year many New Yorkers had never heard of Hart Island, where the city’s unclaimed dead are buried. Then, in the midst of the pandemic, video of contractors digging long trenches there went viral. Around 120 bodies were sent to the tiny islet every week, as burial grounds and crematoriums struggled to keep pace with covid-19. One funeral home in Brooklyn was sued for stacking bodies in an unrefrigerated rental truck.
The pandemic has helped people to get over such shyness. Susan Barsky Reid launched the Death Café in 2011, organising meetups between strangers over cake and tea to discuss everything from estate planning to theories of the afterlife. The number of events has shot up this year. “You don’t get pregnant by talking about sex and you don’t die by talking about death,” she says, but many people think it bad luck.
Massachusetts General Hospital, also in Boston, began training doctors in 2017 to have such conversations and document them in patients’ files. In April and May alone the hospital recorded 5,100 conversations, two-thirds as many as the total up to then. “It is mortality salience that allows clinicians, patients and families to get over the emotional barriers,” says Vicki Jackson, head of the hospital’s palliative care and geriatric medicine division.
For the Tana Torajans in Indonesia the home is deathbed and funeral parlour. Saba Mairi’ recalls losing her grandfather when she was 11. Her family kept his body in a room next to the kitchen, offering him rice and water at mealtimes. Even after the funeral five years later the family did not say goodbye. Following Torajan tradition, they periodically fetch mummified bodies from their tombs, clean them, dress them in new clothes and throw a party.
In the West, ironically, the pandemic is threatening the traditional funeral industry. America’s National Funeral Directors Association says cremation rates have risen, partly because some regulators banned burials for victims of covid-19 in case corpses carry the virus. This furthers a decades-long shift that squeezes the industry’s profitability. In 2015 cremations overtook burials as the most common form of funeral in America.
Cremation is the best way to go. Bodies can still be infected & far less space is required.
💩💤
Wut?
Try treating them like human beings, they're dieing, not dead. Respect them like anyone else, let them know they are loved & made a difference.
Most Germans don't know how to act even around living people
Probably didn't feel shy because they wouldn't let us in the hospital to see our family members
RT : This year 40% of British people who lost a family member to covid-19 wrote down their end-of-life wishes, and a third planned their own funerals
Not sure what the point of this article is. “Some people plan their own funerals and sort out their own wills”...so?
China CCP CPC ChinaVirus kill BoycottChina to stop China bio-weapon
That’s not a British cemetery trying to deceive readers
Thinking about DEATH often leads one to a righteous way of LIFE
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