Month: May 2020

Does Death Cafe Offer A Way Of Coping With COVID-19?

The Covid19 pandemic has brought us face to face with our mortality and that of our friends and relations in a way that few of us have ever experienced before. Is this going to be a major step towards society’s acceptance of death as something to be discussed openly?

The Death Cafe movement was the brainchild of Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz and the first ‘Cafe Mortel’ was held in Neuchatel in 2004 and since then has gained a foothold in more than 70 countries worldwide. In the UK, the baton for the Death Cafe movement was taken up by Jon Underwood and the first meeting was held at his London home in 2011.

The aim of the cafe movement back then, and to this day, is to break the ‘tyrannical secrecy’ surrounding the topic of death, by offering anyone interested a safe place to discuss all things death-related in a non-judgmental environment.

The outbreak of Covid19 has led to a surge of interest in Death Cafes reported from all areas and whilst facilitators cannot hold face to face meetings, they are still arranging meetings online via Zoom or other facetime apps.

What happens at a Death cafe?

First of all, the meetings are not always held in cafes. But they do always supply tea, coffee, and cake. A facilitator will lead the discussions and questions like ‘How would you like to die? In your sleep? In a hospital? ‘ ‘Would you like a funeral or cremation?’ ‘What music would you like to have played?’ There is no right or wrong answer and no obligation to give an answer.

Importantly, the cafes are non-profit and rely on contributions from attendees and there is no agenda either in the sense of what to talk about or in the sense of leading people to a decision. They are most definitely not a platform for sales or promoting businesses.

And while a lot of attendees find themselves going to a Death Cafe because they have experienced a loss first-hand, the cafes don’t offer bereavement support or counselling. There are no guest-speakers, set questions or topics to discuss. The cafes are not morbid in any way and their aim is to make people make the most of their lives by embracing the inevitable and discussing it openly.

Why now?

If we were to turn the clock back just over 100 years or so, we would have found ourselves in very different times. Times where our acceptance of death was far more heightened than it is today. Families were much larger because the high rate of infant mortality meant that families expected to lose some children in infancy.

Husbands, fathers and brothers went off to fight in one of the bloodiest wars the world has seen and families weren’t ever sure they would see them again. Medicine, hygiene and hospital care was nothing like as advanced as it is now and death was all around. Since those times, as a society we have sleep-walked into believing that for some reason death won’t happen and we shouldn’t talk about it.

Jon Underwood pointed out that Western society has effectively outsourced its’ discussions on death to third parties, doctors, priests and funeral directors. And as a result, this outsourcing that has led to us being ill-equipped to deal with death when it is an inevitable part of life.

The last taboo

If we are to take anything positive away from this pandemic then it must surely be that it has opened a door to people wanting to discuss topics related to death; living wills, funeral plans, or advanced care discussions.

Our death may not be exactly what we expected and whilst we can’t plan for exactly when it will happen, what we can do is go some way towards opening the discussions about the inevitable and taking on the last taboo.

In my role as a celebrant, I am in no way endorsing Death Cafe, but should you wish to look into this further and find where your nearest or next meeting might be, then go to https://deathcafe.com/

A Fascinating Find in a Dorset Graveyard

How a day out in a Dorset village led us to finding out about the renowned 18th-century farmer and pioneer of inoculation, Benjamin Jesty.

as our lockdown woes began to ease recently, we decided to go out for a day trip to the Dorset countryside.

We’d been recommended to go to Worth Matravers, a few miles outside of Corfe on the way to Swanage. It was a glorious day and because some restrictions were still in place we were able to park in the charming village without any bother.

The village itself looks probably much the same as it did back in the 17th & 18th centuries, with the small cottages built from local stone. In fact, any new dwellings still have to be built from the same stone.

As we took in the village, I saw St Nicholas Church and made my way in to take a few photos. To the far side of the church and not visible from the road were two very well-tended gravestones. Thinking they must be the graves of recently deceased local dignitaries, I looked closer and found they were the graves of Benjamin Jesty and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom had died in the early 19th century.

Who was Benjamin Jesty?

Benjamin Jesty was a farmer from Yetminster in Dorset, born in 1736. He married Elizabeth and together they had four sons.

What made Jesty remarkable was that at the time he was alive, smallpox was rife throughout Europe and frequently resulted in epidemics ( over 400,000 deaths annually). It became apparent that milkmaids and others who worked with cows and had contracted cowpox were able to nurse those suffering from smallpox without the danger of contracting the killer disease.

Jesty and two of his servants had already had cowpox and so were immune and when a smallpox outbreak occurred in Yetminster in 1774, Jesty had the bright idea of inoculating his wife and his two eldest sons.

Bearing in mind that Jesty was by no means a medical man, but had the idea that if he could introduce the disease into his family deliberately, they would be immune. And so, using a darning needle he transferred cowpox into his wife and children by scratching their arms. Thankfully, although his wife suffered quite a severe reaction, they all survived.

Was Jesty hailed as a hero?

You would think that after such a significant medical breakthough, Jesty would be lauded wherever he went. But this was the 18th century and instead he was reviled because people thought that introducing animal diseases into man would lead to some sort of metamorphosis into that animal.

Edward Jenner takes the credit

In 1802, some 20 years after Jesty’s pioneering work, physician Edward Jenner received a reward from the House of Commons of £10,000 ( equivalent to £1 million today) for his work on vaccines and a further £20,000 five years later. Physician George Pearson was familiar with Jesty’s earlier work and tried to get parliament to give him recognition but although Jesty’s case was well-documented he failed to petition in person and so the case was disregarded.

However, all was not lost because another physician and reverend, Dr Andrew Bell of Swanage, prepared a paper proposing Jesty as the first vaccinator and Jesty was invited along with his son to London to give their version of events before a panel of medical officers at the ‘Original Pock Institute’.

After cross-examination and inoculating his son again with smallpox, Jesty was awarded with a pair of gold mounted lancets and the results of the examination were published in the ‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal’.

Jesty was a country farmer who had realised there may be a link between immunity to one disease and the contraction of another. I don’t think he ever sought fame or riches and as if to illustrate this, when he was invited to London and his family tried to persuade him to dress in a more up-to-date fashion, he said he didn’t see why he should dress better in London than in the country.

It seems a shame that Jesty didn’t get the recognition, ( or the £10,000) that he so thoroughly deserved for most of his life, but at least now there is a permanent memorial in a Dorest graveyard to his intuition and bravery.

Why You Might Get The Response ‘Mum Was Mum’

When you first hear that phrase, it takes you aback. What do they mean? Why aren’t they prepared with dozens of stories? In this post, I’m going to look at some of the possible reasons why someone might say those words.

A few years ago, I asked a bereaved son to tell me about his mother, who he clearly loved dearly.

He thought for a moment and replied, ”Mum was mum.”. I have to say that I at the time, I was somewhat taken aback. How could anyone possibly be so dismissive about their mother? After all,this was someone who looked after you your whole life, cooked for you, cared for you, loved you unconditionally for over 50 years and all you can say is ‘Mum was mum.’

I found over time, the answer was repeated and so, I took some time to have a look at the facts behind this alarmingly offhand comment. And there were two areas to take into account.

The Background

I realised that, on the whole, the mums in question were usually in their 80s or 90s and so they’d been bringing up their children in the late 50s and early 60s and they were very different times.

At the risk of generalising from the specific, these mums had several things in common;

  1. They hadn’t gone on to further education.
  2. They didn’t have a career.
  3. They had married at a young age.
  4. Any job they had done had been given up to care for their children.
  5. They had been stay at home housewives while the husband worked.
  6. They hadn’t travelled widely.
  7. They didn’t have exciting hobbies to speak of.
  8. They didn’t have much time for hobbies or pastimes.
  9. They had largely been ‘in the background’ being mums.
  10. They didn’t have an extensive social life.

And so, despite my surprise at the phrase, that was exactly how they’d been seen. And it wasn’t meant in an insulting or denigrating manner. I just think that for many of these people losing a mum in their 80’s and 90’s, that was exactly how so many of them were seen. Despite the hugely important role they played, they had no chance to shine as individuals because the work they were expected to do was all-consuming, and that was symptomatic of the era they found themselves in.

The second thing to take into account is;

The Brain

In spite of the fact that our brains are without question more powerful than any computer ever built, if you ask a simple open-ended question like ‘Tell me about X’ it will freeze.

Why?

Firstly, there is just too much information to process in one hit and our brains go into panic mode. We experience what is called an ‘amygdala hijack’ ( https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack#overview ) where our amygdala ( the part of the brain that developed to control fight or flight responses to threats) takes control because of the stress of the situation and disables our ability to make logical and rational decisions. Thankfully, our frontal lobes have developed and override this, realising that the threat is not life-threatening and rational decisions can be made.

Secondly, we may be experiencing ‘attention saturation’ ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/metacognition-and-the-mind/201503/why-we-cant-remember-the-things-we-most-often-see ) a common occurrence where, if the same thing is seen on a routine basis it becomes less and less memorable. Consider growing up with a stay-at-home mum who cooked and baked every day, washed the clothes, cleaning the house, ironed, dusted and everything else and suddenly you’re being asked ‘tell me about mum’. What DO you say?

Thirdly, we may be experiencing ‘grief fog‘. Our brains are programmed to protect us and when something happens that we haven’t experienced before, especially something traumatic, like the death of a loved one, we have to begin to process the new experience. So, our brain attempts to focus and protect us simultaneously as it attempts to understand and make sense of what has happened.

Generally, with a little prompting and a little time, fond memories will come flooding back and I’m happy to say that on every occasion that I’ve heard the phrase ‘Mum was mum’, together we have always managed to produce a tribute that illustrates the wonderful qualities she possessed.

Surprising and Simple Ways To Ease Stress While You Sit At Your Desk

Dealing with families when they are at an emotional low point is likely to take its’ toll on anyone and funeral directors, arrangers, celebrants, and other funeral professionals are expected to do this on a daily basis.

When you invest so much of your own emotional well-being into giving bereaved families what they want, it is impossible to prevent your own emotional well-being from taking a bit of a battering. Little surprise then that funeral professionals are likely to suffer from ‘compassion fatigue’. ‘ a secondary traumatic stress disorder. Essentially, it’s about caring so much it begins to hurt.‘ https://www.frazerconsultants.com.

Sound familiar? What can we do?

In recent posts, https://celebrantglynbawden.com/5-reasons-why-its-hard-for-us-to-say-no/ and https://celebrantglynbawden.com/5-reasons-why-you-should-say-no-more-often/ I covered some of the reasons why its’ hard for funeral service professionals to say ‘No’ but why saying ‘No’ is actually important. In today’s post, I want to look at some simple and perhaps, surprising ways you can combat stress.

They aren’t expensive and they are things that anyone can do easily in just a few spare minutes.

Breathe

Breathe? Did I read that right? Yes, you did. Breathing is the one thing we all do but hardly any of us does it to benefit our health efficiently. One of the single best ways to reduce stress and to give you an energy boost is deep breathing and this can be done LITERALLY anywhere. Hard day? Try it while you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the way home.

Inhale through the nose for 3 seconds and exhale through the mouth for 3 seconds and repeat this 10 times. It is remarkable just how simple and effective this is. For more information on Perfect Breathing check out this site http://phttp://perfectbreathing.com/

Drink Orange Juice

It sounds unlikely to say the least but studies have repeatedly shown that food and drink high in Vitamin C, such as Orange Juice, reduce stress by lowering the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Two glasses a day should work fine.

Smile or Laugh

‘Smile, it might never happen!’ How many of us have heard those wonderful words of wisdom in the past? Having a laugh or even a smile does things that reduce stress in the long term. It can reduce cortisol levels, and release those endorphins that we hear so much about.

We all have phones, find a video of a cat on a skateboard and enjoy it for 5 minutes.

Pet a dog

It’s no surprise that many funeral homes have now started to have a resident ‘bereavement dog’ to hand. Stroking a dog can reduce blood pressure and ease anxiety and dogs are especially good at de-stressing us because over thousands of years they’ve been bred to be good companions and are particularly adept at feeling and responding to human emotions .

So, it’s not a mistake when people say that they are ‘man’s best friend’

Massage Your Ear

Or ‘auriculotherapy’ to give it its’ proper name. Our ears are home to multiple nerve endings and pressure points that benefit from being massaged. A gentle massage of the ear lobe can have effects like releasing endorphins ( again), boosting the immune system and stimulating relaxation.

Try rubbing the ear lobe between your thumb and forefinger, or gently tugging it away from you, stroking where the ear joins the head or massaging the cartilage which forms the main part of the ear for just a few minutes.

Act As If..

This is a strategy used by salespeople or for someone going to an interview to trick the mind into believing something else.

Our mind is such an astonishingly powerful tool, a simple trick like this can work wonders.

Because our mind is unable to differentiate between reality and what we tell it is reality, we can make it believe virtually anything. So why not tell your mind that you’re not stressed and in fact, you’re coping brilliantly with everything that’s thrown at you. Make sure that your physiological signs display the same as what you’re thinking, so slow your breathing and act calmly.

So, next time things start to get a little too much, why not try one or more of the above? Who knows, it might just help and if it doesn’t then you only wasted 5 minutes.