Living Years Blog

Entries categorized as ‘Research’

Death leaves online lives stuck in limbo

November 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

NEW YORK (AP) W hen Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.

It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password, and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Kentucky, heard about Spangenberg’s death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

“I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off,” Pagoria said. “I was blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn’t been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out.”

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they’re also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There’s even a tiny industry that has emerged to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant’s father died last year, he left his son a USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Oklahoma. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

“It was creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead,” Bryant said. “It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed.”

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

“I work in the world’s largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn’t expect that just five minutes earlier,” he said. “If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are.”

For more of this facinating article by PETER SVENSSON of The Associated Press, you can read it here.

Categories: Events · Living History · News Items · Research

Six Interesting Facts about Death

November 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Little Known Fact About Death #1 ~
At least one place (in India) doesn’t bury their dead. They leave the dead bodies sitting out to be consumed by vultures.

Little Known Fact About Death #2 ~
In the 19th century, Egypt had such an excess of mummies that they started using them as fuel for trains engines.

Little Known Fact About Death #3 ~
Approximately 100,000,000,000 people (that’s 100 billion!) have died since humans began.

Little Known Fact About Death #4 ~
Queen Victoria insisted that she get buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert. She also took a plaster cast of Albert’s hand with her to the grave.

Little Known Fact About Death #5 ~
A Swedish company called ‘Promessa’ now offers an ecological burial. They freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, then pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and then put your powdered remains into a cornstarch coffin. It all decomposes within six to twelve months.

Little Known Fact About Death #6 ~
Maybe people just aren’t comfortable using the word ‘die’. There are more than 200 euphemisms for death, so we don’t have to utter the real words.

Categories: Celebrating Life · Interesting Facts · Research

A Greener Resting Place

November 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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Eckhard Kennerer came up with the concept for Life Art’s cardboard coffins 5 years ago. Three years was spent in developing and perfecting the product, and it was necessary for the product to pass all the relevant safety and regulation checks before it could be used in the industry.

In 2005 the industry (composed of funeral homes and funeral directors) were not at all keen to embrace another cardboard coffin concept. Conventional caskets for the deceased are beautifully polished wood-finished with elaborate handle designs, interiors and fastenings, which are not at all cheap: no wonder funeral directors were well used to hearing from customers “I’d be happy to be buried in a cardboard box!” Ironically, cardboard coffins do not work out that much cheaper than a basic wooden coffin, but there is satisfaction in knowing though that these coffins are made from 90% recycled paper and biodegrade much more quickly in the earth.

They are also suitable for cremation, which makes up 80% of metropolitan funerals, in that they use up a lot less energy. LifeArt is unique not only in that it makes “environmentally friendly” coffins, but also that these containers can be personalised and creative – with artistic images representing the deceased life and interests able to be adorned on the coffin’s exterior. Workers at LifeArt feel that this is a positive, warm and therapeutic way of dealing with an otherwise difficult, traumatic and dark time.

For more information, click on the picture above to watch the video.

Categories: Celebrating Life · Living History · News Items · Research

Maybe grief isn’t so bad afterall

November 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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Regardless of how well we look after our health, it is a given that we will die one day. By caring for our bodies we can enjoy good health for as long as we live but we will not live on this earth forever. We all know this and yet death is  a subject many people avoid thinking or talking about.

When someone we know and love dies it is normal to feel sad and to grieve for that person. There are many different ways in which people do this. Many cultures have rituals and ceremonies around death to help those who remain behind to come to acceptance and closure.

The vast majority of people will do exactly that in their own way and in their own time-if we let them. More recently there has been ,as part of a general trend to medicalize normal human emotions, a tendency to see grief as some form of illness which requires some form of treatment.

It is interesting then to see a new book, ”The other side of sadness” which has looked at the path of many people through grief. The finding is that 85 to 90% of people cope and adapt in their own way and time without any form of treatment including formal counseling.

Is this really surprising?  People have coped with death since the beginning of mankind. Whilst counseling has a role for some people, the majority will do just fine with adequate time and the support of friends and family. When facing grief we need to be able to both enjoy memories of the god times coupled with sadness that there will be no more good times with the deceased.

What sometimes makes it tricky is that there can be mixed emotions. This too is quite normal. We might be angry or have unresolved conflicts with the person who has died. It is seen as inappropriate to be angry with someone who has passed on but the fact that they have does not in itself mean that suddenly the issue you had with them has died.  It means though that you must now come to terms with it without the other person. Sometimes we need to shake our fist at the sky or stomp our feet to release the emotion. This is not for everyone but has a valid role for some.

The key in all this is that grief is a normal human emotion. It is not a disease, which requires treatment. It is a reaction to an event such as the passing of a loved one. It is no more abnormal to feel grief in this situation than to feel joy on winning lotto yet no one would suggest counseling after the latter.

Some people will benefit from counseling if they are getting “stuck” and find themselves not able to move on with their lives. However just the knowledge that what you are experiencing is normal ,and that in most instances will be a stage from which you emerge is an empowering start point.

For more information on Dr. Joe, you can visit his website here.

Categories: Interesting Facts · Interviews · News Items · Research

Rear Vision’s Palliative Care podcast

November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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First broadcast by Radio National in may, 2009, this palliative care podcast covers it’s short history and practive throughout the world. Rear Vision tracks the history of this approach to dying from its origins in Britain to Australia, where the world’s first professor of palliative care was appointed.

The transcript is available here, or you can listen to it directly here: 

Categories: Interesting Facts · Interviews · Living History · News Items · Pod Cast · Research

Did you know that…

October 30, 2009 · 1 Comment

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The most expensive funeral so far was that of Alexander the Great. It would cost about $600,000,000 in today’s money.  One of the reasons was the building of a road from Babylon to Alexandria, big enough move a jewel studded hearse the size of a small building which was pulled by 64 horses.

Categories: Interesting Facts · News Items · Research

What really happens when you die?

October 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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As I have said here many times before, in working for Living Years you come across some pretty interesting information.  I just found this amazing, and very practicle article on the topic of “what happens when you die”.  Now I’m not talking in the spiritual context, but more the “what happens to my body” context.

Here are some snippets from the article:

To certify that someone is dead, you listen to the heart for one minute and feel for a pulse for one minute. You examine for signs of breathing, you look at the pupils to check there is no response to a shining light. If you’re not certain, you can rub on the breastbone, which is a very painful procedure: if they are not dead, they’ll quickly jump up and say, “That hurt!”

Many good things may come from a postmortem. You may find something that is relevant to subsequent generations – say, if a young mother has died and you find a coincidental breast cancer, you would suggest screening for her children.

The cremation chamber is fuelled by gas and has to be heated to at least 750C before we can load, or “charge”, the coffin. We have to adhere to strict guidelines and everything is logged automatically on the computer – time, date, duration, emissions, smoke levels, carbon monoxide, oxygen levels and the temperature in the different parts of the cremator. The computer prints out a report and every few months these are sent to environmental health.

One of the biggest problems with cremation is the amount of mercury going into the atmosphere and the ecosystem. In Britain, about 16% of the mercury that goes into the atmosphere is caused by cremations. Resomation is a greener alternative to cremation. It uses water, potassium hydroxide and steam heat to dissolve the body. At the moment there are only a few resomation chambers in operation in the world, all of them in the US – ours is at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota – but there has been interest from several UK councils and cemeteries about installing them. It does offer people a greener option.

For the full article, you can find it here:  guardian.co.uk

Categories: Interesting Facts · News Items · Research

Secrets of the centenarians: Life begins at 100

October 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Old peopleTHIS year, the number of pensioners in the UK exceeded the number of minors for the first time in history. That’s remarkable in its own right, but the real “population explosion” has been among the oldest of the old – the centenarians. In fact, this is the fastest-growing demographic in much of the developed world. In the UK, their numbers have increased by a factor of 60 since the early 20th century. And their ranks are set to swell even further, thanks to the ageing baby-boomer generation: by 2030 there will be about a million worldwide.

These trends raise social, ethical and economic dilemmas. Are medical advances artificially prolonging life with little regard for the quality of that life? Old age brings an increased risk of chronic disease, disability and dementia, and if growing numbers of elderly people become dependent on state or familial support, society faces skyrocketing costs and commitments. This is the dark cloud outside the silver lining of increasing longevity. Yet researchers who study the oldest old have made a surprising discovery that presents a less bleak vision of the future than many anticipate.

To read the full article, head on over to The New Scientist.  Well worth a read.

Categories: Documentaries · Interesting Facts · Living History · News Items · Research