#death-management

#death-management

The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove's father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record.

"A Death Cafe is not 'a grief group, a counseling session, or a place to push religious or other spiritual agendas,' Leija says."

Today I saw images of students leaving their school with their hands raised in the air, hours after cowering in fear and terror in barricaded classrooms. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded in the tiny Rocky Mountain town of Tumbler Ridge. The mayor, Darryl Krakowka, said, "I have lived here for 18 years. I probably know every one of the victims." And this in Canada, which often seems to us Americans like a bastion of sanity and normalcy in comparison with our madness.

I think everybody worries when they come to the last stages, no one knows what to expect, but these people are wonderful at relaxing you and they help you an awful lot.

For decades, the gold standard for the coma-induction phase of euthanasia was thiopental. It was swift, reliable, and highly concentrated and rapidly induced a deep coma. In 2011, however, the European Union banned the export of drugs used for capital punishment, including thiopental. In the wake of the ban, manufacturers withdrew or tightly controlled supplies to avoid association with executions, making the drug increasingly difficult to obtain. "Thiopental is very difficult to get now," Horikx said.

Peter Dervin had spent all day by his son's side in Broomfield Hospital before he decided to get dinner. He pleaded with staff at the Essex facility not to leave his eldest child, Greg, alone in his absence. "They almost laughed at me and said, 'This is what we do. We're nurses and we look after patients'," Dervin recalls. Greg had been given lorazepam, an anxiety drug flagged by clinicians as leaving him prone to becoming unsteady and agitated.

'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.

When we think of rituals, we tend to think of face masks and wellness trends. But there are actually ways to use rituals to help heal grief and deal with stressful times. On this episode, Lucy Lopez, Elizabeth Newcamp, and Zak Rosen are joined by ritual expert Betty Ray to talk about creative ways to help children process grief and big emotions, how to use ritual to create safety and expression, and much more.