The late Oliver Sacks’s life partner, Bill Hayes, has written Insomniac City, New York, Oliver and Me. It is an incredible memoir and honors his relationship with Oliver, Oliver’s decline and death, and Bill’s love of New York City. The writing, the telling, pulls the reader into a place that is quietly special.

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

 

After all, there are many ways to die — peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead — one either is or isn’t.

 

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause — to memorize moments of the everyday.

I highly recommend the book – for many reasons – but it shines in its ability to remove the reader from the current political intensity. It reminds us that we can be inspired. It reminds us that the world at large doesn’t need to change who we are or how we chose to be. It reminds us to pay attention to what brings us joy.

Found on Amazon.com

We are featuring a recent video, “A Life Worth Living”, made by the NYC support agency, OHEL.

The Roth family shares their experience of losing their son, Jonathan, to suicide.  The video is particularly important because it emphasizes how easy it is to ignore, and/or miss signs that a teen is suicidal.

Watch Video>  A Life Worth Living

For more info on OHEL:  www.ohelfamily.org

If you want to access free audios by Vicki to quell your anxiety, deal with your grief, find sleep or just become motivated, go to her YouTube Channel, ComfortCareConnection.

If you liked this post, please forward! Thanks!

Vicki Panagotacos PhD, FT is a grief counselor and life transition coach.  She writes for her blog, TalkingGrief.com, is founder of BestGriefBooks.com, and author of Gaining Traction: Starting Over After the Death of a Life Partner.

In the last weeks, clients have asked me, “What were people thinking when they voted for Trump? My answer has been some form of: “They weren’t thinking, they were feeling. If a person doesn’t feel safe, they are less likely to be able to think –  so they take a stab in the dark.”

They did and now we shall see.

The Mourning After the Election

Many agree with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who said in his Nov. 13th online comment: “(Trump’s) level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of the clinical environment.”

• Few voters are aware of recent research showing roughly 20% of CEO’s are psychopaths – the same rate found in the prison population.
• US Emory University researcher Scott Lilienfeld found that psychopaths are over-represented in the fields of politics, business, and high-risk sport. UK Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton’s research showed that CEO’s, lawyers, TV/Radio media, salespeople and surgeons are the professions with the highest number of psychopaths.

How does a psychopath behave?

“Trauma is contagious; but love is contagious too – that’s another thing I learned – it is the healing agent.”

I occasionally post an article which addresses a problem so foreign to my experience that it is important to hear it from another. In this post, London-based psychotherapist tells a heart-rending story about how art is allowing Ugandan adults to finally speak about being child soldiers.

It is an opportunity for each of us to realize:

I am all right right now I am all right,

and to be grateful.

Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2016/oct/25/hearing-these-stories-changes-you-it-makes-you-more-human

(Excerpt from coming book, Help! Someone Died!)

Is there a downside to trading in the funeral…for a celebration-of-life service?

I have attended end-of-life services since I was toddler and have watched the services move from being a sacred space of shared sorrow and concern for the surviving family—to being a memorial, which seems to be a secular form of funeral—to the current trend of celebration that rewinds the deceased’s life away from the tear-filled reality of death entirely.

There seems to be trend in the US for milestones such as bar/bat mitzvahs, high school proms, graduations, weddings and now, end-of-life services, to be lavish rather than intimate.

Do deathstyles match our lifestyles?

We naturally distance ourselves from what is unpleasant but, historically, we didn’t expect every life experience to be enjoyable and we didn’t distance ourselves from the reality of death. When someone died, friends and neighbors actively helped the family face the reality and mourn the death, because the potential of the entire community was as important as individual potential. As far as the deceased’s legacy was concerned, it was obvious the day the person died, for good or ill.

Is there value in gravity?

(Excerpt from coming book, Help! Someone Died!)

Ancient Egypt: Tomb of Ramos – Funeral Procession

Evidence of the desire to reunite a decedent’s soul with their ancestors in the spirit world goes back to Neanderthal man. This ceremonial quest for immortality continued, for the most part, to be the norm up to and into our contemporary western funerals. *

Until the 1960’s.

The 1960’s Revolution

The 60’s brought revolutionary change to every facet of society as young people disrupted and deconstructed the socio/political process and pulled away from organized religion.

Today, our American culture continues to shift from the sacred to a secular end-of-life service, except for active Catholics, High Episcopalians, Muslims and members of the Orthodox faiths.

The ever-evolving end-of-life practices

• Obituaries: In the past a short obituary ran in the local newspaper giving the deceased’s name, date and cause of death, and time and place for the visitation and funeral service. Now, if an obituary is published in a local paper or online, the primary focus in on the deceased’s life. The cause of death is often omitted, and service details may or may not be listed.
• Visitation: In the past, one or two evenings were set aside prior to the funeral so friends could gather at the funeral home and view the deceased in an open casket. (The exception: Jewish tradition required burial within 24 hours of death.) Now visitations are less common because younger generations consider an open casket barbaric.

Sometimes a person writes of their experience of deep grief—from a place so outside of my own—that I post their entire article.

Today’s post is one of those times.

I am not black, and I can’t authentically write about the black experience. Nikole-Hannah-Jones is and she can.

Nikole’s article does not report an opinion; she invites you into her experience. Remember, trauma is not an event, it is an experience.

And so I thank Nikole, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and 2016 Peabody Award winner, for writing The Grief White American’s Can’t Share.