Help Desk from the New York Times Book Review: How to grieve and how to die.

Or let nature help you:
Take a walk or make a garden.

Okay, there are economic reasons for making the most of life while encouraging a shorter death watch. The Economist April 29, 2017 admonishes that living as long as possible isn't really the best way to go.

There are also reasons of human kindness and love.  The bar graph accompanying What Matters Most in the same edition of the weekly news magazine is not living as long as possible.  Only about 17% of Japanese, 40% Italians and 45% Americans want to live as long as possible.  Maybe they've seen and experienced enough with up-close views of the end-stage suffering still permitted in countries that don't understand the concept "death with dignity".

~

Death With Dignity Locations in the U.S.A.

• California (End of Life Option Act; 2016)
• Colorado (End of Life Options Act; 2016)
• District of Columbia (Death with Dignity Act; 2017)
• Oregon (Oregon Death with Dignity Act; 1994/1997)
• Vermont (Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act; 2013)
• Washington (Washington Death with Dignity Act; 2008)     Source: https://www.deathwithdignity.org/learn/death-with-dignity-acts/

Open Grave, the movie

I started writing Open Grave as a zine-newsletter in 1978.  First story featured a grave digger who was transporting concrete grave liners in Florida.   Online version of  Open Grave started in 2008.

Now there's a movie called Open Grave.  

And a band called Open Grave.

Universal subject.

Death in Tuscany

I am lying on a hillside in Tuscany pretending to be dead.  My body cells merge with the grass and dirt.  I would be the organic being I strive to be.  A wind courses through the trees, the few left by  industrious firewood harvesters.  They are wise enough to leave shade trees, well-spaced saplings and venerable flowering fruit trees.  

An octopus-shaped cloud obscures the sun.  A few minutes ago it was a flying goddess with a swan on her back.  The clothes under my body would be better on, but then have buried me naked so I know I am alive.

Holy Casket Makers!

Wood coffin made at Saint Joseph Abbey.
Photo: CatholicNewsAgency.com

The 37 monks at Saint Joseph Abbey near Covington, Louisiana support their monastery by selling simple handmade wooden caskets.  The relatively modest coffins sell for $1,500 to $2,000 -- far less than the typical burial casket with all the trimmings offered on the funeral director's sales floor.

The state's funeral directors believed they had a lock on the sale of coffins, caskets and other trappings of burial.  The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors tried to shut down coffin making and selling at the monastery, citing a state regulation crafted to benefit the funeral directors and embalmers, that the casket market is only open to licensed funeral directors. 

The monks enlisted the help of the Institute for Justice to initiate a legal action to repudiate the state-wide grip the funeral managers had on all funeral-related business.

"The great deference due state economic regulation does not demand judicial blindness to the history of a challenged rule ... nor does it require courts to accept nonsensical explanations for naked transfers of wealth," Circuit Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham wrote, referring to the long sweet deal the funeral directors held over all aspects of funeral services and equipment in Louisiana. 

As of March, 2013, the monks can make 

Saint Joseph Abbey monks at work.
Photo: ReligionNews.com

and sell the wooden coffins and the funeral directors can't stop them.  As reported in Religion News.com, the  Appeal in the U.S. Fifth Circuit came out on the side of consumers and the monastery-based small business: "Funeral homes, not independent sellers, have been the problem for consumers with their bundling of product and markups of caskets. The “grant of an exclusive right of sale (for licensed funeral directors) adds nothing to protect consumers and puts them at a greater risk of abuse including exploitative prices.”

The "coffin cartel" --as one blogger put it-- funeral directors aren't going to let their cash cow go easily. In July, 2013, the Times-Picayune reports, the Louisiana embalmers and funeral directors petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn federal district and appeals court rulings in favor of the monks' right to free enterprise, the making and selling of wood caskets.

More:

Barnes, Robert. A victory for monks in fight over caskets. The Washington Post, October 25, 2012, p. A3.

Sullivan, Laura (host). Louisiana Abbey Finally Able to Sell its Caskets. All Things Considered. National Public Radio, March 31, 2013.

End of Life::Right to End of Life

YÉH√ **√HÉY 

there is no reason to be

afraid of death 

you get a new life

Celebrities  sometimes refer to whom they might have been, had they been, in a past life.

Songwriters, poets and  ordinary folks too, make off-hand comments explaining certain behavior as caused by a past life, or express a desire to do something in a future life.

Yet many people don't seem to get beyond the joking,

self-deprecating remarks to really study the self and the

experience that comes through lives and deaths, life and death.

The concept that the spirit lives beyond the body isn't new.

One way or another, it's been expressed by the world's

religions, secure in their authority won by the sword. 

Some faiths explain the soul returning to the

physical world, some would have the body reuniting with the spirit. 

Religion salvages the notion: not just here today, gone tomorrow.  

Is there a willingness to speak out, or at least mention the possibility, that the human spirit

endures?  Let's push the dialogue and share what we know about death. 

Communication about what people think and feel about life and death would help humans relax, understand their inner nature and prepare for the stages of the physical ending of

life and the advance into death.  

Myth-busting might change attitudes and release the care of the body and spirit for those approaching death, free them from the preachers, doctors and undertakers. We need to be sure that all have the right to their chosen care at end of life.  No extra permits, certificates, living wills and powers of attorneys.  The simple right to chose manner of death and care at end of life must be left to the individual and the chosen circle. 

I think we of human spirit should strive to reduce the impact of the

tangible and spend more time concentrating on the unseen world.

There is much more to see there.