Death and Crackers | Explore the profoundness of death and the trivality of life.

Academia: Letter to Myself

Posted on May 22, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

This was an assignment for a class in death and dying.

Original Submission date: September 4, 2019

Dearest Raine,

As stereotypical as it might sound, I’m staring death in the face but choosing to turn around and look back over my life and one of the things that stands out is how much key events in my life like Cam’s walk to Navy Pier and Luke’s death really made me aware of my own mortality and the mortality of those around me and made me realize how important it was to truly be present for those we love. I’m chuckling as I realize, that my master’s work at WMU foretold this looking back as I can clearly remember Dr. V. saying in her lecture that the elderly took time to reconcile their lives to determine if they’ve had a good life. I think I’ve had a good life, but thinking about that class has also made me think about how my viewpoints of death have changed over the years.

As a child, it was not death that scared me, but the rapture as every summer we would go to church and see a movie about the rapture and I would end up in tears because I was terrified that Jesus would swoop down and take away everyone I loved and I would be left alone. My first real memory of death was when I was nine and my Grandpa Tony died. He wasn’t my real grandfather, but his wife (Grandma Elda) had babysat me from when I was six months old so he had been a constant in my life. I didn’t truly understand what death was, but I was sad that my Grandma Elda was so sad and I remember hugging her and telling her I loved her.

When I was ten, my cousin Randy tried to kiss me in the hayloft and I never told anyone. I honestly don’t think it went any further than that, but it made me so uncomfortable that I never wanted to see him again. When I was twelve, my parents were talking about taking Randy in to live with us because his father was abusive. I remember being terrified of what would happen if he lived in our tiny house with us, but I still never said anything to my parents. A few weeks after that conversation, on my mother’s birthday, Randy was killed when he fell into a silo full of corn and suffocated. I remember being relieved that he wasn’t going to live with us, but feeling so guilty and feeling as if I had caused his death because I was selfish and didn’t want him to live in my house. Looking back to that long-ago lecture on death attitudes, I remember Dr. V. saying that it is normal for children to think a death is their fault. Please don’t feel guilty about his death as we had a legitimate reason to not want him to live with us and we had nothing to do with his death.

The next two significant deaths I experienced were separated by twenty years and both had profound effects on me as they made me think about love and loss. Our grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s and she was in a home for the aged for a few years prior to her death. Several times over the course of those few years, we would get a call from my uncle saying she was near death and that we needed to rush to Poplar Bluff to say our goodbyes. I remember spending our 20^th birthday visiting my grandmother and watching as my father, with tears in his eyes, told her he loved her and told me to never be ashamed to tell people that you loved them. Watching my father cry was heartbreaking and a reminder that love hurts. My father died in 2010 after bravely battling lung cancer for a year or so. I was working on a project in Georgia at the time and I’d visit as often as I could and every time I visited him, I made sure to tell him how much I loved him. He died the day after Thanksgiving and I drove out there to be with my mother and when I arrived I found she hadn’t had his body moved from the nursing home as she wanted to give my brother and me a chance to say good bye. It was difficult to see my father’s lifeless body laying there and I was too afraid to touch him to say goodbye. The next few days were spent helping my mother deal with funeral arrangements and her new status as a widow. The hardest moment of that period was watching her throw her body over my father’s during her last goodbye before he was cremated and realizing the finality of death.

I never truly mourned my father when he died because I was busy being strong for everyone else. I had to be strong for my kids, I had to be strong for my mother, and I had to be strong for my husband. It felt like I could never mourn because I was too busy taking care of everyone else. Oddly, that’s something else that Dr. V. touched on in her lecture when she said that middle age was about thinking about responsibilities toward others and whether they would be able to carry on. A year after my daddy died, my husband had a heart attack and I spent hours by his bedside being strong and more hours walking the streets of Chicago crying and praying. Three months after his heart attack, he decided he wanted to leave and start a new life and I fell apart. I was mourning the death of my father, the death of my marriage, and worrying about what was next in my life. It was then that I realized that the death of relationships and ideals were just as painful as the deaths of people. I also realized that not taking time to grieve, doesn’t mean the grief evaporates, it is still there and it will eventually come out.

The death of elders makes you realize that you are one step closer to your own mortality, but the death of someone your age smacks you upside the head and makes you realize that you’re not invincible. The first time someone my age died was right after high school when a classmate of mine died in a military training accident. To see someone my age laid out in a box was disconcerting, but the mind is a great rationalizer and the fact that he died in a military barracks in a world far removed from my safe rural upbringing had me convinced his death was an anomaly and that I was still invincible. When my favorite cousin died in 2014, death came into my inner circle as someone I had spent my childhood laughing with first became a specter of his former self, then passed away leaving his young children behind. We had lost touch and I didn’t hear about his passing immediately, but when I did it was as if I could no longer hear the laughter of my younger self as if those memories weren’t real and as if death had intruded where it had no right to be.

It’s odd how life and memory is not a linear thing as Mark’s death was in a way the death of my childhood, but our daughter’s childhood had been marred by death many years before Mark died. Her best friend died when the girls were six and I remember Mackenzie’s wake and funeral like it was yesterday. Cam gave Mackenzie’s father a little butterfly and he put it in the casket with her and I remember crying as that butterfly was on her shoulder and her father kept stroking her body as he talked to mourners. My heart broke even more at the site of all those children dressed in their best sitting at the altar mourning their friend. I knew then that death could take even children, but I still felt mine were immune as we had asked Anubis to stay by them and protect them. It wasn’t until Cam was 20 that I realized that she could also be taken from me way too young. She had a psychotic break from reality and decided to walk the three miles from our house to Navy Pier in the middle of the night on the coldest day of the year. She called me and told me she was at Navy Pier, but I didn’t realize at the time how sick she was until she got home. It was then that all the things that could have gone wrong hit me: she could have frozen to death as she was wearing a light coat, she could have been harmed by someone, she could have fallen off the pier into the viciously cold water. However, none of those things happened and she encountered a kind security guard who let her into the pier at the risk of his own job and stayed with her until he could help her to safety. I cried in gratitude when she got home and thanked Anubis for once again doing his job.

Children and animals are innocents and I’ve had many pets die over the course of my life, but it was the death of my dog Luke that taught me the spirituality of death. I was never present when other pets died as my parents shielded me from death when I was younger and when I was older one pet was hit by a car and another died at the vet’s of an epileptic seizure. Luke was different though as he had been my reason for living after I was divorced. It was just him and I in an apartment and while I didn’t so much care about taking care of myself, I did want to make sure he was well cared for. He nursed me through the divorce and moved with me multiple times. The final move being a move to Cleveland, OH with my young adult children as we decided we wanted to escape the high costs and crime in Chicago. Luke had two years in Cleveland, two years with a big back yard, two years of a big house to run through, and a final two years of love. Our son was going back to Chicago the last weekend of July and Luke insisted on going with me to take him to the train station on Friday night. And he insisted on going upstairs to sleep in my room on Saturday night, even though he hadn’t climbed those stairs in a few months. Our daughter and I awoke to a dog in distress. He was weak and woozy and couldn’t climb down the stairs. We carried him down and as he got sicker and sicker, we started calling around to find a vet. We finally found one and we took him in and after tests she came back and told us that he had cancer and was bleeding out internally. Surgery could give him another few months, but the quality of life would be limited. We made the difficult decision to say goodbye. In one last act of agency, Luke moved off the rug and into the one spot of sunlight in the room. We called Sean so that he could say goodbye to his buddy and hearing my adult son in tears on the phone broke my heart even more. Then it was time and we positioned Luke so his head was on my leg and my daughter was facing him and we stroked him and told him what a good boy he was and that it was okay to go. We held him as his life slipped away and that was when I viscerally knew how easy it was to slip into death. One moment he was looking at us with loving eyes, then he was gone. That was the moment I truly knew the frailty of life.

While life is fragile and death can come in a heartbeat, memories and love are more resilient. Cemeteries are full of both as they are places where the living visit their dead. It should come as no surprise to me that I find peace in cemeteries as my mother plucked my birthname, Lorraine, from a gravestone. When I am agitated and feeling restless and that the latest minor disaster is the end of the world, I visit a cemetery because as I walk between the stones and read the names and dates, I feel a sense of peace wash over me as I realize that whatever I’m going through is temporary and that the people who are in the cemetery lived, they loved, and they died. Everything is transitory and that’s okay. Cemeteries are also places of love as people remember those they’ve come before with sturdy gravestones and ephemeral flowers. Cemeteries surround me with peace as I remember that I am but one link in a chain and that what truly matters is what I do during my life on earth. I need to focus on what matters and let go of that over which I have no control. While cemeteries are places of love and peace, mausoleums are places of overwhelming grief as it feels the pain and grief is trapped within their very stones. Rosehill Mausoleum is a beautiful building full of stained glass and tributes to the dead, but when I’ve walked through the two floors of death, I’ve felt a heaviness as if the pain of the living and the dead is too much to be contained.

Death is upon me now and while I don’t know if death will come in one year or six, I’ve reached the point where I’m not afraid. I know I’ve lived many lives before and that I will live many more lives, this is just one stop. I do hope that the lessons I’ve learned in this life will carry into the next.

You don’t know it yet, my dearest self, but the next 30 years or so will be filled with love, with laughter, and with joy. Be responsible and take care of all of the legal aspects of death (a will, funeral plans, etc.) so that Dr. V. will be proud of you and enjoy life. Take time to smell the flowers and don’t forget what Daddy said and make sure the people you love, know you live them.

Blessings,

Your Older Self

Posted in Academic, Death, Grief, Personal | Comments Off

Memorials: Cleveland Cultural Gardens

Posted on May 20, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Memorials come in many forms including cemeteries, memorial walls, and memorial buildings. Memorials are even present in places that are designated as memorials. The Cleveland Cultural Gardens is one such place. The Cleveland Cultural Gardens were established in 1916 with the creation of the Shakespeare Gardens, now the British Gardens. In the 108 years since that first garden was established, 35 more have been created including the German Cultural Garden (1929), the Estonian Cultural Garden (1966), and the Vietnamese Garden (2020). Several other gardens, including a Native American Garden and a Peruvian Garden are under development.

Each garden is designed and funded by the ethnic community for which they are named. It is always interesting to me to walk among the older gardens and think about the time in which they were created. For instance, the German Garden was founded in 1929, the year of the market crash the preceded the Great Depression and four years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The African American Cultural Garden was founded in 1977 at a time when African Americans were still battling for civil rights.

The Cultural Gardens are a celebration of world culture, especially those groups that settled in Cleveland, and many of the gardens celebrate cultural icons from their home countries. For instance, the Italian Cultural Garden celebrates Michelangelo and Renaissance Architect Andrea Palladeo and the German Cultural Garden celebrates Bach and Mozart. Other gardens, including the Hungarian Cultural Garden, celebrate the war dead from their community.

As the Cultural Gardens are one of my favorite places to explore, I will be periodically exploring some of the individual gardens and posting about the memorials within their borders.

Posted in Gardens, Memorials | Comments Off

Podcast Review: All There is With Anderson Cooper

Posted on May 17, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Link: All There is with Anderson Cooper

In the last episode of this podcast, Anderson played voicemails from people who shared their grief with him and one of these voicemails was from a mother who said she shared her grief because it was a way to help other people and that it was like headlights in a white out storm. That sums up this podcast overall because as Anderson puts himself out there he serves as a light in the darkness for others.

This amazing podcast isn’t full of shoulds and shouldn’ts, but simply provides stories and lessons from people famous and not so famous who have lost people they loved. Some of the more famous are Ashley Judd, who lost her mom to suicide, and Joe Biden, who lost his first wife and daughter when his sons were younger and who lost his son to brain cancer. This podcast doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff like death by suicide and the death of people who were difficult.

I also like that most of the podcasts are less than 40 minutes, which are long enough to make you care about the story, but not so long as to be hard to listen to.

A note about podcast reviews: In reviewing podcasts, I cannot say that I have listened to all episodes, but I have listened to at least three episodes in order to write a good review.

Posted in Grief, Media, Podcast | Comments Off

Grieving the Unacceptable

Posted on May 15, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Grief is not just for the death of a corporeal being. Humans grieve the loss of jobs, the loss of dreams, the loss of situations. Anytime there is a loss, real or perceived, humans may feel the sadness, heaviness, and physical sensations of grief such as loss of appetite and sleep disturbances. Grieving a situation that we loved and was enjoyable is completely understandable. However, it makes a lot less sense to grieve a situation that was abusive and stressful, but that’s where I find right now.

I’m choosing to walk away from a situation where I was being bullied and abused, but I’m still grieving. I’m grieving the certainty of a daily schedule, I’m grieving the casual conversation with people. I’m grieving the sense of purpose that comes from a shared mission. I’m grieving the routine of it all. I’m also a little freaked out about the financial aspects and it would be easy to dismiss what I’m feeling as angst over the practical aspects of the situation, but I’ve been around the block enough to know that most of what I’m feeling is grief.

This is not an unfamiliar place for me to be in. I’ve grieved the loss of situations, acceptable and unacceptable, before. I’ve grieved graduations as that meant no more studying arcane academic subjects and drawing conclusions; I’ve grieved moving out of Chicago even though it meant no more gunfire across the street from my apartment; and I’ve grieved the loss of less than optimal jobs before. I also grieved the loss of my abusive marriage.

It took me a lot of introspection and hard work to realize that while grieving a situation where I had been physically, think beaten with a baseball bat, and verbally abused, in a weird way it made sense because I had been raised to believe that the only worth a woman had was in getting married and raising children. I’d been conditioned to believe that anything I wanted for myself, such as attending writing retreats, was selfish. The result of those beliefs was that I stayed in my marriage longer than I should have, and that it took time and a lot of hard work for me to mentally divorce the situation. However, along the way I learned a lot of valuable lessons that are proving helpful in my current situation. Although some of the guidance below may seem contradictory, healing is a journey and there are no instant answers.

Permission to Grieve

After my divorce, I found myself in a spiral where I would be sad and grieving and then would beat myself up for grieving a situation that was mentally and physically damaging. I’d call myself horrible names and was convinced that I was so broken and worthless that I didn’t deserve happiness. It was only with time and the help of my personal recovery team, which included an acupuncturist and a therapist, that I realized it was okay to grieve a bad situation. One of the best things I did for myself was to make a list of the good things and realize that those were what I was mourning, and not the abuse. Although, this did not stop the sadness and grief, it did stop me from beating myself up.

Name and Claim Your Emotions

When I’m grieving, especially the loss of a situation and not a loved one, I have a tendency to want to stay busy. There is a part of me that thinks that I can power through anything and that if I keep busy enough, I can outrun my feelings. I’ve also been known to numb my feelings with sugar and alcohol. However, I learned the hard way that you can only run so far and eventually the loneliness, sadness, and whatever hard emotions you’ve been trying to avoid. I learned this the hard way, sitting on the steps of the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee.

My husband had left me and while I had broken down at first, I had worked hard to stuff all the emotions inside and move on with my life. I was on a business trip to Milwaukee and I went for a walk after work and I found myself sitting on the steps of the Pabst Mansion and I broke down and cried and cried and cried. What I realized sitting on those steps is that while I had allowed myself to feel sadness, I had never allowed myself to feel the cold hard anger I felt at him leaving me after years of abuse. I had never allowed myself to name and claim the shame I felt for putting up with the years of abuse.

However, as hard and painful as that moment was, it was the beginning of my true healing as I was finally able to feel my anger, feel the shame, and once I named and claimed the emotions, I was able to start healing. The healing wasn’t instantaneous, but being able to just be honest with myself about all the conflicting emotions helped me name and claim them.

Remember the Bad

There were times after my divorce when I would get nostalgic for the good times and find myself glossing over the bad. I would be remembering our first kiss, trips we took, my ex’s smile at the birth of his children. At those times, I would tell myself it wasn’t that bad. And I would start spiraling and beating myself over losing my marriage. I would hear my mother’s voice in my head telling me it was all my fault.

The second–or maybe 10th–time, I started spiraling and blaming myself. I forced myself to start remembering the worst times of my marriage. The cruel insults, the sabotage, and the physical abuse. I made myself remember very specific incidents in painful detail. I found that reminding myself of these very painful incidents helped me to remember that I had not walked away from something that was mostly good with a little bad sprinkled in. I had walked away from something that was mostly nasty with just a little good sprinkled on top. I reminded myself that even the supposedly good times were tinged with bad.

I forced myself to write all of those painful memories down so that the next time I started beating myself up for my divorce, I would be able to quickly recall all the reasons I’d left. The very act of writing them down, meant that the next time, I quickly remembered all the reasons I had divorced my ex and was able to pull myself out of the spiral much more quickly.

FEAR Not

Within the sacred rooms of AA and Al-Anon, there is a saying that FEAR is nothing more than False Expectations Appearing Real. I am reminding myself of this regularly as my brain immediately goes to “I’m going to be homeless tomorrow, I should have just accepted the abuse as at least I would have a roof over my head.” That is the scary place that my brain goes to even though I am still collecting a paycheck, I have money in the bank, and I’ve had three interviews in the past week. Realistically, if I am careful with what I have available to me, I can pay my bills for the better part of a year.

However, logically knowing what my bank balance is and knowing I have other resources available to me, just not prevent these false expectations as presenting themselves as real. When this happens, I go through all the facts in my brain and think about what I can do right now to change my financial situation. Some of those things are looking for and applying for jobs, writing on my blog as a reminder that other people have tough times, reaching out to contacts who might have leads on jobs, and a whole host of other activities that prove I still have agency.

Do Something

Grief can lead to situational depression, which is defined as a depression that is directly related to a stressful or traumatic situation. Symptoms of situational depression are similar to those of grief and can include trouble eating or sleeping, crying, and sadness. Therapy can be useful, but I’ve also found that just doing something can help me function and work my way out of situational depression. As I noted above, taking tiny steps directly related to the situation can be incredibly helpful. If you’ve lost a job small steps to find a job can help. If you’re facing divorce, calling a lawyer or looking for a support group can be helpful.

I’ve also found that even small steps not directly related to the situation can help me to feel better about myself and can help motivate me. One of my favorite ways to start being productive is to make a to-do list of things to do around the house. My list is always in very granular detail. For instance, instead of cleaning the dining room, my list will include things like “clean off the dining room table” and “organize the place mats.” My tasks are mostly tasks that can be completed in 5 minutes or less. Once I have a task list, I will set a timer for 20 minutes or so and work though as many tasks as I can. Sometimes when the timer goes off, I keep working, but other times I will stop with no guilt because I did something.

I also use the timer trick to limit one of my favorite distractions, binge watching TV shows. I’ll allow myself 20 minutes or so to watch a show, then take a break to clean house. It isn’t a perfect solution, but being productive and not sitting in my jammies all day eating bonbons and watching junk TV.

Nurture Yourself

Nurturing yourself can take many forms. It can mean taking a long bath, getting a massage, or taking a nap. It can also mean getting up off the couch and taking a short walk around the block. It can mean taking time to cook yourself a nourishing meal. Or if cooking seems too overwhelming, it can mean Door Dashing, putting the food on a real plate, and eating at the table instead of on the couch. Nurturing yourself can also mean cleaning your home and lighting a candle.

I’ve learned over the years that nurturing myself is really about sending myself the message through action that I matter. I matter enough to eat healthy food instead of fast food. I matter enough to have a clean and comfortable home. I matter enough to exercise my body. There are days when I love myself and days when I don’t, but I work hard to remind myself every day that I matter.

One thing that self nurturing doesn’t have to be is expensive. It would be easy to assume that self nurturing is all about spending money by staying in a hotel or getting a massage. However, self nurturing is not about spending yourself into the red zone financially, it is about saying to yourself loudly and clearly that you matter. And that doesn’t have to involve spending any money at all.

Be Kind to Yourself

The last tidbit of guidance I have goes along with nurturing yourself, but it is bigger than that. It is all about treating yourself with kindness and respect. Something may have been taken away from you, you may be grieving something that wasn’t good for you, or you may be mourning having to move on. However, whatever situation you are mourning, please know that you deserve to be happy and you deserve to be respected. If you’ve found yourself grieving a bad situation, please know that it is okay to grieve and it doesn’t make you maschocistic. It just makes you human.

Posted in Grief, Personal | 1 Comment

Memorials: Lake View Cemetery Overview

Posted on May 13, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Lake View Cemetery is a garden style cemetery locaed in 1869 on 211 acres on Cleveland’s east side. It is modeled after other gaden style cemeteries including Mount Auburn in Cambridge, MA and Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadephia. Garden style, or rural cemeteries, were designed to move burial places out of crowded urban areas and into more rural areas. They were also designed to provide a place of beauty for city dwellers to escape to and in the early days of Lake View people came to the cemetery to walk and picnic. The most famous maseleum in Lake View is the Garfield Memorial.

I live three miles from Lake View and it is still a place where people go to walk and relax. The cemetery hosts events, tours of famous graves, and even concerts. Through their website, the cemetery also offers mobile tours on varous themes that provide audio and a map to guide you to certain memorials. In other posts, I’ll share my experiences taking some of these tours.

I always love visiting Lake View as driving through the elegant gates feels as if I’m transported to a place outside of time. The cemetery is beautiful and full of hills, plants, winding roads, and different types of graves. One of the things that always impresses me about Lake View is that it very much feels like a place for the living and not just the dead. It is well kept and feels like visiting a landscaped garden and not a cemetery per se. It feels much more welcoming than smaller cemeteries that sometimes have a keep out vibe.

During a visit last summer, my daughter and I drove by one of the ponds in the cemetery and saw a heron. We stopped to get a closer look and realized we had parked right by Elliott Ness’ tombstone. Close to Ness’ tombstone was a grave that had pens stuck in it and I realizzed it was the gravestone of Harvey Parker, a Cleveland cartoonist who had appeared on an episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows.

Lakeview is a mecca for wildlife and on the day that we visited, we saw what we thought was an unleashed dog and imediately got judgey about who would have an unleashed dog in the cemetery. However, when we saw it again, we realized that it was a coyote who was standing right in the area that we had intended to visit that day: Section 50.

Section 50 is primarily African American graves and most of them in this section are flat tombstones inscribed with names and dates. However, there were some that gave an indication of who the people were in life. These included gravestones with musical notes on them and one with a chef’s hat. Perhaps my favorite was of a well dressed angel and the inscription that “This Lady had Style.”

Although there are much larger memorials in the cemetery, there was something about this small angel that struck me as a beautiful memorial to a woman who was obvously loved. Garfield’s grand memorial towers over the cemetery and from its heights you can see Lake Erie, but this small angel is a reminder that memorials do not have to be large to be grand.

Posted in African American, Cemetery, Lake View Cemetery, Memorials | Comments Off

Movie Review: Elizabethtown

Posted on May 10, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Elizabethtown is a romantic comedy centered around a death and a funeral. The movie opens on the worst day of Drew’s life. He is a shoe designer and his latest shoe design is a colossal failure that is going to cost his company almost $1 billion. He goes home, rigs up a suicide machine, and is ready to take his own life when his sister calls crying. Their father, who was visiting his hometown in Kentucky, has died of a heart attack. Drew’s suicide plans are put on hold as it is decided that he’ll go to Kentucky to have their father, Mitch, cremated and return with his ashes.

Drew picks up his father’s favorite blue suit from his mother’s home and heads to the airport. He is the only passenger on the plane and a very talkative flight attendant, Claire, sits next to him for most of the ride. She chats about anything and everything and gives him directions from the Louisville Airport to Elizabethtown. She stresses the need not to miss exit 60B. She follows him off the plane and gives him a coupon, which he later finds she’s written her numbers on.

Elizabethtown is a small town in Kentucky where it seems everyone knew his father. Drew goes to his aunt’s house, where he meets father’s family. Some of them he has met when he was a child, but others he has never encountered before. His father’s family has very definite ideas about Mitch’s funeral, as they intend for him to be buried in the plot his family has owned for over 200 years. Cremation is definitely not deemed acceptable for Mitch, a war hero and from what we can tell an all around good guy. While Drew is meeting the family in Kentucky, his mother is trying to outrun her grief by fixing the car, learning to cook, and tap dance.

One lonely night at the Brown Hotel, Drew calls Claire, and they talk all night, then agree to meet to watch the sunrise. They realize there is a definite connection, and Claire skips her trip to Hawaii to be there for Drew. Drew ends up having his father cremated and his mother and sister fly in from Oregon to attend the memorial service, and Mitch’s family buries his blue suit and medals in the family plot. Drew takes the road trip with his father that they had kept putting off and as he is following Claire’s meticulous instructions, he finds her waiting for him at the Second Biggest Flea Market in the country. And then there is happily ever after.

On the surface, this is just a fun rom com that happens to be centered around a funeral, but it is so much more than this from a human perspective. We start off with Drew wanting to die because of his colossal failure at work, but then a phone call from his mother and the need to be there for his family puts life into perspective, and he pulls himself together to be there for his family. This is something that many of us can relate to as death has a tendency to put things into perspective and helps us to realize that as long as we and our loved ones are still breathing there is hope that things will turn out okay.

Deaths and funerals have a tendency to bring together people from different aspects of people’s lives. The work people. The church people. The friends. The family. Elizabethtown did a nice job of illustrating how different people see different aspects of someone’s personality. Mitch’s Kentucky family knew him when he was a child and schoolboy. They shared stories of his growing up and interacting with his family. His Army buddies knew him as a hero. And his wife and children knew him as a beloved husband and father. His wife Hollie told about how they had met and how she knew his kin in Elizabeth town thought she had stolen him away.

Hollie’s grief was on full display at Mitch’s memorials, but unlike other depictions of grief where the widow would have been shown crying and inconsolable, Hollie was funny and honest. She talked about taking dance and cooking lessons as a way to avoid her grief. She talked about wanting to be brave and strong by fixing the car herself. And she spoke about the unmentionable when she mentioned a male friend who hugged her and suggested he could help with her grief while he got a boner. She had the audience in tears and in stitches and while they may have thought she stole their Mitch, in the end they embraced her as a grieving family member.

Funerals and memorial services run the gamut from the solemn and staid to rowdy Irish wakes to fisticuffs. And Mitch’s funeral was no exception. In addition to Hollie’s raucous tribute, Mitch’s nephew Jesse gets his band back together for a ripping rendition of Freebird complete with a paper bird on a wire that is meant to fly the length of the ballroom. Unfortunately, the bird gets lit on fire, and it’s flight through the ballroom brings flames and mayhem. Although most memorial services don’t end with a paper bird going down in flames, a lot do end in mayhem as people’s emotions are raw. After the mayhem of the memorial service, we cut to the cemetery, where we see how the cremation versus burial debate ends. Mitch has been cremated, but his family buries his suit in the family’s plot.

This movie was a wonderful, although at times overblown, depiction of what loss and grief is like in the real world. It is a mix of emotions that can range from tears to laughter over fun memories. There is no one way to grieve and we need to be generous in our grief. And in the end it is about love: love for the one who has left and love for one another.

Posted in Death, Funeral, General, Grief | Comments Off

Dolce Morte: Sweet Death

Posted on May 8, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Dolce Morte is a small batch ice cream sold only in the Four Seasons, Buenos Aires. I had the vanilla ice cream, and it was the absolute best vanilla ice cream I have ever eaten. It was sweet and the texture was amazingly smooth. Although they do not sell merch, my waitress did find a few stickers for me.

I was attracted to the name because it literally means sweet death and it left me pondering the concept of a sweet death as death is usually thought of as sad and bitter and not sweet at all. However, I realized that death could be sad, but sweet if someone went gently into the night and was surrounded by their loved ones.

Luke’s death, as sudden as it was, was sweet. We woke up on a sunny morning in July to a very sick dog who could not walk down the stairs. Although he was 14, we thought he would live another few years. Unfortunately, the emergency vet said he was bleeding internally and although she could do surgery, it would only give him a few more months and he would not have a good quality of life.

My daughter and I made the decision to euthanize our sweet boy, and we called Sean, my son and Luke’s big brother, so he could say goodbye. Sean choked his goodbyes into the phone and Luke, in his last act of agency, jumped off the couch to lay in a patch of sun. I sat beside him on the floor and stroked him, and my daughter sat in front of him and petted his head. In his very last moments, he knew he was loved very much and that it was okay to say goodbye.

We were devastated by our loss, but were also comforted in knowing that he had not been in pain and that he knew he was loved and cared for up until his very last minute on earth. We also realized that he must have known his time was near as Friday night, when I took Sean to the train station, Luke had been super affectionate and had insisted on going with me to take Sean. Although Sean didn’t know it at the time, Luke had insisted on that one last goodbye.

Sean was in the Midwest with his father and was set to take a six hour train ride home alone. Cam and I decided that there was no way we could let Sean make the trip home by himself in tears and sadness on the train. We drove six hours to Chicago to pick him up and shared stories of Luke along the way. We met him at the designated meeting place, my ex gave me an awkward hug, and then we headed to Scoops, Luke’s favorite ice cream place.

When we lived in Chicago, we would sometimes walk Luke over to Scoops and one of us would go in while he anxiously waited outside. He would gobble down his vanilla ice cream, then beg us for the remnants of ours. Luke was always a polite beggar. He would start out by standing and looking at us, then at the food he wanted. If that didn’t work, he would sit down and continue his routine. His grand begging finale was laying down and looking as if he could no longer go on.

After our memorial ice cream, we headed to another of Luke’s favorite places, the lake front. We’d drive to the lake front and walk along the trail. In the winter, Luke, who hated puddles and getting wet, would roll around in the snow and do what we called the worm. If there was no one around, we would release his leash and let him run free for a few minutes. We left the lake front and got back in the car to begin the long drive home to Ohio, knowing that when we got there our home would feel empty as there was no fuzzy orange dog waiting to greet us.

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Memorials: Recoleta Cemetery

Posted on May 6, 2024 by raine.clara.shakti

Our Lady of Lujan adorns a tomb in Recoleta Cemetery

Date visited: April 13, 2024 and April 19, 2024
Address: Buenos Aires, Argentina

The term “City of the Dead” is often used to describe cemeteries, but until I visited Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, I never understood why a cemetery would be described that way. As an American, I’m used to cemeteries full of greenery and gravestones spaced far enough apart to give their residents a little privacy. Some of our cemeteries, like Rosehill in Chicago, have shared mausoleums, but most of our cemeteries have at least some green space. Recoleta is like a mini concrete jungle with the only greenery being that that slips through the cracks in the sidewalk.

Recoleta’s 14 acres are laid out like a city with a wide promenade down the center and side streets containing over 6,400 mausoleums in various states of repair. A key difference between Recoleta and a city is that there are no “good” neighborhoods and “bad” neighborhoods, in this city of the dead well-kept homes of the dead are shoulder to shoulder with those in disrepair. The styles of these abodes vary widely as well, with structures that look like modern day banks shoulder to shoulder with small gothic temples. The saddest structures for me were the “high rise” mausoleums that had fallen into disrepair to the point that coffins were visible.

Recoleta Cemetery was established in 1822 and was built in the garden of the former convent, Our Lady of Pliar. It takes its name from the Recollect monks, who had previously owned the land. French engineer Prospero Catelin, who also designed the city’s Metropolitan Cathedral in the Plaza de Mayo, designed the cemetery. Although at one time the cemetery may have been sacred ground, the Catholic Church does not consider it sacred, as masons and other non-Catholics were buried within its walls.

The residents of Recoleta include the famous and the infamous. Perhaps the most famous resident is Eva Peron, the wife of Argentina’s former president Juan Peron. The one time actress was a woman who did much in her 33 years on earth including championing women’s rights in Argentina. She died in 1952 and her body spent time in Italy and France before being returned to Argentina 1976 and buried in her family’s crypt in Recoleta Cemetery. The Argentina government went to elaborate steps to make sure her body was not tampered with again, it is buried under tons of concrete.

Although Liliana Crociati de Szasak was significantly less famous than Eva Peron, her memorial is much more promient. Liliana was killed by an avalanche in Innsbruck, Austria in 1970 and her mother designed her Neo-Gothic tomb. The most striking part of the monument is the bronze statue of Liliana in a full length gown with her head resting on the head of a statue of her beloved dog Sabu.

As I was wandering through the cemetery on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I came across a black mausoleum with a statue of a man in a bathrobe in front and was a little freaked out that there’d be a statue of someone in a robe. However, once I stepped back and got a little more perspective, I realized that he was a boxer. Doing my research after the fact, informed me that he was Luis Angel Firpo, an Argentine boxer called “The Wild Bill of the Pampas.” He died i 1060 and in 2003 was named one of the greatest punchers of all time.

One of the most unique mausoleums , at least in my mind, was the “rock cabin.” The stone vault was built for General Tomas Guido, an officer in the Argentine War of Independence, was built by his son, the poet and politician Carlos Guido y Spano, with his own hands as a tribute to his father.

There are so many more interesting stories about Recoleta Cemetery that I could fill hundreds of blog pages with stories and images and I most likely will at least write one more post to share my stories, but for now it is off to explore the living aspects of Argentina.

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