failure to confront the truth, to acquire "the full understanding of what is happening". Again and again she found (and she went on personally ministering to the dying right into her seventies) that if people had the chance to work through their perplexities, they could face what was coming.

She particularly remembered one man who had been in great agony of mind, but had at last resolved it, about an hour before he died: "Suddenly he looked amused." Talk mattered a great deal, she believed, but so did silence, and she emphasised how important it was that people should have the right things to look upon - art by their beds, design that soothed, a chapel to pray in.

The phrase "being there for someone" is now a cliché of pop-psychology, but it means something, and Dame Cicely thought of it. She derived it from Jesus's request to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his death: "Watch with me" (an injunction which they disobeyed).

I did not know Cicely Saunders. I gather from people who did that she had the mental toughness which is to human goodness what physical fitness is to athletes. You and I read thrillers in the bath: she read spiritual classics.

She said that her favourite pastime was "a sacred cow shoot". She was formidable, could even be forbidding. She stared at you, unblinking. People who disagreed with her sometimes got short shrift. She fitted the Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa model of fierce devotion to the great task.

But when she spoke of the "vulnerability of the heart", she knew what that meant, too. She had loved David Tasma, and it was his loss that inspired her. When doing her research into pain control at St Joseph's Hackney, she fell in love with a second Pole, who died there. She eventually married a third Pole, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, an artist, who died in 1995. "Total pain" was something she had seen, had felt. People who watched her die testified that she had overcome it.

Because of demography and medical advance, there has never been a time in our civilisation when death has come so stealthily and so late to so many. Compared with our forebears, we are privileged. But as is often the case with the privileged, we are also frightened.

So we more and more seek euthanasia, which in turn only increases fear. We think that we can take some bypass which avoids the valley of the shadow of death. No, says Cicely Saunders: we're all on the same journey; let us make it together, to the very end.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.

A living message from the valley of the shadow of death, DT, 23.7.2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/23/do2301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/07/23/ixopinion.html

Brain dead American woman gives birth to girl

Tue Aug 2, 2005
10:46 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A 26-year-old brain dead pregnant woman kept on life support for almost three months at a Virginia hospital gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The baby, delivered by caesarean section, weighed one pound and 13 ounces (0.8 kg) and was being monitored in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Virginia Hospital Center, the hospital said in a statement.

The mother, Susan Torres, suffered a stroke on May 7 in the 17th week of her pregnancy due to an aggressive melanoma and was brain dead, her family said.

A statement on The Susan M. Torres Fund Web site said the baby, named Susan Anne Catherine Torres, was doing well and there were no complications during delivery.

The fund was established to help the Torres family raise money to defray medical costs not covered by insurance. The mother was kept on life support at Virginia Hospital Center to allow time for the fetus to develop.

"The entire staff and administration of Virginia Hospital Center, especially the physicians and nurses caring for Susan Torres and Baby Girl Torres, are delighted with the successful delivery," the hospital statement said.

The hospital provided no further information.

Brain dead American woman gives birth to girl, R, Tue Aug 2, 2005 10:46 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-08-03T024537Z_01_N02658563_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-LIFE-BABY-DC.XML

Where Death Comes in Winter,

and Burial in the Spring

May 1, 2005
The New York Times
By DONNA LIQUORI

GREENFIELD CENTER, N.Y. - Spencer Mangino, a 4-year-old, was buried on April 23 in a cemetery in this rural upstate community, nearly a month after he died.

The delay was "like the absolute worst day of your life is prolonged," said his mother, Marcy Mangino.

It is not unusual for families here to wait weeks, even months, to bury loved ones who die during the region's long winters, which freeze the earth solid. But now, with the ground yielding to daffodils and tulips, burials have begun again at the small, mostly rural cemeteries across the northern half of New York State that close in wintertime and do not reopen until the spring thaw.

"Our whole house - everybody is a disaster," Mrs. Mangino said a few days after her son was buried in Greenfield Cemetery, in Saratoga County, where graves date to the mid-1800's. "It brought it all back fresh. It was horrible."

The ritual of spring burials in parts of upstate New York and other northern areas began long before the first grave was dug in Greenfield Cemetery. The bodies of people who die in the winter are stored in cemetery vaults and at funeral homes until it is warm enough to dig into the earth.

Randy McCullough, a spokesman for the New York State Funeral Directors Association, estimated that 1,000 burials were delayed this winter. That means that family members and friends who attended funerals during the colder months are now gathering to grieve once again.

The long delays would all but end under a plan state lawmakers are considering that would require year-round burials. There would be provisions for exceptionally bad weather, but cemeteries that fail to comply would face fines of $250.

"You can't just close down because your cemetery caretaker goes to Florida for six months," said Assemblywoman RoAnn M. Destito, a Democrat from Rome, a sponsor of the bill. "I think we need to move this system into the 21st century."

The proposal has divided funeral directors, who must deal with a backlog of burials in the spring, and cemetery caretakers, who say it would be too expensive for many small cemeteries to buy the more powerful equipment needed to cut through the frozen earth.

If the legislation becomes law, New York would become the third state, after Minnesota and Wisconsin, to require winter burials, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The funeral directors, who are pushing the legislation, say the practice is outdated, extends the grieving process for the family and is costly for families to have to return for spring burials.

Joseph Dispenza, the president of the New York State Association of Cemeteries, said he questioned the motives of the funeral directors. "This is yet another opportunity through legislation to mandate a fee on the family to line the pockets of the for-profit mortuaries," Mr. Dispenza said.

Families would have to pay for the extra costs needed to dig through the frozen ground, he said. But Mr. McCullough said costs may actually decrease because funeral directors' services would not be required for another day to oversee the spring burial.

Mr. Dispenza said, however, that the costs of new equipment and remaining open during the winter could be too steep for some smaller cemeteries and might force them to close permanently.

"How does a cemetery control nature?" asked Mr. Dispenza. "How does a cemetery change the hand of God - the nature of the hand of God?"

Mr. Dispenza said upstate communities had long accepted the practice of cemeteries closing for the winter, and that he did not realize that some people had objections until the legislation was announced at a news conference held by funeral directors' association. Dr. Rudy Nydegger, a clinical psychologist in Schenectady who has worked with hospice patients and their families, has assessed the grief associated with spring burials in his work.

"The acuteness of those feelings probably won't last as long or be quite as disruptive as it might have been at the time of the death," Dr. Nydegger said. "Not that it's easier. There's been some partial grieving going on in the interim."

Mark Phillips, a Saratoga funeral director who is member of the board of the funeral directors' association, handled Spencer Mangino's funeral, held on April 4. The child died of mitochondrial disease, a genetic degenerative illness, on March 30.

Mr. Phillips said he kept the boy's body at the funeral home until his burial because his mother strongly objected to its being placed in the vault at another cemetery, where he had stored 20 bodies for the winter.

"I hate to say it's an inconvenience, but it's an infringement on their mourning process," Mr. Phillips said, referring to the practice of closing cemeteries. A representative of Greenfield Cemetery, where the boy was buried, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Webster Union Cemetery, 10 miles east of Rochester, usually closes for February and March. "We try to do them as much as we can until the weather gets bad," said Tom Anderson, the cemetery superintendent.

For the most part, Mr. Anderson said, people understand that winter burials may not be possible. They are warned when they purchase their plots, he said.

If the proposal to mandate winter burials becomes law, Mr. Anderson said, the cemetery, a nonprofit organization, will adapt. A stronger backhoe will be needed and additional workers will be hired. But for now, the weather determines the cemetery's season.

At Graceland Cemetery in Albany, where year-round burials are conducted, a century-old granite receiving vault houses bodies that will be taken to smaller cemeteries. There are 60 marble slots in the vault; eight of those held coffins with bodies awaiting burial on Friday. Several of them had been there since January. Graceland's caretaker, Bob Curtis Jr., said he used a "frost dome," a tin structure that is heated by propane, to soften the earth in the winter.

Mr. Curtis, who also takes care of two other cemeteries, including one that does not do winter burials, said he thought the legislation would help grieving families.

"They get over it easier doing it once," he said.

Where Death Comes in Winter, and Burial in the Spring, NYT, May 1, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/nyregion/01burial.html

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