Reimagining Death Care for our Ageing Population
August 20, 2024
What are the policy considerations for integrating medical and social care to transform the way we care for older Australians at the end of life?
What are the policy considerations for integrating medical and social care to transform the way we care for older Australians at the end of life?
A group of friends have gathered for a “death-planning party” to make plans for their funerals and fill out the documents together, to make it a less “daunting” experience. Organiser Dee Stokes says she wants people to be prepared so loved ones aren’t left with all the decisions, following the “confronting and scary” task of organising her twin sister’s funeral. Independent funeral director Bec Lyons, who provides information about funerals to the party attendees, says she is flooded with messages about people wanting a similar party.
Did you know, you are going to die! Have you considered what it’s going to feel like. Look like. Sound like. If you have considered your own mortality, chances are its going to have been in a way that is ‘other’ to yourself. We are getting pretty good as a society , talking about death as an abstract thing that happens to someone else without ever really considering what that reality means for us. Death can be messy or clean. Loud or quiet. Death can be alone or in company. There can be tears of anguish or relief. There can be pain or peace. While we might know all this, we rarely put ourselves in the picture. If you talk to people diagnosed with a terminal illness, or
As a part of NDAN and the advocacy work, Bec Lyons has been consulting with Fiona from Bodalla in NSW as she is setting up what looks to be the first stand alone natural burial site in Australia. She has put years of work and negotiations into this to be able to launch and Bec is heading to see it in person next month!
Our very own, Bec Lyons was pleased to be invited to contribute to the Wicking Trust Round Table put on by Equity Trustees. They have a significant amount of funding to put towards end of life initiatives and wanted a wide input into what the focus of that should be. As you can see there was a lot of data that came from the day and Wicking are working hard to use the results to find the best ways to serve the end of life space in Australia.
A water cremation facility has opened in Hobart. Water Cremation is an end-of-life process which breaks down the body in a stainless steel drum filled with a solution heated to about 90C for 10 hours. What’s next? Australia is heading towards what is being called “peak death” as the baby boomer generation ages.
When was the last time you really listened…? That might seem like a silly question, it’s not often we think about the sense of hearing but if you8 are a person who can hear you use it every day… but are you listening? We hear a lot of stuff all the time. We have so much background noise in our lives for so much of the time that when we go places like the outback, we get astounded by the true silence. Some of that background noise is made up of hundreds of inane conversations we have every week, the majority of which we will never remember. They are the background noise of our social relationships. But when a person feels like they have not been heard, that
What comes with age? There’s lots of things people say come with age, things like wisdom, patience, tolerance, respect – things that we seem to spend a lifetime learning and acquiring. But there are other things that happen with age as well and often that culminates in developing a sense of what truly matters to us in life. We define what it is that we value the most. I’d like to tell you a story about a lady and we’re going to call her Maggie. I met Maggie when she was having a real struggle in life. She had had an accident; she had been near death and spent months in a hospital. She had no family to speak of and being in her 80’s she was declining
I have been thinking a lot about my grandparents of late. Before my mum died she asked me to make sure that my grandmothers ashes got placed where she had wanted them to be, with her husband, my grandfather. I had my grandmother for 40 years of my life, most of that we lived together in various ways, and I adored her. Grandad died when I was much younger and his death was one of the most traumatic deaths I have known. Back in the 1980’s ashes urns were not buried as a standard practice, the ashes were at times dug into the earth under the monument. It didn’t feel right then when the cemetery offered to have Nanas ashes put in the urn in the ground then,
Life as we know it is changing, and so too is death. From death doulas to death cafes, bespoke funerals, and human composting, Grave Matters is your crash course in the end-of-life revolution. In this first episode, hear a fireside chat with one Australian woman leading the field. Bec Lyons is an end-of-life doula, independent funeral director, death literacy educator and family-led death care advocate.
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