Life is for the Living

When you die, what do you want to happen to you body? Producer Marco and I rank body disposition methods and how we want our bodies disposed of, give helpful tips on how to to get the cheapest funeral, and dive into the ins and outs of coffin making. 

Hold on to your hats for this episode, because it is a great one. Guest and co-owner of the Natural Funeral Seth Viddal walks us through all the different types of body disposition methods, including earth cremation, water cremation and funeral pyre. 

In this epitaph, Producer Marco quizzes me on the signs of active dying (which I totally cheat on, don't tell him) and we talk about the deaths we have seen, and what how we envision our death beds. 

What does dying look like? In this episode, with the help of Death Doula Kathy and Hospice Volunteer Brooks we talk about what to expect when someone is close to death.

Reference:
Gone From My Sight by Barbara Karnes, RN

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Flipping the script, Producer Marco interviews me about my experience with my mom's dementia. I talk about having to face a complete uncertainty of how it will all pan out, coming to peace with my mom's eventual death, and how my dad is coping with the loss. 

In this episode, I talk with Mara and with Kathy about the experience in between getting a terminal diagnosis and the actual death. This is a time that can be fraught with a lot of unknowns, and will force you to face the fact that you have very little control over what is happening. You can't plan, or even be emotionally prepared, and you may not even know if you are in a sprint towards the end or if it a marathon you need to settle into. 

Producer Marco and I dive into Medical Aid in Dying, and whether or not we would want it for ourselves, and if we could assist a loved one who wanted to die. This episode does contain conversations about suicide. 

Once you get a terminal diagnosis (and being alive is a terminal diagnosis), not only will you be struggling to adapt to your new reality, you also need to make series of really tough decisions, sometimes with very limited information. Do you take the treatment that might extend your life but has some nasty side effects? What live saving measures to you want, and which ones don't you want? If you need a tracheotomy to breath, would you do it? We dive into these questions and more with guests Mara and Kathy in this episode of Death is for the Dying. 

In this week's epitaph producer Marco and I get into what diagnosis we fear the most, how we would want to handle it, and how we probably would handle it.

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What do you do when you get the worst news of your life? How do you cope? Who do you tell? And how do you move forward? In this episode, guest Mara walks us through the journey to her husband's Pat diagnosis of ALS and the months after the diagnosis and they learned what their new normal was. 


To learn more about ALS: https://www.iamals.org/
Pat's Website: https://farmstrong.info/
Mara and Pat's Twitter: https://x.com/farmstronginfo
To listen via Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LifeisfortheLivingPodcast