Author: John

Categories
Cemeteries Monuments + Memorials

Arlington National Cemetery Update…Now with Hints of Conspiracy

Warner to Introduce Bill to Revoke Reserved Plots at Arlington
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (March 30, 2011)

A quick update on Arlington National Cemetery and its ongoing problems. The lead didn’t necessarily get buried in this most recent article from the Washington Post but the entire Arlington debacle just got a lot more interesting.

As The Washington Post reports, a list has surfaced of 84 names, mostly generals and colonels, who have been promised choice spots in the cemetery, despite the ban on such favoritism. This unofficial reservation system seems to contribute to the failure to computerize records, despite millions of dollars spend on such a project, starting in 2002. It’s easier to falsify and deliberately mismanage a paper trail than it is a digital facsimile.

There has already been a Congressional investigation but I won’t be surprised if we see another.

Categories
Burial Death + Disaster

Japan Begins Mass Burials

Hasty Burial for the Dead Collides With Tradition
Michael Wines, The New York Times (March 24, 2011)
Families of the tsunami’s victims faced a mass burial in a seaport town in northeast Japan, where mathematical reality has made cremation impossible.

99%. That is the number which kept going through my head when I saw the tidal wave sweeping through northeast Japan.

99% of all Japanese dead are cremated. Indeed, Japan is always at the top of international indexes on annual cremation rates.

But when I saw the remnants of those Japanese villages, I knew that there would be too many dead bodies for the local crematoria– in the event those crematoria were even functional.

It has taken a while for this kind of story to finally emerge from Japan, but the New York Times is now reporting on mass burials of the dead. The turn to mass burials is a radical break for contemporary Japanese funereal traditions, but when confronted with the sheer numbers of dead, little choice remained.

There is one section of the article which I take slight exception to. Towards the end of the entire article, which is well reported, the following point is made:

It was the bureaucracy’s best effort to imbue Wednesday’s interments with the dignity of genuine funerals rather than what they were: an unavoidable response to a potential public health problem. Later in the day, Buddhist monks would come to the site to pray over the graves.

The often cited fear of potential public health problems is not entirely accurate. Last year, in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, the Death Reference Desk discussed the widely held misconception that dead bodies pose a public health concern. It is true that people working around masses of dead bodies should wear normal protective gear (gloves, masks, etc.) but those bodies aren not going to rampantly spread disease.

Meg wrote a particularly insightful piece on this very topic: The (un)Diseased Dead.

All this said, I understand the push for burial. Dead bodies decompose and they smell and all of this can compound the broader tragedy.

It is also important to note that Japanese officials appear to be doing something which stands in stark contrast to the Haiti situation: the dead are being identified before burial. Thousands of dead bodies were buried in Haiti without any ID’ing of the corpses. Identifying each of the bodies is important for many of the families and it helps establish who is known to be dead vs. missing and presumed dead.

As usual, we will keep an eye on this particular facet of the Japanese disaster.

Out of respect for the dead.

Categories
Cemeteries

Arlington Cemetery Debacle Gets Worse and Worse

Arlington Cemetery Struggles with Old Reservations
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (March 21, 2011)
Officials at Arlington National Cemetery — still unable to fully account for who is buried where at the nation’s premier military resting place — are struggling to determine who has reserved plots and whether some of those grave sites are already in use.

Oh poor, sad black-hole-of-problems Arlington National Cemetery. One day, a book about running modern cemeteries will be written and in said book will be a chapter entitled Arlington National Cemetery: A Case Study in Totally Preventable Burial Disasters.

Last week, I posted another Washington Post article on the mass burial of ‘unknown’ urns.

And I now have a prediction: We have not yet reached the bottom of this continuing fall from postmortem grace. It boggles the imagination to imagine what will happen next, but I know that some new terrible development is on the way.

In all fairness, Arlington Cemetery’s new executive director, Kathryn Condon, is doing an impressive job of dealing with the multiple problems she inherited from the previous overseers. You can read about all of the problems confronting Arlington Cemetery here.

The newest problem confronting Arlington, as reported in the Post article linked above, is they don’t have accurate records for who holds a gravesite reservation and where, and whether that grave is already occupied.

At some point, it would be good to compile an entire list of everything that has gone wrong at Arlington…I’ll plan on this for the future.

Coincidentally, Meg posted information yesterday on some proposed legislation working its way through the United States Congress. The Bereaved Consumer’s Bill of Rights Act of 2011 was written to deal with the kinds of problems afflicting Arlington Cemetery. Sadly, this Bill would not encompass Veterans Affairs cemeteries, such as Arlington, so it’s up to the Federal Government to make the fixes.

This story will continue.

Categories
Death + the Law Death Ethics

Suicide Tourism

The Suicide Tourist
Frontline (March 22, 2011)

On March 22, 2011, Frontline will re-broadcast its brilliant documentary The Suicide Tourist. This is an exceptionally well done documentary (even for Frontline) and it captures the end of one man’s life, Craig Ewert, with an unflinching gaze. I watched it last year. Unfortunately, the website version of the documentary is only available in America, which is too bad because everyone should watch this Frontline piece.

h_vid

The entire story is presented without sentimentality or moral judgement. It forthrightly and honestly follows Craig Ewert and his wife Mary as they travel to Dignitas in Switzerland. Many Death Reference Desk readers will have come across Dignitas either on Death Ref or in other situations. Dignitas was founded in 1998 by Ludwig Minelli and it remains one of the few places in the world that individuals can travel to, in order to end their life without hiding. Ludwig Minelli appears in the documentary and you can read a longer interview with him here.

The documentary speaks for itself, so I won’t drone on and on.

But watch it.

For those who are interested, the state of Oregon has now published its official 2010 Death with Dignity Act statistics. This is the annual report that Oregon files, as required by the DWDA, documenting how many individuals used the law and for what reasons.

These statistics are worth reading too.

Categories
Cemeteries Monuments + Memorials

Arlington Cemetery Re-Buries the ‘Unknown’ Dead

For First Time in Decades, Arlington National Cemetery Must Bury Multiple ‘Unknowns’
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (March 06, 2011)
When the remains of a Vietnam War soldier buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery were identified in 1998 using DNA, Pentagon officials proudly said that the days of interring service members as “Unknown” could well be over.

It is difficult to imagine the situation at Arlington National Cemetery getting any worse. But the bad news just keeps coming and coming. Hats off to the Washington Post, whose reporters have been rigorously following this case.

The newest revelation is that eight sets of unidentified, cremated human remains were chucked into a single gravesite because of human negligence.

When Arlington Cemetery’s problems first came to light, I remember referring to the entire situation as a ‘Code Red’ alarm for any cemetery.

I’m not sure that even Code Red is an adequate description anymore.

One day, a final tally of all the mishandled burials might be known. But I’m not counting on it.

To read more about the Arlington National Cemetery debacle, click here.

Categories
Death + the Law Death Ethics

Westboro Baptist Church Wins Funeral Protest Case

Supreme Court Rules First Amendment Protects Westboro Church’s Right to Picket Funerals
Robert Barnes, The Washington Post (March 02, 2011)
A nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects even hurtful speech about public issues and upheld the right of a fringe church to protest near military funerals.

 

Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals
Adam Liptak, The New York Times (March 02, 2011)
The First Amendment protects hateful protests at military funerals, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in an 8-1 decision.

 

Supreme Court of the United States
Snyder v. Phelps decision

For people who read United States Supreme Court decisions, the most important thing to do with any new ruling is immediately flip to the second or third page and look for the verdict. Then you can go back and and actually digest the text.

So, without much further ado, here is what the Supreme Court said about the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) and its funeral protests:

Held: The First Amendment shields Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

We’ve been following the Westboro Baptist Church case here on the Death Reference Desk and you can read all of that coverage here.

In brief, the Westboro Baptist Church, which is based in Topeka, Kansas was sued by Albert Snyder after its members protested outside his son’s military funeral in Maryland. This was in 2006. Snyder’s son was a US Marine and the WBC, led by Fred Phelps and his daughter Shirley, appeared with signs which proclaimed “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and other, similar statements. The WBC is also known as the group God Hates Fags and fervently believes that soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because America has embraced homosexuality. God is showing his displeasure with America by letting the deaths happen.

The case worked its way up and down the US Court system after Albert Snyder won an earlier case and was awarded millions of dollars in damages. Last October, the Supreme Court heard arguments from both sides.

I’m not surprised that the Supreme Court decided in the WBC’s favor, since the entire case was a classic First Amendment debate. I also understand the logic which the eight justices in the majority used, even if the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts seems a bit forced. By this, I mean, that the Justices could have simply said that the WBC protests were allowed to be obnoxious and ridiculous because the First Amendment guaranteed that right.

Instead, the decision uses an array of legal points which really reach reach reach for legal justifications.

Ok. That’s a little unfair.

Adam Liptak, of the New York Times summarises:

Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the ruling that three factors required a ruling in favor of the church group. First, he said, its speech was on matters of public concern. While the messages on the signs carried by its members “may fall short of refined commentary,” the chief justice wrote, “the issues they highlight — the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our nation, homosexuality in the military and scandals involving the Catholic clergy — are matters of public import.”

 

Second, he wrote, the relationship between the church and the Snyders was not a private grudge.

 

Third, the members of the church “had the right to be where they were.” They were picketing on a public street 1,000 feet from the site of the funeral, they complied with the law and with instructions from the police, and they protested quietly and without violence.

 

Chief Justice Roberts suggested that the proper response to hurtful protests are general laws creating buffer zones around funerals and the like, rather than empowering of juries to punish unpopular speech.

So there you have it.

Funereal protests by the Westboro Baptist Church are protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. You can read an excerpt of Snyder v. Phelps here.

You can also read the full decision at the top of the page.

The lone dissenter, Justice Alito, built his dissent around empathy for the grieving families and their desire to be left alone during a funeral. He has a point but that does not mean individual states can create laws banning certain groups from protesting outside funerals.

And even though the WBC won this particular US Supreme Case, which is significant, it just means that anytime the Westboro Baptist Church shows up at a funeral with its handful of members the number of counter-protesters will be even larger.

Finally, the first sentence of the Snyder v. Phelps decision is, hands down, the best ever. It is a sentence that implicitly states, for both good and bad reasons, only in America:

For the past 20 years, the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church has picketed military funerals to communicate its belief that God hates the United States for its tolerance of homosexuality, particularly in America’s military.

The Death Reference Desk will post any relevant updates on this story. It’s not going to disappear now. That’s for sure.

Categories
Death + the Economy Death + the Law Death Ethics

Donating Dead Bodies to Save Money

Donating Body Can Save Families Money
Dan McFeely, The Indianapolis Star (February 08, 2011)

A short post on a perennial topic for the Death Reference Desk: how the dead body is transformed into some kind of cash value. Rarely, if ever, does this postmortem value involve direct cash exchanges, mostly because the law frowns upon such things. No, these are situations where a dead body is handed over to an institution of some kind in exchange for compensation of some kind.

So, as this article discusses, families donate a body to the Indiana University Medical School and in exchange for their donation receive significantly reduced if not totally free funeral services. More often than not, this means that the cremation of the remains (post dismemberment, more or less, by medical students) is covered by the institution receiving the body.

Most American medical schools accept cadaver donations and gladly thank the next-of-kin with a non-cash gift of some kind. It’s true that even though money isn’t being exchanged there is still a quid pro quo involved…but not too many people that participate in any of this complain.

The bigger question to ask is this: What happens when medical schools, for example, start paying families with cold, hard cash for a dead body? The historians amongst you will already be thinking about Burke and Hare in Scotland, and that’s the historical example that usually scuttles these kinds of questions.

But I’m not so sure, given the economic conditions which many people currently face, that it won’t come to pass.

We’ve been adding story after story about these kinds of dead body transactions and you can see them all here: Death + the Economy.
Never say never…especially when dead bodies are involved.

Categories
Death + Crime Death + Technology Death + the Law

Postmortem on Frontline’s Post Mortem

Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America
Frontline, NPR, and Pro Publica (February 01, 2011)

Go Go Frontline. There are moments in this documentary on postmortem examinations in America and the attached medical-legal investigative personnel that made me physically groan.

Out loud.

And then slap my forehead.

None of the dead body images elicited any kind of response from me (shocking, I know). Rather, the interviews with some of the coroners and autopsy investigators were so painful to watch that I wondered if they really knew what kinds of documentaries Frontline makes. One of Frontline’s best investigative reporters, Lowell Bergman, is the on-camera interviewer and his abilities at making interview subjects squirm, especially those who lie or get caught in a certain-kind-of-truth-stretching, are phenomenal.

web-lagos_a_cadaverThe interview with Dr. Frank Minyard, the coroner for New Orleans, Louisiana, is some of the most cringe-worthy television that I have seen in a long time. A number of Death Reference Desk readers might know Dr. Minyard from his interviews about dealing with post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Minyard is a complex figure, to be sure, and he doesn’t end up looking so good in this documentary. Ironically, he has been interviewed in other Frontline pieces, so it’s not as if he had no idea what could happen.

But I digress…

Here, then, is the take away information from Post Mortem. 1.) The overall training, accreditation, and educational standards for American Medical Examiners needs to be uniform, rigorous, and regulated. As with the American funeral industry, for example, the education and licensing requirements are all state-by-state. This means that some states (and regions within states) are far more competent than others. In a nutshell, if you died and your death required a full investigation, then it’s better to die in some states than others.

Frontline produced a map of America which shows what kind(s) of postmortem investigation system(s) exist in each state. Check it out here.

The documentary’s other key point is that medical examiners and investigators need more money to do their work. This hardly comes as a surprise, since everybody wants more money to do their work, but the investigative labor being done involves guilt and innocence. I would always hope that the individuals given the power to provide evidence about either guilt or innocence, had the necessary funding to do the job. In some cases, this is not the case.

So watch this documentary. You can either view it right here or go to the Frontline website (linked at the top of this page).

It’s worth the 52 minutes and provides an opportunity to begin contemplating which American state you would want to die in…

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Web Funeral Industry

Webcasting Killed the Funeral Star

For the Funeral Too Distant, Mourners Gather on the Web
Laura M. Holson, The New York Times (January 25, 2011)
Webcast funerals reach more friends and family members and reflect the fact that people are living more and more online.

In January 2010, Meg posted some articles and a video about webcasting funeral services. Now, in January 2011, the New York Times is finally catching up to the postmortem future laid bare by ye olde Death Reference Desk.

Yet again, the Gray Lady is reporting on a story that is not particularly new. Or, at least, a new story for the funeral industry. I first read about webcasting funerals in 2002. Indeed, the funeral industry trade journals all discuss webscasting and webpresence and web death (for lack of a better term) nonstop.

The great irony of funeral webcasting (for me at least) is that the modern American funeral developed around waiting for people to arrive for a funeral. One of the reasons embalming became so prevalent in US funerals was that it allowed the preserved dead body to be shipped on a train without decomposing. Embalming also created time for the next-of-kin to arrive for a funeral, without worrying that prolonged travel would cause problems with the body. So, in nutshell, the modern funeral developed around travel time to funerals.

Postmortem Space and Time was expanded.

Webcasting inverts the whole situation. The need for travel time or to ship the body is being greatly reduced. There isn’t anything good or bad with this situation. It does mean that more people will have access to a funeral (given access to the required technology) and that’s certainly better than nothing.

And the webcasting trend is most certainly the future for most funeral services.

The question I always ask myself is this: What is lost by not attending the funeral in person? If anything? Given the choice, I will always attend a funeral in person. My own personal interactions with the other attendees and the deceased individual are important experiences.

I say all this now but I have strong suspicion that in the coming years I will end up “attending” a webcast funeral.

It seems inevitable at this point.

In an effort to find a YouTube video of an actual funeral being webcast I came across the follow advert. This was not entirely what I wanted to use…but it was too good to pass up.

Categories
Death + the Law Death Ethics

Discussing End-of-Life with Jane Brody

Personal Health: Keep Your Voice, Even at the End of Life
Jane E. Brody, The New York Times (January 18, 2011)

Here is a quick follow-on article to the recent post on End-of-Life discussions in the American medical system.

Jane Brody has been writing for some time about the importance of End-of-Life planning with a person’s doctor. Her most recent column is a response to the Obama administration’s back and forth on Medicare funding for End-of-Life discussions between patients and physicians. I wrote about that recent debacle (for lack of a better term) two weeks ago. Brody’s writings have appeared before on the Death Reference Desk. In August 2009 I wrote about her push for End-of-Life planning in the (then) proposed American health care reform bill. You read that here.

Brody’s commitment to this issue is partly personal and she has been extremely open about the recent, unexpected death of her husband. She makes the following case for End-of-Life planning in her most recent column:

For many more of us these days, the end does not come swiftly via a heart attack or fatal accident, but rather after weeks, months or years battling a chronic illness like cancer, congestive heart failure, emphysema or Alzheimer’s disease. When doctors do not know how you’d want to be treated if your heart stopped, or you were unable to breathe or eat and could not speak for yourself, they are likely (some would say obliged) to do everything in their power to try to keep you alive.

 

A year ago, my husband was given a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer. As his designated health care proxy, I had agreed long before he became ill to abide by the instructions in his living will. If he was terminally ill and could not speak for himself, he wanted no extraordinary measures taken to try to keep him alive longer than nature intended.

 

Knowing this helped me and my family avoid agonizing decisions and discord. We were able to say meaningful goodbyes and spare him unnecessary physical and emotional distress in his final weeks of life.

Not much else to say, really.

Categories
Burial Death + Crime Death + the Law

Update on 91 Year Old Pennsylvania Woman Keeping Corpses in House

Happy Homecoming for Widow Who Lived with Corpses
 Authorities found out and took the embalmed corpses away. She is having a mausoleum built on her property to get them back.
Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press (January 04, 2011)

A quick update on the July story about 91-year-old Jean Stevens in Pennsylvania. Stevens, many people will recall, had been keeping the embalmed bodies of both her husband and twin sister in her home. Pennsylvania officials quickly determined that this was not an appropriate form of final disposition for the bodies and took them away. I wrote about the original case here.

Back in July I suggested that Pennsylvania authorities should think twice about prosecuting Stevens and, instead, help her build a mausoleum for the bodies.

And lo, if that isn’t exactly what happened. The AP explains:

The 91-year-old widow [Jean Stevens] who lived with the embalmed corpses of her husband and twin sister — until authorities found out and took them away — is hopeful they’ll be returned soon.

 

corpses-300x225

Workmen at Stevens’ rural property outside the northern Pennsylvania town of Wyalusing have been busy the past few months, erecting a gabled building with gray siding and a white door. It resembles an oversized shed, or a smaller version of Stevens’ detached garage.

 

In reality, it’s a mausoleum that Stevens intends as the final resting place of her husband of nearly 60 years, James Stevens, and her twin, June Stevens. And authorities have told her it’s the only way she can get them back.

So there you go. Jean Stevens will be re-united with her dead husband and sister, forevermore.

Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Economy

Brain$…Brain$…Brain$

Donate Your Brain, Save a Buck
Gary Stix, Scientific American (January 4, 2011)
Hard times are making tissue donation more appealing

 

The Great Recession changed the way many people live—and its repercussions appear to be altering how some people choose to die. At least two prominent tissue banks have seen an increase in the number of individuals who are interested in donating their bodies to research in exchange for a break in funeral costs.

This is isn’t an entirely new story: people donating their postmortem brains for medical science research in order to save on funeral costs. Death Ref has featured regular stories on this very topic in the Death + the Economy section. In fact, at one point in Autumn 2009 the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee stopped accepting dead bodies because it had received too many unclaimed bodies from local morgues. The Body Farm studies dead body decomposition, as well as other postmortem issues, to assist forensic investigators. Unclaimed dead bodies are not that extraordinary but the 2009 situation was different. In many cases, next-of-kin knew that the body was at the county morgue but couldn’t afford to retrieve said corpse.

 

So the uptick in cadaveric brain donation for research, and by extension a cut in funeral expenses is hardly surprising.

Indeed, the brain donation example is one of the current ways that the human corpse is being redefined as a source of biovalue.

Not purely a commodity but something rather close to it.

More on this in the future.